6 ms·

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I

I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. But setting that aside, I learned of WP Engine when they launched here, on hacker news. At the time their value proposition was "bullet proof and secure wordpress for people who just want to publish and not learn devops". Over the years, I've watched them through a progression of management changes move from value of service to value extraction. Chipping away at costs while holding the price constant or raising it and extracting the difference for themselves. This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does, however I find the integrity around value extraction varies tremendously. From zero integrity Mackenzie type MBAs to high(er) integrity owner operators. It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad.

coliveira 2y ago
> rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.
- clankyclanker 2y ago
  That's why (A)GPL is so handy, it discourages value-extraction. As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/
  - mxey 2y ago
    WordPress is licensed under GPL.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- Sparyjerry 2y ago
  Obviously many people will use open source without contributing. The point of making it open source being that others will run into bugs, let you know about them, and maybe even try to fix them, especially if they also become or are reliant on the software. They might even want improvements to make it work for them and again work on them if they have a need for it. If a software is good and/or mature enough it doesn't need to be open source in the first place and doesn't need contributions. Wordpress has sort of reached that mature place where it is already 'good enough' but you can't now un-open source it.
  - bigiain 2y ago
    > The point of making it open source being that others will run into bugs As I see it, that's part of the OSI's revisionist history they want you to believe. The "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" phrase was coined by Eric Raymond and _named_ after Linus, without it having been "the point" of why Linus chose to release Linux with the license he used. I don't know if it was intended at the time, but it's an idea that's widely been used to sell value-extracive behaviour to businesses. The worst example in my opinion being project that rug pull the users/contributors when the close the permissiveness of the license after having built their project/product taking full advantage of those "many eyes". Yes I'm looking at you Mongo and Hashicorp...
- bigiain 2y ago
  I still recall back in the day <wavey lines> before the OSI decided to politicise (and perhaps even value-extract) the term "open source", there were still a heaps of people doing groundbreakingly useful coding and giving it all away. Linux is perhaps the posterchild of that, but Apache was just some people patching NCSA httpd because they needed new features. Perl was Larry Wall writing a better language for generating reports. PHP was Rasmus Lerdorf's project to make it easier to build his personal website and make it "dynamic" and able to connect to databases. The vast majority of the commands and utilities in your Linux distribution were written by the GNU project and many of those by Stallmann himself. Out of those (and many other examples most greybeards here could mention), probably only GNU/Stallmann were motivated by "lofty ideals", pretty much everyone else was doing what was called "scratching their own itch". The needed features or software that didn't exist, so they wrote it. License-wise, Apache could only exist because NCSA httpd allowed it - it was explicitly released into the public domain (and later GPL-ed I think?). Perl was dual licensed, you could choose GPL or Perl's own "Artistic License" which was much more free, allowing you to sell stuff incorporating it so long as you still credited the original authors. Linux was originally licensed with something Linus wrote without lawyering up, which was basically "the source code must remain available" and "no money can change hands" because he was annoyed at having had to pay for Minix, but shortly after he changed his mind abut the money aspect, and chose to use GPL instead. While from my perspective, Stallmann was the "lofty ideals" guy, and pretty much everyone else were pragmatists who were "just getting shit done", and sharing stuff so other people could get shit done better too. It was Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens who hijacked the already in-use term "open source", and claimed to have invented it and went on to build a business-friendly brand and "industry" around it - and as you say those "industry people" will _always_ jump in with their revisionist history to "correct" you when you say otherwise. So to me, OSI-defined "open source" really can be wage theft. It isn't always, but it's intentionally set up so it can be. (Probably not originally with malicious intent, I suspect back then many of the people involved were perfectly happy with the reputational payoff in lieu of monetary reward.) The existence of "Open Source Companies" like Mongo, Elastic, Hashicorp et al, and BSL-style licenses - seem to me to be closer in spirit to Linus's original license than anything the OSI approves. And I feel they are the result of a new (relative to the '90s) trend of people writing open source software for the sake to writing the software, instead of the old-school approach of people writing software to get their actual jobs done better or to scratch their own itch. Linus and Larry and Rasmus and Brian didn't write/release their software so they could become Founder/CEO of Linux PTY LTD or Perl Corp or PHP Inc or Apache GmbH. They did it because they wanted an OS they didn't have to pay for, or a better way to generate reports, or a better way to make websites, or a better way to serve the HotWired website.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad. It's not just rare, it's important to know that in many arrangements it's simply impossible. Once any company takes outside equity financing, every quarter is only looked at in terms of growth, and anything a company says should always be viewed in terms of "will this allow us to grow revenue." I'm not saying it makes all companies "evil", and there are a good deal of "do good" things that happen to coincide with growing revenue. But you can bet that if any principal requires going against growing revenue, it will be jettisoned in short order. The only way to avoid this is to not take outside funding, and even then there is no guarantee what happens when the business is sold (and when a business is sold, the acquires are nearly always going to look at ROI solely from monetary returns).
pdntspa 2y ago
> This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does Yes it is. If you're hollowing out your value prop you better be returning at least some, if not a majority, of that value back to your users in the form of price drops or increased service levels. We have all been Stockholm Syndrome'd into believing otherwise as our favorite products and services institutionalize themselves into nothingness. Ownership and management are mere stakeholders in the business, equal with (and no more) than customers and employees.
jonas21 2y ago
> I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. How can it be wage theft when people voluntarily contribute to it? If you don't want others to use your software, don't write open source software.
- nqzero 2y ago
  try releasing something under an open-but-not-open-source license as a solo developer or small team. there's a lot of established developers (presumably earning high salaries) that will very vocally badmouth the license choice. i'd seen this happen over and over again eg here, and when i've asked other developers why they open sourced their products they've said the same, and it was one of my concerns when i approached launch sadly, my market fit was so bad that nobody ever looked at the license ::karma:: note: i have no problem with someone choosing not to use a product with a license they don't like (i do the same). it's the dissing of others that would use it that potentially crosses the line. i'm not even saying it *is* theft, only that there's a valid argument to that effect
  - bad_user 2y ago
    You're being disingenuous. There are 2 reasons freemium shared-source-style licenses are bad mouthed: 1. The products get advertised as open source; inviting people to look at it and contribute, the problem being that they are legal minefields, copyright or patents lawsuits that are waiting to happen. This was the biggest complaint against Microsoft's Shared Source initiative back in the day, and it's just as true now. 2. Some companies made their product popular via Open Source, like MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, took all the contributions and the free marketing, then switched; such instances being a bait-and-switch. Elasticsearch in particular is interesting because what they wanted was to withhold security patches from the OSS version, and Amazon got on the way by pushing PRs for patches. All these cases are more glaring examples of value extraction, benefiting from unpaid labor. There is nothing wrong with developing proprietary software, but you need to be honest about what you're selling.
    - 2y ago
blackoil 2y ago
> I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft. Good you didn't write, or else I may have read it for free and did a wage theft.
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  I posted it on Mastodon https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783 https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783
  - bigiain 2y ago
    I mostly agree with your rant, but I counter your example of sticking $100 bills up in your front yard as "art". There are many people who spend hundreds or thousands (or more) sticking up outrageous displays for halloween or xmas lights in their front yard, expecting no more payoff than watching people be delighted as they pass by. That's a great and admirable motivation. Even if it's largely done just to show Bob down the street how lame he is and how you can gather a bigger crowd than him - that's less great but still OK in my opinion. I admit that most of those displays are only able to be paid for because the homeowner is getting that $5k/week at their big tech job or their finance job or whatever. Same as how Burningman's "free" art mostly couldn't exist without Bay Area tech millionaires funding it as they cosplay being an Artist.
    - ChuckMcM 2y ago
      The key difference is that holiday decorations aren't as fungible as $100 bills. People can (and do) steal stuff out of peoples yards (and packages on their porches) and then resell that stuff for cash. The reality is that people with poor morality/integrity will always see self enrichment at the expense of others. As I mentioned to another commenter, FOSS licenses take away (steal) a right that creators have to arbitrate giving away their work. You can write software, keep it licensed, and give 'no cost' licenses to people who just want to use it for their fun stuff, but when someone wants to use it in a product, and it is code they would have had to hire someone to write otherwise, I think it is more reasonable for them to pay the creator the equivalent cost (at least). So if something would take a week to write, what is 40 hrs of wages you would accept to write that code? Let's say its $100/hr that is $4,000. So for a one time payment of $4,000 you can license your code for them to use in their commercial product which will make them, presumably, much much more than $4,000 over its lifetime. But with FOSS licenses, you can't do that. You can sue them (it's expensive) and after suing them the only compensation you can expect is that they publish their source code? Now the FOSS license has stolen not only your creative work, but your time you could have used to write more software, and the monetary expense of hiring lawyers. As a result FOSS authors don't have a lot to gain by suing scofflaws, the scofflaws know that and so they steal the value safe in the knowledge that it will be unlikely to cost them anything.

coliveira 2y ago

> rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable Yes, I came to realize the same thing about open source, it was created with lofty ideals, but the practice is just the opposite. Of course, most people will not agree with this conclusion since the whole industry will tell them otherwise.

clankyclanker 2y ago
That's why (A)GPL is so handy, it discourages value-extraction. As cwebber says: https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/
- mxey 2y ago
  WordPress is licensed under GPL.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
Sparyjerry 2y ago
Obviously many people will use open source without contributing. The point of making it open source being that others will run into bugs, let you know about them, and maybe even try to fix them, especially if they also become or are reliant on the software. They might even want improvements to make it work for them and again work on them if they have a need for it. If a software is good and/or mature enough it doesn't need to be open source in the first place and doesn't need contributions. Wordpress has sort of reached that mature place where it is already 'good enough' but you can't now un-open source it.
- bigiain 2y ago
  > The point of making it open source being that others will run into bugs As I see it, that's part of the OSI's revisionist history they want you to believe. The "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" phrase was coined by Eric Raymond and _named_ after Linus, without it having been "the point" of why Linus chose to release Linux with the license he used. I don't know if it was intended at the time, but it's an idea that's widely been used to sell value-extracive behaviour to businesses. The worst example in my opinion being project that rug pull the users/contributors when the close the permissiveness of the license after having built their project/product taking full advantage of those "many eyes". Yes I'm looking at you Mongo and Hashicorp...
bigiain 2y ago
I still recall back in the day <wavey lines> before the OSI decided to politicise (and perhaps even value-extract) the term "open source", there were still a heaps of people doing groundbreakingly useful coding and giving it all away. Linux is perhaps the posterchild of that, but Apache was just some people patching NCSA httpd because they needed new features. Perl was Larry Wall writing a better language for generating reports. PHP was Rasmus Lerdorf's project to make it easier to build his personal website and make it "dynamic" and able to connect to databases. The vast majority of the commands and utilities in your Linux distribution were written by the GNU project and many of those by Stallmann himself. Out of those (and many other examples most greybeards here could mention), probably only GNU/Stallmann were motivated by "lofty ideals", pretty much everyone else was doing what was called "scratching their own itch". The needed features or software that didn't exist, so they wrote it. License-wise, Apache could only exist because NCSA httpd allowed it - it was explicitly released into the public domain (and later GPL-ed I think?). Perl was dual licensed, you could choose GPL or Perl's own "Artistic License" which was much more free, allowing you to sell stuff incorporating it so long as you still credited the original authors. Linux was originally licensed with something Linus wrote without lawyering up, which was basically "the source code must remain available" and "no money can change hands" because he was annoyed at having had to pay for Minix, but shortly after he changed his mind abut the money aspect, and chose to use GPL instead. While from my perspective, Stallmann was the "lofty ideals" guy, and pretty much everyone else were pragmatists who were "just getting shit done", and sharing stuff so other people could get shit done better too. It was Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens who hijacked the already in-use term "open source", and claimed to have invented it and went on to build a business-friendly brand and "industry" around it - and as you say those "industry people" will _always_ jump in with their revisionist history to "correct" you when you say otherwise. So to me, OSI-defined "open source" really can be wage theft. It isn't always, but it's intentionally set up so it can be. (Probably not originally with malicious intent, I suspect back then many of the people involved were perfectly happy with the reputational payoff in lieu of monetary reward.) The existence of "Open Source Companies" like Mongo, Elastic, Hashicorp et al, and BSL-style licenses - seem to me to be closer in spirit to Linus's original license than anything the OSI approves. And I feel they are the result of a new (relative to the '90s) trend of people writing open source software for the sake to writing the software, instead of the old-school approach of people writing software to get their actual jobs done better or to scratch their own itch. Linus and Larry and Rasmus and Brian didn't write/release their software so they could become Founder/CEO of Linux PTY LTD or Perl Corp or PHP Inc or Apache GmbH. They did it because they wanted an OS they didn't have to pay for, or a better way to generate reports, or a better way to make websites, or a better way to serve the HotWired website.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

> It is rare when a management team says, "this is enough money" and that is sad. It's not just rare, it's important to know that in many arrangements it's simply impossible. Once any company takes outside equity financing, every quarter is only looked at in terms of growth, and anything a company says should always be viewed in terms of "will this allow us to grow revenue." I'm not saying it makes all companies "evil", and there are a good deal of "do good" things that happen to coincide with growing revenue. But you can bet that if any principal requires going against growing revenue, it will be jettisoned in short order. The only way to avoid this is to not take outside funding, and even then there is no guarantee what happens when the business is sold (and when a business is sold, the acquires are nearly always going to look at ROI solely from monetary returns).

pdntspa 2y ago

> This isn't in and of itself a "bad" thing, it is what business does Yes it is. If you're hollowing out your value prop you better be returning at least some, if not a majority, of that value back to your users in the form of price drops or increased service levels. We have all been Stockholm Syndrome'd into believing otherwise as our favorite products and services institutionalize themselves into nothingness. Ownership and management are mere stakeholders in the business, equal with (and no more) than customers and employees.

jonas21 2y ago

> I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft and value extraction by unscrupulous third parties is built in and unavoidable. How can it be wage theft when people voluntarily contribute to it? If you don't want others to use your software, don't write open source software.

nqzero 2y ago
try releasing something under an open-but-not-open-source license as a solo developer or small team. there's a lot of established developers (presumably earning high salaries) that will very vocally badmouth the license choice. i'd seen this happen over and over again eg here, and when i've asked other developers why they open sourced their products they've said the same, and it was one of my concerns when i approached launch sadly, my market fit was so bad that nobody ever looked at the license ::karma:: note: i have no problem with someone choosing not to use a product with a license they don't like (i do the same). it's the dissing of others that would use it that potentially crosses the line. i'm not even saying it *is* theft, only that there's a valid argument to that effect
- bad_user 2y ago
  You're being disingenuous. There are 2 reasons freemium shared-source-style licenses are bad mouthed: 1. The products get advertised as open source; inviting people to look at it and contribute, the problem being that they are legal minefields, copyright or patents lawsuits that are waiting to happen. This was the biggest complaint against Microsoft's Shared Source initiative back in the day, and it's just as true now. 2. Some companies made their product popular via Open Source, like MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, took all the contributions and the free marketing, then switched; such instances being a bait-and-switch. Elasticsearch in particular is interesting because what they wanted was to withhold security patches from the OSS version, and Amazon got on the way by pushing PRs for patches. All these cases are more glaring examples of value extraction, benefiting from unpaid labor. There is nothing wrong with developing proprietary software, but you need to be honest about what you're selling.
  - 2y ago

blackoil 2y ago

> I have a long rant about how open source is wage theft. Good you didn't write, or else I may have read it for free and did a wage theft.

ChuckMcM 2y ago
I posted it on Mastodon https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783 https://chaos.social/@ChuckMcManis/112429390169387783
- bigiain 2y ago
  I mostly agree with your rant, but I counter your example of sticking $100 bills up in your front yard as "art". There are many people who spend hundreds or thousands (or more) sticking up outrageous displays for halloween or xmas lights in their front yard, expecting no more payoff than watching people be delighted as they pass by. That's a great and admirable motivation. Even if it's largely done just to show Bob down the street how lame he is and how you can gather a bigger crowd than him - that's less great but still OK in my opinion. I admit that most of those displays are only able to be paid for because the homeowner is getting that $5k/week at their big tech job or their finance job or whatever. Same as how Burningman's "free" art mostly couldn't exist without Bay Area tech millionaires funding it as they cosplay being an Artist.
  - ChuckMcM 2y ago
    The key difference is that holiday decorations aren't as fungible as $100 bills. People can (and do) steal stuff out of peoples yards (and packages on their porches) and then resell that stuff for cash. The reality is that people with poor morality/integrity will always see self enrichment at the expense of others. As I mentioned to another commenter, FOSS licenses take away (steal) a right that creators have to arbitrate giving away their work. You can write software, keep it licensed, and give 'no cost' licenses to people who just want to use it for their fun stuff, but when someone wants to use it in a product, and it is code they would have had to hire someone to write otherwise, I think it is more reasonable for them to pay the creator the equivalent cost (at least). So if something would take a week to write, what is 40 hrs of wages you would accept to write that code? Let's say its $100/hr that is $4,000. So for a one time payment of $4,000 you can license your code for them to use in their commercial product which will make them, presumably, much much more than $4,000 over its lifetime. But with FOSS licenses, you can't do that. You can sue them (it's expensive) and after suing them the only compensation you can expect is that they publish their source code? Now the FOSS license has stolen not only your creative work, but your time you could have used to write more software, and the monetary expense of hiring lawyers. As a result FOSS authors don't have a lot to gain by suing scofflaws, the scofflaws know that and so they steal the value safe in the knowledge that it will be unlikely to cost them anything.