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The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it. Don’t do it! Who’s asking you to work on it? I s

by lakpan 3y ago

The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it. Don’t do it! Who’s asking you to work on it? I say this as a minor OSS developer who receives some donations. I love the money, but it would be pretty dumb for me to say they oughta pay me, because the only reason I work on it is addiction/compulsion/procrastination of real work. If it bothered me that people use it for free, then I could just stop working on it and let it rot, just like lodash’ maintainer did for a few years. You always have the option. I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users.

onion2k 3y ago
Who’s asking you to work on it? All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay consulting fees. If you give up they complain loudly, and then often pay a contractor to do the work they wanted. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users. You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'. Even if it was $1000 and only companies that paid, the landscape would shift dramatically.
- rco8786 3y ago
  > All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. I think OP's point is that the maintainer is under no obligation to deliver on these demands.
- flir 3y ago
  > All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay consulting fees. If you give up they complain loudly, and then often pay a contractor to do the work they wanted. Ignore them. I mean, it's not like they're paying you. Scratch your own itch instead. I'm probably being dense, but I'm still not seeing a problem. I think if we dig, we'll find non-monetary incentives that open source authors are a bit shy about admitting to. Otherwise why hold on to the project at all? If you're not being paid, and you think you should be, and that's the only reason you're building the thing, just stop building it. Open source isn't unsustainable. We've got decades of evidence of that.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  If an individual were not the maintainer for a project, they would not be receiving demands from users of that project. The only reason they receive those demands is because they choose to be the maintainer. If they step down from that roll, all of the expectations go away. If the reason you're doing something is for money, and you're not getting money, then stop doing it. It's that simple.
- kawhah 3y ago
  > You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from' What if the mindset of producers were to shift? What if people only worked for free on things that they want to work on? Isn't that both more realistic and better for everyone?
- dash2 3y ago
  >You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'. Even if it was $1000 and only companies that paid, the landscape would shift dramatically. Any solution to a problem that relies on humans becoming more ethical is not, in fact, a solution.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  Knowing most large corps, they would rather pay a contractor $175/hr for two months than sign a $20/month license. Also, you usually cannot hire the open-source maintainer as the contractor, you have to use some company with insider relationships. It isnt the engineering manager's fault at any large company. The policies make no sense, but there may be a larger wisdom that I do not understand.
  - kawhah 3y ago
    So become a contractor, work for an inflated fee for two months. Then take a month off and work for yourself on whatever you want. Or just do nothing, if you prefer that to working on your own projects. Economic injustices and inefficiencies can and do exist in free-ish markets. But this isn't one of them. It's more like "old man shouts at supply and demand".
  - ejb999 3y ago
    absolutely true - once sat around in a meeting which the combined cost of the contractors in that meeting was ~$2500 per hour - we met for 90 minutes arguing about which of the customer departments would be responsible for paying the $50/month subscription fee for twilio services for the year. We could have paid for 50 months of that service with the money we spent trying to figure out who would be responsible for the bill.
mcpackieh 3y ago
> I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users. From another angle, if I gave a dollar a month to every Free Software program or library I used that month, it would cost me thousands of dollars a month. Obviously that isn't realistic. I have donated to projects before but those products need to individually make the case to me that my donation is needed. Expecting users to donate to every project they use by default just isn't realistic. Most projects won't get donations from most people most of the time; that's just the way it is. Developers should be at peace with this before they decide to personally commit themself to a project.
- bboozzoo 3y ago
  I don't think anyone is expecting you to donate to literally every project you use. However, say your business is to build and sell a product done in JS. You already have a bunch of JS devs, whom you may have even bought those sweet MacBooks. Let's also say, you're invested in keeping the code quality high, which you boast about in your product web page. Why not donate a $100/month to the JSLint project which is part of your toolchain anyway and helps you achieve your goals? The annual cost is probably less then you'd spend on the toilet paper for the office. You get a maintained product, they get some money to support their efforts. It's clearly a win win.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    That's a fine pitch for the merit of donating to ESLint, but if that pitch isn't working for the developer then he should either make peace with doing the work for free, or stop doing the work.
    - bboozzoo 3y ago
      Yes, completely. If there's no business contract in place, it's hard to expect compensation of any sort. It's all hinged on the other party's willingness to recognize the value in keeping the project alive. Very few do.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
It goes both ways. Crowd blame the maintainer if they change the license for the future updates. So it makes sense to blame the crowd if they want the updates for free. But I agree with you. Open source projects shouldn't have any obligation to listen to the people if they change the license. Even if they intentionally bait and switch, the users should only expect the current version to be open source and shouldn't expect free updates for life.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  Yes, if it's open source then users don't have any right to expect that it'll be maintained by someone, but if a project deliberately uses the bait and switch trick to get people to start using the project when it's open source in the hope of trapping them, then that's clearly manipulative and ruins trust in other open source projects.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    Why? All they are claiming is that current version is open source and will remain open source. How is it different than stopping maintaining it altogether?
    - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
      Because they released it as open source purely to lure people in and get them using it enough so that switching away would be difficult for them. If they're up-front with people and mention that it'll be open source up until a time of their choosing, after which subsequent versions will be proprietary, then I don't see a problem and no-one's getting tricked. When I'm choosing an open source tool to use, then I want to know whether it's under current development or is more or less abandoned. If the author suddenly decides to stop maintenance for some reason, then that's acceptable because they weren't trying to trick me into selecting their tool over others, though I'd still be looking to either switch to a different tool or see if the project has been forked. It's about honesty.
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
phpisthebest 3y ago
You mean you would write your own leftpad function instead of pulling in a $1 npm dependency That is crazy. /s
- blitz_skull 3y ago
  It would actually be amazing if you could do that—somehow stub dependencies with your own libraries. Because the number of times I’ve needed a left pad lib is literally 0, but other, more useful libraries always have it as a dependency.
lynx23 3y ago
This! Its always the same. When volunteers start to complain they aren't compensated for their work, things start to smell fishy. And this kind of behaviour seems to have increased lately. Rather sad. Either I do something for the love of it, or I am going for a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and these two are the same, but that is very much the exception.
- eXpl0it3r 3y ago
  Sometimes it's that devs still like the project, but more often it's probably just the fame/exposure that they don't want to lose. If you have no compassion for a project and the demand is high, it's still your decision to invest your time for no money exchange. You can just ignore the demands, if you can accept that your project might eventually fold. This is additionally supported by the point that only few maintainers will hand out commit rights to other devs. They rather complain about all the workload and demands than give up some of all of their control, so others with more passion or who are even paid can continue working on the project. If you want to be paid for your code, then pick a license model that matches it, but it will mean that you won't rise to the top, as only a limited amount of people will use it. I wrote some more thoughts on this, during the "Moq incident" earlier this year: https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2023/09/23/foss-funding/ https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2023/09/23/foss-funding/
- sofixa 3y ago
  > Either I do something for the love of it, or I am going for a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and these two are the same, but that is very much the exception. Why should that be the exception? Why shouldn't people's passions, especially when they are widely useful to others, not be encouraged and turned into paying jobs? Everyone wins. The passionate can keep doing what they're passionate about without having to split their attention to a job to pay the bills, and in exchange everyone else gets better quality output.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > Why shouldn't people's passions, especially when they are widely useful to others, not be encouraged and turned into paying jobs? Because there is no fair way of estimating what someone's work is worth without a free market. Sometimes it turns up weird outcomes like maintaining a critical driver being worth $0. If someone is willing to do something for free and the marginal cost of copying the work is 0 then by simple economics they will not get paid for doing the thing. Same logic applies to having children, advocating good ideas in politics and a lot of creative work. Besides, why should someone doing what they are passionate about entitle them to a leg up? What about someone doing plumbing and hating it? They're making more of a sacrifice for the benefit of others, they deserve more money. And if someone is adding enormous value then let them who recognise it pay for it. Nothing wrong with people working on their passions and making money of course, but words like 'should' are suspicious. Once you get to software development, people are in a world where market forces are fair and reasonable.
cxr 3y ago
> I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not [have] thousands let alone millions of users. The dirty secret of the GitHub era of open source is that many developers and open source codebases would be better off if such a thing happened. A lot of stuff associated with the development processes that are fashionable with GitHub and programmer Twitter provide net negative value (e.g. issue close bots) or neutral value at best (because they solve a problem that really exists but not at the scale that most downstream projects that opt in are actually at). If it suddenly became necessary or even just strongly encouraged for programmers to pay a dollar a month for things that are only as pervasive as they are because they are free and give the false sense of productivity, then we'd see a huge dropoff in the adoption and use of lots of things that are of dubious value to begin with.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  I could see it now, every time you run yarn install it charges you $1 USD per dependency.
rpastuszak 3y ago
> The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it. > Don’t do it! Who’s asking you to work on it? I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path. The value we get from OSS compared to the monetary compensation for that work is disproportionately small. OSS generally doesn't depend on an army of people paid to make you buy shit you don't need or want.
- sevagh 3y ago
  >I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path. They knew that before they started.
  - rpastuszak 3y ago
    I meant it in a general sense, I think we'd be in a better place as a society if this model of work was easier to follow/more mainstream.
    - simbolit 3y ago
      I am not sure what you are saying here. Is this is a general critique of capitalist exploitation of the "software" field? Like, as in software should be a utility like fresh water or electricity? If not, and you are relatively literal in what you write, the following question seems unavoidable: What about coaches for youth sports? What about beach cleanup? What about a thousand other worthwhile and societally useful activities that people volunteer to do, but for which there is no sustainable career path? What makes OSS contributing any different from them?
    - anon291 3y ago
      > I think we'd be in a better place as a society if this model of work was easier to follow/more mainstream. Why?
      - 3y ago
empath-nirvana 3y ago
I think the general pattern is that someone releases something for free, then people start using it, and start depending on it, and then start opening PRs and issues, and then the person who did it for free in their spare time is expected to respond to those issues, etc. Now other people are making money from your work, but demanding that you work on it for free. Mostly this is the point where people start thinking about how to monetize it -- and they should! Your time is valuable, you should get paid for it. If you don't figure out how to get in the middle of the cash flows that are happening _because of your work_, someone else will do it.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  The book shareware heroes discusses this at length through the various solutions shareware developers came up with on how to monetize software written and given out for free.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
As long as it's some hobby thing where you don't make any promises. If people start expecting stuff, they should start paying for it. I suppose projects can get so big that developers literally don't have enough free time to fulfill people's expectations even if they wanted to do it. At that point they should get sponsored so that it become possible for them to devote more time to their projects. Sponsorships seem like a perfectly ethical way to make money to me. With enough sponsors people can afford to quit their jobs and work on their own thing full time. I've seen news of developers who did just that when they got enough support. I hope they're doing well.
nunez 3y ago
Exactly. Open source has always meant exactly that and _only_ that. Support has always been (and should always be) on a best-effort basis. If you absolutely need the support, pay for it! If you can't or don't want to and need to fix it now, fork it! (I maintained a small OSS project for a few years. I loved the folks that would get all mad when it didn't do x even though the code should theoretically be able to do it and "it's not that hard!". If only they submitted pull requests with their issues...)

by lakpan 3y ago

onion2k 3y ago

Who’s asking you to work on it? All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay consulting fees. If you give up they complain loudly, and then often pay a contractor to do the work they wanted. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users. You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'. Even if it was $1000 and only companies that paid, the landscape would shift dramatically.

rco8786 3y ago
> All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. I think OP's point is that the maintainer is under no obligation to deliver on these demands.
flir 3y ago
> All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay consulting fees. If you give up they complain loudly, and then often pay a contractor to do the work they wanted. Ignore them. I mean, it's not like they're paying you. Scratch your own itch instead. I'm probably being dense, but I'm still not seeing a problem. I think if we dig, we'll find non-monetary incentives that open source authors are a bit shy about admitting to. Otherwise why hold on to the project at all? If you're not being paid, and you think you should be, and that's the only reason you're building the thing, just stop building it. Open source isn't unsustainable. We've got decades of evidence of that.
mcpackieh 3y ago
If an individual were not the maintainer for a project, they would not be receiving demands from users of that project. The only reason they receive those demands is because they choose to be the maintainer. If they step down from that roll, all of the expectations go away. If the reason you're doing something is for money, and you're not getting money, then stop doing it. It's that simple.
kawhah 3y ago
> You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from' What if the mindset of producers were to shift? What if people only worked for free on things that they want to work on? Isn't that both more realistic and better for everyone?
dash2 3y ago
>You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to 'pay for things you get value from'. Even if it was $1000 and only companies that paid, the landscape would shift dramatically. Any solution to a problem that relies on humans becoming more ethical is not, in fact, a solution.
TuringNYC 3y ago
Knowing most large corps, they would rather pay a contractor $175/hr for two months than sign a $20/month license. Also, you usually cannot hire the open-source maintainer as the contractor, you have to use some company with insider relationships. It isnt the engineering manager's fault at any large company. The policies make no sense, but there may be a larger wisdom that I do not understand.
- kawhah 3y ago
  So become a contractor, work for an inflated fee for two months. Then take a month off and work for yourself on whatever you want. Or just do nothing, if you prefer that to working on your own projects. Economic injustices and inefficiencies can and do exist in free-ish markets. But this isn't one of them. It's more like "old man shouts at supply and demand".
- ejb999 3y ago
  absolutely true - once sat around in a meeting which the combined cost of the contractors in that meeting was ~$2500 per hour - we met for 90 minutes arguing about which of the customer departments would be responsible for paying the $50/month subscription fee for twilio services for the year. We could have paid for 50 months of that service with the money we spent trying to figure out who would be responsible for the bill.

mcpackieh 3y ago

> I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users. From another angle, if I gave a dollar a month to every Free Software program or library I used that month, it would cost me thousands of dollars a month. Obviously that isn't realistic. I have donated to projects before but those products need to individually make the case to me that my donation is needed. Expecting users to donate to every project they use by default just isn't realistic. Most projects won't get donations from most people most of the time; that's just the way it is. Developers should be at peace with this before they decide to personally commit themself to a project.

bboozzoo 3y ago
I don't think anyone is expecting you to donate to literally every project you use. However, say your business is to build and sell a product done in JS. You already have a bunch of JS devs, whom you may have even bought those sweet MacBooks. Let's also say, you're invested in keeping the code quality high, which you boast about in your product web page. Why not donate a $100/month to the JSLint project which is part of your toolchain anyway and helps you achieve your goals? The annual cost is probably less then you'd spend on the toilet paper for the office. You get a maintained product, they get some money to support their efforts. It's clearly a win win.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  That's a fine pitch for the merit of donating to ESLint, but if that pitch isn't working for the developer then he should either make peace with doing the work for free, or stop doing the work.
  - bboozzoo 3y ago
    Yes, completely. If there's no business contract in place, it's hard to expect compensation of any sort. It's all hinged on the other party's willingness to recognize the value in keeping the project alive. Very few do.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

It goes both ways. Crowd blame the maintainer if they change the license for the future updates. So it makes sense to blame the crowd if they want the updates for free. But I agree with you. Open source projects shouldn't have any obligation to listen to the people if they change the license. Even if they intentionally bait and switch, the users should only expect the current version to be open source and shouldn't expect free updates for life.

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
Yes, if it's open source then users don't have any right to expect that it'll be maintained by someone, but if a project deliberately uses the bait and switch trick to get people to start using the project when it's open source in the hope of trapping them, then that's clearly manipulative and ruins trust in other open source projects.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  Why? All they are claiming is that current version is open source and will remain open source. How is it different than stopping maintaining it altogether?
  - ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
    Because they released it as open source purely to lure people in and get them using it enough so that switching away would be difficult for them. If they're up-front with people and mention that it'll be open source up until a time of their choosing, after which subsequent versions will be proprietary, then I don't see a problem and no-one's getting tricked. When I'm choosing an open source tool to use, then I want to know whether it's under current development or is more or less abandoned. If the author suddenly decides to stop maintenance for some reason, then that's acceptable because they weren't trying to trick me into selecting their tool over others, though I'd still be looking to either switch to a different tool or see if the project has been forked. It's about honesty.
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

phpisthebest 3y ago

You mean you would write your own leftpad function instead of pulling in a $1 npm dependency That is crazy. /s

blitz_skull 3y ago
It would actually be amazing if you could do that—somehow stub dependencies with your own libraries. Because the number of times I’ve needed a left pad lib is literally 0, but other, more useful libraries always have it as a dependency.

lynx23 3y ago

This! Its always the same. When volunteers start to complain they aren't compensated for their work, things start to smell fishy. And this kind of behaviour seems to have increased lately. Rather sad. Either I do something for the love of it, or I am going for a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and these two are the same, but that is very much the exception.

eXpl0it3r 3y ago
Sometimes it's that devs still like the project, but more often it's probably just the fame/exposure that they don't want to lose. If you have no compassion for a project and the demand is high, it's still your decision to invest your time for no money exchange. You can just ignore the demands, if you can accept that your project might eventually fold. This is additionally supported by the point that only few maintainers will hand out commit rights to other devs. They rather complain about all the workload and demands than give up some of all of their control, so others with more passion or who are even paid can continue working on the project. If you want to be paid for your code, then pick a license model that matches it, but it will mean that you won't rise to the top, as only a limited amount of people will use it. I wrote some more thoughts on this, during the "Moq incident" earlier this year: https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2023/09/23/foss-funding/ https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2023/09/23/foss-funding/
sofixa 3y ago
> Either I do something for the love of it, or I am going for a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and these two are the same, but that is very much the exception. Why should that be the exception? Why shouldn't people's passions, especially when they are widely useful to others, not be encouraged and turned into paying jobs? Everyone wins. The passionate can keep doing what they're passionate about without having to split their attention to a job to pay the bills, and in exchange everyone else gets better quality output.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > Why shouldn't people's passions, especially when they are widely useful to others, not be encouraged and turned into paying jobs? Because there is no fair way of estimating what someone's work is worth without a free market. Sometimes it turns up weird outcomes like maintaining a critical driver being worth $0. If someone is willing to do something for free and the marginal cost of copying the work is 0 then by simple economics they will not get paid for doing the thing. Same logic applies to having children, advocating good ideas in politics and a lot of creative work. Besides, why should someone doing what they are passionate about entitle them to a leg up? What about someone doing plumbing and hating it? They're making more of a sacrifice for the benefit of others, they deserve more money. And if someone is adding enormous value then let them who recognise it pay for it. Nothing wrong with people working on their passions and making money of course, but words like 'should' are suspicious. Once you get to software development, people are in a world where market forces are fair and reasonable.

cxr 3y ago

> I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not [have] thousands let alone millions of users. The dirty secret of the GitHub era of open source is that many developers and open source codebases would be better off if such a thing happened. A lot of stuff associated with the development processes that are fashionable with GitHub and programmer Twitter provide net negative value (e.g. issue close bots) or neutral value at best (because they solve a problem that really exists but not at the scale that most downstream projects that opt in are actually at). If it suddenly became necessary or even just strongly encouraged for programmers to pay a dollar a month for things that are only as pervasive as they are because they are free and give the false sense of productivity, then we'd see a huge dropoff in the adoption and use of lots of things that are of dubious value to begin with.

SamuelAdams 3y ago
I could see it now, every time you run yarn install it charges you $1 USD per dependency.

rpastuszak 3y ago

> The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it. > Don’t do it! Who’s asking you to work on it? I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path. The value we get from OSS compared to the monetary compensation for that work is disproportionately small. OSS generally doesn't depend on an army of people paid to make you buy shit you don't need or want.

sevagh 3y ago
>I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path. They knew that before they started.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  I meant it in a general sense, I think we'd be in a better place as a society if this model of work was easier to follow/more mainstream.
  - simbolit 3y ago
    I am not sure what you are saying here. Is this is a general critique of capitalist exploitation of the "software" field? Like, as in software should be a utility like fresh water or electricity? If not, and you are relatively literal in what you write, the following question seems unavoidable: What about coaches for youth sports? What about beach cleanup? What about a thousand other worthwhile and societally useful activities that people volunteer to do, but for which there is no sustainable career path? What makes OSS contributing any different from them?
  - anon291 3y ago
    > I think we'd be in a better place as a society if this model of work was easier to follow/more mainstream. Why?
    - 3y ago

empath-nirvana 3y ago

I think the general pattern is that someone releases something for free, then people start using it, and start depending on it, and then start opening PRs and issues, and then the person who did it for free in their spare time is expected to respond to those issues, etc. Now other people are making money from your work, but demanding that you work on it for free. Mostly this is the point where people start thinking about how to monetize it -- and they should! Your time is valuable, you should get paid for it. If you don't figure out how to get in the middle of the cash flows that are happening _because of your work_, someone else will do it.

mnky9800n 3y ago
The book shareware heroes discusses this at length through the various solutions shareware developers came up with on how to monetize software written and given out for free.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

As long as it's some hobby thing where you don't make any promises. If people start expecting stuff, they should start paying for it. I suppose projects can get so big that developers literally don't have enough free time to fulfill people's expectations even if they wanted to do it. At that point they should get sponsored so that it become possible for them to devote more time to their projects. Sponsorships seem like a perfectly ethical way to make money to me. With enough sponsors people can afford to quit their jobs and work on their own thing full time. I've seen news of developers who did just that when they got enough support. I hope they're doing well.

nunez 3y ago

Exactly. Open source has always meant exactly that and _only_ that. Support has always been (and should always be) on a best-effort basis. If you absolutely need the support, pay for it! If you can't or don't want to and need to fix it now, fork it! (I maintained a small OSS project for a few years. I loved the folks that would get all mad when it didn't do x even though the code should theoretically be able to do it and "it's not that hard!". If only they submitted pull requests with their issues...)