15 ms·

Open source pioneer Perens says it's time to contemplate a post-open world

45 points by osivertsson 2y ago

justinclift 2y ago
Interesting concept. Seems like it could be worth experimenting with a bit and seeing what the good/bad/etc points are in practise. :)
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
May be. Most companies already hate agpl so I figure you could solve some of the freeloader problem by dual licensing agpl and proprietary sorta like Qt does. He's proposing what sounds like Qt but instead of an app framework led by one company it'd be a huge collection of anything useful from a variety of parties, and developers would be compensated in proportion to usage, somehow.
- jgeada 2y ago
  Largely they hate agpl because it doesn't enable them to parasite off the work of others for free.
  - sp332 2y ago
    Yes, that's why it's useful to drive commercial uses to the paid license.
  - seanhunter 2y ago
    Can't speak in general (and I'm doubtful you can either) but at the big corporate where I currently work we recently opensourced some stuff. We (the dev team) were suggesting the AGPL but when we got advice from outside counsel[1] they strongly recommended Apache 2 or MIT because of technical legal stuff to do with how the license is drafted. The concern wasn't due to any sort of GPL "virality" type concerns it was to do with the wording of all the linking and "conveying"/distribution stuff which they felt wasn't drafted very well and might be weak if we later tried to pursue someone who was violating the license. [1] From one of the most reputable big law firms in the US specializing in IP issues
  - yarekt 2y ago
    Idk, as a software developer, the process of looking for a library is basically if it’s not MIT, it’s just easier to do it yourself. not even worth spending time integrating to later rewrite. Imo I’d even release our own stuff as MIT just because otherwise it won’t get used. I do agree that the state of open source is poor, despite it being basically the reason internet exists as it does. I really think we need a modern model that accounts for how masses of people behave in our current work environment. (EDIT: to clarify, all this is mostly around other contractual issues)
Pet_Ant 2y ago
I honestly think the part of open-source that matters most is that it really has no compliance. Free to download is good enough. The fact that you can just download it and use it and don't need to go through legal cannot be understated. Things that are free for private non-commercial use are good enough, because they can be downloaded and used without a PO and getting legal involved. If I wanted to get a $1 donation to the Linux kernel, would never happen. If it's not something that developer's can use behind management's back it's not useful. They'll tell us we have all the ones and zeros we need and are just being lazy. The people paying the bills don't want better products and just about anything can already be bodged together. Building better products is only desired by the engineers who have no say in the matter.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cryptonector 2y ago
  You always have to go through Legal at $WORK, for any serious $WORK. That's because $WORK can't let you 'infect' proprietary code with copyleft code, for example. Typically there will be a list of licenses that require no further approval to use in your work at $WORK, and for everything else you need to ask Legal. For non-commercial work you do on your own there's really no real limits on what open source you take and use, and that's great, yeah.
hgs3 2y ago
It sounds like Parens is proposing a centralized mutual fund for closed-source license subscriptions. I'm going to disagree and say I'd rather not have a central authority behind this. Developers should be empowered to sell closed-source licenses, support, documentation, examples, etc. themselves as individuals. As a counter proposal I'd rather have code hosting services and package managers offer better monetization tools because that is more decentralized.
- greggsy 2y ago
  Agreed. Developers and consumers already have a relationship with repository platforms - it makes sense to integrate the monetisation or paid support channel there. Can I coin the term ‘pay per pull’ (not that I think that’s the best approach)? Perhaps you could pay with a freshly minted CommitCoin?
  - frizlab 2y ago
    You mean this? https://tea.xyz https://tea.xyz
    - greggsy 2y ago
      Sort of, but baked right into the repo platform.
- justinclift 2y ago
  > a central authority behind this. Yeah, a central authority could potentially be beneficial if/while it's run by benevolent people. But if it gets taken over by (say) political activism types, or just MBA types determined to treat it like a profit center, then it's going to turn to crap right about then. :(
  - Borg3 2y ago
    And it always happen likes that, sooner or later. Yet, every time people think this time its gonna be different... NOT.. The only way is decentralization...
Spivak 2y ago
This has got to be the hacker version of watching a band you love sell out. It's crazy where we're calling "I made this thing that was useful for me and I'm giving it away so that it might be useful to others" corporate welfare like they're the ones betraying the spirit of OSS. But the companies that release OSS as a growth hack for their VC funded startups and are happy to take it away when it benefits them, those guys are the real spirit of OSS. There has never been a time that selling OSS has ever worked and it seems like business are wising up to the fact that there's no first party advantage in OSS. If your plan is make some software and charge for <something else> you better be damn good at the something else. RedHat made it work with a truly ungodly amount of effort on support, documentation, compliance, and security channels.
jujube3 2y ago
What if we collected money from users in exchange for a license to use the software. Then, that money could go to an organization: call it a "company." Then the company could use the money to pay the developers! We could call this idea "proprietary software." I wonder if anyone has thought of it?
- marssaxman 2y ago
  I participated in an extended, large-scale experiment along those lines during the '80s and '90s, and it didn't work very well.
- wmf 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    Bill Gates didn't understand mind-share...
- jbmchuck 2y ago
  [dead]
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  You're confused, apparently thinking there is only one goal: fund software development. But that's incorrect, there are at least two goals: ensure that software development can continue, and provide users (whoever they may be) with some approximation of GNU's Four Freedoms (freedom to use, freedom to study, freedom to modify, freedom to distribute). At least, those are the minimal two goals for anyone interested in FLOSS.
  - jujube3 2y ago
    The freedom to use means the freedom to use without paying. So it is you who is confused.
onewheeltom 2y ago
As we have recently discovered, the current system is clearly open to exploits. Closed source isn’t any better. We need a way to audit the source to find the potential exploits before they are deployed.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Closed source isn’t any better. Closed source is worse; it's much harder to find backdoors or accidental bugs when you don't even have source code to work from.
- arp242 2y ago
  A single incident doesn't really demonstrate that it's "open to exploits"; it just demonstrates that it's possible, but no system is 100% foolproof so that's not really meaningful. I can only recall two incidents: the other being the JS event-stream cryptothing and that was five years ago. Perhaps there are others I'm not aware of, but by and large, it seems very rare that projects that see real-world usage get compromised. (and don't give me any of that "but we don't know how often it happens!"-bollocks – you can always say that about almost anything; go find evidence).
  - googh 2y ago
    > "but we don't know how often it happens!"-bollocks I am not sure why you describe that as bollocks. The most surprising part of the xz backdoor is that it was discovered by sheer luck. Imagine what would've happened if the backdoor hadn't caused a noticeable slowdown. It is not a stretch to imagine that there might be other backdoors in OSS that are not (yet) found.
pca006132 2y ago
Don't see how this can work. How would you encourage collaboration between projects when they are kind of competing for resources? How to track the 'contribution' of certain projects? Some projects may be more important to some and less important to the others, does it mean they need to pay a subscription plus a donation to support that a specific project? And it feels like this will become a paywall, like those academic publishers, with most of the money going to 'administrative fees' as well as legal fees.
Teever 2y ago
I sympathize with Perens but I don't that this is the right approach. At least not yet. The recent moves by the EU and the DoJ to regulate companies like Google and Apple fill me with hope that we can fix the problems that these monoliths create. We shouldn't have to destroy something like open source to stop them from taking advantage of us. We should just regulate away their ability to take advantage of us.
clcaev 2y ago
This sounds like a solution that is not based upon free market ethos. Much more detail would be needed to evaluate things. Who evaluates which and by how much each developer is compensated?
slowhadoken 2y ago
Or enforce regulations that prevent the corporate exploitation of open source software.
- theamk 2y ago
  Those being? Most of the so-called "corporate exploitation" cases I hear about on HN happened in exact accordance to the license. It's like clockwork: (1) Authors releases software under license which explicitly allows anyone (including AWS) to productize it (2) All the users flock to it (people do like it when there are multiple suppliers that can drive the price down) (3) AWS productizes it, drives the price down. Users are happy. (4) Developers act surprised that users don't want to pay more money when they can pay less. (One notable exception is massive and common GPL violations by various hardware manufacturers. This is a real shame and should be enforced more... but that's not what Perens was talking about)
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    I have wondering about this model. Somehow developers/companies should get marketing from product being free, but then should also be paid for it... I personally see that these technologies are often picked up because they are free. Meaning that if they were not it would have been unlike option to choose. It is like having your cake and eating it too... I'm not sure if there is any good solution. Maybe it is just going back to something like source available... And selling actual products or services.
  - slowhadoken 2y ago
    You’re rationalizing exploitation. There are open source rules and corporations are breaking them. OpenAI most of all these days.
    - theamk 2y ago
      By "OpenAI", do you mean Github Copilot training on open source data? Even if government makes new laws, it's not going to be nearly enough. Github Copilot had $100M revenue (not profit) 6 month ago [0]. Let's say MS dedicates half of it to payment to providers of training data. Github currently has 120M public repositories [1] - that's less than $0.50/year for each repo. Even if we say only 1% of repos are "alive" and need payments, that's still $50/year, not enough to pay for any development. So I agree that OpenAI is unfair and should be prohibited from scraping all copyleft code, but fixing this won't help with open source payments at all. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37835486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37835486 [1] https://github.com/search?q=is%3Apublic&type=repositories https://github.com/search?q=is%3Apublic&type=repositories
anthonyskipper 2y ago
This feels like the opposite direction of where we should be going. Open source should be more like science where you will never get paid unless some company or lab is paying you to do it, and there is a hard focus against commercialization. Parens approach seems revolting I work at a big company where we both consume and contribute to open source. Our single biggest problem in open source is vendor license issues like confluent and redis, where we can't get that service from a cloud provider without hoops.
irq-1 2y ago
It should be a union, like the Screen Actors Guild. An entrepreneur model already exists for developers; start a company with your software and monetize it. But most developers don't want to do all the activities involved in making a company. Open source developers want to work on their choice of software and get paid. A collaborative venture, like a union or guild, aligns with this.
curtis3389 2y ago
This is your reminder that OSI shills for corporations and is opposed to the GNU project and digital freedoms. OSI has always existed to shift the conversation from talking about freedoms and rights in the digital era to about software quality. Here, again, we see them pushing their corporate-benefactors' interests: reducing costs and meeting compliance requirements.
- justinclift 2y ago
  > OSI has always existed to shift the conversation from talking about freedoms and rights in the digital era to about software quality. That seems wildly inaccurate. If you take a look at their internal license discussion mailing list, the majority of the time the members are talking about the freedoms and rights of various licenses and proposals. Discussion archives are here if that's useful: http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/ http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....
  - curtis3389 2y ago
    I believe you misunderstood what I wrote. The difference between the OSI and GNU/FSF are well stated here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html
motohagiography 2y ago
open source let some of the most brilliant people in the world find each other, collaborate, and coordinate to produce a tech ecosystem that transformed our whole species and its quality of life in three short decades. it succeded. there are no poor FOSS contributors either. the music industry is a bad model to emulate because the incentives are even worse than FOSS to rob creators. Streaming platforms paying out fractions of a cent for thousands of uses would be the example software would likely converge on. what free software did phenomenally well is establish merit and signal capability in a culture that produced the most wealth of any other era. who is it broken for? maybe people who want to use tech as a proxy to govern people without adding value, but i'd argue that's a feature not a bug.
- justinclift 2y ago
  > there are no poor FOSS contributors either. How sure about that are you? Asking because there seem to have been plenty of posts over the years from people working on OSS stuff, who are or have faced financial difficulties.
  - motohagiography 2y ago
    many troubled people who have experienced homelessness and addiction as well, but if you are committing code to projects that people use, you are separate and a part of a rich community
    - justinclift 2y ago
      Ahhh, I misunderstood your usage of the poor/rich terms there. You're not meaning financially. :)
johnea 2y ago
Sure, and the internet can run on IIS?
dragonwriter 2y ago
So the great new idea is: (1) Proprietary license with annual term, annual mandatory customer audits, and customer revenue-based payment, (2) Massive bundling so it would all be under one license and payment, (3) Automated, “git depository”-based determination of revenue sharing to contributors, (4) Despite #2, multiple different companies involved in actually taking and redistributing payment. Whose problems is this solving? It’s not solving real user problems (except maybe for some large enterprises, where the added annual fee might be worth the supposedly simplified compliance, though I don’t actually see that this offers necessarily offers simplified compliance.) It’s not solving the problems of the VC-funded startups that have been complaining about not being able to make money off open source. I don’t think its really solving individual developer payment issues better than users with substantial interest paying developers directly for work that those users are interested in and/or supporting foundations backing projects of interest.

45 points by osivertsson 2y ago

Interesting concept. Seems like it could be worth experimenting with a bit and seeing what the good/bad/etc points are in practise. :)

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

May be. Most companies already hate agpl so I figure you could solve some of the freeloader problem by dual licensing agpl and proprietary sorta like Qt does. He's proposing what sounds like Qt but instead of an app framework led by one company it'd be a huge collection of anything useful from a variety of parties, and developers would be compensated in proportion to usage, somehow.

jgeada 2y ago
Largely they hate agpl because it doesn't enable them to parasite off the work of others for free.
- sp332 2y ago
  Yes, that's why it's useful to drive commercial uses to the paid license.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  Can't speak in general (and I'm doubtful you can either) but at the big corporate where I currently work we recently opensourced some stuff. We (the dev team) were suggesting the AGPL but when we got advice from outside counsel[1] they strongly recommended Apache 2 or MIT because of technical legal stuff to do with how the license is drafted. The concern wasn't due to any sort of GPL "virality" type concerns it was to do with the wording of all the linking and "conveying"/distribution stuff which they felt wasn't drafted very well and might be weak if we later tried to pursue someone who was violating the license. [1] From one of the most reputable big law firms in the US specializing in IP issues
- yarekt 2y ago
  Idk, as a software developer, the process of looking for a library is basically if it’s not MIT, it’s just easier to do it yourself. not even worth spending time integrating to later rewrite. Imo I’d even release our own stuff as MIT just because otherwise it won’t get used. I do agree that the state of open source is poor, despite it being basically the reason internet exists as it does. I really think we need a modern model that accounts for how masses of people behave in our current work environment. (EDIT: to clarify, all this is mostly around other contractual issues)

Pet_Ant 2y ago

I honestly think the part of open-source that matters most is that it really has no compliance. Free to download is good enough. The fact that you can just download it and use it and don't need to go through legal cannot be understated. Things that are free for private non-commercial use are good enough, because they can be downloaded and used without a PO and getting legal involved. If I wanted to get a $1 donation to the Linux kernel, would never happen. If it's not something that developer's can use behind management's back it's not useful. They'll tell us we have all the ones and zeros we need and are just being lazy. The people paying the bills don't want better products and just about anything can already be bodged together. Building better products is only desired by the engineers who have no say in the matter.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cryptonector 2y ago
You always have to go through Legal at $WORK, for any serious $WORK. That's because $WORK can't let you 'infect' proprietary code with copyleft code, for example. Typically there will be a list of licenses that require no further approval to use in your work at $WORK, and for everything else you need to ask Legal. For non-commercial work you do on your own there's really no real limits on what open source you take and use, and that's great, yeah.

hgs3 2y ago

It sounds like Parens is proposing a centralized mutual fund for closed-source license subscriptions. I'm going to disagree and say I'd rather not have a central authority behind this. Developers should be empowered to sell closed-source licenses, support, documentation, examples, etc. themselves as individuals. As a counter proposal I'd rather have code hosting services and package managers offer better monetization tools because that is more decentralized.

greggsy 2y ago
Agreed. Developers and consumers already have a relationship with repository platforms - it makes sense to integrate the monetisation or paid support channel there. Can I coin the term ‘pay per pull’ (not that I think that’s the best approach)? Perhaps you could pay with a freshly minted CommitCoin?
- frizlab 2y ago
  You mean this? https://tea.xyz https://tea.xyz
  - greggsy 2y ago
    Sort of, but baked right into the repo platform.
justinclift 2y ago
> a central authority behind this. Yeah, a central authority could potentially be beneficial if/while it's run by benevolent people. But if it gets taken over by (say) political activism types, or just MBA types determined to treat it like a profit center, then it's going to turn to crap right about then. :(
- Borg3 2y ago
  And it always happen likes that, sooner or later. Yet, every time people think this time its gonna be different... NOT.. The only way is decentralization...

Spivak 2y ago

This has got to be the hacker version of watching a band you love sell out. It's crazy where we're calling "I made this thing that was useful for me and I'm giving it away so that it might be useful to others" corporate welfare like they're the ones betraying the spirit of OSS. But the companies that release OSS as a growth hack for their VC funded startups and are happy to take it away when it benefits them, those guys are the real spirit of OSS. There has never been a time that selling OSS has ever worked and it seems like business are wising up to the fact that there's no first party advantage in OSS. If your plan is make some software and charge for <something else> you better be damn good at the something else. RedHat made it work with a truly ungodly amount of effort on support, documentation, compliance, and security channels.

jujube3 2y ago

What if we collected money from users in exchange for a license to use the software. Then, that money could go to an organization: call it a "company." Then the company could use the money to pay the developers! We could call this idea "proprietary software." I wonder if anyone has thought of it?

marssaxman 2y ago
I participated in an extended, large-scale experiment along those lines during the '80s and '90s, and it didn't work very well.
wmf 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Bill Gates didn't understand mind-share...
jbmchuck 2y ago
[dead]
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
You're confused, apparently thinking there is only one goal: fund software development. But that's incorrect, there are at least two goals: ensure that software development can continue, and provide users (whoever they may be) with some approximation of GNU's Four Freedoms (freedom to use, freedom to study, freedom to modify, freedom to distribute). At least, those are the minimal two goals for anyone interested in FLOSS.
- jujube3 2y ago
  The freedom to use means the freedom to use without paying. So it is you who is confused.

onewheeltom 2y ago

As we have recently discovered, the current system is clearly open to exploits. Closed source isn’t any better. We need a way to audit the source to find the potential exploits before they are deployed.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> Closed source isn’t any better. Closed source is worse; it's much harder to find backdoors or accidental bugs when you don't even have source code to work from.
arp242 2y ago
A single incident doesn't really demonstrate that it's "open to exploits"; it just demonstrates that it's possible, but no system is 100% foolproof so that's not really meaningful. I can only recall two incidents: the other being the JS event-stream cryptothing and that was five years ago. Perhaps there are others I'm not aware of, but by and large, it seems very rare that projects that see real-world usage get compromised. (and don't give me any of that "but we don't know how often it happens!"-bollocks – you can always say that about almost anything; go find evidence).
- googh 2y ago
  > "but we don't know how often it happens!"-bollocks I am not sure why you describe that as bollocks. The most surprising part of the xz backdoor is that it was discovered by sheer luck. Imagine what would've happened if the backdoor hadn't caused a noticeable slowdown. It is not a stretch to imagine that there might be other backdoors in OSS that are not (yet) found.

pca006132 2y ago

Don't see how this can work. How would you encourage collaboration between projects when they are kind of competing for resources? How to track the 'contribution' of certain projects? Some projects may be more important to some and less important to the others, does it mean they need to pay a subscription plus a donation to support that a specific project? And it feels like this will become a paywall, like those academic publishers, with most of the money going to 'administrative fees' as well as legal fees.

Teever 2y ago

I sympathize with Perens but I don't that this is the right approach. At least not yet. The recent moves by the EU and the DoJ to regulate companies like Google and Apple fill me with hope that we can fix the problems that these monoliths create. We shouldn't have to destroy something like open source to stop them from taking advantage of us. We should just regulate away their ability to take advantage of us.

clcaev 2y ago

This sounds like a solution that is not based upon free market ethos. Much more detail would be needed to evaluate things. Who evaluates which and by how much each developer is compensated?

slowhadoken 2y ago

Or enforce regulations that prevent the corporate exploitation of open source software.

theamk 2y ago
Those being? Most of the so-called "corporate exploitation" cases I hear about on HN happened in exact accordance to the license. It's like clockwork: (1) Authors releases software under license which explicitly allows anyone (including AWS) to productize it (2) All the users flock to it (people do like it when there are multiple suppliers that can drive the price down) (3) AWS productizes it, drives the price down. Users are happy. (4) Developers act surprised that users don't want to pay more money when they can pay less. (One notable exception is massive and common GPL violations by various hardware manufacturers. This is a real shame and should be enforced more... but that's not what Perens was talking about)
- Ekaros 2y ago
  I have wondering about this model. Somehow developers/companies should get marketing from product being free, but then should also be paid for it... I personally see that these technologies are often picked up because they are free. Meaning that if they were not it would have been unlike option to choose. It is like having your cake and eating it too... I'm not sure if there is any good solution. Maybe it is just going back to something like source available... And selling actual products or services.
- slowhadoken 2y ago
  You’re rationalizing exploitation. There are open source rules and corporations are breaking them. OpenAI most of all these days.
  - theamk 2y ago
    By "OpenAI", do you mean Github Copilot training on open source data? Even if government makes new laws, it's not going to be nearly enough. Github Copilot had $100M revenue (not profit) 6 month ago [0]. Let's say MS dedicates half of it to payment to providers of training data. Github currently has 120M public repositories [1] - that's less than $0.50/year for each repo. Even if we say only 1% of repos are "alive" and need payments, that's still $50/year, not enough to pay for any development. So I agree that OpenAI is unfair and should be prohibited from scraping all copyleft code, but fixing this won't help with open source payments at all. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37835486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37835486 [1] https://github.com/search?q=is%3Apublic&type=repositories https://github.com/search?q=is%3Apublic&type=repositories

anthonyskipper 2y ago

This feels like the opposite direction of where we should be going. Open source should be more like science where you will never get paid unless some company or lab is paying you to do it, and there is a hard focus against commercialization. Parens approach seems revolting I work at a big company where we both consume and contribute to open source. Our single biggest problem in open source is vendor license issues like confluent and redis, where we can't get that service from a cloud provider without hoops.

irq-1 2y ago

It should be a union, like the Screen Actors Guild. An entrepreneur model already exists for developers; start a company with your software and monetize it. But most developers don't want to do all the activities involved in making a company. Open source developers want to work on their choice of software and get paid. A collaborative venture, like a union or guild, aligns with this.

curtis3389 2y ago

This is your reminder that OSI shills for corporations and is opposed to the GNU project and digital freedoms. OSI has always existed to shift the conversation from talking about freedoms and rights in the digital era to about software quality. Here, again, we see them pushing their corporate-benefactors' interests: reducing costs and meeting compliance requirements.

justinclift 2y ago
> OSI has always existed to shift the conversation from talking about freedoms and rights in the digital era to about software quality. That seems wildly inaccurate. If you take a look at their internal license discussion mailing list, the majority of the time the members are talking about the freedoms and rights of various licenses and proposals. Discussion archives are here if that's useful: http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/ http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists....
- curtis3389 2y ago
  I believe you misunderstood what I wrote. The difference between the OSI and GNU/FSF are well stated here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

motohagiography 2y ago

open source let some of the most brilliant people in the world find each other, collaborate, and coordinate to produce a tech ecosystem that transformed our whole species and its quality of life in three short decades. it succeded. there are no poor FOSS contributors either. the music industry is a bad model to emulate because the incentives are even worse than FOSS to rob creators. Streaming platforms paying out fractions of a cent for thousands of uses would be the example software would likely converge on. what free software did phenomenally well is establish merit and signal capability in a culture that produced the most wealth of any other era. who is it broken for? maybe people who want to use tech as a proxy to govern people without adding value, but i'd argue that's a feature not a bug.

justinclift 2y ago
> there are no poor FOSS contributors either. How sure about that are you? Asking because there seem to have been plenty of posts over the years from people working on OSS stuff, who are or have faced financial difficulties.
- motohagiography 2y ago
  many troubled people who have experienced homelessness and addiction as well, but if you are committing code to projects that people use, you are separate and a part of a rich community
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Ahhh, I misunderstood your usage of the poor/rich terms there. You're not meaning financially. :)

johnea 2y ago

Sure, and the internet can run on IIS?

dragonwriter 2y ago

So the great new idea is: (1) Proprietary license with annual term, annual mandatory customer audits, and customer revenue-based payment, (2) Massive bundling so it would all be under one license and payment, (3) Automated, “git depository”-based determination of revenue sharing to contributors, (4) Despite #2, multiple different companies involved in actually taking and redistributing payment. Whose problems is this solving? It’s not solving real user problems (except maybe for some large enterprises, where the added annual fee might be worth the supposedly simplified compliance, though I don’t actually see that this offers necessarily offers simplified compliance.) It’s not solving the problems of the VC-funded startups that have been complaining about not being able to make money off open source. I don’t think its really solving individual developer payment issues better than users with substantial interest paying developers directly for work that those users are interested in and/or supporting foundations backing projects of interest.