3 ms·

If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with m

If you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world). Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure. It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.

subygan 4mo ago
and nobody is willing to pay for it.
- FinnLobsien 4mo ago
  The value created vs value captured equation of OSS must be one of the most lopsided things ever. If you’re at Google and invent Kubernetes you might still capture 0.000001% (probably less) of the economic value created by Kubernetes, but you probably enjoy very generous comp. OSS doesn’t have any of that, besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever.
  - avaer 4mo ago
    > besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever Not necessarily. AI has significantly reduced the marketability of that angle, when people can just ask AI about your OSS project. That is to say, it's only getting more lopsided.
    - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
      Sure, but I also feel like at the higher level, you’re not necessarily looking for implementation alone, but for “what should we be doing in the first place?”, which AI can’t help with
- whatever1 4mo ago
  In the past it kinda worked out, because the code of OSS acted as the portfolio of the developers, who would get hired by big corps. (Today with LLMs you have no way of knowing who was the original author) We definitely do not pay enough for the utility we get from OSS. But on the other hand do we want do copyright in code? Also when you pay for something you can hold liable the vendor if things go south (security holes etc). Do we want the devs of OSS to be in such position?
  - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
    In a way it’s good that the equation is so lopsided. A massive part is that software can be replicated infinitely for free. This is why the scale of the value created is so giant. I definitely do think it’s crazy that someone whose software gets dozens of millions of downloads A DAY can end up making less than someone building a mediocre SaaS app and getting acqui-hired 2 years later. For the record, I think the VC - Startup ecosystem is incredibly valuable. But it IS crazy how essential software can go essentially unrewarded.
    - luke5441 4mo ago
      Yeah, but the software can also be replicated as binaries or as free SaaS.
  - luke5441 4mo ago
    Wouldn't one be able to tell from basic research if a project is legit or not. E.g. looking how the developer handles support? If no HM does take OSS work into account, one other reason for publishing my code goes away. Might as well post it as freeware if I want to share it.
egeozcan 4mo ago
When I was a kid, we always had New Year's (read: Christmas) decorations (the maximum that wouldn't be out of place in a mostly Muslim country) on a small park in my neighborhood. One year they never appeared, and people were enraged. The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying snacks in a nearby shop. I went out when I heard people shouting. They were shouting accusations at a guy who must have just appeared before his door because he was wearing pajamas in that cold weather. "You Islamists will ruin this country! [0] Happy with what you did? My children actually cried!" and so on. He calmly answered: "This is something I did on my own. This year I got a cancer diagnosis, so I didn't have the motivation. Sorry!" Him feeling the need to apologize always comes to my mind when I see the toxic comments on their unpaid work that the open source maintainers feel that they need to respond to. [0]: Well, they did ruin the country. But that's another story.
- lostlogin 4mo ago
  What country was this?
  - egeozcan 4mo ago
    Istanbul / Turkey. Plus code for the park: 326F+73J Beşiktaş, İstanbul, Türkiye
- dmos62 4mo ago
  That sounds almost surreal. Pretty wild how my model of society doesn't account for this.
  - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
    A good way to understand how much we thanklessly rely on some professions, Google pictures of any garbage disposal strike
    - dmos62 4mo ago
devsda 4mo ago
And the expectations - People asking for and always expecting new patterns and colors. - Raise hell if you miss a few superficial stitches and demand immediate patch work. - No exit path without complaints. If you find it unsustainable and ask for help with the cost of materials for the *next* batch while the current batch is still out there and works fine, you are blamed for (literal) rug pulling.
Aurornis 4mo ago
> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure. This is why forks happen. It’s very common for a maintainer to decide they’re stepping away from a project or even that they’re not supporting use cases or bug fixes. Then someone starts a fork and, if they are supporting it better than the original maintainer, the traction moves to that project. This happens all the time. > It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked. I think this is the fallacy at the center of a lot of these debates. In this analogy, people wouldn’t actually around naked. They’d come up with a new solution. They’d switch to sewn or imported clothes. Maybe some other group steps in and learns how to crochet and takes over. The messier situations occur when one person simultaneously wants to maintain a tight hold on a project and its community, but the maintainers or the community don’t want to endorse any fork attempts. I’ve written before on HN about how some past attempts to form projects have been met with undue hostility for trying to “steal” someone’s pet project. Even open source communities can be hostile to companies forking projects, like all of the complaints that come up about big tech companies profiting off of their own forks of open software (which removes the burden from upstream maintainers). Another examples is when BambuLabs forked PrusaSlicer and there were years of cheap shots at the company for it (though those went away as everyone remembered that Prusa forked another project to make PrusaSlicer). I really think maintainers who don’t want to do things should come out and say they don’t want to do those things. Let the communities and companies adapt accordingly. The worst state is this in between that happens some times where the maintainers want to retain tight control over the project and community and they try to give an impression of being the everything-to-everyone maintainer when they secretly hate it. It would be so much better for everyone if maintainers would just come out and say things like “I’m tired of fixing security bugs so everyone be warned, as security issues come out I’ll fix them when I get around to it.”
nitwit005 4mo ago
> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure. Which you should happily abandon if you get bored. If people truly need something fixed, they can fix it themselves, or pay someone to get it fixed.
- pibaker 4mo ago
  It is very hard to just quit any hobby cold turkey if you have built your entire identity, your friendships, your social standing and in the case of FOSS even your employability around it. Maintainers are human. That means their welfare matters. But that also means when the thing hurting them is the thing they have grown so attached to, they can't just walk away from it like throwing away a piece of expired bread.
Gud 4mo ago
If everyone needs it, everyone can pay for it. Don’t take shit just because you release software under a permissive license.
kakwa_ 4mo ago
I feel this is way too fear mongering heavy against developing in Open Source. I published nearly everything I code on my free time, that's ~100 git repositories. Out of these, ~15 are documented and made generic enough to be used by other people, and out of these ~5 actually have some users, 2 being packaged in mainstream Linux distributions and one even has a CVE. In total, I have received one AI slop PR. one. Your mileage may vary, and you may be blessed/cursed with the new redis or xz. But in all likelihood, things will stay more than manageable in terms of critical infrastructure piece.

subygan 4mo ago

and nobody is willing to pay for it.

FinnLobsien 4mo ago
The value created vs value captured equation of OSS must be one of the most lopsided things ever. If you’re at Google and invent Kubernetes you might still capture 0.000001% (probably less) of the economic value created by Kubernetes, but you probably enjoy very generous comp. OSS doesn’t have any of that, besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever.
- avaer 4mo ago
  > besides being extremely in demand as a consultant or whatever Not necessarily. AI has significantly reduced the marketability of that angle, when people can just ask AI about your OSS project. That is to say, it's only getting more lopsided.
  - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
    Sure, but I also feel like at the higher level, you’re not necessarily looking for implementation alone, but for “what should we be doing in the first place?”, which AI can’t help with
whatever1 4mo ago
In the past it kinda worked out, because the code of OSS acted as the portfolio of the developers, who would get hired by big corps. (Today with LLMs you have no way of knowing who was the original author) We definitely do not pay enough for the utility we get from OSS. But on the other hand do we want do copyright in code? Also when you pay for something you can hold liable the vendor if things go south (security holes etc). Do we want the devs of OSS to be in such position?
- FinnLobsien 4mo ago
  In a way it’s good that the equation is so lopsided. A massive part is that software can be replicated infinitely for free. This is why the scale of the value created is so giant. I definitely do think it’s crazy that someone whose software gets dozens of millions of downloads A DAY can end up making less than someone building a mediocre SaaS app and getting acqui-hired 2 years later. For the record, I think the VC - Startup ecosystem is incredibly valuable. But it IS crazy how essential software can go essentially unrewarded.
  - luke5441 4mo ago
    Yeah, but the software can also be replicated as binaries or as free SaaS.
- luke5441 4mo ago
  Wouldn't one be able to tell from basic research if a project is legit or not. E.g. looking how the developer handles support? If no HM does take OSS work into account, one other reason for publishing my code goes away. Might as well post it as freeware if I want to share it.

egeozcan 4mo ago

When I was a kid, we always had New Year's (read: Christmas) decorations (the maximum that wouldn't be out of place in a mostly Muslim country) on a small park in my neighborhood. One year they never appeared, and people were enraged. The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying snacks in a nearby shop. I went out when I heard people shouting. They were shouting accusations at a guy who must have just appeared before his door because he was wearing pajamas in that cold weather. "You Islamists will ruin this country! [0] Happy with what you did? My children actually cried!" and so on. He calmly answered: "This is something I did on my own. This year I got a cancer diagnosis, so I didn't have the motivation. Sorry!" Him feeling the need to apologize always comes to my mind when I see the toxic comments on their unpaid work that the open source maintainers feel that they need to respond to. [0]: Well, they did ruin the country. But that's another story.

lostlogin 4mo ago
What country was this?
- egeozcan 4mo ago
  Istanbul / Turkey. Plus code for the park: 326F+73J Beşiktaş, İstanbul, Türkiye
dmos62 4mo ago
That sounds almost surreal. Pretty wild how my model of society doesn't account for this.
- FinnLobsien 4mo ago
  A good way to understand how much we thanklessly rely on some professions, Google pictures of any garbage disposal strike
  - dmos62 4mo ago

devsda 4mo ago

And the expectations - People asking for and always expecting new patterns and colors. - Raise hell if you miss a few superficial stitches and demand immediate patch work. - No exit path without complaints. If you find it unsustainable and ask for help with the cost of materials for the *next* batch while the current batch is still out there and works fine, you are blamed for (literal) rug pulling.

Aurornis 4mo ago

> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure. This is why forks happen. It’s very common for a maintainer to decide they’re stepping away from a project or even that they’re not supporting use cases or bug fixes. Then someone starts a fork and, if they are supporting it better than the original maintainer, the traction moves to that project. This happens all the time. > It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked. I think this is the fallacy at the center of a lot of these debates. In this analogy, people wouldn’t actually around naked. They’d come up with a new solution. They’d switch to sewn or imported clothes. Maybe some other group steps in and learns how to crochet and takes over. The messier situations occur when one person simultaneously wants to maintain a tight hold on a project and its community, but the maintainers or the community don’t want to endorse any fork attempts. I’ve written before on HN about how some past attempts to form projects have been met with undue hostility for trying to “steal” someone’s pet project. Even open source communities can be hostile to companies forking projects, like all of the complaints that come up about big tech companies profiting off of their own forks of open software (which removes the burden from upstream maintainers). Another examples is when BambuLabs forked PrusaSlicer and there were years of cheap shots at the company for it (though those went away as everyone remembered that Prusa forked another project to make PrusaSlicer). I really think maintainers who don’t want to do things should come out and say they don’t want to do those things. Let the communities and companies adapt accordingly. The worst state is this in between that happens some times where the maintainers want to retain tight control over the project and community and they try to give an impression of being the everything-to-everyone maintainer when they secretly hate it. It would be so much better for everyone if maintainers would just come out and say things like “I’m tired of fixing security bugs so everyone be warned, as security issues come out I’ll fix them when I get around to it.”

nitwit005 4mo ago

> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure. Which you should happily abandon if you get bored. If people truly need something fixed, they can fix it themselves, or pay someone to get it fixed.

pibaker 4mo ago
It is very hard to just quit any hobby cold turkey if you have built your entire identity, your friendships, your social standing and in the case of FOSS even your employability around it. Maintainers are human. That means their welfare matters. But that also means when the thing hurting them is the thing they have grown so attached to, they can't just walk away from it like throwing away a piece of expired bread.

Gud 4mo ago

If everyone needs it, everyone can pay for it. Don’t take shit just because you release software under a permissive license.

kakwa_ 4mo ago

I feel this is way too fear mongering heavy against developing in Open Source. I published nearly everything I code on my free time, that's ~100 git repositories. Out of these, ~15 are documented and made generic enough to be used by other people, and out of these ~5 actually have some users, 2 being packaged in mainstream Linux distributions and one even has a CVE. In total, I have received one AI slop PR. one. Your mileage may vary, and you may be blessed/cursed with the new redis or xz. But in all likelihood, things will stay more than manageable in terms of critical infrastructure piece.