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The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

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Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#11

Post by volkk »

user_50123890 wrote: post #4

Not just open-source maintainers but also moderators. A bad thing about moderators is that nowadays they tend to be immature teens, it's one of the reasons Reddit content quality has been going down in the past few years. It also creates some moral questions, as companies with giant revenues are outsourcing their internet janitor duties to naive unpaid child labourers

i see your point, but it also brings about something like where certain people see quality degrading, and go off to make their own subreddit/community like /r/truereddit or /r/truetruereddit, etc.

it's an interesting phenomenon and am curious as to whether its better this way, or actually making things worse.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#12

Post by cycloptic »

Y_Y wrote: post #5

A rational actor never works for "free", they derive some perceived benefit (not necessarily money) from their action, like reputation or self-satisfaction or warm fuzzies. I think it's brilliant that we can use these carrots to get good work out of people that can be shared on the internet. All the same that's no excuse to abuse people who are acting far from rationally.

I think you overestimate the amount that some people think their decisions through.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#13

Post by pdonis »

muglug wrote: post #9

The overarching problem with expecting companies to pay for open-source is that they don’t have to. It’s often as vital to them as the publicly-provided infrastructure used by their employees to get to work, but because they never see the costs, they assume there isn’t any. In an ideal world business-critical FOSS projects would be funded by the government the same way that other public infrastructure is. Until that…

> The overarching problem with expecting companies to pay for open-source is that they don’t have to.

It might also be because, even when they have to, they refuse to. As in this case described in the article, for example:

"Last year, a company overseas contacted him in a panic after they paused a firmware upgrade rollout to several million devices due to a cURL problem.

"When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for [a support contract], they refused."

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#14

Post by jxramos »

saagarjha wrote: post #8

> Because the code is available to use for free, without any commercial licensing, there’s no reason that companies need to tell him that they’re using it. Well, that depends on the license.

I was actually wondering if there's licensing that has a notification clause or what an attribution clause would look like.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#15

Post by judge2020 »

lysium wrote: post #2

It’s a well written article. I did not get the point where the internet relies on people working for free. Yes, free software such as curl is in use, but where does the internet rely on it? If there were no curl, there would be something else, wouldn’t it?

libcurl is widely used and, along with the curl cli, is bundled with most linux/unix installations; it's installed on nearly every consumer device in the wild, including things like cars on the road. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/09/17/

The article's point is that the reason curl is so widely used by almost everything is because it's free and has a open source license. If it requires some small amount of money per commercial install, or even if it had some license terms that weren't appealing to legal teams at these companies, it would likely not have the widespread adoption is currently has. If every piece of curl-like software in the space were pay-per-install, these companies probably would go and use one of them, but if just one of the offerings is free for all use it's going to top the paid offerings most of the time.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#16

Post by ptah »

Y_Y wrote: post #5

A rational actor never works for "free", they derive some perceived benefit (not necessarily money) from their action, like reputation or self-satisfaction or warm fuzzies. I think it's brilliant that we can use these carrots to get good work out of people that can be shared on the internet. All the same that's no excuse to abuse people who are acting far from rationally.

humans are not "rational actors"

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#17

Post by orisho »

Is that really so widespread though? All of my open source contributions were done on the job, fixing a bug or adding a feature to an open source project I use at work. There is a strong incentive to improve the project rather than fork it to fix, as you don't have to keep maintaining it yourself. It also appears that many maintainers are doing so as part of their duties at work.

Just as Google maintains their search engine for "free" to show you ads, they maintain Kubernetes so that you use it on their cloud platform. You fix bugs in Kubernetes so you can have the fix you need, at work, when you need it.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#18

Post by qudat »

"[...] people working for free." OSS is "free" in the sense that anyone can consume the content. It's not free labor though. Most of the time, the people building OSS are gaining clout and career progression as a result of their "free work." Companies end up paying for it.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#19

Post by chiefalchemist »

> "It’s still not clear that companies would be interested in such a contract. When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for one, they refused."

The irony is, in not paying directly for suppirt they are paying indirectly with risk. Risk to product. Risk to brand. And perhaps in sone cases risk to life.

It seems to me a new licence is in order. One that distinguishs from small fries and big fish. And big fish that refuse to be good citizens of a given (product) community should be outed and shamed for their lack of cooperation.

Extreme? Sure. But sometimes fairness and justice require such guidance.

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