6 ms·

Maybe open-source as the load-bearing infrastructure of the world will never be sustainable, and maybe that's okay. I think open-source is best when it's empowe

Maybe open-source as the load-bearing infrastructure of the world will never be sustainable, and maybe that's okay. I think open-source is best when it's empowering people to modify and remix their software, and have free alternatives to expensive commercial programs. It seems like open-source has become so captured by corporate interests, that people's main motivation for contributing is to add it as a bullet-point on their resume.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
The beauty of open-source is that it doesn’t matter what people say, or do, or decide. The rate of new contributions may be dependant on these factors, but not for what’s already out there.
squigz 2y ago
It would probably be more sustainable if the companies that depend on 100s of FOSS OS'/libraries/applications/etc to generate billions of dollars in profit would contribute more significantly.
- armini 2y ago
  Absolutely, There’s hope in initiatives like https://osspledge.com/ https://osspledge.com/ & https://thanks.dev https://thanks.dev
  - morningsam 2y ago
    Also https://polar.sh/ https://polar.sh/, which lets users of the project "vote with their wallets" on which issues should be prioritized. You can see it in action in Starlette's GitHub issues, e.g. https://github.com/encode/starlette/issues/649 https://github.com/encode/starlette/issues/649
- fsckboy 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - eulgro 2y ago
    > you're not a good person, you don't fool me. Fund open source, it would support young people who were just like you were Or maybe he knows he's not a good person and has no intention of multiplying people who are just like he was, because he knows people as himself are bad and the world is better without them.
    - zmgsabst 2y ago
      Killing other people because you’re a bad person makes you a worse person. If he’s doing that, we should stop him as a danger to others - no different than any other criminal.
  - eslaught 2y ago
    > It's probably too much to ask corporations to dump money into it as it would not be a legitimate business expense. Um, excuse me? Ok, let's suppose you've got a product that depends on open source project X. For simplicity let's say it's a direct dependency, though I think everything here applies to indirect ones as well. Let's consider the options. Option 1: never pay a dime for it. This works in so far as someone else picks up the bill. So really there are two sub-cases: Option 1(a): the project is successful enough that it's self-sustaining. What this really means is that someone else (or multiple someone elses) picked up the bill. Congrats, you lucked out. Option 1(b): the project is insufficiently funded and either dies or has a major security breach. Now you end up paying either for the security breach fallout and/or to replace the component, possibly on short notice, with something else. Or you maintain it yourself and start paying that cost, again possibly on short notice. Is that really worth it? Do you think so? I'm betting all those costs are higher than it would have cost to maintain it in the first place. Because anything you do in an emergency is more expensive, and you're paying the cost of losing all the context in the development of the project itself (if someone leaves before you start maintaining it). Option 2: pay for the software in the first place, making the cost predictable and avoiding a low-probability high-impact failure mode. Honestly, given all the risk management companies do, this seems worth it to me. At least if the dependency is critical enough. Obviously you won't do this with any random open source project. But that's sort of the point: companies are making economic decisions all the time about what they really care about. If they aren't paying, that means they're happy with the inverse lottery[1] of the failed open source project model. [1]: An inverse lottery is one where most of the time you get nothing, but rarely you lose big.
- jaredklewis 2y ago
  This would be nice, but since it hasn’t happened so far, hard to see why it would start happening. No idea what the future will look like in general in 5, 10, or 20 years but I am reasonably confident that donations to OSS won’t be drastically more than they are now.
  - squigz 2y ago
    Terrible reason to believe something won't happen.
    - phendrenad2 2y ago
      Actually no, historical data is the best indicator of future probability.
    - jaredklewis 2y ago
      Fair enough, but having worked inside a lot of tech companies I think I also have a pretty good sense of why tech companies don’t monetarily contribute more: no incentive to do so and because OSS is often chosen specifically to avoid costs. Hard to see why those things will stop being true.
      - zmgsabst 2y ago
        I think it’s pretty easy: Refer to any manager or executive at a tech company who uses open source to generate profits but doesn’t contribute as a “deadbeat” — so their choice becomes a source of social embarrassment.
        llm_trw 2y ago
        If you think companies care about embarrassment I have a nice house in Bhopal to sell you.
        DoreenMichele 2y ago
        Yeah, I think it would take something like bankruptcy of a Fortune 500 company because a critical open source piece shut down. And I'm not holding my breath that even that would sink in. People are amazingly talented at hearing only what they want to hear to justify doing it like they've always done it.
- bruce511 2y ago
  That's not how companies work. Individuals have agency over discretionary spending, in other words you can wake up and decide to donate money, hire a OSS dev, and so on. Because you personally have that agency, and because companies have lots of money, you project that agency onto companies. But that's not how companies work. People at companies have very little personal agency when it comes to spending money. Spending has to be approved, justified, and some value has to be received. FOSS basically is (mostly) incompatible with this model. Some companies do pay staff to work on OSS but it's rare (and exclusively tech companies with a motivation.) So while your statement is completely true, it's also not possible. It's important to recognize that donations and corruption are indistinguishable, and company finances tend to be set up to avoid corruption.
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    Of course it’s possible: All of those reasons you listed are choices that people make — not laws of nature.
    - bruce511 2y ago
      People make choices all the time. Choices that are overseen by management, and shareholders. People can of course choose to spend their political capital, and discretionary budget on random OSS projects. Or they can choose to spend it on their project, their goals, the outcomes that make their walk in the company easier, the actions that will get them promoted and not fired. These are choices people make, and frankly OSS funding delivers very very little bang for the buck. (On a buck by buck basis.)
      - chii 2y ago
        > frankly OSS funding delivers very very little bang for the buck which is why companies generally don't pay anything for OSS. If the cost is zero, but the benefit is not zero, then the bang for buck is infinite!
      - zmgsabst 2y ago
        Sure — my point was that we should discuss why this happens in terms of the real human dynamics. Either to conclude it’s not worth changing or to design a plan of how to change it. But neither goal is aided by hyperbole, pretending that not paying OSS is gravity.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  They do. A huge chunk of open source software is maintained by companies.
- goodpoint 2y ago
  There is a method to have companies fund public infrastructure work: taxation.
  - squigz 2y ago
    That's certainly an interesting idea, but I think some commenters' heads would explode if we tried talking about that. :P
- rini17 2y ago
  That support would inevitably come with strings attached. Which most open source maintainers fervently avoid.
  - palata 2y ago
    Permissive licenses come with strings attached (that most companies ignore): attribution. With copyleft licenses, nothing say that you have to get your changes upstream: you just have to distribute them to the users. It's not a whole lot more complicated than attribution: set up a repo and put your fork there publicly.
    - rini17 2y ago
      Attribution has its own issues too, like when curl developers faced Toyota owners who were grasping at straws because the curl attribution featured prominently in the car's malfunctioning entertainment system.
- palata 2y ago
  Companies that depend on FOSS would contribute if the license did not explicitly tell them that they don't have to. MPLv2/EUPL come to mind: they are compatible with proprietary products, but they make it mandatory to distribute changes/extensions of the library, not the whole product. FOSS authors have a responsibility when they choose a permissive license.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    > Companies that depend on FOSS would contribute if the license did not explicitly tell them that they don't have to. No they won't. They'll only contribute if they're required to, or if doing so will be beneficial to them, and they'll do that regardless of whether the license says they have to or not. When I've worked at companies that use FOSS, and have needed to modify those sources, I'll contribute back (regardless of license) if I think that change is likely to be accepted upstream, because I'd rather not have to maintain a fork. This would fall under "contribute if doing so will be beneficial to them". At any rate, no FOSS license (that I'm aware of, or is in wide use) requires users to contribute. At most, they require that changes be made available. There's nothing that says the changes need to be submitted (or accepted) upstream. Often getting a change into a state where it would be accepted upstream is a significant amount of work beyond what the company has already done for their own purposes, so they don't bother.
    - palata 2y ago
      > No they won't. They'll only contribute if they're required to Did you actually read my comment before you answered? Because I said that copyleft licenses "make it mandatory to distribute changes/extensions", which means that companies are required to contribute if the license is reciprocal. > At any rate, no FOSS license (that I'm aware of, or is in wide use) requires users to contribute. At most, they require that changes be made available. Making changes available is a form of contribution. If you work on a proof of concept for a month and at the end your company decides not to use it in a product (thanks to the learning from your work), do you say that you did not contribute, so you should not be paid? Feels like you're being pedantic just for the sake of the argument.
Nifty3929 2y ago
Companies will continue to take advantage of free and cheap labor just as long as those people continue to serve. Perhaps after this generation of LBIP moves on, the next wave won’t be so generous. Also, open source doesn’t have to mean free labor. One could be paid a wage to work on open source.
marcosdumay 2y ago
I don't think there's any other sustainable format to make software that becomes load-bearing infrastructure. Open source is the only player existing. What isn't sustainable is just the model where some random person takes a huge part of the responsibility for himself without any structure around it. We need different organizations.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Privately owned infrastructure is perfectly sustainable in other fields, and so is publicly funded infrastructure. I think that, if necessary, either of those could be a viable replacement for open source being the infrastructure for tech. Obviously each comes with its own pros and cons compared to open source, but they still ought to be viable.
soerxpso 2y ago
I haven't yet seen the evidence that it's unsustainable. People are still doing it. It seems to be working. There's no reason to believe people are going to stop doing it or that it's going to stop working. It might be important to you to get paid for your work. Okay, charge for your work then! That was always allowed. There are many people who are okay with doing certain work for free. Maybe they just want to put it on their resume, or they already have enough money, or they just really like that work. Open source is working fine.
j45 2y ago
I think there might be a little different. New developers with higher level tools don't seem to go low level enough. And as a result some very talented developers are caught up in the crosswinds of complexity to make things like React deliver html/css, or get people to click on ads, and that same intellect and talent could definitely go towards the meaningful open-source that contributed to them getting access to a lot of opportunities.

MichaelZuo 2y ago

The beauty of open-source is that it doesn’t matter what people say, or do, or decide. The rate of new contributions may be dependant on these factors, but not for what’s already out there.

squigz 2y ago

It would probably be more sustainable if the companies that depend on 100s of FOSS OS'/libraries/applications/etc to generate billions of dollars in profit would contribute more significantly.

armini 2y ago
Absolutely, There’s hope in initiatives like https://osspledge.com/ https://osspledge.com/ & https://thanks.dev https://thanks.dev
- morningsam 2y ago
  Also https://polar.sh/ https://polar.sh/, which lets users of the project "vote with their wallets" on which issues should be prioritized. You can see it in action in Starlette's GitHub issues, e.g. https://github.com/encode/starlette/issues/649 https://github.com/encode/starlette/issues/649
fsckboy 2y ago
[flagged]
- eulgro 2y ago
  > you're not a good person, you don't fool me. Fund open source, it would support young people who were just like you were Or maybe he knows he's not a good person and has no intention of multiplying people who are just like he was, because he knows people as himself are bad and the world is better without them.
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    Killing other people because you’re a bad person makes you a worse person. If he’s doing that, we should stop him as a danger to others - no different than any other criminal.
- eslaught 2y ago
  > It's probably too much to ask corporations to dump money into it as it would not be a legitimate business expense. Um, excuse me? Ok, let's suppose you've got a product that depends on open source project X. For simplicity let's say it's a direct dependency, though I think everything here applies to indirect ones as well. Let's consider the options. Option 1: never pay a dime for it. This works in so far as someone else picks up the bill. So really there are two sub-cases: Option 1(a): the project is successful enough that it's self-sustaining. What this really means is that someone else (or multiple someone elses) picked up the bill. Congrats, you lucked out. Option 1(b): the project is insufficiently funded and either dies or has a major security breach. Now you end up paying either for the security breach fallout and/or to replace the component, possibly on short notice, with something else. Or you maintain it yourself and start paying that cost, again possibly on short notice. Is that really worth it? Do you think so? I'm betting all those costs are higher than it would have cost to maintain it in the first place. Because anything you do in an emergency is more expensive, and you're paying the cost of losing all the context in the development of the project itself (if someone leaves before you start maintaining it). Option 2: pay for the software in the first place, making the cost predictable and avoiding a low-probability high-impact failure mode. Honestly, given all the risk management companies do, this seems worth it to me. At least if the dependency is critical enough. Obviously you won't do this with any random open source project. But that's sort of the point: companies are making economic decisions all the time about what they really care about. If they aren't paying, that means they're happy with the inverse lottery[1] of the failed open source project model. [1]: An inverse lottery is one where most of the time you get nothing, but rarely you lose big.
jaredklewis 2y ago
This would be nice, but since it hasn’t happened so far, hard to see why it would start happening. No idea what the future will look like in general in 5, 10, or 20 years but I am reasonably confident that donations to OSS won’t be drastically more than they are now.
- squigz 2y ago
  Terrible reason to believe something won't happen.
  - phendrenad2 2y ago
    Actually no, historical data is the best indicator of future probability.
  - jaredklewis 2y ago
    Fair enough, but having worked inside a lot of tech companies I think I also have a pretty good sense of why tech companies don’t monetarily contribute more: no incentive to do so and because OSS is often chosen specifically to avoid costs. Hard to see why those things will stop being true.
    - zmgsabst 2y ago
      I think it’s pretty easy: Refer to any manager or executive at a tech company who uses open source to generate profits but doesn’t contribute as a “deadbeat” — so their choice becomes a source of social embarrassment.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        If you think companies care about embarrassment I have a nice house in Bhopal to sell you.
        DoreenMichele 2y ago
        Yeah, I think it would take something like bankruptcy of a Fortune 500 company because a critical open source piece shut down. And I'm not holding my breath that even that would sink in. People are amazingly talented at hearing only what they want to hear to justify doing it like they've always done it.
bruce511 2y ago
That's not how companies work. Individuals have agency over discretionary spending, in other words you can wake up and decide to donate money, hire a OSS dev, and so on. Because you personally have that agency, and because companies have lots of money, you project that agency onto companies. But that's not how companies work. People at companies have very little personal agency when it comes to spending money. Spending has to be approved, justified, and some value has to be received. FOSS basically is (mostly) incompatible with this model. Some companies do pay staff to work on OSS but it's rare (and exclusively tech companies with a motivation.) So while your statement is completely true, it's also not possible. It's important to recognize that donations and corruption are indistinguishable, and company finances tend to be set up to avoid corruption.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  Of course it’s possible: All of those reasons you listed are choices that people make — not laws of nature.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    People make choices all the time. Choices that are overseen by management, and shareholders. People can of course choose to spend their political capital, and discretionary budget on random OSS projects. Or they can choose to spend it on their project, their goals, the outcomes that make their walk in the company easier, the actions that will get them promoted and not fired. These are choices people make, and frankly OSS funding delivers very very little bang for the buck. (On a buck by buck basis.)
    - chii 2y ago
      > frankly OSS funding delivers very very little bang for the buck which is why companies generally don't pay anything for OSS. If the cost is zero, but the benefit is not zero, then the bang for buck is infinite!
    - zmgsabst 2y ago
      Sure — my point was that we should discuss why this happens in terms of the real human dynamics. Either to conclude it’s not worth changing or to design a plan of how to change it. But neither goal is aided by hyperbole, pretending that not paying OSS is gravity.
School-Cotton 2y ago
They do. A huge chunk of open source software is maintained by companies.
goodpoint 2y ago
There is a method to have companies fund public infrastructure work: taxation.
- squigz 2y ago
  That's certainly an interesting idea, but I think some commenters' heads would explode if we tried talking about that. :P
rini17 2y ago
That support would inevitably come with strings attached. Which most open source maintainers fervently avoid.
- palata 2y ago
  Permissive licenses come with strings attached (that most companies ignore): attribution. With copyleft licenses, nothing say that you have to get your changes upstream: you just have to distribute them to the users. It's not a whole lot more complicated than attribution: set up a repo and put your fork there publicly.
  - rini17 2y ago
    Attribution has its own issues too, like when curl developers faced Toyota owners who were grasping at straws because the curl attribution featured prominently in the car's malfunctioning entertainment system.
palata 2y ago
Companies that depend on FOSS would contribute if the license did not explicitly tell them that they don't have to. MPLv2/EUPL come to mind: they are compatible with proprietary products, but they make it mandatory to distribute changes/extensions of the library, not the whole product. FOSS authors have a responsibility when they choose a permissive license.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > Companies that depend on FOSS would contribute if the license did not explicitly tell them that they don't have to. No they won't. They'll only contribute if they're required to, or if doing so will be beneficial to them, and they'll do that regardless of whether the license says they have to or not. When I've worked at companies that use FOSS, and have needed to modify those sources, I'll contribute back (regardless of license) if I think that change is likely to be accepted upstream, because I'd rather not have to maintain a fork. This would fall under "contribute if doing so will be beneficial to them". At any rate, no FOSS license (that I'm aware of, or is in wide use) requires users to contribute. At most, they require that changes be made available. There's nothing that says the changes need to be submitted (or accepted) upstream. Often getting a change into a state where it would be accepted upstream is a significant amount of work beyond what the company has already done for their own purposes, so they don't bother.
  - palata 2y ago
    > No they won't. They'll only contribute if they're required to Did you actually read my comment before you answered? Because I said that copyleft licenses "make it mandatory to distribute changes/extensions", which means that companies are required to contribute if the license is reciprocal. > At any rate, no FOSS license (that I'm aware of, or is in wide use) requires users to contribute. At most, they require that changes be made available. Making changes available is a form of contribution. If you work on a proof of concept for a month and at the end your company decides not to use it in a product (thanks to the learning from your work), do you say that you did not contribute, so you should not be paid? Feels like you're being pedantic just for the sake of the argument.

Nifty3929 2y ago

Companies will continue to take advantage of free and cheap labor just as long as those people continue to serve. Perhaps after this generation of LBIP moves on, the next wave won’t be so generous. Also, open source doesn’t have to mean free labor. One could be paid a wage to work on open source.

marcosdumay 2y ago

I don't think there's any other sustainable format to make software that becomes load-bearing infrastructure. Open source is the only player existing. What isn't sustainable is just the model where some random person takes a huge part of the responsibility for himself without any structure around it. We need different organizations.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
Privately owned infrastructure is perfectly sustainable in other fields, and so is publicly funded infrastructure. I think that, if necessary, either of those could be a viable replacement for open source being the infrastructure for tech. Obviously each comes with its own pros and cons compared to open source, but they still ought to be viable.

soerxpso 2y ago

I haven't yet seen the evidence that it's unsustainable. People are still doing it. It seems to be working. There's no reason to believe people are going to stop doing it or that it's going to stop working. It might be important to you to get paid for your work. Okay, charge for your work then! That was always allowed. There are many people who are okay with doing certain work for free. Maybe they just want to put it on their resume, or they already have enough money, or they just really like that work. Open source is working fine.

j45 2y ago

I think there might be a little different. New developers with higher level tools don't seem to go low level enough. And as a result some very talented developers are caught up in the crosswinds of complexity to make things like React deliver html/css, or get people to click on ads, and that same intellect and talent could definitely go towards the meaningful open-source that contributed to them getting access to a lot of opportunities.