The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
41–50 of 375 posts
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#42Perhaps most egregious are companies who profiteer from open source, without contributing back. Amazon comes to mind.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#43OSS is digital volunteerism. It seems a stretch to imply it's exploitation.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#44Not 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 think (mainstream) Reddit content is something completely different; more like big clumps of PR firms employed by corporations and lobbying groups bitbotting around with nation states, all fighting and agreeing with each other and trying to build false consensus. Source IP analysis there is probably pretty interesting.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#45“The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions.” And the catastrophic Specter and Meltdown bugs show that private code doesn’t prevent this sort of thing either...
The best situation is many independent people vetting code and new versions before it is used somewhere. I wrote this 7 years ago:
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#46A 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.
> A rational actor never works for "free" A rational actor with emotions can work for free is that work makes him/her feel well. Some people even call this a hobby.
Isn't a rational actor with emotions called an irrational actor? ;p
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#47A 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.
> they derive some perceived benefit (not necessarily money) from their action, like reputation or self-satisfaction or warm fuzzies You forgot what is perhaps the most important one: using the resulting software. For instance, when Linus wrote git, it was because he wanted a source control system with certain characteristics for himself to use.
That appears to be how we got rsync.
From the rsync man page:
EXAMPLES
Here are some examples of how I use rsync.
To backup my wife's home directory, which consists of large MS Word files and mail folders, I use a cron job that runs
rsync -Cavz . arvidsjaur:backup
each night over a PPP connection to a duplicate directory on my machine "arvidsjaur".
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#48Perhaps most egregious are companies who profiteer from open source, without contributing back. Amazon comes to mind.
So does Apple.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#49Isn't this one of Microsoft's arguments in its FUD phase? Open source being less secure.
It definitely used to be. I think it tailed off when it turned out they were attempting to throw stones from inside a glass house.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#50I feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren't grasping. Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for. It's only collecti…
I'm in a similar situation. Started a website for fun, maybe I'll sell books. Then my website got popular and people want more content faster. I have a day job, so I can't work full time unless I'm paid similar. I'm unsure what to do next. My free website can be monatized with the goal of quitting my job. Or users can get my hobby for free. It seems no one is happy except me. The only benefit, my popularity will like…
It seems no one is happy except me
That sounds ok to me. You're only responsible for your own happiness.