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This is how ALL open source used to be! Like literally ALL, this is the norm not this bullshit VC funded fremium restricted/tiered fuck the customer trap nonsen

This is how ALL open source used to be! Like literally ALL, this is the norm not this bullshit VC funded fremium restricted/tiered fuck the customer trap nonsense. People built things because they loved it and wanted to help others , not to get rich. Now everyone just wants to get rich, and fast.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
planb 3y ago
While I agree with your sentiment, maintaining software like postgreSQL is a full time job. But your last sentence seems to apply to everything on the internet lately. People used to do podcasts, create guitar tabs or publish cooking recipes because it was their hobby and they wanted others to participate. Now everything seems about making money.
- rglullis 3y ago
  People would do these things for free because they had a stable job which guaranteed their material needs. Now every type of job can be automated and done better/cheaper by a machine, people will be forced to "monetize" everything that exists unless we get a literal revolution in how we tax and distribute the produced wealth.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - xcrunner529 3y ago
    The jobs we’re talking about here, podcasting, development, etc aren’t jobs where everyone is forced out. Everyone is just more into making money these days and decide they want to make money doing those things rather than just fun. Let’s not try making excuses.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      You are getting at it backwards. People are doing podcasts about investing, cooking, music production, <anything> because even those careers are being automated away and the money that they could be getting working is going away. Even Software Engineers: take all the swaths of engineers who were productive but didn't want / didn't make to a FAANG company and now are having to compete in a world where most companies can replace a lot of the people they don't need a team of 8 engineers because their team of 4 now can have Co-Pilot and most of their "middle management" roles could be effectively replaced by some cheap, off-the-shelf SaaS. I'm literally in this scenario. I'm too old to be interested in competing with someone who is 20 years younger than me but can call themselves a "programmer", and whatever knowledge/experience I have can be had at a fraction of my "cost" by using a commodified service that automates a process. So, what is left for me? Either I need to go downmarket and work for "programmer" jobs (further increasing the supply and lowering salaries) or I need to find someone who is willing to invest in my "idea for a startup" (thus getting into the Silicon-Valley way of life), or I need to find a way to take my unique experience and repackage as something of value - and then get to be called "greedy" by people like you. By the way, may I interest you in becoming a customer of my not-yet VC funded company (https://communick.com https://communick.com) and/or join the people sponsoring me for $4/month for my Fediverse work (https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs)?
      - simion314 3y ago
        I do not believe you can replace a competent developer with an AI, or say you have 2 and replace them with 1 dev and 1 AI. You can't just type in ChatGPT something like "write me GTA5" and you get running code, just seen today an example of someone complaining that he asked soemthing like "Create a website in PHP for a company that does X" and they were expecting that by magic a website will just appear.
        rglullis 3y ago
        Aside from clueless people on Elance and upwork, no one goes to a developer and says "write me GTA5" or "make a website in PHP that does X", either. What AI will do is leverage productivity of the individuals. Any new story will have its complexity reduced because the developer will be to use the existing codebase and say "hey, our current code is connecting with Foobar via the Zoberg SDK, now we are adding a customer that uses the BazBah platform and they need to change the order flow for 'deliver on payment' to 'deliver on invoice sent'. Show me what changes are needed to make this happen, and please write the integration tests to make sure that we are not breaking things from existing customers" This goes from a one week task that will require three hour-long to something that can be done in an afternoon, reviewed by the developer and (most importantly) cheap to throw away if the original requirements change.
  - berniedurfee 3y ago
    It’s less automation and more about cheap labor. Content farms sprung up and flooded the landscape with worthless content to get a micro-slice of the pie. Very discouraging to many content creators when their work is just going to be buried in SEO chaff. Also, the automation wave is just beginning. Soon the human run content farms will be overwhelmed by AI created crap. This is likely to happen in software as well. Every product will need to compete with some AI generated piece of garbage that’s barely passable functionally, but being sold at a fraction of the cost. Fun times!
cjk2 3y ago
100% agree on this. Ansible sell out and Hashicorp are fine examples of this.
manish_gill 3y ago
What's wrong with trying to get rich? Please explain.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Just tell everyone you're dealing with that your primary purpose is getting rich with the software. Don't tell them you have always been and always will be open source, just until you're big and give the middle finger to OSS in order to get richer.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    A given piece of open source code when licensed is always open source. Changing the license doesn’t retroactively do so for the previous code. There is no lie.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - iamtedd 3y ago
      No. No no no. Don't weasel-word out of this with bullshit technicalities. The phrase isn't "FooBar v3.11 is free and always will be". There is no version number in the phrase, so the common understanding is that the product and every version of that product will always be free.
      - endisneigh 3y ago
        lol. If it helps you cope, imagine the company died, another company forked it with a new license. Same thing, same result. We are literally discussing this in a thread where a prominent maintainer died. Nothing is forever. There is no way to guarantee something will be the same forever. Again, fork and move on if things change to your dissatisfaction.
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      You apparently are not familiar with the concept of software maintenance, upgrade, security patches. Or completely ignored it when wrote this comment.
endisneigh 3y ago
Yeah man, screw the VCs! That’s why we’re communicating through an open source platform… oh. Well at least this site isn’t created by a VC… oh. Things are nuanced. VCs can fund valuable useful things sometimes.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Nobody's saying screw VCs. We say screw to fooling your users that you're an OSS adopter and supporter, just until your project is big and you can say screw OSS.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    You seem to be confused. Even if the project is big and they change the license, so what? The old code is there with the existing license still. Fork it and move on. People, man.
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      Do you have any idea of what constitutes an OSS project besides characters written on an versioned repository?
    - Barrin92 3y ago
      you can't fork and maintain everything yourself, and that de-facto lock in is exactly what companies bank on when they pull this kind of bait and switch. The idea is precisely to gain popularity with open source, "the first dose is free" style, and then capitalize on the dependency and popularity. Literally just the developer analog to the misleading "everything is free and always will be" advertisements of consumer facing software.
      - endisneigh 3y ago
        Ok find other people to help, that’s how open source works no? There’s no issue here. Just whining. There is no lock in at all. Even if it were OSI open source the maintainers like the very thread we are in could die. Then what? Oh you fork and maintain yourself, or the project rots. License changes are irrelevant.
rmbyrro 3y ago
Monetization-era
bryanlarsen 3y ago
The main alternative to open source monetization is XKCD 2347 (one guy in Nebraska). PostgreSQL appears to have hit that sweet middle ground that is so rare in open source. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

planb 3y ago

While I agree with your sentiment, maintaining software like postgreSQL is a full time job. But your last sentence seems to apply to everything on the internet lately. People used to do podcasts, create guitar tabs or publish cooking recipes because it was their hobby and they wanted others to participate. Now everything seems about making money.

rglullis 3y ago
People would do these things for free because they had a stable job which guaranteed their material needs. Now every type of job can be automated and done better/cheaper by a machine, people will be forced to "monetize" everything that exists unless we get a literal revolution in how we tax and distribute the produced wealth.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- xcrunner529 3y ago
  The jobs we’re talking about here, podcasting, development, etc aren’t jobs where everyone is forced out. Everyone is just more into making money these days and decide they want to make money doing those things rather than just fun. Let’s not try making excuses.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    You are getting at it backwards. People are doing podcasts about investing, cooking, music production, <anything> because even those careers are being automated away and the money that they could be getting working is going away. Even Software Engineers: take all the swaths of engineers who were productive but didn't want / didn't make to a FAANG company and now are having to compete in a world where most companies can replace a lot of the people they don't need a team of 8 engineers because their team of 4 now can have Co-Pilot and most of their "middle management" roles could be effectively replaced by some cheap, off-the-shelf SaaS. I'm literally in this scenario. I'm too old to be interested in competing with someone who is 20 years younger than me but can call themselves a "programmer", and whatever knowledge/experience I have can be had at a fraction of my "cost" by using a commodified service that automates a process. So, what is left for me? Either I need to go downmarket and work for "programmer" jobs (further increasing the supply and lowering salaries) or I need to find someone who is willing to invest in my "idea for a startup" (thus getting into the Silicon-Valley way of life), or I need to find a way to take my unique experience and repackage as something of value - and then get to be called "greedy" by people like you. By the way, may I interest you in becoming a customer of my not-yet VC funded company (https://communick.com https://communick.com) and/or join the people sponsoring me for $4/month for my Fediverse work (https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs https://github.com/sponsors/mushroomlabs)?
    - simion314 3y ago
      I do not believe you can replace a competent developer with an AI, or say you have 2 and replace them with 1 dev and 1 AI. You can't just type in ChatGPT something like "write me GTA5" and you get running code, just seen today an example of someone complaining that he asked soemthing like "Create a website in PHP for a company that does X" and they were expecting that by magic a website will just appear.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        Aside from clueless people on Elance and upwork, no one goes to a developer and says "write me GTA5" or "make a website in PHP that does X", either. What AI will do is leverage productivity of the individuals. Any new story will have its complexity reduced because the developer will be to use the existing codebase and say "hey, our current code is connecting with Foobar via the Zoberg SDK, now we are adding a customer that uses the BazBah platform and they need to change the order flow for 'deliver on payment' to 'deliver on invoice sent'. Show me what changes are needed to make this happen, and please write the integration tests to make sure that we are not breaking things from existing customers" This goes from a one week task that will require three hour-long to something that can be done in an afternoon, reviewed by the developer and (most importantly) cheap to throw away if the original requirements change.
- berniedurfee 3y ago
  It’s less automation and more about cheap labor. Content farms sprung up and flooded the landscape with worthless content to get a micro-slice of the pie. Very discouraging to many content creators when their work is just going to be buried in SEO chaff. Also, the automation wave is just beginning. Soon the human run content farms will be overwhelmed by AI created crap. This is likely to happen in software as well. Every product will need to compete with some AI generated piece of garbage that’s barely passable functionally, but being sold at a fraction of the cost. Fun times!

cjk2 3y ago

100% agree on this. Ansible sell out and Hashicorp are fine examples of this.

manish_gill 3y ago

What's wrong with trying to get rich? Please explain.

rmbyrro 3y ago
Just tell everyone you're dealing with that your primary purpose is getting rich with the software. Don't tell them you have always been and always will be open source, just until you're big and give the middle finger to OSS in order to get richer.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  A given piece of open source code when licensed is always open source. Changing the license doesn’t retroactively do so for the previous code. There is no lie.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - iamtedd 3y ago
    No. No no no. Don't weasel-word out of this with bullshit technicalities. The phrase isn't "FooBar v3.11 is free and always will be". There is no version number in the phrase, so the common understanding is that the product and every version of that product will always be free.
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      lol. If it helps you cope, imagine the company died, another company forked it with a new license. Same thing, same result. We are literally discussing this in a thread where a prominent maintainer died. Nothing is forever. There is no way to guarantee something will be the same forever. Again, fork and move on if things change to your dissatisfaction.
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    You apparently are not familiar with the concept of software maintenance, upgrade, security patches. Or completely ignored it when wrote this comment.

endisneigh 3y ago

Yeah man, screw the VCs! That’s why we’re communicating through an open source platform… oh. Well at least this site isn’t created by a VC… oh. Things are nuanced. VCs can fund valuable useful things sometimes.

rmbyrro 3y ago
Nobody's saying screw VCs. We say screw to fooling your users that you're an OSS adopter and supporter, just until your project is big and you can say screw OSS.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  You seem to be confused. Even if the project is big and they change the license, so what? The old code is there with the existing license still. Fork it and move on. People, man.
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    Do you have any idea of what constitutes an OSS project besides characters written on an versioned repository?
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    you can't fork and maintain everything yourself, and that de-facto lock in is exactly what companies bank on when they pull this kind of bait and switch. The idea is precisely to gain popularity with open source, "the first dose is free" style, and then capitalize on the dependency and popularity. Literally just the developer analog to the misleading "everything is free and always will be" advertisements of consumer facing software.
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      Ok find other people to help, that’s how open source works no? There’s no issue here. Just whining. There is no lock in at all. Even if it were OSI open source the maintainers like the very thread we are in could die. Then what? Oh you fork and maintain yourself, or the project rots. License changes are irrelevant.

rmbyrro 3y ago

Monetization-era

bryanlarsen 3y ago

The main alternative to open source monetization is XKCD 2347 (one guy in Nebraska). PostgreSQL appears to have hit that sweet middle ground that is so rare in open source. https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/