4 ms·

I'm struggling with the framing of all of this. I think it's clear that the author doesn't want to be involved with the realities (as unfortunate as they are) o

I'm struggling with the framing of all of this. I think it's clear that the author doesn't want to be involved with the realities (as unfortunate as they are) of maintaining an OSS project. There are very real issues with entitled or abusive users that have been well documented. What I don't understand is the expectation that the money would just flow upon publishing the software with a permissive license. It sounds like a lesson learned the hard way that most people won't pay for software if they don't have to, or if they don't have a vested interest in the project succeeding. Products launched with OSS cores or with some value-added services model for revenue generally bake in some kind of monetization plan. Relying on "If I build it they'll pay me" seems a bit misguided, even if it can work under some circumstances. The conclusion that OSS is just about people not wanting to pay any money is also problematic. The world runs on OSS, and that's arguably a good thing for a myriad of philosophical and practical reasons. The bad behavior that also happens to be an unfortunate reality doesn't negate this. The sustainability worries are real and need better solutions, but the answer isn't to abandon OSS. Even if it's the right choice for OP, his situation doesn't warrant broad conclusions, and seem less an indictment of OSS and more a misunderstanding of the playing field.

unethical_ban 3y ago
Nailed it. Particularly the fact that as valid as OP's situation is, it isn't necessarily indicative of FOSS as a whole. They basically say it in their article: They grew up on the koolaid (no offense, so did I) of how awesome Linux and BSD are, and the GNU principles that closed source software is unethical, to be avoided, and so on. It seems the harsh reality of "Not everyone can be sustained by a nonprofit foundation" has arrived.
- MBCook 3y ago
  That’s victim blaming. “They were unrealistic and should have known they’d be personally attacked, it’s their own fault for being weak”. Really? How about no one should be treated like shit for proving free software to you?
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    Haha! I just got done chastising someone for exactly what you accuse me of. No, I'm not blaming the person for quitting because of the jerks. There are two narratives in the article: one is the dilemma of how to put food on the table as a developer, and one is about the abuse and criticism from people who pay nothing and expect everything. So no, I don't "blame" the OP at all. No one should treat others rudely online, and OP had to deal with some awful stuff. My comment was about the dream of an all-FOSS world and how that clashes with buying groceries for a lot of people.
  - PhilipRoman 3y ago
    I agree with you, but in general any theory in the form of "the world should/shouldn't do XYZ" quickly falls apart when it meets reality. If you maintain any public communication channel, you are bound to get a bit of garbage coming in. You cannot fix it by saying how things should be.
- Eji1700 3y ago
  I've always found the diehard linux/FOSS crowd naive and abrasive simply because it seems to totally ignore reality. If you're good at coding, and you enjoy coding, you probably want to do it for a living. Not as a second job, not as a side project, and certainly not as a charity case that just flat out will not sustain you. There are precious few things that have the adoption and support linux has, and a lot of that is very much a "right place, right time" thing. The fact that I've seen plenty straight up vilify a coder for daring to want to, you know, make enough to support a library full time has always struck me as self destructive. I'm sure many great coders have given up and moved on to paid projects doing boiler plate because inventing new stuff gets you chewed up and spit out by the community if you monetize.
  - talldayo 3y ago
    It's turtles all the way down. Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story. But then you reach a pit of disillusionment where you realize that you relied on free software more than your own work, and probably ran up quite the karmic deficit selling whatever product you made. Maybe you decide that you don't care, but you have to reason with it somehow. I think a lot of people lash out at the entrepreneurial spirit because a business venture inherently necessitates risk. Your audience is not going to reward high-risk plays, and if your business proposition threatens their use-case enough then they'll probably protest. That train of logic isn't "diehard linux/FOSS" in my mind but more just holding someone to their own standards. Making a living out of coding is one thing, but turning your passion project into a business is another. If simple abrasive comments are what made them quit Open Source, I can't imagine how long they'd last trying to sell people a Javascript library.
    - CRConrad 3y ago
      > Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story. What "investors"?!? As a single developer, you need a computer and an Internet connection. Where do the six-(or seven-, or eight-)figure amounts of Venture Capital investment come in? > But then you reach a pit of disillusionment where you realize that you relied on free software more than your own work, and probably ran up quite the karmic deficit selling whatever product you made. That's what the LGPL is for: Even if you release your actual product only under a commercial license, you can help improve the tools you use, to pay back your karma to the community that enables you to do the whole thing in the first place. (Disclaimer: This is the only way I can see being able to both make a living as a one-man software development company and participate in / contribute to FOSS... But I haven't taken the leap of faith, put my living where my mouth is. (Yet.) So this could all be hot air.)
- fsckboy 3y ago
  >They grew up on the koolaid (no offense, so did I) you grew up thinking you were drinking koolaid, but you weren't, it was indeed fine wine. > of how awesome Linux and BSD are it's hard to think of two things more awesome than those two things. There's no koolaid, they are monumental achievements and are amazing. >the GNU principles that closed source software is unethical Stallman is/was a socialist, so yes, he had a Marxist take, "from those who have the ability, to those who have the need" and "there should be a limit to concentration of wealth regardless of the value of what you provide": much like so many people here. So yes, that's koolaid, but given that a majority of young people/people here believe it, you can't really pin that koolaid on GNU or open source, that's koolaid that was brought from home. But the rest of Stallman's idea and motivation, that if you find an annoying bug while using your printer, you and everybody else benefits if you have the source to the printer driver to fix it: that's not koolaid, that's the same type of can-do idea that drove "American ingenuity" on the frontier. It's nice to be able to fix a printer just like the blacksmith could fix your plough, and once in awhile we get together for a barn-raisin'. I just think you're oversimplifying and mixing separate concepts.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    This seems to be tone deaf fluffy theory in the face of "well, I can't afford to eat but at least some guy online says it's fine wine" Printer driver is a nice motivating story but in practice its a lotta work for no benefit
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      the entire web grew up on and still runs on open source, and everything lamented today as "wrong" with the web is proprietary. there is no fluffy theory, i have no idea what you are talking about. you're just not grateful for what you have, you're (analogy) like a teenager who assumes you're entitled to everything your parents provide... wait till you have kids of your own and you realize your parents had no fluffy illusions
    - CRConrad 3y ago
      > Printer driver is a nice motivating story but in practice its a lotta work for no benefit Printer driver is what the Free Software movement, and therefore its bastard son the Open Source movement, comes from. But, sure, you want to call that "no benefit", you do you, man...
MBCook 3y ago
It doesn’t have to be a reality. But people let it be. It’s only a reality because that kind of behavior is widely tolerated enough, or at least not met with harsh enough pushback, that it continues to drive away good contributors and cause burnout.
- Zancarius 3y ago
  Exactly... This is so true, and it's sort of reflective of the human condition. If you tolerate a wide gamut of responses, and abuse, you're going to get abused. It sucks, but it's reality. The same thing happens (though, sometimes to a lesser degree, sometimes more) in our social circles. Boundaries are necessary in all facets of life. If they're not well-defined, then they're easily crossed and you're left trying to establish them after expectations have already been laid, making it difficult to push back. I know it's not easy, but sometimes it's necessary to say no and cut off abusive behaviors/people. This was one of the hardest lessons I learned years ago. Yes, you'll make some enemies. Yes, you'll upset people. It's necessary. One other problem (at least that I've had) is attachment. It's difficult to detach from something you've put a great deal of time and effort into, and one of the threats that occasionally pop up are "do X or fork/hand the project over/give up" (or any other especially mean epithet). If they're serious about forking it, hey, let them. It probably won't happen—and if it does, what are the benefits for the community? Is it risking fragmentation? If you're detached, threats seem a whole lot less threatening. And we've seen what pressure campaigns can do with some success (xz) with burned out devs. I may just be jaded and cynical.
  - teknico 3y ago
    > I may just be jaded and cynical. You’re just realistic, don’t sabotage yourself.
  - CRConrad 3y ago
    > If you tolerate a wide gamut of responses, and abuse, you're going to get abused. Isn't there something called "the tolerance (or intolerance?) paradox"? Basically, something about "If you want tolerance to prevail, the one thing you can't tolerate is intolerance"? Think I've seen it mentioned here; others may be able to source my dim recollection. Boils down to, I guess, if you don't want to get abused, abuse the crap out of abusers at the first offense.
anaxamander 3y ago
> most people won't pay for software if ... they don't have a vested interest in the project succeeding. Wouldn't you expect companies that rely on a given project to have a vested interest in the project succeeding? I wouldn't choose to spend who-knows-how-many man hours on migrating to a new technology instead of paying a modest (for a business) fee for licensing something I rely on.
- parl_match 3y ago
  The whole reality is kind of rough, and it shouldn't be this way. Yes, but that is abstracted away easily as "someone else's problem". Mature organizations with SCA and policy around it will often do a library review that catches using less mature projects. This means that you get a bunch of small companies that can't/won't maintain or contribute back to the projects themselves, and few big companies using it who'd have the overhead to contribute back. In some cases, for popular and newer stuff, that means that when a vulnerability is found, you have hundreds of companies and projects downstream from the bad code. Meanwhile, the larger and more mature orgs flag it and deprecate or mitigate it (through various, expensive means like WAF/RASPs) And by then, it might even be completely unsupported, or worse, made breaking changes that strand many. Like a whalefall, it will feed hackers for a year.
- bruce511 3y ago
  I think the root of your mis-expectation is in thinking that companies behave like people. Your viewpoint is personal "I would do this" and for you it's easy, it's your money so you just write a check. Companies don't work like that. Firstly because individuals get budgets, and there's no point wasting limited resources on free stuff. Secondly because individuals are accountable. There are procurement processes, multiple-level sign-offs, justifications, invoices etc. In truth most OSS projects make it really hard to get "financial support". If you give away your product for free you make it almost impossible for a company to pay you. My advice: if you plan to write OSS for a living -start- by understanding how company purchasing and invoicing work. Get that part right -before- you even decide what to build.
  - anaxamander 3y ago
bruce511 3y ago
I don't think he's suggesting everyone should abandon OSS. he's still using it, and contributing. I think he's saying that his "professional journey building OSS" is over. ie his day job needs to generate income. The abuse part exists in all software, free and commercial. But it's especially galling when you did the work for free. OSS also tends to attract, um, shall we say, those who are likely to be uncomplimentary. (Spending money on things means you're more likely to like it.) The root point though is well made, and another annedotal data point - relying on random "companies supporting you with voluntary payments" is not a business model, and fundamentally misunderstands how businesses work. Hint - If you don't -invoice- then youre not getting paid.
- haswell 3y ago
  > I think he's saying that his "professional journey building OSS" is over. ie his day job needs to generate income. I agree that he’s saying this. But FTA: > Open source is great, but it's not sustainable. We self-sabotaged ourselves over decades, and now we're at a point where it's hard to turn back. Publishing source code for the greater good is a noble cause, but to be honest, I think that over the years, using "open source" has become an excuse to avoid paying for software. I interpreted this as something beyond just his personal position, and seemed like a broader indictment of the OSS model.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    There's OSS at the large-scale level (Linux, Firefox, Postgres) where the model is clearly working and sustainable. There's also OSS at the "one man band has a small project" level, where, IMO, the sustainable model has yet to be figured out.
    - thayne 3y ago
      At the one man band level, it works fine if it is a hobby. The problem is figuring out how to make a living supporting a small project.
      - 3y ago
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Open source done for money is doing it wrong. One of the things that makes OSS so great is that it's not done with a profit incentive, so it doesn't exploit or rent seek from the user. Many labor under the delusion that they can, or should, make money writing OSS though.
remram 3y ago
Reminds me of "open source is not a business model": https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2018/08/24/open-source-is-not-a-business-model-and-your-business-will-fail-if-you-think-that-it-is/ https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2018/08/24/open-source-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26602316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26602316
THENATHE 3y ago
I think the problem with open source in today's day and age is that old school programmers were all about making the landscape better, because they enjoyed computers where they had a passion for it. Modern-Day programmers, as a general statement, want money. Open source software is generally a terrible way to make money, but modern-day programmers believe that they can just create a really nice program and then make money from it. From a financial perspective, open source software is basically terrible for the people that make it, but really really great for the people that use it. That kind of goes against capitalism, almost, because basically every other capitalist-based business rapes all of the benefits for the person that develops the thing, so coming from a very american-centric perspective, it seems kind of wild to think that I can develop something that is really the backbone of a bunch of different stuff and very good, and make absolutely no money from it.

unethical_ban 3y ago

Nailed it. Particularly the fact that as valid as OP's situation is, it isn't necessarily indicative of FOSS as a whole. They basically say it in their article: They grew up on the koolaid (no offense, so did I) of how awesome Linux and BSD are, and the GNU principles that closed source software is unethical, to be avoided, and so on. It seems the harsh reality of "Not everyone can be sustained by a nonprofit foundation" has arrived.

MBCook 3y ago
That’s victim blaming. “They were unrealistic and should have known they’d be personally attacked, it’s their own fault for being weak”. Really? How about no one should be treated like shit for proving free software to you?
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  Haha! I just got done chastising someone for exactly what you accuse me of. No, I'm not blaming the person for quitting because of the jerks. There are two narratives in the article: one is the dilemma of how to put food on the table as a developer, and one is about the abuse and criticism from people who pay nothing and expect everything. So no, I don't "blame" the OP at all. No one should treat others rudely online, and OP had to deal with some awful stuff. My comment was about the dream of an all-FOSS world and how that clashes with buying groceries for a lot of people.
- PhilipRoman 3y ago
  I agree with you, but in general any theory in the form of "the world should/shouldn't do XYZ" quickly falls apart when it meets reality. If you maintain any public communication channel, you are bound to get a bit of garbage coming in. You cannot fix it by saying how things should be.
Eji1700 3y ago
I've always found the diehard linux/FOSS crowd naive and abrasive simply because it seems to totally ignore reality. If you're good at coding, and you enjoy coding, you probably want to do it for a living. Not as a second job, not as a side project, and certainly not as a charity case that just flat out will not sustain you. There are precious few things that have the adoption and support linux has, and a lot of that is very much a "right place, right time" thing. The fact that I've seen plenty straight up vilify a coder for daring to want to, you know, make enough to support a library full time has always struck me as self destructive. I'm sure many great coders have given up and moved on to paid projects doing boiler plate because inventing new stuff gets you chewed up and spit out by the community if you monetize.
- talldayo 3y ago
  It's turtles all the way down. Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story. But then you reach a pit of disillusionment where you realize that you relied on free software more than your own work, and probably ran up quite the karmic deficit selling whatever product you made. Maybe you decide that you don't care, but you have to reason with it somehow. I think a lot of people lash out at the entrepreneurial spirit because a business venture inherently necessitates risk. Your audience is not going to reward high-risk plays, and if your business proposition threatens their use-case enough then they'll probably protest. That train of logic isn't "diehard linux/FOSS" in my mind but more just holding someone to their own standards. Making a living out of coding is one thing, but turning your passion project into a business is another. If simple abrasive comments are what made them quit Open Source, I can't imagine how long they'd last trying to sell people a Javascript library.
  - CRConrad 3y ago
    > Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story. What "investors"?!? As a single developer, you need a computer and an Internet connection. Where do the six-(or seven-, or eight-)figure amounts of Venture Capital investment come in? > But then you reach a pit of disillusionment where you realize that you relied on free software more than your own work, and probably ran up quite the karmic deficit selling whatever product you made. That's what the LGPL is for: Even if you release your actual product only under a commercial license, you can help improve the tools you use, to pay back your karma to the community that enables you to do the whole thing in the first place. (Disclaimer: This is the only way I can see being able to both make a living as a one-man software development company and participate in / contribute to FOSS... But I haven't taken the leap of faith, put my living where my mouth is. (Yet.) So this could all be hot air.)
fsckboy 3y ago
>They grew up on the koolaid (no offense, so did I) you grew up thinking you were drinking koolaid, but you weren't, it was indeed fine wine. > of how awesome Linux and BSD are it's hard to think of two things more awesome than those two things. There's no koolaid, they are monumental achievements and are amazing. >the GNU principles that closed source software is unethical Stallman is/was a socialist, so yes, he had a Marxist take, "from those who have the ability, to those who have the need" and "there should be a limit to concentration of wealth regardless of the value of what you provide": much like so many people here. So yes, that's koolaid, but given that a majority of young people/people here believe it, you can't really pin that koolaid on GNU or open source, that's koolaid that was brought from home. But the rest of Stallman's idea and motivation, that if you find an annoying bug while using your printer, you and everybody else benefits if you have the source to the printer driver to fix it: that's not koolaid, that's the same type of can-do idea that drove "American ingenuity" on the frontier. It's nice to be able to fix a printer just like the blacksmith could fix your plough, and once in awhile we get together for a barn-raisin'. I just think you're oversimplifying and mixing separate concepts.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  This seems to be tone deaf fluffy theory in the face of "well, I can't afford to eat but at least some guy online says it's fine wine" Printer driver is a nice motivating story but in practice its a lotta work for no benefit
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    the entire web grew up on and still runs on open source, and everything lamented today as "wrong" with the web is proprietary. there is no fluffy theory, i have no idea what you are talking about. you're just not grateful for what you have, you're (analogy) like a teenager who assumes you're entitled to everything your parents provide... wait till you have kids of your own and you realize your parents had no fluffy illusions
  - CRConrad 3y ago
    > Printer driver is a nice motivating story but in practice its a lotta work for no benefit Printer driver is what the Free Software movement, and therefore its bastard son the Open Source movement, comes from. But, sure, you want to call that "no benefit", you do you, man...

MBCook 3y ago

It doesn’t have to be a reality. But people let it be. It’s only a reality because that kind of behavior is widely tolerated enough, or at least not met with harsh enough pushback, that it continues to drive away good contributors and cause burnout.

Zancarius 3y ago
Exactly... This is so true, and it's sort of reflective of the human condition. If you tolerate a wide gamut of responses, and abuse, you're going to get abused. It sucks, but it's reality. The same thing happens (though, sometimes to a lesser degree, sometimes more) in our social circles. Boundaries are necessary in all facets of life. If they're not well-defined, then they're easily crossed and you're left trying to establish them after expectations have already been laid, making it difficult to push back. I know it's not easy, but sometimes it's necessary to say no and cut off abusive behaviors/people. This was one of the hardest lessons I learned years ago. Yes, you'll make some enemies. Yes, you'll upset people. It's necessary. One other problem (at least that I've had) is attachment. It's difficult to detach from something you've put a great deal of time and effort into, and one of the threats that occasionally pop up are "do X or fork/hand the project over/give up" (or any other especially mean epithet). If they're serious about forking it, hey, let them. It probably won't happen—and if it does, what are the benefits for the community? Is it risking fragmentation? If you're detached, threats seem a whole lot less threatening. And we've seen what pressure campaigns can do with some success (xz) with burned out devs. I may just be jaded and cynical.
- teknico 3y ago
  > I may just be jaded and cynical. You’re just realistic, don’t sabotage yourself.
- CRConrad 3y ago
  > If you tolerate a wide gamut of responses, and abuse, you're going to get abused. Isn't there something called "the tolerance (or intolerance?) paradox"? Basically, something about "If you want tolerance to prevail, the one thing you can't tolerate is intolerance"? Think I've seen it mentioned here; others may be able to source my dim recollection. Boils down to, I guess, if you don't want to get abused, abuse the crap out of abusers at the first offense.

anaxamander 3y ago

> most people won't pay for software if ... they don't have a vested interest in the project succeeding. Wouldn't you expect companies that rely on a given project to have a vested interest in the project succeeding? I wouldn't choose to spend who-knows-how-many man hours on migrating to a new technology instead of paying a modest (for a business) fee for licensing something I rely on.

parl_match 3y ago
The whole reality is kind of rough, and it shouldn't be this way. Yes, but that is abstracted away easily as "someone else's problem". Mature organizations with SCA and policy around it will often do a library review that catches using less mature projects. This means that you get a bunch of small companies that can't/won't maintain or contribute back to the projects themselves, and few big companies using it who'd have the overhead to contribute back. In some cases, for popular and newer stuff, that means that when a vulnerability is found, you have hundreds of companies and projects downstream from the bad code. Meanwhile, the larger and more mature orgs flag it and deprecate or mitigate it (through various, expensive means like WAF/RASPs) And by then, it might even be completely unsupported, or worse, made breaking changes that strand many. Like a whalefall, it will feed hackers for a year.
bruce511 3y ago
I think the root of your mis-expectation is in thinking that companies behave like people. Your viewpoint is personal "I would do this" and for you it's easy, it's your money so you just write a check. Companies don't work like that. Firstly because individuals get budgets, and there's no point wasting limited resources on free stuff. Secondly because individuals are accountable. There are procurement processes, multiple-level sign-offs, justifications, invoices etc. In truth most OSS projects make it really hard to get "financial support". If you give away your product for free you make it almost impossible for a company to pay you. My advice: if you plan to write OSS for a living -start- by understanding how company purchasing and invoicing work. Get that part right -before- you even decide what to build.
- anaxamander 3y ago

bruce511 3y ago

I don't think he's suggesting everyone should abandon OSS. he's still using it, and contributing. I think he's saying that his "professional journey building OSS" is over. ie his day job needs to generate income. The abuse part exists in all software, free and commercial. But it's especially galling when you did the work for free. OSS also tends to attract, um, shall we say, those who are likely to be uncomplimentary. (Spending money on things means you're more likely to like it.) The root point though is well made, and another annedotal data point - relying on random "companies supporting you with voluntary payments" is not a business model, and fundamentally misunderstands how businesses work. Hint - If you don't -invoice- then youre not getting paid.

haswell 3y ago
> I think he's saying that his "professional journey building OSS" is over. ie his day job needs to generate income. I agree that he’s saying this. But FTA: > Open source is great, but it's not sustainable. We self-sabotaged ourselves over decades, and now we're at a point where it's hard to turn back. Publishing source code for the greater good is a noble cause, but to be honest, I think that over the years, using "open source" has become an excuse to avoid paying for software. I interpreted this as something beyond just his personal position, and seemed like a broader indictment of the OSS model.
- bruce511 3y ago
  There's OSS at the large-scale level (Linux, Firefox, Postgres) where the model is clearly working and sustainable. There's also OSS at the "one man band has a small project" level, where, IMO, the sustainable model has yet to be figured out.
  - thayne 3y ago
    At the one man band level, it works fine if it is a hobby. The problem is figuring out how to make a living supporting a small project.
    - 3y ago

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

Open source done for money is doing it wrong. One of the things that makes OSS so great is that it's not done with a profit incentive, so it doesn't exploit or rent seek from the user. Many labor under the delusion that they can, or should, make money writing OSS though.

remram 3y ago

Reminds me of "open source is not a business model": https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2018/08/24/open-source-is-not-a-business-model-and-your-business-will-fail-if-you-think-that-it-is/ https://anonymoushash.vmbrasseur.com/2018/08/24/open-source-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26602316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26602316

THENATHE 3y ago

I think the problem with open source in today's day and age is that old school programmers were all about making the landscape better, because they enjoyed computers where they had a passion for it. Modern-Day programmers, as a general statement, want money. Open source software is generally a terrible way to make money, but modern-day programmers believe that they can just create a really nice program and then make money from it. From a financial perspective, open source software is basically terrible for the people that make it, but really really great for the people that use it. That kind of goes against capitalism, almost, because basically every other capitalist-based business rapes all of the benefits for the person that develops the thing, so coming from a very american-centric perspective, it seems kind of wild to think that I can develop something that is really the backbone of a bunch of different stuff and very good, and make absolutely no money from it.