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> The most common belief open source maintainers have is that offering something for free gives them the right to some of their users’ money. Utter horse pucky

by ecjhdnc2025 2y ago

> The most common belief open source maintainers have is that offering something for free gives them the right to some of their users’ money. Utter horse pucky. If there's a common misconception around corporate open source, it's the belief that it will reduce the maintenance burden by sharing it with volunteer contributors, or (for major projects at least) that releasing open source code will lead them to be in control of a standard, rather than (if they are lucky) having influence over one. But individual contributors have such differing motivations, I have no idea what the evidence base for that first line is. And it continues in that vein. So much [citation needed].

rob74 2y ago
What motivated that phrase is probably the plight of (non-corporate) open source maintainers who get very little money for a lot of work, while at the same time seeing billion-dollar companies that save a lot of money by using their software. The example of curl is maybe not the best: curl is a high profile tool, used literally everywhere, and at the same time (relatively) straightforward: it does one thing (with a lot of variants of course) and does it well, but it doesn't have as much of the "bit rot" maintenance burden that other projects have. So there are a lot of open source projects that are much more "thankless" than curl. Of course, no one forces the maintainers to give their work away for free, but then no one should be surprised if projects (even popular ones) are abandoned.
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  > [...] the plight of (non-corporate) open source maintainers who get very little money for a lot of work, while at the same time seeing billion-dollar companies that save a lot of money by using their software. I don't dispute any of this -- it's really obviously a problem, particularly for certain "tent pole" projects where contributors have been horribly unrewarded. I just don't think you can get from there to the first sentence of that article, because the reality of those unrewarded developers is that most will carry on until they starve rather than feel they have "the right" to money.

rob74 2y ago

What motivated that phrase is probably the plight of (non-corporate) open source maintainers who get very little money for a lot of work, while at the same time seeing billion-dollar companies that save a lot of money by using their software. The example of curl is maybe not the best: curl is a high profile tool, used literally everywhere, and at the same time (relatively) straightforward: it does one thing (with a lot of variants of course) and does it well, but it doesn't have as much of the "bit rot" maintenance burden that other projects have. So there are a lot of open source projects that are much more "thankless" than curl. Of course, no one forces the maintainers to give their work away for free, but then no one should be surprised if projects (even popular ones) are abandoned.

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
> [...] the plight of (non-corporate) open source maintainers who get very little money for a lot of work, while at the same time seeing billion-dollar companies that save a lot of money by using their software. I don't dispute any of this -- it's really obviously a problem, particularly for certain "tent pole" projects where contributors have been horribly unrewarded. I just don't think you can get from there to the first sentence of that article, because the reality of those unrewarded developers is that most will carry on until they starve rather than feel they have "the right" to money.