8 ms·

The perils of mixing open source and money

176 points by _pius 13y ago

coleifer 13y ago
Thank you for writing this. I think it's valuable to step back and look at whether accepting donations is in line with the set of values that led to open source in the first place. I am reading Ben Franklin's autobiography and came across this quote which I think also neatly sums up a point you omitted: "...as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
sheetjs 13y ago
Money isn't just for working full time. Sometimes you need hardware or software for compatibility testing. For example, suppose you were trying to build parsers/writers for PSD or XLS files. To test on older versions of photoshop or excel, you need access to those older versions (and most likely, the contemporaneous hardware). Those are real costs. I also think the point regarding focus is misguided: if the money is specifically for embellishments (e.g. 100% compatibility), then you are in fact more likely to embellish Finally, Ruby on Rails happens to be an exceptional example in terms of traction. Most open source projects never come close because the addressable market is smaller (the set of all people supporting a particular ruby gem is a subset of the people interested in ruby) and in those cases a bit of extra money is enough to take a hobbyist effort to a production-level product. That extra work takes time and money (for example, sitting there and validating certain results by hand) and oftentimes won't happen with an open source project.
joydeepdg 13y ago
All open source projects are not the same. All the people running open source projects are not swayed by money. Some projects are much more complicated than a web framework. These projects need funds for progress to be made. Case in point - OpenBSD. I love the project and their approach. I also feel they genuinely need funding to keep improving the system. Another example - LuaJIT. Great project, does not have a load of contributors - so I won't mind funding Mike if it means he spends more time on LuaJIT. Another example - SQLite. I'll just send in a donation because its so damn good.
justinmk 13y ago
> Thousands, collaborating for a decade, to produce an astoundingly accomplished framework and ecosystem available to anyone at the cost of zero. Well, I am sure DHH means "nominal cost", but the cost is certainly not zero. But it degrades economic discussion when people misuse the word "cost" to mean "currency transacted". Inevitably one of the interlocutors wanders down the trail and marvels, "the cost is zero, so much resources were saved!" Well no, the cost is not zero. Things other than currency were transacted.
hacknat 13y ago
It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying this. The open source projects that are popular like Linux, nginx, and other system ops stuff are obviously popular and have benefited immensely from indirect money (in terms of institutional support). They are vastly superior compared to anything a company could built closed source. We often cling to the idea that open source software is superior to closed source software, but a quick survey of the landscape of open source software will show that this is patently false. Where there is obvious demand for a software product that lots of interested parties need just to maintain operability, the open source solution will usually be vastly superior if not mildly better. But, take a look at the vast amount of software that is created on github that is open source and you will see a lot of (self-admitted) crap (I have made a lot of self-admitted crap). This crap might have the kernel of a good idea in it, but it never got the time it needed. I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support. David, not all of us get to be part of incredibly profitable companies that can afford to fund our adventures in coding. Suggesting that Rails hasn't benefited from institutional support and money is just deceptive and something I can't stomach. It's something we can't measure, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
- luckydude 13y ago
  +1. I was going to say this but you said it better. My hackles go up when people say open source is better. That's true sometimes but it most certainly is not always true and I've argued for years that open source is usually a better (or worse) copy of some closed source thing that someone found useful and didn't like that it was closed.
  - spacelizard 13y ago
    Well of course it's not true when you re-frame the argument into a strawman like that. A large percentage of proprietary programs are also blatant copies or ripoffs of something else. The issue that we're trying to get to is that free/open source software is principally better, not that all open source software is always less buggy or more featureful than the proprietary software it's intended to replace. Obviously that would be a ridiculous assumption, anyone who's seen all the crap throwaway projects on github can attest to it.
seiji 13y ago
When was the last time DHH was worth less than a million dollars?
forsaken 13y ago
As someone who worked on an Open Source project for years with no compensation, adding sustainable funding to it was very motivating. Money is a very weird thing, but getting money for the continued existence of your work is fantastic validation and support. It's easy to work on things for free, but how do you know that people value them if they simply use them for free. Attaching money to a pursuit that was previously free can also act to greatly encourage the continued existence of the project in the face of burnout and uncertainty.
- _delirium 13y ago
  For me, it depends on the money, the project, and my financial situation. With a stable salary currently, I often find attempts to make money from my side projects more demotivating than motivating. If it's something I actually find interesting, it's a hobby. Maybe it's writing software, maybe it's editing Wikipedia, maybe it's writing essays. That feels like a good use of my time, and I get to decide if it is or not. But then if I try to find a way to make money at it? Now it turns into basically a job, where I need to figure out how to monetize it, and in all likelihood the hourly rate will end up depressingly low. So I'd rather just spend my hobby time as I choose and not worry about monetizing it. More subtly, I find that having monetization as a goal of a side project can creep in in a lot of ways that aren't really beneficial to the project. Take even just writing something. Sometimes I'm frustrated by the information available online on a subject, and want to spend a bit on writing something to set the record straight. Sometimes this makes sense to publish myself. Other times it makes sense to write or improve a Wikipedia article. This is an interesting tradeoff, because it's basically trading likely many more views (therefore likely more impact) if I write it on Wikipedia, versus more control and authorial credit if I post it myself. From a monetization perspective, writing on Wikipedia is rarely the optimal choice; but from the perspective of getting the information out there, it sometimes is.
ssivark 13y ago
I get the feeling that many comments here, coming from developers who engage with FOSS consider the infusion of money to be a step in the right direction. Imagine like-minded people being able to contribute to a kickstarter targeting their itch, which some developer plans to scratch. I think the picture the OP has is closer to the situation in scientific research, where you can replace kickstarter funding by grants from a funding agency. Many would claim that today's science research situation is broken, with scientists chasing grant money and low-hanging "high-impact" fruit, instead of taking risks working on the really challenging problems (large time-scales and investments) with uncertain results. I think both perspectives have their place and it is important to have a balance between the two. In the case of research, one can argue that tenure is supposed offer security as opposed to an industry job, but it's also true that incentives are strongly tied to research productivity, and it's next to impossible to do research without research funding. If I understand the OP's perspective, he's okay with companies paying for developer time (kinda like tenure) as opposed to developers chasing grants. OP is drawing attention to the possible consequences of going overboard in this newfound enthusiasm/method for funding FOSS.
jcalvinowens 13y ago
Something like 75% of Linux kernel developers are paid for their work. It seems to be working pretty well for them.
- xs_kid 13y ago
  Sure, paid by companies, they aren't asking for funds in kickstarter.
snowwrestler 13y ago
I think it's fair to say that products like Linux, Apache httpd, Firefox, and Wordpress are the gold standard of open source software projects. One thing they all have in common is a core of contributors/managers who are professionally employed full-time on these projects. In addition, many of these projects benefit from contributions by programmers who are employed elsewhere, but are permitted/encouraged to contribute on company time. Basically, I would argue that open source and money have always been inextricably mixed and always will be. If you don't want to suppport a particular person or project, that is of course your right, but I don't agree that funding is some sort of alarming development.
avenger123 13y ago
It's an open marketplace. The project still has to have merit to be funded via Kickstarter or similar venues. The best use of this strategy has been integration of South into Django itself. The funding for this went above and beyond what was expected as everyone released the immense value of getting this work done. Also, I don't believe anyone is getting rich doing this. In the case of South, there was a genuine request of "hey, I can do this, but I can't make too much progress in my free time". Using Ruby on Rails is a little disingenuous example too. It's had the backing of its main company (37signals) since its inception. I do believe that these things will self-adjust itself. On face value, DHH makes interesting arguments. But, projects that are getting funding are being done by people that are already intimidate with the project. Also, the rates that are being set for the hours that will be involved are hardly market rate. What I love about this new model, is that it can push projects into the mainstream whereas companies start getting involved and allow their employees to spend time making fixes and improving the projects. Another example of this was Microsoft's financial support for the jquery UI team for building the grid. They funded I believe at least one developer's salary to get the work done. I don't think anyone would argue that this was a bad move as the jquery team was still in control of the project and the timeline (which has definitely been pushed back with regards to the grid).
- general_failure 13y ago
  Rails did not have the backing of 37 signals. It was created by dhh in his spare time.
  - avenger123 13y ago
    I do understand that. But once it was created, it has been used by 37Signals and to some extent driven by their requirements and ongoing support. At this point, it doesn't matter but in the early releases it likely made a difference.
andmarios 13y ago
I think the article is more about crowdfunding and open source. Until now every single awesome open source project has managed to take off without a kickstarter campaign. Nowadays everyone promises to deliver an awesome open source project if you first provide funds. I have donated to many open source/free software projects, either directly or through crowdfunding when they had a specific goal (eg libre graphics meeting, a full time dev to refactor kdenlive). But I am really skeptical of someone who wants money before he delivers anything. Free software needs the kind of love that money can't buy in order to be successful. I will gladly help free software projects but not so gladly free software promises.
picrow 13y ago
Someone who drives a custom made Pagani Zonda at a price point of well over $1 million shouldn't be talking about "The perils of mixing open source and money" edit: So, let's translate this article, shall we? "Hey guys, it seems to me that it's getting a lot easier to get funding and release quality software products these days. So i'd like to request you stop doing that, please. It's competition to my ba$ecamp and stuff and i'd rather not have to deal with that because my racecars need new tires soooo often, lol. So yea, just make free libraries and stuff don't make anything too good lol"
collint 13y ago
Money is influence, the source of that money is influential. What are the perils of the other sources of money in open source? For quite a long time the best documentation and guide for using Rails was a book. Quite a few of the top contributors to Rails have published books about it. Documentation is very much a weak point for open source. Should we criticize those who contribute to open source and request money for the documentation? If not, why spread FUD around the idea of asking for direct monetary support of the code itself?
mwfunk 13y ago
Funding future software development through Kickstarter is a really dangerous proposition, even more for the person receiving the funding than the people who contribute to it. There've been success stories, but when things go bad it can ruin someone's life and credibility. Maybe I'm wrong, but just from passive observation, it seems like for projects which haven't even been started at the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, success stories are the exception rather than the rule. It's so easy for someone to not manage expectations properly, especially in the early stages when they're trying to get the attention of potential backers. It's so easy to underestimate the time involved in any sort of creative venture that isn't 100% specced out ahead of time, whether it's software or an RPG supplement or a gadget or whatever. Software development time in particular is insanely difficult to predict. I strongly feel like Kickstarter is best for projects that are essentially complete, but need funding for mass production or other costs related to distribution. The danger from Kickstarting open source projects isn't so much from money somehow polluting the goals of a project, as it is from the whole thing just blowing up into a nightmare for everyone involved. It's hard enough to predict timelines and establish requirements and manage expectations for one manager, I can't imagine what it would be like when trying to keep hundreds or thousands of managers happy and on the same page.
freshhawk 13y ago
I've made the same argument before as well. Also thinking of the great overview of market/social norms in Predictably Irrational. It consistently gets ignored when talking about trying to inject money into open source. Now I read a well written article on HN about exactly the question of how to encourage open source without ruining the exact thing that makes it work and think "Hey, there will be at least a bit of an interesting discussion in the comments. Maybe some new ideas about how to retain social norms while encouraging more open source work". So was the point hard to understand and I only think it was clear because I'm on the same page? Why are there barely any comments on point, and the majority seem to just have wilfully ignored it and written whatever was on their mind concerning the author, open source and money in general?
- informatimago 13y ago
  Yes, this is a complex subject. I like to cite the Venus Project in these cases, but while it provides a seemingly simple solution, reaching such a situation will be very complicated both for ideologies to fight, interests to overcome, knowledge to be gained, etc. A citizen revenue seems to be the easiest first step in this direction. You could think of it as a generalized kickstarter project, without the potential drawbacks of kickstarter.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    "The Venus Project is an organization started by self-educated structural engineer, industrial designer, and futurist Jacque Fresco. Fresco's project aims to restructure society through worldwide utilization of a theoretical design that he calls a resource-based economy. Those ideas use a version of sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural resource management and advanced automation with a global socio-economic system based on social cooperation and scientific methodology." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project
erikb 13y ago
I feel what you write is all correct. I would never worry about this influence of money, though. The thing is, if you take off the fluffy pink glasses, which hurts and takes a long time going step by step, you'll see that open source is about money since pretty much forever. Yes there are a lot of people doing some effort for free. But they are not the major influence. Major influence means Linux, Mozilla, Canonical, hack even things like GitHub etc. It simply wouldn't work in this dimension without money. Thus even though all your points are correct and already happening out there, there is still a booming open source world and there are still people having fun.
fhd2 13y ago
I somewhat agree with TFA, but I think it fails to consider that there are (at least) two different types of open source project: 1. Rails, nginx and other stuff that is used by developers generally has a higher chance of getting useful contributions and institutional support. People use this stuff professionally, if they run into a limitation, they contribute back for pragmatic reasons. 2. Firefox, Ubuntu and other open source consumer products are pretty hard to do with nothing but unpaid volunteers. Some projects pull it off (KDE comes to mind, although several distributions employ devs to work on it), but in general it seems pretty hard: Even if you find enough skilled developers, what about UX? What about design? What about marketing? What about PR? Would Firefox have made it in 2004 without the NYT ad?
donniezazen 13y ago
Is he using some sort of static site generator for blogging? whatcms.org has failed me.
quadrangle 13y ago
All this amounts to: society is better when we're motivated for things other than money. The best development is done for other reasons. Capitalist claim that profit is the main motivator is nonsense, and FLOSS developers know that. So: the answer is to keep FLOSS development from getting funded???? The real answer is for everyone to have a Basic Income so that we can all eat and have a roof and healthcare at a minimal level. Then people can make all this great FLOSS and do it even better and it will pay off for the world FAR more than if we tried to pay directly for the development work in a type of market exchange system. But given the actual state of the world, giving a FLOSS developer some money to pay his rent while he focuses on FLOSS is NOT a bad thing.
nairboon 13y ago
Unconditional payment will probably have the highest impact on open source development, either through the government as a basic income or through the people like gittip: https://www.gittip.com/ https://www.gittip.com/
shizzy0 13y ago
He talked about inter-project conflicts due to injecting money into the system, but I think the intra-project issues are the bigger problem. Suppose the head developer receives $10^n for fund raising. Does this encourage or discourage other potential contributors from working with the developer? We've mainly been participating in a gift economy: You've given to me; I'm happy to give back to you. However, if I've got a big feature that I can contribute to this newly funded project, might I hold back since I'm not going to get a cut of any of these funds? The problem seems exacerbated as the funds grow larger.
harshagowda 13y ago
I have used korean site http://www.naver.com/ http://www.naver.com/ Its almost cluttered as amazon

176 points by _pius 13y ago

Thank you for writing this. I think it's valuable to step back and look at whether accepting donations is in line with the set of values that led to open source in the first place. I am reading Ben Franklin's autobiography and came across this quote which I think also neatly sums up a point you omitted: "...as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

sheetjs 13y ago

Money isn't just for working full time. Sometimes you need hardware or software for compatibility testing. For example, suppose you were trying to build parsers/writers for PSD or XLS files. To test on older versions of photoshop or excel, you need access to those older versions (and most likely, the contemporaneous hardware). Those are real costs. I also think the point regarding focus is misguided: if the money is specifically for embellishments (e.g. 100% compatibility), then you are in fact more likely to embellish Finally, Ruby on Rails happens to be an exceptional example in terms of traction. Most open source projects never come close because the addressable market is smaller (the set of all people supporting a particular ruby gem is a subset of the people interested in ruby) and in those cases a bit of extra money is enough to take a hobbyist effort to a production-level product. That extra work takes time and money (for example, sitting there and validating certain results by hand) and oftentimes won't happen with an open source project.

joydeepdg 13y ago

All open source projects are not the same. All the people running open source projects are not swayed by money. Some projects are much more complicated than a web framework. These projects need funds for progress to be made. Case in point - OpenBSD. I love the project and their approach. I also feel they genuinely need funding to keep improving the system. Another example - LuaJIT. Great project, does not have a load of contributors - so I won't mind funding Mike if it means he spends more time on LuaJIT. Another example - SQLite. I'll just send in a donation because its so damn good.

justinmk 13y ago

> Thousands, collaborating for a decade, to produce an astoundingly accomplished framework and ecosystem available to anyone at the cost of zero. Well, I am sure DHH means "nominal cost", but the cost is certainly not zero. But it degrades economic discussion when people misuse the word "cost" to mean "currency transacted". Inevitably one of the interlocutors wanders down the trail and marvels, "the cost is zero, so much resources were saved!" Well no, the cost is not zero. Things other than currency were transacted.

hacknat 13y ago

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying this. The open source projects that are popular like Linux, nginx, and other system ops stuff are obviously popular and have benefited immensely from indirect money (in terms of institutional support). They are vastly superior compared to anything a company could built closed source. We often cling to the idea that open source software is superior to closed source software, but a quick survey of the landscape of open source software will show that this is patently false. Where there is obvious demand for a software product that lots of interested parties need just to maintain operability, the open source solution will usually be vastly superior if not mildly better. But, take a look at the vast amount of software that is created on github that is open source and you will see a lot of (self-admitted) crap (I have made a lot of self-admitted crap). This crap might have the kernel of a good idea in it, but it never got the time it needed. I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support. David, not all of us get to be part of incredibly profitable companies that can afford to fund our adventures in coding. Suggesting that Rails hasn't benefited from institutional support and money is just deceptive and something I can't stomach. It's something we can't measure, but that doesn't mean it's not there.

luckydude 13y ago
+1. I was going to say this but you said it better. My hackles go up when people say open source is better. That's true sometimes but it most certainly is not always true and I've argued for years that open source is usually a better (or worse) copy of some closed source thing that someone found useful and didn't like that it was closed.
- spacelizard 13y ago
  Well of course it's not true when you re-frame the argument into a strawman like that. A large percentage of proprietary programs are also blatant copies or ripoffs of something else. The issue that we're trying to get to is that free/open source software is principally better, not that all open source software is always less buggy or more featureful than the proprietary software it's intended to replace. Obviously that would be a ridiculous assumption, anyone who's seen all the crap throwaway projects on github can attest to it.

seiji 13y ago

When was the last time DHH was worth less than a million dollars?

forsaken 13y ago

As someone who worked on an Open Source project for years with no compensation, adding sustainable funding to it was very motivating. Money is a very weird thing, but getting money for the continued existence of your work is fantastic validation and support. It's easy to work on things for free, but how do you know that people value them if they simply use them for free. Attaching money to a pursuit that was previously free can also act to greatly encourage the continued existence of the project in the face of burnout and uncertainty.

_delirium 13y ago
For me, it depends on the money, the project, and my financial situation. With a stable salary currently, I often find attempts to make money from my side projects more demotivating than motivating. If it's something I actually find interesting, it's a hobby. Maybe it's writing software, maybe it's editing Wikipedia, maybe it's writing essays. That feels like a good use of my time, and I get to decide if it is or not. But then if I try to find a way to make money at it? Now it turns into basically a job, where I need to figure out how to monetize it, and in all likelihood the hourly rate will end up depressingly low. So I'd rather just spend my hobby time as I choose and not worry about monetizing it. More subtly, I find that having monetization as a goal of a side project can creep in in a lot of ways that aren't really beneficial to the project. Take even just writing something. Sometimes I'm frustrated by the information available online on a subject, and want to spend a bit on writing something to set the record straight. Sometimes this makes sense to publish myself. Other times it makes sense to write or improve a Wikipedia article. This is an interesting tradeoff, because it's basically trading likely many more views (therefore likely more impact) if I write it on Wikipedia, versus more control and authorial credit if I post it myself. From a monetization perspective, writing on Wikipedia is rarely the optimal choice; but from the perspective of getting the information out there, it sometimes is.

ssivark 13y ago

I get the feeling that many comments here, coming from developers who engage with FOSS consider the infusion of money to be a step in the right direction. Imagine like-minded people being able to contribute to a kickstarter targeting their itch, which some developer plans to scratch. I think the picture the OP has is closer to the situation in scientific research, where you can replace kickstarter funding by grants from a funding agency. Many would claim that today's science research situation is broken, with scientists chasing grant money and low-hanging "high-impact" fruit, instead of taking risks working on the really challenging problems (large time-scales and investments) with uncertain results. I think both perspectives have their place and it is important to have a balance between the two. In the case of research, one can argue that tenure is supposed offer security as opposed to an industry job, but it's also true that incentives are strongly tied to research productivity, and it's next to impossible to do research without research funding. If I understand the OP's perspective, he's okay with companies paying for developer time (kinda like tenure) as opposed to developers chasing grants. OP is drawing attention to the possible consequences of going overboard in this newfound enthusiasm/method for funding FOSS.

jcalvinowens 13y ago

Something like 75% of Linux kernel developers are paid for their work. It seems to be working pretty well for them.

xs_kid 13y ago
Sure, paid by companies, they aren't asking for funds in kickstarter.

snowwrestler 13y ago

I think it's fair to say that products like Linux, Apache httpd, Firefox, and Wordpress are the gold standard of open source software projects. One thing they all have in common is a core of contributors/managers who are professionally employed full-time on these projects. In addition, many of these projects benefit from contributions by programmers who are employed elsewhere, but are permitted/encouraged to contribute on company time. Basically, I would argue that open source and money have always been inextricably mixed and always will be. If you don't want to suppport a particular person or project, that is of course your right, but I don't agree that funding is some sort of alarming development.

avenger123 13y ago

It's an open marketplace. The project still has to have merit to be funded via Kickstarter or similar venues. The best use of this strategy has been integration of South into Django itself. The funding for this went above and beyond what was expected as everyone released the immense value of getting this work done. Also, I don't believe anyone is getting rich doing this. In the case of South, there was a genuine request of "hey, I can do this, but I can't make too much progress in my free time". Using Ruby on Rails is a little disingenuous example too. It's had the backing of its main company (37signals) since its inception. I do believe that these things will self-adjust itself. On face value, DHH makes interesting arguments. But, projects that are getting funding are being done by people that are already intimidate with the project. Also, the rates that are being set for the hours that will be involved are hardly market rate. What I love about this new model, is that it can push projects into the mainstream whereas companies start getting involved and allow their employees to spend time making fixes and improving the projects. Another example of this was Microsoft's financial support for the jquery UI team for building the grid. They funded I believe at least one developer's salary to get the work done. I don't think anyone would argue that this was a bad move as the jquery team was still in control of the project and the timeline (which has definitely been pushed back with regards to the grid).

general_failure 13y ago
Rails did not have the backing of 37 signals. It was created by dhh in his spare time.
- avenger123 13y ago
  I do understand that. But once it was created, it has been used by 37Signals and to some extent driven by their requirements and ongoing support. At this point, it doesn't matter but in the early releases it likely made a difference.

andmarios 13y ago

I think the article is more about crowdfunding and open source. Until now every single awesome open source project has managed to take off without a kickstarter campaign. Nowadays everyone promises to deliver an awesome open source project if you first provide funds. I have donated to many open source/free software projects, either directly or through crowdfunding when they had a specific goal (eg libre graphics meeting, a full time dev to refactor kdenlive). But I am really skeptical of someone who wants money before he delivers anything. Free software needs the kind of love that money can't buy in order to be successful. I will gladly help free software projects but not so gladly free software promises.

picrow 13y ago

Someone who drives a custom made Pagani Zonda at a price point of well over $1 million shouldn't be talking about "The perils of mixing open source and money" edit: So, let's translate this article, shall we? "Hey guys, it seems to me that it's getting a lot easier to get funding and release quality software products these days. So i'd like to request you stop doing that, please. It's competition to my ba$ecamp and stuff and i'd rather not have to deal with that because my racecars need new tires soooo often, lol. So yea, just make free libraries and stuff don't make anything too good lol"

collint 13y ago

Money is influence, the source of that money is influential. What are the perils of the other sources of money in open source? For quite a long time the best documentation and guide for using Rails was a book. Quite a few of the top contributors to Rails have published books about it. Documentation is very much a weak point for open source. Should we criticize those who contribute to open source and request money for the documentation? If not, why spread FUD around the idea of asking for direct monetary support of the code itself?

mwfunk 13y ago

Funding future software development through Kickstarter is a really dangerous proposition, even more for the person receiving the funding than the people who contribute to it. There've been success stories, but when things go bad it can ruin someone's life and credibility. Maybe I'm wrong, but just from passive observation, it seems like for projects which haven't even been started at the beginning of the Kickstarter campaign, success stories are the exception rather than the rule. It's so easy for someone to not manage expectations properly, especially in the early stages when they're trying to get the attention of potential backers. It's so easy to underestimate the time involved in any sort of creative venture that isn't 100% specced out ahead of time, whether it's software or an RPG supplement or a gadget or whatever. Software development time in particular is insanely difficult to predict. I strongly feel like Kickstarter is best for projects that are essentially complete, but need funding for mass production or other costs related to distribution. The danger from Kickstarting open source projects isn't so much from money somehow polluting the goals of a project, as it is from the whole thing just blowing up into a nightmare for everyone involved. It's hard enough to predict timelines and establish requirements and manage expectations for one manager, I can't imagine what it would be like when trying to keep hundreds or thousands of managers happy and on the same page.

freshhawk 13y ago

I've made the same argument before as well. Also thinking of the great overview of market/social norms in Predictably Irrational. It consistently gets ignored when talking about trying to inject money into open source. Now I read a well written article on HN about exactly the question of how to encourage open source without ruining the exact thing that makes it work and think "Hey, there will be at least a bit of an interesting discussion in the comments. Maybe some new ideas about how to retain social norms while encouraging more open source work". So was the point hard to understand and I only think it was clear because I'm on the same page? Why are there barely any comments on point, and the majority seem to just have wilfully ignored it and written whatever was on their mind concerning the author, open source and money in general?

informatimago 13y ago
Yes, this is a complex subject. I like to cite the Venus Project in these cases, but while it provides a seemingly simple solution, reaching such a situation will be very complicated both for ideologies to fight, interests to overcome, knowledge to be gained, etc. A citizen revenue seems to be the easiest first step in this direction. You could think of it as a generalized kickstarter project, without the potential drawbacks of kickstarter.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  "The Venus Project is an organization started by self-educated structural engineer, industrial designer, and futurist Jacque Fresco. Fresco's project aims to restructure society through worldwide utilization of a theoretical design that he calls a resource-based economy. Those ideas use a version of sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural resource management and advanced automation with a global socio-economic system based on social cooperation and scientific methodology." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Venus_Project

erikb 13y ago

I feel what you write is all correct. I would never worry about this influence of money, though. The thing is, if you take off the fluffy pink glasses, which hurts and takes a long time going step by step, you'll see that open source is about money since pretty much forever. Yes there are a lot of people doing some effort for free. But they are not the major influence. Major influence means Linux, Mozilla, Canonical, hack even things like GitHub etc. It simply wouldn't work in this dimension without money. Thus even though all your points are correct and already happening out there, there is still a booming open source world and there are still people having fun.

fhd2 13y ago

I somewhat agree with TFA, but I think it fails to consider that there are (at least) two different types of open source project: 1. Rails, nginx and other stuff that is used by developers generally has a higher chance of getting useful contributions and institutional support. People use this stuff professionally, if they run into a limitation, they contribute back for pragmatic reasons. 2. Firefox, Ubuntu and other open source consumer products are pretty hard to do with nothing but unpaid volunteers. Some projects pull it off (KDE comes to mind, although several distributions employ devs to work on it), but in general it seems pretty hard: Even if you find enough skilled developers, what about UX? What about design? What about marketing? What about PR? Would Firefox have made it in 2004 without the NYT ad?

donniezazen 13y ago

Is he using some sort of static site generator for blogging? whatcms.org has failed me.

quadrangle 13y ago

All this amounts to: society is better when we're motivated for things other than money. The best development is done for other reasons. Capitalist claim that profit is the main motivator is nonsense, and FLOSS developers know that. So: the answer is to keep FLOSS development from getting funded???? The real answer is for everyone to have a Basic Income so that we can all eat and have a roof and healthcare at a minimal level. Then people can make all this great FLOSS and do it even better and it will pay off for the world FAR more than if we tried to pay directly for the development work in a type of market exchange system. But given the actual state of the world, giving a FLOSS developer some money to pay his rent while he focuses on FLOSS is NOT a bad thing.

nairboon 13y ago

Unconditional payment will probably have the highest impact on open source development, either through the government as a basic income or through the people like gittip: https://www.gittip.com/ https://www.gittip.com/

shizzy0 13y ago

He talked about inter-project conflicts due to injecting money into the system, but I think the intra-project issues are the bigger problem. Suppose the head developer receives $10^n for fund raising. Does this encourage or discourage other potential contributors from working with the developer? We've mainly been participating in a gift economy: You've given to me; I'm happy to give back to you. However, if I've got a big feature that I can contribute to this newly funded project, might I hold back since I'm not going to get a cut of any of these funds? The problem seems exacerbated as the funds grow larger.

harshagowda 13y ago

I have used korean site http://www.naver.com/ http://www.naver.com/ Its almost cluttered as amazon