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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

#191

Post by gravitas »

reaperducer wrote: post #47
cesarb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

rsync was co-developed for his PhD dissertation - Google "rsync phd thesis" real quick to get an overview.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#192

Post by z3phyr »

kortilla wrote: post #179
joshlemer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a super charitable interpretation of what I said. I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations, so we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we're doing god's work here, and my second point is that people probably overestimate the personal reputational/career gains to themselves from contributing to open source. So, a large portion of open source c…

>I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations And this is bullshit. Most popular open source projects see heavy usage in academia, personal projects, public projects, government projects, etc. Python is a massive reason any students know how to program at all.

>Python is a massive reason any students know how to program at all

At other points in our history that language would be BASIC or Pascal. Their initial implementations may not have been open source

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#193

Post by ensignavenger »

jjohansson wrote: post #42

Perhaps most egregious are companies who profiteer from open source, without contributing back. Amazon comes to mind.

Amazon does contribute to open source, though- https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/

It may be argued that they don't contribute enough, or that they aren't contributing to what you think they should be, but they certainly do contribute.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#194

Post by gitgud »

rhizome wrote: post #76
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…

Nobody's saying it has to be, uh...what's the name of a profitable internet company that isn't Facebook? But making demands on people who are working for free is bad manners . I don't care if you think the internet changes everything, it's still possible to be an asshole. My off the cuff solution is for project owners to add a status flag to their issue trackers: PAID. Anybody can submit a bug as PAID, but it costs $…

Charging money to fix something because of who they are seems unethical to me... Maybe it's just capitalism, which is usually antithetical to open source free software...

If they want it fixed, let them add resources to the project like submit a pull request, donations or charge people support fees for urgent bugs, which many OSS projects do...

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#195

Post by z3phyr »

tathougies wrote: post #116
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…

I have found the exact opposite actually. Firstly, the reason I open-source most of my libraries is because, when I was a kid and learning to code, I couldn't afford or convince my parents to buy the expensive proprietary software I wanted to play with. Open source let me have access to this technology ( and to inspect how it worked ) without having to buy anything. This is simple stuff like having GCC to compile C p…

>Firstly, the reason I open-source most of my libraries is because, when I was a kid and learning to code, I couldn't afford or convince my parents to buy the expensive proprietary software I wanted to play with

Just saying, software can be free without getting open sourced.

I agree that OSS gives raw access to technology, but in larger projects, I would prioritize a good documentation/reference book over source code to understand it in a complete manner.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#196

Post by wobbleblob »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #176
wobbleblob wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they are not working for free, they're doing this work during work hours. Individual volunteer maintainers this article is about are a minority. The majority of contributions to the open source projects that "the internet runs on" are from businesses that use the software and maintain or improve it. I'm not talking about your small hobby project with a few dozen users - as good as it may be, the internet doesn't…

And openssl?

OpenSSL has hundreds of contributors, not just one guy, and the 'heartbleed bug' guy they were referring to wrote the code during his PhD, so it wasn't a volunteer donating his spare time.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#197

Post by marknadal »

If you don't want companies using your tech, just use (A)GPL or anything from Richard Stallman.

But there are some of us who believe in Open Source[1] and giving value to the world, including companies. So please stop bullying us into being a victim culture, we're not.

Besides, scientific research over the decades has shown that Open Source produces valuable work specifically because it is unpaid creative work, and when pay is introduced, quality drops.

Here's a good summary video of the studies: https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc

[1] Disclosure: I work on Open Source full time now because 8M people use my tech ( https://github.com/amark/gun ), but I do not charge for it and previously had to do it in my spare time (it is only its success that has lead to me being able to work on it full time - not the other way around).

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#198

Post by ClumsyPilot »

kortilla wrote: post #179
joshlemer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a super charitable interpretation of what I said. I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations, so we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we're doing god's work here, and my second point is that people probably overestimate the personal reputational/career gains to themselves from contributing to open source. So, a large portion of open source c…

>I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations And this is bullshit. Most popular open source projects see heavy usage in academia, personal projects, public projects, government projects, etc. Python is a massive reason any students know how to program at all.

This is bullshit. Corporations benefit from a larger pool of students and cheaper pythons developers, Postgresql and mysql are very popular is business. By comparison, how many people use Ubuntu instead of Linux?

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#199

Post by saltcured »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #153
lucb1e wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole argument is built on the premise that when you fall ill for a while or have an accident, nobody will help you and you'll die instead (I guess they didn't mean it so literally, but that's what the text says). As far as I know, this is actually false in every part of the world that can afford it except for the USA. You may not earn a lot while ill, government support isn't everything, but roughly a thousand…

I think you haven't read the other paragraphs. Please do so if you haven't. But nevertheless, contrary to some open source developers, doctors are not giving their labour force for free nor living below the poverty line. The value of a doctor is very clear to our society and in Europe we happily pay our taxes to keep the universal healthcare system running. The value of software on the other hand is decreasing.

Let's turn your analogy around. Are you complaining that there aren't more hobbyists dabbling in medicine without licenses nor viable careers? Or that society doesn't actively pursue and arrest programmers for doing similarly...?

There are countless developers making successful careers out of it, just like medical doctors. In addition, there are many more successes on a spectrum that includes the programming equivalent of GPs, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists, drug store clerks, pot farmers, herbalists, dietitians, mothers dispensing band-aids and kisses, and aged boy scouts who happen to be in just the right place at the right time to save someone's life with first-aid.

There are countless activities in life that may or may not have viable business plans behind them. What sets programming apart from doctors and other service-based industries is that our work product is trivially replicated and shared by others. Look to literature, music, theater, and cinema for metaphors about the roles and compensation of content producers in culture and society.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#200

Post by js2 »

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…

> 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 can't think of any civic institution I belong to that isn't constantly asking for volunteers, and riding the volunteers they have to do more. I'm not sure it's any different.

Society needs volunteers, and money isn't everything.

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