Does Open Source Have a 'Working For Free' Problem? (tidelift.com) 191
"Let's abandon the notion that open source is exclusively charity," writes Havoc Pennington, a free software engineer (and former Red Hat engineer) who's now a co-founder of Tidelift:
Look around. We do have a problem, and it's time we do something about it.... The lack of compensation isn't just bad for individual developers -- it also creates social problems, by amplifying existing privilege.... The narrative around open source is that it's completely OK -- even an expectation -- that we're all doing this for fun and exposure; and that giant companies should get huge publicity credit for throwing peanuts-to-them donations at a small subset of open source projects.
There's nothing wrong with doing stuff for fun and exposure, or making donations, as an option. It becomes a problem when the free work is expected and the donations are seen as enough... What would open source be like if we had a professional class of independent maintainers, constantly improving the code we all rely on?
The essay suggests some things consider, including asking people to pay for:
There's nothing wrong with doing stuff for fun and exposure, or making donations, as an option. It becomes a problem when the free work is expected and the donations are seen as enough... What would open source be like if we had a professional class of independent maintainers, constantly improving the code we all rely on?
The essay suggests some things consider, including asking people to pay for:
- Support requests
- Security audits/hardening and extremely good test coverage
- Supporting old releases
- License-metadata-annotation practices that are helpful for big companies trying to audit the code they use, but sort of a pain in the ass and nobody cares other than these big companies.
"Right now many users expect, and demand, that all of this will be free. As an industry, perhaps we should push back harder on that expectation. It's OK to set some boundaries..."
"Of course this relates to what we do at Tidelift -- the company came out of discussions about this problem, among others... In our day-to-day right now we're specifically striving to give subscribers a way to pay maintainers of their application dependencies for additional value, through the Tidelift Subscription. But we hope to see many more efforts and discussions in this area.... [I]n between a virtual tip jar and $100 million in funding, there's a vast solution space to explore."
Just make it free for non-commercial use (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just make it free for non-commercial use (Score:5, Insightful)
Noncommercial use is not concretely defined in law and using a purely non-commercial license makes software incompatible with the majority of FOSS and proprietary according to the open-source definition.
What I believe is needed is making paying for software simple. On Google Play or the AppStore, I have one-click solution to pay the developer what they believe is a fair compensation. It's all in one place, my card credentials are saved, and I don't need to guess at how much they'd like to be paid.
With FOSS, I need to open the browser, hunt down the individual project's donation page, if it has one, give careful thought to how much to contribute, and potentially fill out my payment details (depending onthe payment platform they use). It's so much harder and more laborious to do this. We need a simple payment system in FOSS software centers to make this easier.
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With FOSS, I need to open the browser, hunt down the individual project's donation page, if it has one, give careful thought to how much to contribute, and potentially fill out my payment details (depending onthe payment platform they use). It's so much harder and more laborious to do this. We need a simple payment system in FOSS software centers to make this easier.
But that's only one tiny bit of making sure the right people are fairly compensated, if you can even define such a thing. What about software that's front-ends with other projects doing the heavy lifting? Libraries? Forks? Even donation-based software suffer from repackaging, if it came with a real cash flow the problem would be 10x worse. Then there's the project side, does every project have an entity to take donations? Who decides how the costs are split, like how essential are your contributions and for
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I Display the QR code you can quickly and painlessly donate any amount of bitcoin you choose.
Granted, you have to have a bitcoin wallet and app installed, but once you do it's as easy as snapping a pic of the QR and entering the amount, or copy/pasing the wallet address into another window. If you have a browser plugin, the QR code is a link you can click that invokes your wallet with destination address already filled out.
Maybe once banks start pairing their online services with crypto currency (and they
Re: Just make it free for non-commercial use (Score:2, Interesting)
Just add a "for commercial use you must pay us $x per end user software instance unless you negotiate alternate terms with us," that will get the leaches to chip in their fair share (by rewriting it, upping their cost to thousands of dollars per license to account for all the OSS they refuse to pay for but depend upon, or negotiate a fair deal.) The absolute last thing the OSS community should try for is communal/shared bargaining, that just funnels money to lawyers while having the same issues for develop
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Re: Just make it free for non-commercial use (Score:5, Insightful)
But if they did that, most people would never use their software. The problem these devs are trying to solve is: "how do I take advantage of open source to get all of its benefits, but later have the ability to take full proprietary control when it becomes profitable?"
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I think there's also an aspect of "how can I make sure someone else isn't getting rich off my work" which is more understandable.
If I spend years creating something and give it away for free, go me. But if someone else then takes it and finds a way to make loads of money using it, and doesn't contribute anything back to me or even the project, then it doesn't feel great. Legally of course I don't have a leg to stand on, but it doesn't "feel" fair to most people.
The solution of course is to license the work
Re: Just make it free for non-commercial use (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there's also an aspect of "how can I make sure someone else isn't getting rich off my work" which is more understandable.
If it bothers you that other people benefit from your code, then an obvious solution is to not release it as FOSS.
A license that prohibits non-commercial use is not a free software license.
if you start a project with a very permissive license it's hard to roll back
As it should be. You should not be able to reap the benefits of free software while betraying the principles.
Re: Just make it free for non-commercial use (Score:2)
I think your concept of entitlement is a bit reversed. The people here don't feel entitled to your code. But neither do they feel compelled to give your project a second glance if it's not FOSS.
The project developers somehow feel entitled to be considered. There's usually very little reason to ever consider proprietary software for most tasks. The reality is closing your software is the best way to ensure you lack a functioning support group on the wider Internet. When I search for a solution, the first pla
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I think there's also an aspect of "how can I make sure someone else isn't getting rich off my work" which is more understandable.
But even ignoring the obvious fact that you clearly shouldn't have given your work away for free then, a huge part of the draw of open source is that you can build a business out of supporting open source products i.e. making money from somebody elses work.
If I spend years creating something and give it away for free, go me. But if someone else then takes it and finds a way to make loads of money using it, and doesn't contribute anything back to me or even the project, then it doesn't feel great.
So you want royalties for software? I view it more as a tool to do a job, if you sell a paint brush for $2 and an artist creates a $100,000 masterpiece using it do you feel upset because they figured out how to take the thing you sold them and use it to m
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The problem is that those making a boatload of money have different resources than the developers. I'm sitting here on my own with my desktop and laptop writing quality software. Then Amazon comes in with globally distributed data centers to run the software. There is NO FUCKING WAY IN HELL I could ever come up with the same level of hardware resources that Amazon has. This isn't a "missed opportunity", this is one of the largest companies in the world using their vast amounts of cash to make even more vast
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The problem is that those making a boatload of money have different resources than the developers. I'm sitting here on my own with my desktop and laptop writing quality software. Then Amazon comes in with globally distributed data centers to run the software. There is NO FUCKING WAY IN HELL I could ever come up with the same level of hardware resources that Amazon has. This isn't a "missed opportunity", this is one of the largest companies in the world using their vast amounts of cash to make even more vast amounts of cash, with zero contribution to those that gave them part of the resources to do so.
So make it non-free software and have them pay a license to you then. Alternatively they may come along and simply develop their own alternative, even if your invention was unique and non-obvious there is nothing to stop them using their vast resources to create their own implementation of it, unless of course you go the software patent route to prevent that.
I'm not really sure what you want here, the solutions to the problem you are describing already exist: it's simply non-free software and software paten
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The problem these devs are trying to solve is: "how do I take advantage of open source to get all of its benefits, but later have the ability to take full proprietary control when it becomes profitable?"
I don't think so. I've got OS projects that have had some commercial interest in using them (for free, as is their right under GPL), and contributed some code to OS projects I've used in a commercial environment.
In the first case you often end up with requests that they want serviced quickly and poor quality code submissions, and they think that because you are checking code in regularly you are "actively maintaining" the project and should be responsive. When you try to explain that it's just a hobby and y
Re: Just make it free for non-commercial use (Score:2)
It sounds more like an issue of saying "No" than an issue of licensing model. What part of that exchange requires that you ever address the users' concerns?
When I've submitted patches to FOSS which weren't moving, I reached out. Often the issue was that the particular fix isn't really possible to unit test (server env issues) and the maintainer doesn't know how to verify the code. If I don't have the time to build a test harness and prove the code works, why would I ever expect the maintainer to do so?
The o
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That has proven unenforceable and very confusing for modification and redistribution of the licensed software. And it is precisely how "systemd" happened. much lighter weight, cross-platform, and generally superior "daemontools" had an amazingly restrictive license that prevented any vendor or publisher from publishing compiled binaries with any source code changes: they could only publish source code, and patches, not binaries. So despite its effectiveness no Linux or other operating system vendor would p
Re: Just make it free for non-commercial use (Score:1)
I worked on open source for many years and sat and watched the value of my electrical engineering degree oh so slowly go down the drain.
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On what basis was that comment moderated as "interesting" (or "funny")?
The obvious answer is "Yes, and how."
In my longer support comment below (to one of the few suggested solution approaches) I forgot to mention other kinds of projects that could cover the other examples mentioned in the summary of the essay.
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I suppose the "free for noncommercial use" is too vague to be enforced, but you only really want to enforce against the largest users anyway. So why not make it 0.1% of all revenue from products that use this tool/lib/etc.
Most time you just won't care, but maybe honest people who use your stuff and sell it will donate that amount back. But you then can take action to ensure a big company that uses it in their car entertainment system or OS does pay up properly.
like most free to play games, its only a very f
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You seem to be talking to me (by replying to a comment I wrote), but I don't see how your comment relates to what I wrote. Actually I don't see how it relates to the comment I was replying or to the entire topic.
I'm trying to figure out where to ask for clarification, but even that is hard. Perhaps the real context of your discussion is buried in AC comments I'm not seeing at all? If so, it would obviously help if you included more context in your comment.
So I guess this is how to approach it:
(1) If you are
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I suppose the "free for noncommercial use" is too vague to be enforced, but you only really want to enforce against the largest users anyway. So why not make it 0.1% of all revenue from products that use this tool/lib/etc.
So if a carmaker puts a Linux distro (with thousands of libraries) in their car entertainment system you're going to take percentages of the car revenue? I can't even think how you could word your description of what the product is, much less actually enforce such a thing legally.
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It does not solve anything unless you litigate like heck.
We had a lot of discussions about this in the Diku MUD community a couple decades back.
Try to Google "Medievia Dikumud license".
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In the end a lot of code for Diku derivatives was never released.
Something like a GPL-ed license, or even an Affero like GPL, for remotes services like this, works a lot better. There is a much higher chance you will get contributions back into the pool.
For one it won't be just you, the author, willing to litigate against them so they open up the code in case the product is important enough.
create for fun, maintain to pay the bills (Score:5, Insightful)
I always thought that that has been the motto of Open Source. That's how Linux was thriving: open source from the get go, several commercial companies having their open source variants where you pay for the system and support.
In my personal experience, whenever you go for relying on open source in a serious project, creators and main contributors of the software guarantee you piss-poor support. "It's open source, fix it yourself". That works for clearly written code, not some python gobbledygook with no rhyme or reason.
There are way too many things that need to be done or redone right in the world for the currently available free developer time.
There is absolutely no creativity-linked limitation on the projects, all that needs to be done is to sit down and code it. And there ain't enough cycles in the world for that.
We need 10 times more developers and 10 times more money paid to these developers to code all the good stuff that needs to be created.
Lack of resources, not science, not inventions, is the bottleneck of the technological process nowadays.
Re:create for fun, maintain to pay the bills (Score:5, Interesting)
I always thought that that has been the motto of Open Source. That's how Linux was thriving: open source from the get go, several commercial companies having their open source variants where you pay for the system and support.
i have put proposals in to well-funded entrepreneurs (such as Mark Shuttleworth). their response was, "Why Don't You Work On It In Your Spare Time??"
which, to be absolutely blunt, is about as insulting and unrealistic as it can possibly get.
as you hint at, mapkinase, certain classes of software are hopelessly beyond the "Spare Time Paradigm". this is just down to how the human mind - human brain chemistry - works. yes, i have often done full-time jobs - a full eight hour working data - then come home and CARRIED ON WORKING ON FREE SOFTWARE FOR ANOTHER SIX HOURS. six days a week.
what do you think the effect on my health has been, from doing that? what about the effect on my family, on my daughter?
network-reverse-engineering of NT Domains was a FOUR YEAR full-time project, requiring detailed side-by-side analysis of tens of thousands of network traces, looking for that ONE bit (yes, really: six weeks looking for a single wrong bit) that prevents moving on to the next packet.
whilst i was sitting in a freezing house, RSI getting so bad that i had to use two hands to turn the key in the lock, and had to ask neighbours to open jars of food for me, Corporations *AND OTHER FREE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS* were spongeing off of my work and making money, receiving Stocks and Shares from VA Linux and Redhat IPOs.
the team behind OpenExchange actually tracked my progress in real-time, duplicated the work, FAILED to mention where they got their information from, and consequently received funding for "their" work, where for five months of 7 day a week 12 hour a day network-reverse-engineering i was offered an amount that was equivalent to half that of working at MacDonalds.
it is therefore no surprise that i no longer do such strategically significant work quotes for free quotes.
by the way: after getting all the stocks and shares (enough to buy houses outright) and failing to make sure that my financial needs were properly taken care of (yes i'm referring to you, Jeremy Allison, managing to get your BROTHER onto the VALinux IPO when i was excluded from it), the Samba Team then FAILED - for TEN YEARS - to get quote their quotes version of samba up to scratch, costing businesses world-wide hundreds of millions of dollars in Microsoft Server license fees as they were forced to go back to Microsoft Servers.
the kinds of people who work on software libre (please can we stop referring to it as "free" software) are those who do so out of a sense of responsibility and duty to humanity.
making sure that they are ADEQUATELY REWARDED should be an absolute top priority.
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People like Mark Shuttleworth are businessmen. If they could make more money selling bananas they would. They really don't care about you or tech. You are considered a tool. However people like me appreciate your efforts (I also write open source).
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Great post, it really encapsulates a segment of the Open Source dev community. I too was taken advantage of by friends who made hundreds of millions via an IPO and cut a bunch of us out of the deal. For me, it was probably about 8 million that I was owed, but they structured the deal to leave about 20 of us holding worthless paper. So thanks for that rant, nice to know there are other paths to getting taken advantage of.
Anyway, there's a real lesson in there besides the "don't trust your business partner
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A large amount of my money goes to me paying for things I don't want to. The idea you "pick and choose" what services and goods you pay for is not true. I pay a lot of taxes and very little of it goes to things I approve of.
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" yes, i have often done full-time jobs - a full eight hour working data - then come home and CARRIED ON WORKING ON FREE SOFTWARE FOR ANOTHER SIX HOURS. six days a week."
Thank you for your service. But... I'm curious as to who was holding a gun against your head forcing you to do this?
(Please, if you would capitalize the first word of a sentence, and the personal pronoun "I" and its derivatives, it would make your text much easier to parse.)
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Ehr, no you don't. All you need is pretend to know some key programming languages, and the offers come flying.
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whilst i was sitting in a freezing house, RSI getting so bad that i had to use two hands to turn the key in the lock, and had to ask neighbours to open jars of food for me, Corporations *AND OTHER FREE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS* were spongeing off of my work and making money, receiving Stocks and Shares from VA Linux and Redhat IPOs.
With all due respect, that was stupid, unless you personally needed the functionality badly enough that it was worth it to code it. You should have spent your time in some other way. FOSS should only be coded by people who want to code it, not people for whom it's torture. If people are depending on you, they can bloody well pay you. If you're doing work for free because you feel obligated, that's something that you did to yourself.
OSS started with people who had written software for their own purposes, and
Re:create for fun, maintain to pay the bills (Score:4, Insightful)
whilst i was sitting in a freezing house, RSI getting so bad that i had to use two hands to turn the key in the lock, and had to ask neighbours to open jars of food for me, Corporations *AND OTHER FREE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS* were spongeing off of my work and making money, receiving Stocks and Shares from VA Linux and Redhat IPOs.
With all due respect, that was stupid, unless you personally needed the functionality badly enough that it was worth it to code it. You should have spent your time in some other way. FOSS should only be coded by people who want to code it, not people for whom it's torture.
This is the whole answer, right here. And I pretty much use open source for everything.
IMO, if you're not scratching your own itch, you shouldn't be doing it. And just because nobody paid you for it, doesn't automatically imply that you should release it to the world and take on "support."
People who release software they didn't need are largely just littering. Art is great, do your art. Do it the way you like. But don't abandon your sculpture in the park, please.
And open source isn't just volunteer stuff. Businesses release open source libraries because they already wrote it and if it becomes popular they'll be able to offer paid support services. And if nobody uses it, nothing was lost.
There is not any shortage of programmers available to do OSS volunteering. The shortage is in available projects, because most of these people don't even have an unfilled need. They just want some padding on their resume, or they want to Do Good(TM). This just results in lots of pollution that you have to sift through to find useful code for reuse. And yet, even with this surplus of programmers and shortage of projects, most of the useful open source code gets written by paid employees at companies who also use the tools!
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I refer you to the CSB solution approach I described elsewhere in this discussion.
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> That's how Linux was thriving: open source from the get go,
Since the Linux kernel is actually "free software" under the GPL, not "open source", it's a confusing description. I'd very much agree that many open source projects are poor quality and unmaintainable. Many of them became this way when the primary owners attempted to proprietize the code by putting bulky, unnecessary, closed source management tools around it. This occurred with the commercialized Citrix Xen, which required a Windows based clos
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Since the Linux kernel is actually "free software" under the GPL, not "open source", it's a confusing description.
You can't stop Free Software from also being Open Source.
That isn't how words work. Things can be two words. And different people will use different words. And nobody is "r0ng."
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No it doesn't. Case in point: Open Office Writer (and Libre). I use this to write my books. It has had two very annoying bugs from the get go. When reporting same I have actually gotten the quote as a response.
Thing is, I use it to write. If I were to take it upon myself to learn the code enough to correct it (regardless of how clear and holy it is), I wouldn't be writing a
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I always thought that that has been the motto of Open Source. That's how Linux was thriving: open source from the get go, several commercial companies having their open source variants where you pay for the system and support.
Yes, it is true. That was clear in the 1990s. However, smaller and up-and-coming groups missed the memo due to timing or need a reminder.
Many government organizations and large corporations have policies that require support contracts before they can use software. That's been the revenue source behind Canonical, Red Hat, and many other organizations. They develop it to be useful, and then organizations pay them for maintenance and support.
Other individuals and groups have worked out funding by requiring
Re: create for fun, maintain to pay the bills (Score:5, Insightful)
We find ourselves in a jobs using a certain set of open source software. We benefit from others work while not having to reinvent the wheel over and over. We find bugs as our companie's usage results in untested use cases. We get frustrated when a bug is found by this unique use case, or when a needed feature is missing. We fix it. We share the fix with the community to the benefit of all. How fucking great is that?
Why is it that most people complaining about complaining about entitlements, feelings, diversity... are contributing for exposure and fame? Do it to make your life better and help others by contributing if you want. Do it for fun. Do it as a grind to gain experience that will benefit you as you level up, You are entitled to nothing. Work for a company that pays you for contributing or start your own business off of an open source project to get paid while contributing. Working off of donations is the equiv of setting a cup out in the street and playing music that no one asked for.
Re: create for fun, maintain to pay the bills (Score:5, Insightful)
This is underrated! For open source work, you do what you like, and share it for free because you did it for yourself first and foremost.
But that's where your responsibility ends, if someone wants changes, ask them to pay. If they want doc or whatever.. you don't do it if you don't want to, you tell them to pay or find someone else who will, and they will nearly always want to be paid too.
If you don't want FOSS to be a free ride, simply don't let them ride you for free when they get on your back.
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No (Score:5, Insightful)
People can demand whatever they want.
Just say "No".
If they get pissy about it, that's when you know you've given the answer they deserve.
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Okay but wouldn't it be great if we could think of a way for them to instead pay for what they want?
The key is the expectation. At the moment far too many expect you to work for free. It's like back when OS itself was new and people expected that software given away with no strings attached would just result in their hard work being ripped off and them not being able to make any money.
A web site setting out expectations and how to pay contractors to work on OS projects would be a good start. It should of co
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Just say "No".
Okay but wouldn't it be great if we could think of a way for them to instead pay for what they want?
You mean besides gofundme, or patreon? Or just "how much is that feature worth to you? You can paypal me at this address"? How about upwork? That's four distinct solutions which suit different situations, right there. I saw mention of some open collective thing in this thread somewhere, that's five...
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Also /s/ear/eat
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Users of open source software that want more than is being offered have a problem. If you want something that has been given to you for free to be altered then you should do it yourself or be willing to compensate someone who will do it for you. If you are unwilling to do either then it's your problem and nobody else's.
Re:No. (Score:4, Interesting)
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There is definitely some sort of expectation that if I'm building this for you, that I'm responsible for maintaining it for you for the rest of my life without any sort of compensation. I get this nonsense all the time now from even paying customers. There's some sort of societal change and force in action that is pushing this.
This is the actual problem, and frankly the whole thing up top reads like a pitch for a startup that won't fix the actual problem but likely make it worse.
Somebody who is giving away their work gets to dictate their terms--it's not 'working for free,' because that would imply there is some boss running the show when it's 100% volunteer work unless the donations are bringing enough money in for people to be getting paid. However, I could definitely see space for a service that makes it easy to hire somebody
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the trouble is, its not really possible for a single end user to pay for a feature or bug fix in a free app.
sure you can throw the guy $20, but thats not going to pay for much time.
perhaps there needs to be some kind of crowdfunding model, where devs can put up features X Y and Z, with a price for each, and people can contrib towards them.
Or perhaps something like patreon?
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of course if a big corp wants something, they should totally pay the guy for it, or get one of their own devs to contrib the feature.
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> the trouble is, its not really possible for a single end user to pay for a feature or bug fix in a free app.
I do so as a matter of course. It's why the mailing lists and the git repositories support feature requests and bug reports. Some of the systems are burdensome, true.
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requesting a feature is one thing. paying the dev a reasonable rate for the hours it takes to implement is a whole other thing.
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Again, I do so myself as a matter of course. I work on, and am paid for, providing bug fixes and feature requests in open source software that I work on. So is my team. It's sometimes a budget and resource allocation issue to include work time to do them. It can be difficult to commission time from the primary author to satisfy a feature request: I've on occasion offered consulting pay for just such feature requests. It can be tricky to arrange, especially when the company that wants the feature is in one c
Charity Share Brokerage (Score:2)
Extending your suggestion, I think there should be a CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) to collect lots of little donations, and the funds would be released only when enough donors have pledged to support the project. The CSB would earn a percentage of the successfully funded projects for such services as vetting the project proposals, helping to expose the projects to potential donors, and reporting on the results to the donors (and the public at large). Donors would be listed on the official donors' page and w
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If it is an edge case bug that really only affects me or whatever, I don't see the problem with offering the dev (or A dev) $25 to fix the problem. I may be even able to see it in the code but not have time/energy/resources to set up a full build environment, or the skills to integrate a patched version into my distribution's package management system.
And the reverse happens - I found a bug in a very nice text editor back in '97 when running on Windows NT. Had to do with 1) runnign on NT and 2) NT being i
Re: No. (Score:2)
This was my reasoning too.
This is actually a problem in the commercial world. How many hours over 40 do devs work to meet deadlines they didn't agree to or figure out a bug fix that must be delivered? How many features are asked to just be thrown in for free? On the commercial side, the customers hold the monies they paid for the subscription, contract liabilities, or licenses as part of the negotiations.
If you don't have a good sales team, BA, or manager, your family & good customers will be subsidiz
It's a common misunderstanding (by sleazebags) (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with the license, nor with the not-getting paid thing. It's always been part of the deal. These licenses exist to benefit the user, not the creator.
When you create or contribute to an open source work, there is not a guarantee that it will be profitable to you.
If you can find a way to make it profitable, great! But if you can't, well sucks to be you, but the world doesn't owe you this.
You signed the contract, now you deal with the consequences. Contract law doesn't give a damn that you signed up for a deal that you now regret.
Fucking millennials? (Score:3, Insightful)
Learn how open source licensing works before you start your project. Stop your whining. You got what you asked for.
Entitled dipshits think they can use open source to get their projects to go big, then they want to abandon it once the project is successful.
Grow the fuck up.
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So you're saying open source is holding back innovation?
no, there is no working for free problem (Score:2)
As if (Score:1)
Learning the lessons of capitalism (Score:1)
As I get older I get a laugh out of each generation learning the lessons of capitalism.
People WAY smarter than all of us here - for the entire existence of humanity have struggled with economic theory. Capitalism for all its faults, is the best way we've devised to distribute limited resources in a world with unlimited demand.
Open-source is a noble idea but it has big problems in the real world. Programmers have limited time on this earth and they want to earn a living just like everyone else. It should
groups of universities maintaining packages? (Score:1)
Riiight (Score:5, Insightful)
"amplifying existing privilege"
WTF does that mean?
No one is forced to work on open source. I open source my code, because I hope it will be useful to someone. If some company takes it, makes a fortune, and fails to throw me a bone - I dunno, maybe I would be annoyed, but probably not. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure that dozens of my students have borrowed bits and pieces and found it useful later in their programming lives, and that's what I actually care about.
"Right now many users expect, and demand, that all of this will be free."
Um...if you are required to pay for it, it isn't open source anymore. I don't think I have ever paid money to an open source project. I've contributed to a couple, and published a fair bit of OSS code myself.
Look, if you want to earn money writing software, then OSS is almost certainly the wrong model. There are very, very few companies that successfully market open source software - they have delicately balanced business models chargine for support or ancillary products. In most cases, it just isn't going to work. You can either market your software as SaaS (and maybe keep the code secret), or write and sell software under a commercial license.
TFA is an article written by a company that wants you to pay them, to pay developers on OSS projects. Of course, they're going to take a cut along the way. Here's a bet: that's not going to work. If I wanted to pay money to an OSS project, guess what, I wouldn't go through a third party.
Re: (Score:2)
Um...if you are required to pay for it, it isn't open source anymore.
Developers are certainly free to work on a bounty system, where they only fix bugs or code new features if someone pays for it. Users are free to seek projects which offer features they want at a price they are willing to pay. Whether the code is open or not is totally separate from the issue of whether you have to pay to get bug fixes or updates, if you're not willing or able to code them yourself.
Re: (Score:1)
"amplifying existing privilege"
WTF does that mean?
It means that if you're not working 18x7 to survive, then you've benefited from past wrongs and must make it up to other people by guilting yourself into serving them. As long as everyone else isn't better off than you, you're an immoral human. And even then, you still need to serve others because those people's ancestors were wronged somehow. The fact that you have time to work on non-survival critical activities such as open source code means you are too prideful and need to be pushed down.
Even if you
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It means, to the extent there is a benefit to creating open source (e.g. resume items), those benefit accrue to the (children of the) wealthy, who can afford to work for free. It acts more as a way of helping those already born into a good situation. As opposed to , e.g. food stamps, which help poor children eat enough food to also develop normal mental functioning.
Support for Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
I highly recommend this group, Open Collective, which can and does provide financial support for many open source projects.
Read about it - https://opencollective.com/ [opencollective.com]
After you read about it, if you're able, send some money in the direction of the open source projects you most depend upon or, if you're an open source project creator/maintainer who's feeling pressed by demands on your time and funds, register your own project there.
Re: (Score:1)
Their financials are transparent - on their website
The problem (Score:2)
In their free time they added to the code that was "open source".
Everything was good. The global computer community got all that US academic wisdom and skill for "free".
Now the people who gave their wisdom away for free expect to be paid for "free" work?
That was the day job. The "open source" was a hobby, a few hours after "work", something to do on a weekend.
The free "hobby" work is not the project a decade later to become wo
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"Open source" is a social contract. People give away their work for free, and in exchange, expect work based on it to likewise be free, so that people can freely become part of the field that shouldn't otherwise require regulation. This paradigm was necessary in order to encourage long-term growth, eventually resulting in high-quality free software.
What later happened is someone using open source software in their products,
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Giving work away for free is not a contract. That was something a person wanted to do and did in the past. For free.
If they no long have the time, skill, ability to work for free they can walk away from a project. Go back to work. Find another hobby.
It was their project to start, design and code. Their project to work on in their own time. Their project to walk away from years later.
Thats the nature of "free" code and having a hobby.
Re "To have that properl
Re: (Score:1)
You misunderstand the article and summary, fundamentally. Firstly, this is not about programmers expecting to be paid for creating open source software. Its about users (and corporations) feeling *entitled* to changes/updates/etc just because its open source (they see it as 'free'). The point of open source is collaboration and contribution, not turning yourself into a slave to all and sundry. Corporations and individuals are more than welcome to make such changes themselves, no one is trying to stop them.
Re: (Score:2)
People years alter joined to keep a project working.
That is not anyone been "*entitled* to changes/updates/etc".
That is how free software worked for years.
People no longer have the ability/skill/need to do free code? Thats their time to walk away from projects they no longer want to work on.
They can start new projects, not work with code, find a new hobby.
People who want/need/depend on complex and advanced "free" code will just have to "
No but Slashdot has a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
With news articles that are actually advertising a particular company. Nobody expects work to be done for free. If I as a company want something from an open source product, I have 3 options: I put in a request and hope enough people find it interesting to do for free - ideal for me but I won't have a goal or date or even know that it will be according to my needs. I can put in the request and pay someone - basically at this point I'm hiring and contributing to the economy. I can do it myself but my time costs money too.
Open source makes it easier for small business to get things done. I don't need to shell out thousands of dollars to IBM or Sun or Novell to run a website for example. But there is also an expectation that if you need "more" you get a contractor or company to do something for money and that drives an economy.
Stupid over-generalisation (Score:3)
Honestly (Score:2)
Fork you. (Score:2)
Open source is a brand, a way of doing things, a philosophy, some might even say a religion.
If you don't like it, then feel free to do something else - just don't call it open source.
Create your own brand/philosophy/way of doing things.
Give it a different name, explain why $newthing is better, and let the people decide for themselves if they want to switch, or keep both, or ignore $newthing altogether.
Good programmers are valuable (Score:2)
Well, it's about 3/8 o'clock for this story according to the Slashdot front-page clock... I think I know exactly what I was looking for in the discussion, but so far I can't find it. Yet another failure of moderation? My inability to find the correct keywords to search for? Bad luck in scanning? Tired eyes? Good stuff hidden in the AC comments that I don't see?
Anyway, I would describe it as an obvious paradox: If a programmer has valuable skills, why isn't anyone willing to pay him well? The obvious answer
Starving was the most useful keyword? (Score:2)
Turns out that "starving" was the new keyword that found the largest number of promising comments in this discussion. Negated by AC. Alas.
Well there's a difference between "Free Software" (Score:2)
and "Open Source".
Essentially "Free Software" should never be so complicated that you need support or anything like that. It assumes that you, as a literate user, are able to make changes to the code yourself. Ideally there isn't even a central developer and everyone runs their own custom version of the software.
On the other hand there's "Open Source". Essentially you have your normal development model of a powerful developer and illiterate users. The main difference to Shareware or commercial software is t
Context: This is part of a vastly larger whole. (Score:2)
My own participation in Open Source has been 80% of the "scratch that itch" type, where I hack in a feature or squish a bug that affected my own work, and then gave it to the community, both to share and to encourage others to do the same. Also in this category is simply "staying with" every bug I report but can't fix, to supply all requested observations and dumps, to help craft test cases, to test patches, and so on, until the bug is resolved.
This also includes getting employers who adapt Open Source too
Free advertising for tidelift? (Score:2)
or did /. get paid for it?
Either way, where's the advertising tag?
Privilege? (Score:2)
A perspective on independent OSS development (Score:1)
RedHat (Score:1)
This is what RedHat is all about. They have a paid for version and a free version. Then some people didn't like RPM and split off for debian. This has been very destructive. In fact a lot of things debian depends on - was developed and donated by RedHat. Such as your wifi stuff. Such as so many other things.
Splitting is what caused Microsoft to flourish. Old BSD vs SysV crap. So many of us back then - didn't care which one was decided upon, make a decision and get rid of the other one. RedHat seemed to have
Crowd-fund each issue (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Havoc Pennington! Of course he misses it ENTIRELY. (Score:2)
You build more flexible, more customizable products. And then people pay you bounties for feature requests and customization assistance requests. (Pooling money together for the trickier features.) See, if OSS developers can finally realize they're not going to beat Apple at its own game ("The customer is always wrong! User choice is bad! Customization is bad!"), they could sta
It depends (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
So you like the SaaS model where you rent your software month-to-month, eh?
Because that's exactly what that looks like in practice. You can stop paying when it no longer works for you (for whatever reason), but you also have to pay each month to continue to use it.