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The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
91–100 of 375 posts
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#92There aren't a lot of totally free, open-source, end user products. In the 90s FOSS devs though one day GiMP would surpass Photoshop, we'd see Linux on at least 8% ~ 10% of laptops at coffee shops, Inkscape would be better than Illustrator, etc. Today, a lot of FOSS is corporate sponsored. But it's not end-product. It's all middleware. Hophop/Hack, Lightbend libraries like Slick, React, etc. It's all to help you buil…
It's great that corporates pay developers for writing open source software! I'm much happier today about open source than in 90ies, when no one was getting paid for writing it.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#93The 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 h…
Sounds like that company either found an alternative or decided it wasn't important enough of a problem. This isn't a situation inherent to FLOSS. I've worked many sales cycles with commercial software where potential customers act exactly the same way.
I wouldn't be surprised if this effect is even stronger for commercial software, because of the sunk cost effect.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#94I 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…
> Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. Many job postings list OSS contributions as a requirement / desirable for employment. So, I'm not sure if your statement holds up. I personally know developers that contribute to OSS because of this. And many that have burnt out because of the constant need to contribute. Most OSS contributors do it for fun - but there i…
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Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: very interesting that this post is getting downvoted. I didn't even say anything controversial, just that banning people is bad. Exactly the danger we face online, which will eventually get into broader society. I got banned on a platform for saying a public figure was physically attractive to me. Prior to that, I had engaged in a perfectly factual discussion about certain statistics that were in favor of a par…
Don’t kid yourself — moderation is done with an editorial goal in mind, and HN is no different. There are plenty of topics about which the mods will shut down discussion. It’s just that HN’s moderation is more consistent and less emotional/political than your average subreddit.
That wasn't my point. Editorializing is fine, what is problematic is outright banning.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#96I 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.
I disagree. Plenty of people are enjoying your content so much they want more. That doesn't mean they are unhappy, only that they think they could be happier than they already are. They are happy.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#97Of course it does.
There is a thing about open source and I would submit, many uses of the Internet, that ESR (and others) talked about early on, and that's use value.
Because the entire work product is available to anyone, the use value is high. There is a skill / understanding investment to make, and while that is expected, it can get ignored, or overemphasized in these discussions.
Once someone has made the skill investment, they need only entertain incremental change type investments.
Overall, great return on investment. Anyone learning *nix systems can get a ton of work done, and or have set themselves up to explore and benefit from a large number of technologies.
The point ESR made is simple:
Nobody is really working for free. They are getting the use value, and it's non-trivial. In the case of some important developers, use value is not enough. Can't eat it, or live in it. Fair enough.
In this way, OSS is a whole that really is greater than it's parts, and high use value is why.
Contributions, and their cost, are multiplied across users and that is often enough to warrant making said contributions. Anyone doing that can improve their use value, and anyone may see the benefit of other contributions.
None of that has really changed, but for large corporations deriving significant financial returns, all of which further demonstrate the huge use value in play.
I submit this high degree of use also comes with more demands for contributions than an average user / developer too. Funding this should be a no brainer given the extremely low costs needed to see awesome use value and potential to profit.
Seriously, the larger players are making plenty. It's my opinion more financial contributions can and should be made, and made in a way that leaves plenty of agency for those who receive them too.
Without that, it could be a sort of tragedy of the commons scenario. OSS is awesome, but could be a lot less awesome if this is not improved.
Surely an ecosystem like this can be maintained from the billions that it has helped others earn. We say greed is good. Well, so is a degree of fairness, and some respect for that which has delivered so much too.
If not, the question, "why should I bother?" is totally fair, and will present itself more and more over time.
And this:
>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.
They totally got their use value. If they can't be bothered to help with the code, paying for said help is totally reasonable.
What drives that?
Perhaps some important people can start posing the question:
Either help with code, or dollars, which is it because everyone needs to help?
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#98I 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…
There's an issue though. You spend time as you please and its fine, but ultimately current society revolves on exchanging services in a semi quantifiable manner (transactions at price). You cannot live on free contributions. I find this hybrid situation too paradoxical.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
$50k-100k seems a bit high for a bugfix.... else I'm desperately undervaluing my worth in salary negotiations
High for salary, yes. High for buying enterprise support on mission-critical software? Perhaps the value might be different.
Good point - though I'd argue anything mission-critical should never rely on external SME contractors being hired to fix one-off bugs.. :shrug:
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#100Some other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so. I now am starting to rethink…
this is the core reason for free software