'Paying People To Work on Open Source is Good Actually' 40
Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the lead developers of Django, writes in a long post that he says has come from a place of frustration: [...] Instead, every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, people show up to criticize and complain. Non-OSI licenses "don"t count" as open source. Someone employed by Microsoft is "beholden to corporate interests" and not to be trusted. Patreon is "asking for handouts." Raising money through GitHub sponsors is "supporting Microsoft's rent-seeking." VC funding means we're being set up for a "rug pull" or "enshitification." Open Core is "bait and switch."
None of this is hypothetical; each of these examples are actual things I've seen said about maintainers who take money for their work. One maintainer even told me he got criticized for selling t-shirts! Look. There are absolutely problems with every tactic we have to support maintainers. It's true that VC investment comes with strings attached that often lead to problems down the line. It sucks that Patreon or GitHub (and Stripe) take a cut of sponsor money. The additional restrictions imposed by PolyForm or the BSL really do go against the Freedom 0 ideal. I myself am often frustrated by discovering that some key feature I want out of an open core tool is only available to paid licensees.
But you can criticize these systems while still supporting and celebrating the maintainers! Yell at A16Z all you like, I don't care. (Neither do they.) But yelling at a maintainer because they took money from a VC is directing that anger in the wrong direction. The structural and societal problems that make all these different funding models problematic aren't the fault of the people trying to make a living doing open source. It's like yelling at someone for shopping at Dollar General when it's the only store they have access to. Dollar General's predatory business model absolutely sucks, as do the governmental policies that lead to food deserts, but none of that is on the shoulders of the person who needs milk and doesn't have alternatives.
None of this is hypothetical; each of these examples are actual things I've seen said about maintainers who take money for their work. One maintainer even told me he got criticized for selling t-shirts! Look. There are absolutely problems with every tactic we have to support maintainers. It's true that VC investment comes with strings attached that often lead to problems down the line. It sucks that Patreon or GitHub (and Stripe) take a cut of sponsor money. The additional restrictions imposed by PolyForm or the BSL really do go against the Freedom 0 ideal. I myself am often frustrated by discovering that some key feature I want out of an open core tool is only available to paid licensees.
But you can criticize these systems while still supporting and celebrating the maintainers! Yell at A16Z all you like, I don't care. (Neither do they.) But yelling at a maintainer because they took money from a VC is directing that anger in the wrong direction. The structural and societal problems that make all these different funding models problematic aren't the fault of the people trying to make a living doing open source. It's like yelling at someone for shopping at Dollar General when it's the only store they have access to. Dollar General's predatory business model absolutely sucks, as do the governmental policies that lead to food deserts, but none of that is on the shoulders of the person who needs milk and doesn't have alternatives.
Scenarios considered (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Dude makes commercial software that does X. Near zero uptake because no one wants to invest time and effort in creating a dependency on your software that costs money
2) Dude makes open source software to do X. Now people are interested, assuming it doesn't suck.
Anything that is not congruent with zero cost open source is going to piss people off, in general. The complaining is to be expected if you advertised as #1 and then became #2 after the fact. The fact that none of this makes economic sense is a fact of life. There's a more important point at stake here: monopoly control and the use of intellectual property law to create rents. It is why things are as they are. Maybe this dude needs to be reminded of that.
Subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, & theft (Score:2)
All five are types of transactions various people engage in. Resources don't always have to come from exchange transactions. They can come from other types of transactions (with theft transactions hopefully minimized, where theft tends to happen when the social contract seems to break down for some people and leads to increasing security costs for everyone).
So one can ask how subsistence, gift, and planned transactions can support FOSS? Rather than emphasize only funding via, as you point out, monopoly rent
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Commercial software can be open source (and open source software can be commercial). A lot of software is specific to the use cases of a customer. The customer pays for the custom made software and gets the source code. Where is the problem with that? You get what you pay for with no vendor lock-in.
More generic software that serves a lot of companies can be jointly developed, and keeping the source open makes that easier. X is an example of that. (That's X as in X11, XFree86, X.org, not X as in Twitte
Re: Scenarios considered (Score:1)
If you pay someone for program plus source that is not open source. That's just contract programming. The license is what makes it open or not.
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If you pay someone for program plus source that is not open source.
Yes it is, that is exactly what open source means.
You can pay for a programme and not get the source. That is also contract programming. And it is far more common for some reason.
Open source means that the source code is the product.
One thing that is confusing is that nowadays you often don't pay for a programme, you pay for a licence to use it without owning it (or a copy of it), even though a copy is in your possession by necessity. It's basically the difference between having a library book and having
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Python web framework. You're welcome.
Altruism Does Not Feed Stomachs (Score:5, Insightful)
What has always been both frustrating and amusing is the thought that people should work on code, documentation, do testing, and other related tasks but yet not not receive compensation. Whether you paid nothing or large amounts of money to learn how to do this type of work, those skills once learned have a value.
At some point, most people - whether they admit it or not - are going to want to profit from those skills, if for nothing else, sustenance (i.e. food). Shaming people for wanting to profit is just willfully ignorant. Not everyone wants to volunteer for some feel-good feeling (I know I never have...my time and work always has a cost, that someone will pay).
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The idea that one or two programmers (or a team) build software for free to serve millions of pe
Some people just don't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source is magical and amazing. Could you imagine paying for Linux, like you would have had to do in the 80s for any equivalent? I don't personally use Django, but I use many open-source libs and frameworks and my employer would be spending millions of dollars on licenses...and thus the technology would be far behind. I am sure half our stack would be forbidden because we can justify the investment or 5 years behind because we're waiting to renew the license.
"Oh, you want to use lombok? OK, well you need to have a meeting with the CTO to justify the $5000/developer license and give me a list of every developer who will need access to it, as well as every one of their managers and the 20 people you didn't realize read your code, like auditors."
Look, if open source isn't pure enough for you because the maintainer takes money...you're human garbage...please remove yourself from the conversation and never speak on the subject again.
As a former maintainer of a major open-source project, I feel his pain. I hope he can get a little better at ignoring the people that don't matter. It sucks to listen to trolls, but your work is too important to be distracted by people like that. Gatekeepers are clearly losers taking their insecurities out on others.
If you want open source to be any good, you need talented maintainers. If the talent is good enough to make good open-source software, they're good enough to be paid well by Google, MS, Apple and 1000s of others. They need to be paid and paid well if you want your projects maintained by capable, responsible individuals...if VCs and corporate sponsors want to chip in, I can't imagine a more beneficial scenario for humanity.
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I hope he can get a little better at ignoring the people that don't matter. It sucks to listen to trolls, but your
work is too important to be distracted by people like that.
Perhaps requiring a minimum monthly pledge before you allow someone to contact you (about the project)?
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Social media lowered the requirements once needed to share thoughts and opinions with the world. That's amazing. but the flip-side is they lowered the bar and now we have to listen to all the riff-raff. [wikipedia.org]
Open Source is amazing. I think people over-hype it sometimes, especially when a start-up is trying to raise money, but I have learned so much by having access to code bases that hundreds or thousands of people work on. The ability to jump in and tweak a program is a huge win for controlling your own computer
Tell my wife (Score:2)
Maybe the problem is that "wife" is a concept that these bottom dwellers don't understand?
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Maybe the problem is that "wife" is a concept that these bottom dwellers don't understand?
We get it. That is why we are upset. We aren't lucky, rich, or stupid enough to ever have one.
Waits for the list of useless life advice that always follows this
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Go fuck yourself.
Triggered, snowflake?
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Re: Tell my wife (Score:2)
Fuck your feelings.
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Re: Tell my wife (Score:2)
I'm not stupid enough to get married, so that's impossible
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The reaction you got is pretty incredible. Something that is demonstrably bad for men results in a bunch of cursing. As if that is going to incentivize doing something that is against your economic interest.
Money is, like, ILLUSORY, man. (Score:2)
This is just pragmatism versus idealism again. People have to make choices, every day, in every aspect of their lives, of where they fall on that spectrum.
The critics aren't wrong about enshittification. It happens. They see it happening right now, to dozens of projects that they care about. Moneyed interests don't just hand out money for nothing. Indeed, by some interpretations of "fiduciary duty", it's not even legal for them to do so. They expect to be receive something valuable in return. Them get
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Indeed, that's a problem, because short term shareholders suck.
Henry Ford wasn't giving workers raises out of the kindness of his heart, just like he wasn't cutting prices on the Model T for fun of it.
Henry Ford was a shrewd businessman, and he realized that if he paid workers a lot, the competition would be screwed - would you work at Dodge at prevailing wages, or Ford, where you get paid more? At the same time, cut
Open Source funding isn't the problem (Score:1)
Open source funding isn't the problem, it's the vultures who operate in the sphere and only claim to offer that funding.
I'm talking about organizations like the Linux Foundation or the Open Collective, which are effectively money laundering schemes and don't fund what they claim to fund. The LF, for instance, only spends about 2% of it's revenue on Linux while spending huge amounts of its money on AI research and DEI, for whatever reason. Open Collective is openly money laundering through Ukraine and deprec
Open Source is a parasitic practice in general (Score:1)
Re: Open Source is a parasitic practice in general (Score:2)
The best solution to that is probably to create a community site and let people help each other, and if they want support they can pay...
Open Source doesn't mean Starvation and Burlap. (Score:3)
Honest Developers and Engineers make their systems open and available, because we don't need to hide. We aren't ashamed at what we've built, and we want you to know that, we want you to trust us, and our product. Wanting you to trust us, and being open, doesn't mean we should stand in a breadline and wear burlap, and the belief you can't take compensation, is a suggestion people think that those who offer trust, should be slapped down.
Let's flip the discussion, why isn't your platform open? What are you hiding? Why are you ashamed or intentionally covering something up? Just as I can pop the hood of a car and see the engine, why can't I see your engine? How do I know you didn't bleep the engine in that GTO up, and are really offering me a Smart Car with good lipstick?
Every single project that I develop outside my job, is open, and not jump through hoops open, buttons in plan view to download the platform open. My blog, andrewmurdoch.ca, has a button "code" in the header, and when you click it, you will literally get the code to the platform, backend, frontend, and middle wear. That's how honest Developers and Engineer operate.
Paid Open Source isn't as open (Score:3)
I've found the project where someone is making money from them tend not to be as open.
I've been an open source contributor and maintainer for 30 years. I was a Linux Kernel subsystem maintainer for a few years (unpaid). I've been paid to work on open source projects too. So maybe I have some first hand experience here, from all sides.
If you are getting paid to do projects, contracting if you will, you must constantly be looking for new work to do. Every day you work puts you one day closer to having no more work. It is a demanding and never ending task to keep the pipeline full. I know this as well from decades of experience.
If an open source project lacks a feature, the maintainer almost certainly knows this already. They are also aware that someone may pay them to add this feature. It's a good way to get work. "One month retainer for general maintenance work, PR review, etc." is very hard to sell. And if you want to get paid, you must first sell. "Add new feature needed for something people want." That's a much easier sell.
If someone outside the project, not paid, submits work to add this feature that is missing, then the insider(s), those people paid to do work, can no longer sell this feature and get paid for it. The contributor has effectively taken their work.
I've found paid maintainers, or open source projects run for a profit by a group of insiders, are far less accepting of outside contributions that projects which are not this way.
conflicts between business and project interests (Score:2)
Money does complicated the internal politics significantly. I wouldn't go far as to say it's not an open project anymore. But the way in which a project receives money does matter a lot.
I don't mind it when a big project gets organized and has a board of directors and an elected chairperson. If sponsored by multiple businesses and has a decent charter for keeping architectural power in the hands of architects, designers, and/or technical review board then paid open source can work well.
But a project is spon
Many hands make light work (Score:2)
Most open source is not written by an individual independent of their job.
At its core, its about collaboration. When you collaborate w/ people outside your group/work you get things you would not have thought of. Why else would companies pay people to work on open source?
If Linux (the kernel) was only Linus, it wouldn't be as good as it is. There are hundreds of active contributors. Each of them has their own agenda. It may be getting support for a device your company makes. Or proving new ideas in sche
Old news (Score:1)
The 'parable of the shrewd manager' comes to mind.
As the aphorism goes... (Score:2)
“Running a successful open source project is Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.”
And if you're lucky, you even get paid the same as the janitor.
Who cares? (Score:2)
Who cares how the code was created (for free or paid)? What really matters is it's and open source and you can take it and fork it.
i pay for open-source projects (Score:2)
And more recently, if they accept payment in major cryptocurrencies (btc, ltc, xmr). It reduces friction because I don't have to think whether my bank will allow this donation or this website, and whether the website is safe to trust with my credit card information
Money, FOSS and people (Score:1)
In FFmpeg a few months ago people complained about sustainability
One solution suggested was a consulting company and employment. The other was donations through SPI and funding work and maintenance with that money. (these are obviously not exclusive nor conflicting)
We do have FFlabs that employs FFmpeg developers for consulting since several years and we also use SPI for many years.
It has always been difficult though to convince people to ask for money for development work from SPI. On top of that some