The Internet Relies on People Working for Free • Hacker News Board

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#141

Post by wvenable » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

davnicwil wrote: post #102

wvenable wrote: post #29

I 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…

> most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for I agree with your general thrust but on a tangent, this isn't true and isn't the right way to think about software contributions, even 'trivial' ones. A trivial change seems low value to you because you wouldn't have to spend much time at all doing the same thing yourself. To see its market value, you have to view it from the perspective of…

I actually completely agree with you; the value isn't how long it takes or how much effort goes into it -- it's how much it's worth to the user. The problem is that most contributions, individually, just aren't worth that much to a users individually.

For example, how much would I personally for a fix to a graphical glitch fixed in the Dolphin emulator? Think how hard that is to quantify! Is it worth $20? It it worth $0.00001 over thousands of users? Is it not worth anything because nobody even noticed it?

If there was a dollar amount attached to it, would it ever get fixed at all? Maybe it's value is too low to bother now that we've quantified it that way; new features are worth so much more.

Even if you sell something for what's it worth to the end user, it might not be worth doing. Most of my open source projects fall in that category: It's worth maybe $20 to an end user, and there might be handful of users, and that's definitely less than my hours are worth to make it. But that's why it's not a business.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#142

Post by seph-reed » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

TurboHaskal wrote: post #73

I always liked this post by Erik Naggum: The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not suc…

> Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house

There's your problem. Don't shackle yourself to a system you already know doesn't care about you, then get upset when it's abusive.

- "Grown up" is a children's game (which somehow doesn't involve taking responsibility for them world), - you don't need college to learn or hone a skill, - you can love a person and not marry them, - you can't simultaneously dislike the world and justify bringing children into it, - and if you can't afford your house you can always sell it and live in a van.

Open Source Software is one of the few decent things people still do, even if the world they're doing it for is not.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#143

Post by teddyh » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #106

cheez wrote: post #24

Earlier 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…

> I like HN's approach to moderation. You don't ban the person unless they are really unreasonable. You flag the comment, disappear it from the thread and tell them to behave. That does happen, but HN also silently rate-limits and downrates comments for people that have been flagged as troublemakers by the mods. I'm currently rate-limited on HN to no more than five comments in a period of, I think, several hours. Try…

I am, I have come to believe, in the exact same situation as you, except that I have never contacted the moderators. My account is even almost exactly the same age as your account. It’s very disheartening to hear that contacting the moderators, which I have considered doing, will apparently accomplish nothing.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#144

Post by sidlls » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

zulln wrote: post #71

wslh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That would fall under "perceived benefit" and thus not free, according to the parent's definition.

The parent's definition basically defines "free" as something that doesn't exist. It's not very useful.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#145

Post by watwut » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

Liquix wrote: post #121

joshlemer wrote: post #89

Some 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…

Traditionally, OSS contributions are selfless labors of love and curiosity. These people are flexing their intellect and creativity doing something they thoroughly enjoy: solving problems in the most elegant way possible. Code is shared with an air of positivity, camaraderie, and we're-all-building-this-together. At the risk of sounding kitschy, it's this sense of collaboration that enables the open source community…

Based on FOSS stats, majority of open source contributions is paid for. Either by companies or universities.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#146

Post by jen_h » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

mopsi wrote: post #81

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 believe redesign is the single largest contributor to Reddit's decline. It went from text-based site (like HN is at the moment) to image-based site.

You can get around this, though via https://old.reddit.com and, in Preferences, disable thumbnails, image previews, and "allow subreddits to show me custom themes."

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#147

Post by baron_harkonnen » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

TurboHaskal wrote: post #73

I always liked this post by Erik Naggum: The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not suc…

Erik Naggum is such a legend and it's truly a tragedy that he is gone, and also that we really no longer have any technologists of his calibre.

I saw a conversation on twitter the other day about how great XML is and why we should use it more and realized that even if I posted Erik's classic take on this, it would only mean reactionary outbursts. I wonder how many people would even understand his arguments about SGML today?

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#148

Post by _the_inflator » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

joshlemer wrote: post #89

Some 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…

The problem I see is, that companies make money by using OS, but are often very hesitant to commit to the code and instead bug the OS developers to fix these problems. In some rare cases only a lead developer of an OS project can do that without a fork.

OS matured, contribution in 2019 does not necessarily mean you commit code. Donating some money is fair use in my point of view and is simply a sign of respect.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#149

Post by valiant55 » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #86

djsumdog wrote: post #68

There 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…

My perception was always that the FOSS hopes of GiMP, Inkscape, etc flopped mainly because nobody in FOSS put work into UI/UX. So, it kind of makes sense that FOSS found a niche somewhere that UI/UX didn't matter.

GiMP UI/UX has actually improved a lot over where it was just a few years ago.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#150

Post by partialrecall » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

snek wrote: post #135

Liquix wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditionally, OSS contributions are selfless labors of love and curiosity. These people are flexing their intellect and creativity doing something they thoroughly enjoy: solving problems in the most elegant way possible. Code is shared with an air of positivity, camaraderie, and we're-all-building-this-together. At the risk of sounding kitschy, it's this sense of collaboration that enables the open source community…

It's generally not a problem until the big companies start asking for features, asking for bugs to be fixed, etc., expecting anything more than what the maintainers choose to donate. If someone from Amazon reports a bug it's kind of scary, you feel like you've broken Amazon. You might even try to set aside time you weren't planning to set aside. It's hard to remember/enforce that you don't owe them that time (especia…

If Amazon doesn't pay you, then why are you scared of breaking Amazon?

I understand why somebody would be scared of that. They're big and important to the tune of many many billions of dollars, while you or I are not. But you shouldn't let that get to you. You should make a conscious effort to not let that get to you. If they want you to take their problems personally, let them hire you. If they can be broken by you but are unwilling to pay you, then fuck them. Put them lower in your priority queue than private individuals.