9 ms·

Solving the Maker-Taker Problem

81 points by geerlingguy 2y ago

beefman 2y ago
This problem has an established name and is widely studied in economics and mechanism design: the free-rider problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
bruce511 2y ago
This is a problem unique to Open Source because the root problem itself is baked into OSS and Free Software. The very foundation of Free Software is the idea that a user can do whatever they like, are given the source code, and pass those freedoms on to their users. There are no protections offered to the developer, and that is not a bug it's the explicit point of the model. There are advantages and disadvantages to this model. But the model is what it is. Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows. Drupal has created a parallel organisation which monitors and rewards participation. This doesn't "solve" the problem, it just adds a commercial and administrative layer. Proprietary software solved the problem by not being Open Source. Others have adopted a "source available" license, which may come with restrictions. In other words, lots of people have solved the problem simply by not being "open source" (not necessarily by closing the source, but rather by restricting usage.) Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it. If Word Press don't like the rules of the game then they can change the rules. That is 100% under their control. But don't use the "common rule book" then complain when the other team plays to the rules.
- roenxi 2y ago
  Although I agree with what you say, that seems to be mischaricterising the blog post - he is talking about the community rather than the software. It is a bit like free speech and ideologies like communism. Do I support the right of people to spread communist messages? Yes. Do I support them in doing so? No. Indeed, I would pick a fight with them on the subject - it just happens that suppressing them by censorship is a bad strategy. Similarly, the Drupal Association seems to be supporting the general freedom of all software users but the people it actually supports is a much smaller group. The specifics might not work, but building a community isn't related to the license of a piece of software.
  - mcmcmc 2y ago
    So you would physically fight someone over political speech? That doesn’t seem to respect their right to it. Curious why you’d choose to harp on communist ideology when there are real live Nazis again.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      bruce511's comment included "Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it". In this comment the word "fight" means to write a blog post calling them parasites and maybe have some legal arguments.
- senko 2y ago
  They can't change the rules of the game because WordPress itself is a fork. [0] This is GPL working exactly as it's designed to do, ensuring whoever forks the software must allow others to do the same. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
  - okanat 2y ago
    If the majority of the code and functionality is written by WordPress, Having a little GPL component in there will not affect them to change the license. GPL's idea of infecting copyright with small libraries is a convention. I don't think it will hold in an actual court that will test who wrote what at what degree of substance.
    - xandrius 2y ago
      Did the little GPL component force itself into the codebase without anyone noticing? Was it so useless that nobody could have removed it from the project to get rid of this obvious parasite? I think it will hold in court specifically because, since it is so aggressive in what it is set to do, a company choosing to use it in their otherwise non-GPL codebase is declaring that it is not easily replaceable and thus proving it contributes to the overall value.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  More people should try splitting the difference with source available licenses that turn into GPL after a year. The point of open source was to change the balance of power from developer to user, it was not an economic system. Theres plenty of room in the middle to balance interests without resorting to predatory proprietary licenses. The only workable way to fund software development is for users to pay. The idea is that if the user, after some time, can take the source to a new development team then both parties are invested in continuing the relationship in a stable way unlike proprietary licenses where the incentive is to squeeze to the users limit. It also solves the abandonware issue.
- Terretta 2y ago
  > Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows. Maybe, but they seem to be basing their legal argument on trademarks, that WPE is using the same WordPress and WooCommerce labels as the labels on the primary maintainer's services based on the upstream code base, when, according to them, the downstream forks of pieces of this are not the same service and WPE doesn't have rights to that trade dress. In addition to the methods you talk about, trademarks are another method of "solving the problem".
o11c 2y ago
Two immediate thoughts on this: * There's nothing wrong per se with being a Taker - (assuming a broad definition of "profit") the vast majority of individual users certainly fall into this category. The problem is only when the Taker's actions harm the Maker ecosystem. * Regarding a credit system, one problem that jumps out at me is - how do you quantify work on a plugin? Do you attempt to scale by what fraction of users uses that plugin? What about a plugin that's widely used, but many of its users are customers of your hosting company?
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  > how do you quantify work on a plugin There's also the fact that the majority of big wordpress plugins are "freemium", with most features locked behind a paywall, that includes Automattic's own plugins like jetpack.
kuratkull 2y ago
I don't really understand the premise of these types of write-ups — the software has a license, and people and companies use it accordingly. I understand most core software was started long ago as a one-person project and given a FOSS license. Due to the license, it grew from the work of hundreds or thousands who contributed, but the license no longer serves the authors' worldview. It seems to me all the contributors implicitly approve of this situation, as they contribute labor while knowing what the license is.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  I think the article clearly states the problem: It encourages contributors to stop contributing and become "takers", and once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies. A classic tragedy of the commons.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    > once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies Once there are not enough makers, willing to license products to corporations for free, the corporations either have to write their own software or die. A classic tragedy of the billionaires.
  - feoren 2y ago
    > A classic tragedy of the commons. Except software is infinitely reproducible once written. There's no tragedy of the commons if the commons' resources are infinte. "But code needs to constantly change and update all the time! Who's going to do that!?" -- well, maybe that's the problem. Maybe if we want to make a real, lasting contribution to OSS, without being stuck maintaining it forever, we should focus on making software that doesn't have to change. Code is basically math, and we get lots of use out of polynomials and complex numbers and Galois theory without anyone actively "maintaining" them. Galois died in 1832! Maybe the software we're writing is trying to do too much; maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?
echoangle 2y ago
Does this really solve the problem? The article doesn’t really provide statistics, but why would WP Engine suddenly increase contributions to get listed on the WordPress homepage? Is that an important marketing tool for them?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  Some Drupal users only contracting with contributors likely does solve a lot of the problem. How they made that happen, I don't know. The marketing surely also helps, not sure how relevant it is for WP Engine though and how willing WordPress would be to do that given the very direct competition with Automattic.
- blitzar 2y ago
  It's the software developer equivalent of - I will make a post on my Instagram (50,000 followers) if you give me a free holiday - "influencer" request.
- patcon 2y ago
  Yeah, it really requires a whole specific culture of the community, which Wordpress did not build over the decades, and Drupal did. It's not a system, but a long culture-bending process to implement this to full effect Drupal best this drum every conference and summit for decades
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
This is the most amazing part for me: > Drupal users like Pfizer and the State of Georgia only allow Makers to apply in their vendor selection process. I wonder how they managed to convince companies to add such a requirement, but it's amazing!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dmurray 2y ago
  I could imagine a checkbox with something like "participates in the development of the Software" as a criterion for selecting vendors. I'm amazed they got it to be an absolute for a government body, I think it likely would not be legal in Europe.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    It's pretty dirty. Yikes.
pdimitar 2y ago
This all stems from people of certain backgrounds expecting everyone to be a good citizen, more or less. If your intentions are not clearly spelled out somewhere, then somebody is absolutely going to use your thing in a way that you did not intend. What complicates matters even further is that the original license reflected some youthful idealism and optimism. In the meantime the maintainer(s) worldview evolved but they forgot to encode that in a new license. Pretty classic mistake, it seems. Less idealism and more formalities solve that problem. Mostly. Though good luck suing the big companies if they violate the license.
- Liftyee 2y ago
  "Certain backgrounds"? Any particular examples?
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    Well I am not a sociologist or a professional psychologist, I am sharing what I've seen many times is all. But let's just say: somewhat privileged white Western men. They seem to think everyone operates on goodwill. I am a white guy, though from Eastern Europe. Happily most of us suffer no illusions about the benevolence of the world at large.
    - zahlman 2y ago
      I don't think this expectation is a consequence of race or ethnicity, but a consequence of seeing it work in one's own local society. (Privilege, in a generic sense of socio-economic status, probably does play into that. It's easier to have high trust when nobody is desperate.)
      - pdimitar 2y ago
        Indeed it's not a question of race and ethnicity per se, but it's also true that historically such communities that demonstrate a bit of a privileged mindset are mostly white (with some rich Asians here and there). Privilege stems from community as you alluded to. Many people's worst problem was to ask a new neighbor to turn down the music 1-2 times until they learned to be a good citizen of the neighborhood and that was that. Some of us however had to deal with much worse situations -- on a regular basis -- and for people like myself I really find it difficult to sympathize with OP because coldly and mathematically speaking, they simply did not cover their bases, and they had signs and signals that they should have done it.
throwaway48476 2y ago
The title made me think this was about market makers and takers.
kragen 2y ago
this is not a new problem; peter deutsch was very annoyed in the 90s about linux distributions distributing outdated, and often modified, copies of ghostscript, whose users would then complain to him about their bugs. compounding the problem in his case: virtually nobody else was capable of contributing third-party code that was up to his quality standards; for context, he'd written i think the second or third implementation of lisp, in assembly language, when he was 15, some 30 years earlier, and hadn't stopped honing his craft since then, for example inventing jit compilers ultimately i think the answer is to limit your interactions with the takers; some of them may become makers later, often of different free software than yours†, but most of them won't. they may provide useful feedback (bug reports, feature requests, etc.) but most of them will not. what's important is preventing them from overrunning spaces where the makers are collaborating (and especially harassing makers into quitting), and maybe to give them a path toward growing into makers, if they are so inclined. dries's system seems like a gentle, probably sufficient way to do that ______ † the contributors to vim mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to gcc, and the gcc maintainers mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to vim, but they each benefit from the others' work. similarly, many linux distributors eventually became important indirect contributors to ghostscript development, even though at first peter wasn't using linux, and i think even today very little of the code is contributed by outsiders
languagehacker 2y ago
There's some cognitive dissonance to me about using Ayn Rand's words about open-source efforts. What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good". That is, if you're doing what you're doing to make the world a better place, you wouldn't be so incentivized to keep score about who's benefiting more. I don't disagree with the author's ideas about how to create an incentive structure that finds alternate means of benefiting those who have gone out of their way to contribute. I just think framing it the way he did comes across as a little pecuniary.
- Chyzwar 2y ago
  Only rich people can think in terms of public good. Rest of us pheasants needs to put food on the table. There is difference between childless google employee maintaining open source library as side hustle and someone running company building Drupal sites for a living in India.
  - sdenton4 2y ago
    And worse, we pheasants are in constant danger of being eaten by starving peasants.
    - incanus77 2y ago
      It’s important, as pheasants, that we maintain presence of mind around peasants, lest we become holiday meal presents.
      - yoav 2y ago
        To my ear, this all sounds very pheasant.
  - languagehacker 2y ago
    > childless Google employee yikes
    - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zahlman 2y ago
This seems far wordier than necessary for the point it's making, and reads to me as AI-generated or at least assisted.
kazinator 2y ago
I don't see this issue at all. I put a BSD license on it so you can do whatever you want. Get rich with it; steer missiles at civilian targets with it; whatever. Building a business with the help of someone else's open source isn't some zero effort, turn-key event. Those people still hustle and take risks.

81 points by geerlingguy 2y ago

This problem has an established name and is widely studied in economics and mechanism design: the free-rider problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

bruce511 2y ago

This is a problem unique to Open Source because the root problem itself is baked into OSS and Free Software. The very foundation of Free Software is the idea that a user can do whatever they like, are given the source code, and pass those freedoms on to their users. There are no protections offered to the developer, and that is not a bug it's the explicit point of the model. There are advantages and disadvantages to this model. But the model is what it is. Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows. Drupal has created a parallel organisation which monitors and rewards participation. This doesn't "solve" the problem, it just adds a commercial and administrative layer. Proprietary software solved the problem by not being Open Source. Others have adopted a "source available" license, which may come with restrictions. In other words, lots of people have solved the problem simply by not being "open source" (not necessarily by closing the source, but rather by restricting usage.) Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it. If Word Press don't like the rules of the game then they can change the rules. That is 100% under their control. But don't use the "common rule book" then complain when the other team plays to the rules.

roenxi 2y ago
Although I agree with what you say, that seems to be mischaricterising the blog post - he is talking about the community rather than the software. It is a bit like free speech and ideologies like communism. Do I support the right of people to spread communist messages? Yes. Do I support them in doing so? No. Indeed, I would pick a fight with them on the subject - it just happens that suppressing them by censorship is a bad strategy. Similarly, the Drupal Association seems to be supporting the general freedom of all software users but the people it actually supports is a much smaller group. The specifics might not work, but building a community isn't related to the license of a piece of software.
- mcmcmc 2y ago
  So you would physically fight someone over political speech? That doesn’t seem to respect their right to it. Curious why you’d choose to harp on communist ideology when there are real live Nazis again.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    bruce511's comment included "Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it". In this comment the word "fight" means to write a blog post calling them parasites and maybe have some legal arguments.
senko 2y ago
They can't change the rules of the game because WordPress itself is a fork. [0] This is GPL working exactly as it's designed to do, ensuring whoever forks the software must allow others to do the same. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
- okanat 2y ago
  If the majority of the code and functionality is written by WordPress, Having a little GPL component in there will not affect them to change the license. GPL's idea of infecting copyright with small libraries is a convention. I don't think it will hold in an actual court that will test who wrote what at what degree of substance.
  - xandrius 2y ago
    Did the little GPL component force itself into the codebase without anyone noticing? Was it so useless that nobody could have removed it from the project to get rid of this obvious parasite? I think it will hold in court specifically because, since it is so aggressive in what it is set to do, a company choosing to use it in their otherwise non-GPL codebase is declaring that it is not easily replaceable and thus proving it contributes to the overall value.
throwaway48476 2y ago
More people should try splitting the difference with source available licenses that turn into GPL after a year. The point of open source was to change the balance of power from developer to user, it was not an economic system. Theres plenty of room in the middle to balance interests without resorting to predatory proprietary licenses. The only workable way to fund software development is for users to pay. The idea is that if the user, after some time, can take the source to a new development team then both parties are invested in continuing the relationship in a stable way unlike proprietary licenses where the incentive is to squeeze to the users limit. It also solves the abandonware issue.
Terretta 2y ago
> Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows. Maybe, but they seem to be basing their legal argument on trademarks, that WPE is using the same WordPress and WooCommerce labels as the labels on the primary maintainer's services based on the upstream code base, when, according to them, the downstream forks of pieces of this are not the same service and WPE doesn't have rights to that trade dress. In addition to the methods you talk about, trademarks are another method of "solving the problem".

o11c 2y ago

Two immediate thoughts on this: * There's nothing wrong per se with being a Taker - (assuming a broad definition of "profit") the vast majority of individual users certainly fall into this category. The problem is only when the Taker's actions harm the Maker ecosystem. * Regarding a credit system, one problem that jumps out at me is - how do you quantify work on a plugin? Do you attempt to scale by what fraction of users uses that plugin? What about a plugin that's widely used, but many of its users are customers of your hosting company?

RobotToaster 2y ago
> how do you quantify work on a plugin There's also the fact that the majority of big wordpress plugins are "freemium", with most features locked behind a paywall, that includes Automattic's own plugins like jetpack.

kuratkull 2y ago

I don't really understand the premise of these types of write-ups — the software has a license, and people and companies use it accordingly. I understand most core software was started long ago as a one-person project and given a FOSS license. Due to the license, it grew from the work of hundreds or thousands who contributed, but the license no longer serves the authors' worldview. It seems to me all the contributors implicitly approve of this situation, as they contribute labor while knowing what the license is.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
I think the article clearly states the problem: It encourages contributors to stop contributing and become "takers", and once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies. A classic tragedy of the commons.
- blitzar 2y ago
  > once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies Once there are not enough makers, willing to license products to corporations for free, the corporations either have to write their own software or die. A classic tragedy of the billionaires.
- feoren 2y ago
  > A classic tragedy of the commons. Except software is infinitely reproducible once written. There's no tragedy of the commons if the commons' resources are infinte. "But code needs to constantly change and update all the time! Who's going to do that!?" -- well, maybe that's the problem. Maybe if we want to make a real, lasting contribution to OSS, without being stuck maintaining it forever, we should focus on making software that doesn't have to change. Code is basically math, and we get lots of use out of polynomials and complex numbers and Galois theory without anyone actively "maintaining" them. Galois died in 1832! Maybe the software we're writing is trying to do too much; maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?

echoangle 2y ago

Does this really solve the problem? The article doesn’t really provide statistics, but why would WP Engine suddenly increase contributions to get listed on the WordPress homepage? Is that an important marketing tool for them?

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
Some Drupal users only contracting with contributors likely does solve a lot of the problem. How they made that happen, I don't know. The marketing surely also helps, not sure how relevant it is for WP Engine though and how willing WordPress would be to do that given the very direct competition with Automattic.
blitzar 2y ago
It's the software developer equivalent of - I will make a post on my Instagram (50,000 followers) if you give me a free holiday - "influencer" request.
patcon 2y ago
Yeah, it really requires a whole specific culture of the community, which Wordpress did not build over the decades, and Drupal did. It's not a system, but a long culture-bending process to implement this to full effect Drupal best this drum every conference and summit for decades

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

This is the most amazing part for me: > Drupal users like Pfizer and the State of Georgia only allow Makers to apply in their vendor selection process. I wonder how they managed to convince companies to add such a requirement, but it's amazing!

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dmurray 2y ago
I could imagine a checkbox with something like "participates in the development of the Software" as a criterion for selecting vendors. I'm amazed they got it to be an absolute for a government body, I think it likely would not be legal in Europe.
- kazinator 2y ago
  It's pretty dirty. Yikes.

pdimitar 2y ago

This all stems from people of certain backgrounds expecting everyone to be a good citizen, more or less. If your intentions are not clearly spelled out somewhere, then somebody is absolutely going to use your thing in a way that you did not intend. What complicates matters even further is that the original license reflected some youthful idealism and optimism. In the meantime the maintainer(s) worldview evolved but they forgot to encode that in a new license. Pretty classic mistake, it seems. Less idealism and more formalities solve that problem. Mostly. Though good luck suing the big companies if they violate the license.

Liftyee 2y ago
"Certain backgrounds"? Any particular examples?
- pdimitar 2y ago
  Well I am not a sociologist or a professional psychologist, I am sharing what I've seen many times is all. But let's just say: somewhat privileged white Western men. They seem to think everyone operates on goodwill. I am a white guy, though from Eastern Europe. Happily most of us suffer no illusions about the benevolence of the world at large.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    I don't think this expectation is a consequence of race or ethnicity, but a consequence of seeing it work in one's own local society. (Privilege, in a generic sense of socio-economic status, probably does play into that. It's easier to have high trust when nobody is desperate.)
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      Indeed it's not a question of race and ethnicity per se, but it's also true that historically such communities that demonstrate a bit of a privileged mindset are mostly white (with some rich Asians here and there). Privilege stems from community as you alluded to. Many people's worst problem was to ask a new neighbor to turn down the music 1-2 times until they learned to be a good citizen of the neighborhood and that was that. Some of us however had to deal with much worse situations -- on a regular basis -- and for people like myself I really find it difficult to sympathize with OP because coldly and mathematically speaking, they simply did not cover their bases, and they had signs and signals that they should have done it.

throwaway48476 2y ago

The title made me think this was about market makers and takers.

kragen 2y ago

this is not a new problem; peter deutsch was very annoyed in the 90s about linux distributions distributing outdated, and often modified, copies of ghostscript, whose users would then complain to him about their bugs. compounding the problem in his case: virtually nobody else was capable of contributing third-party code that was up to his quality standards; for context, he'd written i think the second or third implementation of lisp, in assembly language, when he was 15, some 30 years earlier, and hadn't stopped honing his craft since then, for example inventing jit compilers ultimately i think the answer is to limit your interactions with the takers; some of them may become makers later, often of different free software than yours†, but most of them won't. they may provide useful feedback (bug reports, feature requests, etc.) but most of them will not. what's important is preventing them from overrunning spaces where the makers are collaborating (and especially harassing makers into quitting), and maybe to give them a path toward growing into makers, if they are so inclined. dries's system seems like a gentle, probably sufficient way to do that ______ † the contributors to vim mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to gcc, and the gcc maintainers mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to vim, but they each benefit from the others' work. similarly, many linux distributors eventually became important indirect contributors to ghostscript development, even though at first peter wasn't using linux, and i think even today very little of the code is contributed by outsiders

languagehacker 2y ago

There's some cognitive dissonance to me about using Ayn Rand's words about open-source efforts. What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good". That is, if you're doing what you're doing to make the world a better place, you wouldn't be so incentivized to keep score about who's benefiting more. I don't disagree with the author's ideas about how to create an incentive structure that finds alternate means of benefiting those who have gone out of their way to contribute. I just think framing it the way he did comes across as a little pecuniary.

Chyzwar 2y ago
Only rich people can think in terms of public good. Rest of us pheasants needs to put food on the table. There is difference between childless google employee maintaining open source library as side hustle and someone running company building Drupal sites for a living in India.
- sdenton4 2y ago
  And worse, we pheasants are in constant danger of being eaten by starving peasants.
  - incanus77 2y ago
    It’s important, as pheasants, that we maintain presence of mind around peasants, lest we become holiday meal presents.
    - yoav 2y ago
      To my ear, this all sounds very pheasant.
- languagehacker 2y ago
  > childless Google employee yikes
  - 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

zahlman 2y ago

This seems far wordier than necessary for the point it's making, and reads to me as AI-generated or at least assisted.

kazinator 2y ago

I don't see this issue at all. I put a BSD license on it so you can do whatever you want. Get rich with it; steer missiles at civilian targets with it; whatever. Building a business with the help of someone else's open source isn't some zero effort, turn-key event. Those people still hustle and take risks.