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> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments. I a

> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments. I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default. I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. Equally, if you expect someone creating open source owes you anything, you're also part of the problem, (and part of why people feel they deserve compensation for something that used to be considered a gift). All that said, you should take care of your people, if you can help others; especially when you depend on them. I think you should try. Or rather, I hope you would.

Barbing 9mo ago
Redistributing unwanted funds would be a good chore to have to do!
pixelready 9mo ago
I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met. Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…
- ThrowawayR2 9mo ago
  The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple. There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.
  - adezxc 9mo ago
    and yet their hypothesis is true, there are already many people, with or without UBI, that volunteer, create things and in general help people surrounding them without any reward and they are the backbone of every society, not the career-chasers
    - pixelready 9mo ago
      I think phenomena like hikkikomori have more to do with (at least perceived) social rejection than lack of motivation. If the only acceptable message you receive from society is that you must chase the brass ring constantly and any setback means you are an abject failure, then withdrawing from the pain of that rejection makes sense for anyone who has experienced enough setbacks or strongly feels alien to that culture. A broader societal shift would occur if it was truly universally understood that everyone has value as a human being separate from their labor market leverage or capital accumulation. There will always be strivers who measure their self worth against superficial standards (Russ Hanneman “doors go up” hand gesture here), I just don’t see why everyone should be forced to play that game or starve I suppose. Giving everyone the option to settle for a life of basic dignity while caring for those around them, or going all in on some academic / creative pursuit seems equally valid investments for society.
      - skinnymuch 9mo ago
        Yes. The only real conclusion from people like NEETs is that society failed them. Outside of a fraction of total people (or when addictions are at play), it is very rare that someone never wants to be productive.
  - dpark 9mo ago
    Hikikomori seems to be largely a symptom of mental illness. NEETs almost by definition are not productive. The fact that these groups are not producing mass amounts of creative works in no way implies that currently-productive people would not produce significantly more creative works if they had the time and resources to do so.
  - 9mo ago
- kiba 9mo ago
  Not really against welfare programs...but... UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off. You need to impose a tax called the Land Value Tax to prevent landowners eating up the public money. Even then we got a long list of much needed public spending before we can even think about a Citizen's Dividend.
  - derektank 9mo ago
    > UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off. This is only true if there’s a static supply of rental units, which isn’t true in most places (despite new construction being constrained by regulation in many places). I support an LVT, but it is not a necessary precondition for redistribution.
- keybored 9mo ago
  UBI is an idea from another money-centric ideology, namely “libertarianism”. It’s not an idea for fostering creativity. It’s an idea for dealing with less employable dependents of society, while the true dependents (parasitic capitalists) take the real spoils of industrialized productivity.
  - godshatter 9mo ago
    Doesn't UBI come from taxes? I can't reconcile the idea of welfare for everyone resonating very well with any of the libertarians I know. Personal charity, sure, absolutely, but not government controlled payouts to people, even if that includes everyone. They would probably consider it better than the current welfare system with all it's bureaucracy, but that's as positive a response as I can expect. Most libertarians I know (and I consider myself an on and off libertarian as I learn more about it) want the government to stick to making sure people's rights aren't being trodden upon and otherwise leave us alone.
    - keybored 9mo ago
      See Milton Friedman. Or Friedrich Hayek if Friedman isn’t crazy enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_universal_basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_universal...
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  I've made my living working fulltime on a single open source project for more than 15 years now. I think it is important to differentiate between different kinds of projects that people might undertake, and 3 particular categories always come to my mind (you may have more): * "plumbing" - all that infrastructure that isn't something you'd ever use directly, but the tools you do use wouldn't function without it. This work is generally intense during a "startup" phase, but then eases back to light-to-occasional as a stable phase is reached. It will likely happen whether there is funding or not, but may take longer and reach a different result without it. * "well defined goal" - something that a person or a team can actually finish. It might or might not benefit from funding during its creation, but at some point, it is just done, and there's almost no reason to think about continuing work other than availability and minimal upgrades to follow other tools or platforms. * "ever-evolving" - something that has no fixed end-goal, and will continue to evolve essentially forever. Depending on the scale of the task, this may or may not benefit from being funded so that there are people working on it full time, for a long time. These descriptions originate in my work on software, but I think something similar can be said for lots of other human activities as well, without much modification.
  - pamcake 9mo ago
    If a "well-defined goal" project gets popular and sticky enough, it can metamorphize into an "ever-evolving" project by injection of VC capital.
    - theshrike79 9mo ago
      Or just good old scope creep =) https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/ https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/ > Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. -- James Zawinski, 1995
- john-h-k 9mo ago
  > There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books. But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
  - true_religion 9mo ago
    I’ve met a lot of people who are passionate about public cleanliness to the point of organizing rubbish pickups, beach cleanups, and river dredging using their own power. With UBI, you may have to take your own trash to the landfill but rest assured the larger ecology will still be taken care of by passionate people. I think a bigger issue will be that the people who are passionate for a project may not be the most effective at accomplishing it, and without income you can’t motivate those more effective people into working on the project.
    - somenameforme 9mo ago
      This sounds like it'd be one of the many ideas that sounds great on paper but in reality just creates an even greater stratification in society. I think you're completely correct that in many places, particularly higher end - people would come together to keep the place looking great, possibly even better since you get to 'own' it on some ways. But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. But I also think we're looking at things superficially. There's a lot of technical work that can't be casually done like plumbing or electrical that is currently moderately compensated. In an UBI world costs for this would likely skyrocket which would lead to an even higher UBI which would lead to even higher costs which would lead to Zimbabwe. Pessimism aside I would probably actually support it, simply because I think it would be the ultimate expression of liberty - but you have to realize that you're not going to create anything like the same society we have, but with everybody being able to independently support themselves. You're going to completely destroy the contemporary economy and create a new entity that would probably be much closer to something of times long since past when the overwhelming majority of America was self employed. 'The Expanse' offers a realistic take on what UBI would probably entail.
- carlosjobim 9mo ago
  1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free. 2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything. 3. Now I'm really angry! I should have gotten some money from them! 4. The government must force my neighbours to pay a salary to me! 5. Continue to work for free making open source code for giant corporations, so they can profit. How about instead?: 1. Don't work for free or give away your code. Instead charge a fair price for people to use your code or software. 2. If your code is good, people and corporations pay you for it. 3. Now you're really happy! You got money for your labour. 4. The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary. 5. You can continue to work for money and make more money.
  - whattheheckheck 9mo ago
    And everyone can get stuck with big corporation proprietary software that they have no idea how it runs or what it does under the hood
    - carlosjobim 9mo ago
      You can then make your own software. Nobody owes you free software.
      - ranger_danger 9mo ago
        You're not wrong, but I think it is increasingly harder (and perhaps socially taboo) to stay far away from proprietary software while still being part of a functioning society. FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.
  - no-name-here 9mo ago
    I'm not agreeing with the OP proposal, but with LLMs today, no matter how you license your code and no matter what ToS or other prohibition you put on it, there does not seem to be any way to prevent LLMs from absorbing and using it to implement a replacement based on your code unless you choose to only do closed source code - there's no "opt out" for someone's source code, let alone an opt-in (again, unless we give up open source). (A very different situation from the AI companies themselves, where companies such as Anthropic make Claude Code closed source, and their ToS provide strict prohibitions on using it to work on something that could compete with them - can you imagine if Windows or MacOS's ToS prohibited people from using their OS to work on a competing OS, of if the VSCode ToS prohibited people from using VSCode to work on another editor?)
- piekvorst 9mo ago
  “Strong” social safety can be achieved only by enslaving producers who have to provide the ground for “many many” caring people. This is always the case. Consider Russian support of young families: the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have. Personally, I cannot imagine a worse moral depravity than supporting this atrocity as a matter of justice. Capitalism is not “slavery with extra steps,” it’s freedom in a fragile world repleted with conflicting goals. Just because people don’t agree with your goals doesn’t make you a slave.
  - derektank 9mo ago
    >the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have IDK, this seems perfectly reasonable if the state also provides an old age insurance / pension system for retirees. Without a younger generation of people paying into the system (i.e. the children of parents) these systems collapse. It seems appropriate to support the people that keep the government functioning. Of course, I’m guessing you oppose systems like social security too, given your comment. I just find it odd that you can’t imagine anything worse than giving money to parents, given most governments give money to a lot of people, most of whom aren’t opting into anything as noble as parenthood.
    - ZoomZoomZoom 9mo ago
      Giving uncharacteristically large direct stimuli for procreation disproportionately incentivizes the people in dire need of money, meddling with the rationality of the decision and increasing social tension later. The only other way to be promised a big pile of cash from the govt there is a military contract.
- golergka 9mo ago
  > Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met. If people find these things useful, they can actually pay for them. If you can't find people who value it enough to pay for it, then may be it's not as valuable as you think it is.
  - Dilettante_ 9mo ago
    By that measure, doing something for a poor person who cannot pay would be entirely worthless, while delivering food to a particularly generous billionaire would be more valuable than an entire month of an average person's work. The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.
- croon 9mo ago
  I'm generally an advocate for a robust safety-net such that people shouldn't be on their knees every month just to scrape by with food/housing/healthcare, and would love it if we reached Star Trek/The Culture levels of post-scarcity, but I'm simultaneously not convinced by this idea, but possibly from another angle. 1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists). 2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded. TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.
- paulddraper 9mo ago
  Somehow no one talks about the incredible plumbing.
- bloppe 9mo ago
  I support UBI, funded by high capital gains taxes, to offset the growing value of capital relative to labor due to ever-improving automation, but I think it's silly to think a significant number of people will ever be happy with UBI alone. First of all, "baseline needs" are fluid. These days, electricity and internet are broadly considered baseline needs, but would have been unimaginable luxuries for previous generations. The future will inevitably bring new "baseline needs" we can hardly yet comprehend. Secondly, the vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum, no matter what that minimum is. If you have a friend who can afford fancy things, and you can't, then more likely than not, you will not be satisfied. It's also much easier to attract a partner if you're financially successful, for similar reasons. That's just human nature. Just because you don't have to worry about starving or succumbing to the elements does not mean people will stop competing with one another.
  - DerArzt 9mo ago
    > The vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum Isn't that a benefit for UBI? If everyone's basic needs are met and they want more, nothing would stop them from taking a job and making more money right?
    - bloppe 9mo ago
      Ya. I'm saying I support UBI, and that the concern most people raise about UBI (usually along the lines of "I don't think anybody should just coast by without working") is completely unfounded. The parent post was talking about how everybody would have more time for unpaid pursuits if only we had UBI. I'm saying that I don't think UBI would change that much. People will continue to pursue unpaid hobbies much like they do today, but making money will still be just as important.
dgacmu 9mo ago
I agree with you, but I do think we have a bit of a problem in which an open source creator makes something and then suddenly finds themselves accidentally having created a load-bearing component that is not only used by a lot of people and companies, but where people are demanding that bugs be fixed, etc., and we lack great models for helping transition it from "I do this for fun, might fix the bug if I ever feel like it" to " I respect that this has become a critical dependency and we will find a way to make it someone's job to make it more like a product". I gather that the open source maintainers who have found themselves in this situation sometimes get very unhappy about it, and I can see why -- it's not like they woke up one day and suddenly had a critical component on their hands, it kind of evolved over time and after a while they're like "uhoh, I don't think this is what I signed up for"
- ummonk 9mo ago
  I think expecting to get paid to fix bugs, add features, etc. to one’s open source code is much more reasonable and there should be marketplace infrastructure that makes this much easier to do (compared to the current system where developers have to apply for corporate grants for long running projects).
- kiba 9mo ago
  Public funding from governments would make sense. Open source software are effectively public good.
  - mjrpes 9mo ago
    Europe is doing this: https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/ https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/
- chrysoprace 9mo ago
  In that case the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything. If somebody depends on the maintainer's package for a critical component then they should consider paying them and possibly drawing up an explicit contract. That's what we did at my work for a critical open source component, where we paid the maintainer to add several features we needed.
gregsadetsky 9mo ago
My apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time. I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”. If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work they hadn’t necessarily signed up for (who signs up for burnout?) - it’s ok/necessary/mandatory to see how everyone (and or Nvidia/Google/OpenAI etc) can, like, help. My insistence is on the opt-out nature of this so that people who would be ok being compensated don't have to beg. Consider how the xz malware situation happened [0]. Or the header & question 8 from the FAQ for PocketBase [1]. [0] https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500 [1] https://pocketbase.io/faq/ https://pocketbase.io/faq/
- echelon 9mo ago
  Don't apologize. "Open Source" is hugely conflated in terms of the reasons people write open source software. There are people who truly don't care to be compensated for their work. Some are even fine with corporations using it without receiving any benefit. Some people prefer viral and infectious licenses the way that Stallman originally intended and that the FSF later lost sight of (the AGPL isn't strong enough, and the advocacy fell flat). They don't want to give corporations any wiggle room in using their craft and want anyone benefiting from it in any way to agree to the same terms for their own extensions. Many corporations, some insidiously, use open source as a means of getting free labor. It's not just free code, but entire ecosystems of software and talent pools of engineers that appear, ready to take advantage of. These same companies often do not publish their code as open source. AWS and GCP are huge beneficiaries that come to mind, yet you don't have hyperscaler code to spin up. They get free karma for pushing the "ethos" of open source while not giving the important parts back. Linux having more users means more AWS and GCP customers, yet those customers will never get the AWS and GCP systems for themselves. There are "impure" and "non-OSI" licenses such as Fair Source and Fair Code that enable companies to build in the open and give customers the keys to the kingdom. They just reserve the sole right to compete on offering the software. OSI purists attack this, yet these types of licenses enable consumers do to whatever they want with the code except for reselling it. If we care about sustainability, we wouldn't attack the gesture. There are really multiple things going on in "open source" and we're calling it all by the same imprecise nomenclature. The purists would argue not and that the OSI definition is all that matters. But look at how much of the conversation disappears when you adhere to that, and what behavior slips by.
asah 9mo ago
I'm pretty sure you didn't wake up at 5am to an urgent issue. Because I did last night, and for sure __MY WIFE__ expects me to get paid for it!! In general, people's time is not free if only because they have rent/mortgage, food, transportation, medical bills, education, etc.
- Dilettante_ 9mo ago
  >Urgent issue Urgent issue for whom? If there is some org relying on something you maintain voluntarily, in your free time, that seems like a "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"-type situation to me. At the risk of sounding like a poor man's John Galt: If you wouldn't like to get out of bed at 5am to work without getting compensated, then you should just not do that.
Quarrelsome 9mo ago
> I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. I think this is a little unfair, given that many (especially younger maintainers) get into it for portfolio reasons where they otherwise might struggle to get a job but stick around because of the enjoyment and interest. It still sucks that so many big orgs rely on these packages and we're potentially experiencing a future when models trained on this code are going to replace jobs in the future. I think a lack of unionisation is what puts the industry in such a tough spot. We have no big power brokers to enforce the rights of open source developers, unlike the other creative industries that can organise with combined legal action.
saidnooneever 9mo ago
thanks grayhatter. well said. been programming for 20+ years never earned a dime from it dont want it. its a silly assumption that everyone's motivation is money. this is very far from the truth.
chris_wot 9mo ago
Agreed. I do this too.
franciscop 9mo ago
I was going to comment exactly the same thing, thanks for expressing it so well and here's my upvote. I think part of why I wanted to comment the same, is that for me this IS exactly the reason I make open source! It is my gift for everyone, please use it well. I do think it would be nice to get paid anything at all, but that wouldn't change at all how I do things/release code. In fact, unless it'd be really no-strings-attached, I'd prefer to keep the current arrangement than being paid a pittance per month and then have extra obligations.
davidhyde 9mo ago
Yes and yes. I make open source software because I fundamentally enjoy the act of learning something new and then applying that knowledge by making something. I publish it for the ego boost only. I am equally likely to be irritated by contributions than to be excited by them. My day job contributions are up for scrutiny but the personal projects I publish on github are my island, my sovereign ground. As exciting as PR interest is, sometimes I don’t really want someone to paint over my painting. It’s mine after all. I obviously don’t speak for all open source contributors but I don’t want compensation. If someone wants to fork my work and turn it into a community then they are free to do so as a result of my licensing choice. If the first few contributions I receive are pleasant and someone takes over then that is great too. My point is that not all creators are aggregators. Leave us alone and stop complaining. We gave it away for free after all.
tracerbulletx 9mo ago
People really want to have a business with none of the work of running a business. They want to make something useful, then have people just pay them for it without any of the things that go into operating a business. In a perfect world value would directly correlate to income, but it isn't even close to being the case, there's a lot of coercion and control of supply that goes into owning a business.

Barbing 9mo ago

Redistributing unwanted funds would be a good chore to have to do!

pixelready 9mo ago

I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met. Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…

ThrowawayR2 9mo ago
The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple. There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.
- adezxc 9mo ago
  and yet their hypothesis is true, there are already many people, with or without UBI, that volunteer, create things and in general help people surrounding them without any reward and they are the backbone of every society, not the career-chasers
  - pixelready 9mo ago
    I think phenomena like hikkikomori have more to do with (at least perceived) social rejection than lack of motivation. If the only acceptable message you receive from society is that you must chase the brass ring constantly and any setback means you are an abject failure, then withdrawing from the pain of that rejection makes sense for anyone who has experienced enough setbacks or strongly feels alien to that culture. A broader societal shift would occur if it was truly universally understood that everyone has value as a human being separate from their labor market leverage or capital accumulation. There will always be strivers who measure their self worth against superficial standards (Russ Hanneman “doors go up” hand gesture here), I just don’t see why everyone should be forced to play that game or starve I suppose. Giving everyone the option to settle for a life of basic dignity while caring for those around them, or going all in on some academic / creative pursuit seems equally valid investments for society.
    - skinnymuch 9mo ago
      Yes. The only real conclusion from people like NEETs is that society failed them. Outside of a fraction of total people (or when addictions are at play), it is very rare that someone never wants to be productive.
- dpark 9mo ago
  Hikikomori seems to be largely a symptom of mental illness. NEETs almost by definition are not productive. The fact that these groups are not producing mass amounts of creative works in no way implies that currently-productive people would not produce significantly more creative works if they had the time and resources to do so.
- 9mo ago
kiba 9mo ago
Not really against welfare programs...but... UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off. You need to impose a tax called the Land Value Tax to prevent landowners eating up the public money. Even then we got a long list of much needed public spending before we can even think about a Citizen's Dividend.
- derektank 9mo ago
  > UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off. This is only true if there’s a static supply of rental units, which isn’t true in most places (despite new construction being constrained by regulation in many places). I support an LVT, but it is not a necessary precondition for redistribution.
keybored 9mo ago
UBI is an idea from another money-centric ideology, namely “libertarianism”. It’s not an idea for fostering creativity. It’s an idea for dealing with less employable dependents of society, while the true dependents (parasitic capitalists) take the real spoils of industrialized productivity.
- godshatter 9mo ago
  Doesn't UBI come from taxes? I can't reconcile the idea of welfare for everyone resonating very well with any of the libertarians I know. Personal charity, sure, absolutely, but not government controlled payouts to people, even if that includes everyone. They would probably consider it better than the current welfare system with all it's bureaucracy, but that's as positive a response as I can expect. Most libertarians I know (and I consider myself an on and off libertarian as I learn more about it) want the government to stick to making sure people's rights aren't being trodden upon and otherwise leave us alone.
  - keybored 9mo ago
    See Milton Friedman. Or Friedrich Hayek if Friedman isn’t crazy enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_universal_basic_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_universal...
PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
I've made my living working fulltime on a single open source project for more than 15 years now. I think it is important to differentiate between different kinds of projects that people might undertake, and 3 particular categories always come to my mind (you may have more): * "plumbing" - all that infrastructure that isn't something you'd ever use directly, but the tools you do use wouldn't function without it. This work is generally intense during a "startup" phase, but then eases back to light-to-occasional as a stable phase is reached. It will likely happen whether there is funding or not, but may take longer and reach a different result without it. * "well defined goal" - something that a person or a team can actually finish. It might or might not benefit from funding during its creation, but at some point, it is just done, and there's almost no reason to think about continuing work other than availability and minimal upgrades to follow other tools or platforms. * "ever-evolving" - something that has no fixed end-goal, and will continue to evolve essentially forever. Depending on the scale of the task, this may or may not benefit from being funded so that there are people working on it full time, for a long time. These descriptions originate in my work on software, but I think something similar can be said for lots of other human activities as well, without much modification.
- pamcake 9mo ago
  If a "well-defined goal" project gets popular and sticky enough, it can metamorphize into an "ever-evolving" project by injection of VC capital.
  - theshrike79 9mo ago
    Or just good old scope creep =) https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/ https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/ > Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. -- James Zawinski, 1995
john-h-k 9mo ago
> There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books. But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
- true_religion 9mo ago
  I’ve met a lot of people who are passionate about public cleanliness to the point of organizing rubbish pickups, beach cleanups, and river dredging using their own power. With UBI, you may have to take your own trash to the landfill but rest assured the larger ecology will still be taken care of by passionate people. I think a bigger issue will be that the people who are passionate for a project may not be the most effective at accomplishing it, and without income you can’t motivate those more effective people into working on the project.
  - somenameforme 9mo ago
    This sounds like it'd be one of the many ideas that sounds great on paper but in reality just creates an even greater stratification in society. I think you're completely correct that in many places, particularly higher end - people would come together to keep the place looking great, possibly even better since you get to 'own' it on some ways. But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. But I also think we're looking at things superficially. There's a lot of technical work that can't be casually done like plumbing or electrical that is currently moderately compensated. In an UBI world costs for this would likely skyrocket which would lead to an even higher UBI which would lead to even higher costs which would lead to Zimbabwe. Pessimism aside I would probably actually support it, simply because I think it would be the ultimate expression of liberty - but you have to realize that you're not going to create anything like the same society we have, but with everybody being able to independently support themselves. You're going to completely destroy the contemporary economy and create a new entity that would probably be much closer to something of times long since past when the overwhelming majority of America was self employed. 'The Expanse' offers a realistic take on what UBI would probably entail.
carlosjobim 9mo ago
1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free. 2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything. 3. Now I'm really angry! I should have gotten some money from them! 4. The government must force my neighbours to pay a salary to me! 5. Continue to work for free making open source code for giant corporations, so they can profit. How about instead?: 1. Don't work for free or give away your code. Instead charge a fair price for people to use your code or software. 2. If your code is good, people and corporations pay you for it. 3. Now you're really happy! You got money for your labour. 4. The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary. 5. You can continue to work for money and make more money.
- whattheheckheck 9mo ago
  And everyone can get stuck with big corporation proprietary software that they have no idea how it runs or what it does under the hood
  - carlosjobim 9mo ago
    You can then make your own software. Nobody owes you free software.
    - ranger_danger 9mo ago
      You're not wrong, but I think it is increasingly harder (and perhaps socially taboo) to stay far away from proprietary software while still being part of a functioning society. FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.
- no-name-here 9mo ago
  I'm not agreeing with the OP proposal, but with LLMs today, no matter how you license your code and no matter what ToS or other prohibition you put on it, there does not seem to be any way to prevent LLMs from absorbing and using it to implement a replacement based on your code unless you choose to only do closed source code - there's no "opt out" for someone's source code, let alone an opt-in (again, unless we give up open source). (A very different situation from the AI companies themselves, where companies such as Anthropic make Claude Code closed source, and their ToS provide strict prohibitions on using it to work on something that could compete with them - can you imagine if Windows or MacOS's ToS prohibited people from using their OS to work on a competing OS, of if the VSCode ToS prohibited people from using VSCode to work on another editor?)
piekvorst 9mo ago
“Strong” social safety can be achieved only by enslaving producers who have to provide the ground for “many many” caring people. This is always the case. Consider Russian support of young families: the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have. Personally, I cannot imagine a worse moral depravity than supporting this atrocity as a matter of justice. Capitalism is not “slavery with extra steps,” it’s freedom in a fragile world repleted with conflicting goals. Just because people don’t agree with your goals doesn’t make you a slave.
- derektank 9mo ago
  >the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have IDK, this seems perfectly reasonable if the state also provides an old age insurance / pension system for retirees. Without a younger generation of people paying into the system (i.e. the children of parents) these systems collapse. It seems appropriate to support the people that keep the government functioning. Of course, I’m guessing you oppose systems like social security too, given your comment. I just find it odd that you can’t imagine anything worse than giving money to parents, given most governments give money to a lot of people, most of whom aren’t opting into anything as noble as parenthood.
  - ZoomZoomZoom 9mo ago
    Giving uncharacteristically large direct stimuli for procreation disproportionately incentivizes the people in dire need of money, meddling with the rationality of the decision and increasing social tension later. The only other way to be promised a big pile of cash from the govt there is a military contract.
golergka 9mo ago
> Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met. If people find these things useful, they can actually pay for them. If you can't find people who value it enough to pay for it, then may be it's not as valuable as you think it is.
- Dilettante_ 9mo ago
  By that measure, doing something for a poor person who cannot pay would be entirely worthless, while delivering food to a particularly generous billionaire would be more valuable than an entire month of an average person's work. The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.
croon 9mo ago
I'm generally an advocate for a robust safety-net such that people shouldn't be on their knees every month just to scrape by with food/housing/healthcare, and would love it if we reached Star Trek/The Culture levels of post-scarcity, but I'm simultaneously not convinced by this idea, but possibly from another angle. 1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists). 2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded. TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.
paulddraper 9mo ago
Somehow no one talks about the incredible plumbing.
bloppe 9mo ago
I support UBI, funded by high capital gains taxes, to offset the growing value of capital relative to labor due to ever-improving automation, but I think it's silly to think a significant number of people will ever be happy with UBI alone. First of all, "baseline needs" are fluid. These days, electricity and internet are broadly considered baseline needs, but would have been unimaginable luxuries for previous generations. The future will inevitably bring new "baseline needs" we can hardly yet comprehend. Secondly, the vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum, no matter what that minimum is. If you have a friend who can afford fancy things, and you can't, then more likely than not, you will not be satisfied. It's also much easier to attract a partner if you're financially successful, for similar reasons. That's just human nature. Just because you don't have to worry about starving or succumbing to the elements does not mean people will stop competing with one another.
- DerArzt 9mo ago
  > The vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum Isn't that a benefit for UBI? If everyone's basic needs are met and they want more, nothing would stop them from taking a job and making more money right?
  - bloppe 9mo ago
    Ya. I'm saying I support UBI, and that the concern most people raise about UBI (usually along the lines of "I don't think anybody should just coast by without working") is completely unfounded. The parent post was talking about how everybody would have more time for unpaid pursuits if only we had UBI. I'm saying that I don't think UBI would change that much. People will continue to pursue unpaid hobbies much like they do today, but making money will still be just as important.

dgacmu 9mo ago

I agree with you, but I do think we have a bit of a problem in which an open source creator makes something and then suddenly finds themselves accidentally having created a load-bearing component that is not only used by a lot of people and companies, but where people are demanding that bugs be fixed, etc., and we lack great models for helping transition it from "I do this for fun, might fix the bug if I ever feel like it" to " I respect that this has become a critical dependency and we will find a way to make it someone's job to make it more like a product". I gather that the open source maintainers who have found themselves in this situation sometimes get very unhappy about it, and I can see why -- it's not like they woke up one day and suddenly had a critical component on their hands, it kind of evolved over time and after a while they're like "uhoh, I don't think this is what I signed up for"

ummonk 9mo ago
I think expecting to get paid to fix bugs, add features, etc. to one’s open source code is much more reasonable and there should be marketplace infrastructure that makes this much easier to do (compared to the current system where developers have to apply for corporate grants for long running projects).
kiba 9mo ago
Public funding from governments would make sense. Open source software are effectively public good.
- mjrpes 9mo ago
  Europe is doing this: https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/ https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/
chrysoprace 9mo ago
In that case the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything. If somebody depends on the maintainer's package for a critical component then they should consider paying them and possibly drawing up an explicit contract. That's what we did at my work for a critical open source component, where we paid the maintainer to add several features we needed.

gregsadetsky 9mo ago

My apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time. I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”. If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work they hadn’t necessarily signed up for (who signs up for burnout?) - it’s ok/necessary/mandatory to see how everyone (and or Nvidia/Google/OpenAI etc) can, like, help. My insistence is on the opt-out nature of this so that people who would be ok being compensated don't have to beg. Consider how the xz malware situation happened [0]. Or the header & question 8 from the FAQ for PocketBase [1]. [0] https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500 [1] https://pocketbase.io/faq/ https://pocketbase.io/faq/

echelon 9mo ago
Don't apologize. "Open Source" is hugely conflated in terms of the reasons people write open source software. There are people who truly don't care to be compensated for their work. Some are even fine with corporations using it without receiving any benefit. Some people prefer viral and infectious licenses the way that Stallman originally intended and that the FSF later lost sight of (the AGPL isn't strong enough, and the advocacy fell flat). They don't want to give corporations any wiggle room in using their craft and want anyone benefiting from it in any way to agree to the same terms for their own extensions. Many corporations, some insidiously, use open source as a means of getting free labor. It's not just free code, but entire ecosystems of software and talent pools of engineers that appear, ready to take advantage of. These same companies often do not publish their code as open source. AWS and GCP are huge beneficiaries that come to mind, yet you don't have hyperscaler code to spin up. They get free karma for pushing the "ethos" of open source while not giving the important parts back. Linux having more users means more AWS and GCP customers, yet those customers will never get the AWS and GCP systems for themselves. There are "impure" and "non-OSI" licenses such as Fair Source and Fair Code that enable companies to build in the open and give customers the keys to the kingdom. They just reserve the sole right to compete on offering the software. OSI purists attack this, yet these types of licenses enable consumers do to whatever they want with the code except for reselling it. If we care about sustainability, we wouldn't attack the gesture. There are really multiple things going on in "open source" and we're calling it all by the same imprecise nomenclature. The purists would argue not and that the OSI definition is all that matters. But look at how much of the conversation disappears when you adhere to that, and what behavior slips by.

asah 9mo ago

I'm pretty sure you didn't wake up at 5am to an urgent issue. Because I did last night, and for sure __MY WIFE__ expects me to get paid for it!! In general, people's time is not free if only because they have rent/mortgage, food, transportation, medical bills, education, etc.

Dilettante_ 9mo ago
>Urgent issue Urgent issue for whom? If there is some org relying on something you maintain voluntarily, in your free time, that seems like a "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"-type situation to me. At the risk of sounding like a poor man's John Galt: If you wouldn't like to get out of bed at 5am to work without getting compensated, then you should just not do that.

Quarrelsome 9mo ago

> I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. I think this is a little unfair, given that many (especially younger maintainers) get into it for portfolio reasons where they otherwise might struggle to get a job but stick around because of the enjoyment and interest. It still sucks that so many big orgs rely on these packages and we're potentially experiencing a future when models trained on this code are going to replace jobs in the future. I think a lack of unionisation is what puts the industry in such a tough spot. We have no big power brokers to enforce the rights of open source developers, unlike the other creative industries that can organise with combined legal action.

saidnooneever 9mo ago

thanks grayhatter. well said. been programming for 20+ years never earned a dime from it dont want it. its a silly assumption that everyone's motivation is money. this is very far from the truth.

chris_wot 9mo ago

Agreed. I do this too.

franciscop 9mo ago

I was going to comment exactly the same thing, thanks for expressing it so well and here's my upvote. I think part of why I wanted to comment the same, is that for me this IS exactly the reason I make open source! It is my gift for everyone, please use it well. I do think it would be nice to get paid anything at all, but that wouldn't change at all how I do things/release code. In fact, unless it'd be really no-strings-attached, I'd prefer to keep the current arrangement than being paid a pittance per month and then have extra obligations.

davidhyde 9mo ago

Yes and yes. I make open source software because I fundamentally enjoy the act of learning something new and then applying that knowledge by making something. I publish it for the ego boost only. I am equally likely to be irritated by contributions than to be excited by them. My day job contributions are up for scrutiny but the personal projects I publish on github are my island, my sovereign ground. As exciting as PR interest is, sometimes I don’t really want someone to paint over my painting. It’s mine after all. I obviously don’t speak for all open source contributors but I don’t want compensation. If someone wants to fork my work and turn it into a community then they are free to do so as a result of my licensing choice. If the first few contributions I receive are pleasant and someone takes over then that is great too. My point is that not all creators are aggregators. Leave us alone and stop complaining. We gave it away for free after all.

tracerbulletx 9mo ago

People really want to have a business with none of the work of running a business. They want to make something useful, then have people just pay them for it without any of the things that go into operating a business. In a perfect world value would directly correlate to income, but it isn't even close to being the case, there's a lot of coercion and control of supply that goes into owning a business.