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Open source needs sustainable funding models. It's hard to tell what fosshost was and how many people are impacted. It's also unclear what the Radix project is

Open source needs sustainable funding models. It's hard to tell what fosshost was and how many people are impacted. It's also unclear what the Radix project is how it will be different/avoid what caused fosshost to shut down.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
My grand theory is that for a lot of reasons we need to restructure society to focus on automating most of the basic tasks required to reproduce society (basic manufacturing of shoes, farming, etc) in a collectively owned and managed way, and then provide the "dividend" of this production for free to everyone as a kind of basic support. Cheap housing, free food and clothes, basic medical care, etc. In such a world, open source devs could live off of that basic support indefinitely, rather than slowly draining savings or killing themselves working a second job to fund the open source work. I think if we did this we would see much more open innovation, which would lead to more rapid innovation, which would be good for everyone. Its more of a distant goal and doesn't solve the problem today, but its something I like to discuss as it can inform what direction we head in.
- unity1001 4y ago
  That's the direction that the world should head in.
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  This sounds like a fantastic future, but I have problems imagining it actually working out that way, given how greedy humans can be. I'm not convinced by projections of UBI maybe due to my own lack of imagination. I find it difficult to imagine a world where UBI doesn't create a two-tier system -- pre-nationalization haves and have-nots. Such schemes make me imagine a world where people who built capital and became necessary (ex. Walmart) will have fresh money for their monopolies guaranteed for all time. As for the very specific problem of open source not being properly supported, I think there's a closer/easier stopgap -- monetization. Free software exists because idealists manipulating existing legal systems to meet their ends. I think we need the same thing, but in the business domain. We need hackers that are good at business just like free software needed hackers that knew enough about the legal system. Put simply -- we need more businesses who work with F/OSS and give back to it. Imagine if even .1% of Amazon's revenue was going back into the open source projects it uses across the stack. The open source world would look drastically different. I'm biased towards this solution because I'm trying to build it, but I bet I can build something to generate value for F/OSS faster than we can straighten out the allocation of society.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    So to be clear I’m not talking about UBI or nationalization. I agree there’s big problems with that. Nationalization can work well for things like railroads, but I’m talking about something else. Specifically I’m advocating for an economy comprised of a federation of cooperatives. There would be no nationalized Walmart, instead there would be community owned cooperative stores that achieve economies of scale through voluntary federation with similar stores in neighboring regions, or across even wider areas. Health care could be managed by regional cooperatives, again federated. An important part would be a culture that avoids buying from businesses outside of this federated arrangement. Traditional businesses controlled by a small board of directors can under pay workers and try to undercut competition, but businesses in the federation would understand the importance of building their own solutions to these problems to prevent control by large entities. This might work similar to housing in Vienna. There, the city government owns about 50% of all housing units, and this keeps the privately owned housing prices in check. In a federated economy, perhaps 50% of the businesses would be cooperatives, but they would keep workers rights and wages at privately owned businesses in check. One thing about cooperatives is that workers will have a tendency to want to automate their jobs. For profit businesses are happy to under pay workers and only automate if it makes financial sense. But cooperatives may have more incentive as more automation can mean less work for them personally. Cooperatives also may have less incentive to create artificial demand and low quality products. If they are essentially making products for themselves and people like them, they will appreciate quality products that last longer, reducing waste. I’m happy you’re working on more solutions to fund F/OSS. Nothing I’m talking about will support developers in the near term. I prefer solutions that make our economy more like F/OSS rather than the other way around, but one is easier to change than the other.
MaxBarraclough 4y ago
This is the first I've heard of Fosshost, but from a glance at their twitter: [0] > Fosshost is a cloud computing platform for the open-source community Presumably then the Radix project will have similar goals, and it will presumably not serve as a forge, although their website isn't very clear on this point. [1] [0] https://twitter.com/fosshostorg https://twitter.com/fosshostorg [1] https://radixproject.org/about https://radixproject.org/about

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

My grand theory is that for a lot of reasons we need to restructure society to focus on automating most of the basic tasks required to reproduce society (basic manufacturing of shoes, farming, etc) in a collectively owned and managed way, and then provide the "dividend" of this production for free to everyone as a kind of basic support. Cheap housing, free food and clothes, basic medical care, etc. In such a world, open source devs could live off of that basic support indefinitely, rather than slowly draining savings or killing themselves working a second job to fund the open source work. I think if we did this we would see much more open innovation, which would lead to more rapid innovation, which would be good for everyone. Its more of a distant goal and doesn't solve the problem today, but its something I like to discuss as it can inform what direction we head in.

unity1001 4y ago
That's the direction that the world should head in.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
This sounds like a fantastic future, but I have problems imagining it actually working out that way, given how greedy humans can be. I'm not convinced by projections of UBI maybe due to my own lack of imagination. I find it difficult to imagine a world where UBI doesn't create a two-tier system -- pre-nationalization haves and have-nots. Such schemes make me imagine a world where people who built capital and became necessary (ex. Walmart) will have fresh money for their monopolies guaranteed for all time. As for the very specific problem of open source not being properly supported, I think there's a closer/easier stopgap -- monetization. Free software exists because idealists manipulating existing legal systems to meet their ends. I think we need the same thing, but in the business domain. We need hackers that are good at business just like free software needed hackers that knew enough about the legal system. Put simply -- we need more businesses who work with F/OSS and give back to it. Imagine if even .1% of Amazon's revenue was going back into the open source projects it uses across the stack. The open source world would look drastically different. I'm biased towards this solution because I'm trying to build it, but I bet I can build something to generate value for F/OSS faster than we can straighten out the allocation of society.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  So to be clear I’m not talking about UBI or nationalization. I agree there’s big problems with that. Nationalization can work well for things like railroads, but I’m talking about something else. Specifically I’m advocating for an economy comprised of a federation of cooperatives. There would be no nationalized Walmart, instead there would be community owned cooperative stores that achieve economies of scale through voluntary federation with similar stores in neighboring regions, or across even wider areas. Health care could be managed by regional cooperatives, again federated. An important part would be a culture that avoids buying from businesses outside of this federated arrangement. Traditional businesses controlled by a small board of directors can under pay workers and try to undercut competition, but businesses in the federation would understand the importance of building their own solutions to these problems to prevent control by large entities. This might work similar to housing in Vienna. There, the city government owns about 50% of all housing units, and this keeps the privately owned housing prices in check. In a federated economy, perhaps 50% of the businesses would be cooperatives, but they would keep workers rights and wages at privately owned businesses in check. One thing about cooperatives is that workers will have a tendency to want to automate their jobs. For profit businesses are happy to under pay workers and only automate if it makes financial sense. But cooperatives may have more incentive as more automation can mean less work for them personally. Cooperatives also may have less incentive to create artificial demand and low quality products. If they are essentially making products for themselves and people like them, they will appreciate quality products that last longer, reducing waste. I’m happy you’re working on more solutions to fund F/OSS. Nothing I’m talking about will support developers in the near term. I prefer solutions that make our economy more like F/OSS rather than the other way around, but one is easier to change than the other.

MaxBarraclough 4y ago

This is the first I've heard of Fosshost, but from a glance at their twitter: [0] > Fosshost is a cloud computing platform for the open-source community Presumably then the Radix project will have similar goals, and it will presumably not serve as a forge, although their website isn't very clear on this point. [1] [0] https://twitter.com/fosshostorg https://twitter.com/fosshostorg [1] https://radixproject.org/about https://radixproject.org/about