esr's solution to this problem is https://gitlab.com/esr/loadsharers
The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
301–310 of 375 posts
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#302Some 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 vast majority of the benefit ... go towards increasing the bottom line of for-profit companies, not to developers
The problem is in the licensing.
Large companies have become the primary user rather than the real end users and other developers... because the licenses make it possible.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#303It's not just that it relies on some people working for free. It's that others have figured out how to profit from this free donated labour.*
(*No judgements necessarily implied here, merely an observation.)
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can politely ask these nice people to contribute funds towards your project that is so important to them. Since they are so nice, they will probably nicely send some money towards the oss developer.
That is the subject of the entire "oss funding" problem. Precisely that many companies are not willing to contribute funds even though the project is important to them. That's why this thread on HN exists.
If they are not willing to contribute funding, this might mean that the project is not much important to them?
Anyway, the developer does not need to stress out too much about Amazon employees having problems with their code...
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 wor…
A converse example is also possible: an one-by-one error can be critical,cause a game to crash or database to loose data.
That tiny fix could take minutes to a person that knows the code base, and weeks to one that doesn't. Its financial impact could be in millions.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If someone from Amazon reports a bug it's kind of scary, you feel like you've broken Amazon. Really? If Amazon filed a bug on one of my repos I'd probably see dollar signs flashing.
How would you go about getting paid for that? I doubt it would be possible, even if the people that reported it really want to and need it, they could never get approval from the bureaucrats.
Eh - I work for a big SV company in a group that provides key software and hardware. If we have a schedule risk that can be mitigated by paying a 3rd party engineer a reasonable sum we could probably get it approved in a week. It would require at least exploring alternatives and quantifying the risk, but it's really not hard to get (reasonable amounts of prudently spent) money when your project is in the profit pipeline. I doubt it would have to go as high as a VP for approval.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a project starts having large companies relying on it, traditionally there have been 2 mechanisms to address this: - start a company around providing enterprise support services; - ask for the large companies to provide some resources such as a part (or all) of an employee's time to work on the project, for the parts that are more dear to that company. If a company is unwilling to pay, either in the form of a supp…
Or ask them to fix it and submit a PR. If their edge case broke it, then they should know best how to fix it.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#308There 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…
I think it may be in part because UI is very transient. Trends come and go very quickly. Well-made libraries can last a very very long time though as programs that work well are always in fashion.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
High for salary, yes. High for buying enterprise support on mission-critical software? Perhaps the value might be different.
Enterprise support and "no badgering on ETAs" don't quite go together. I want to live in the fantasy world some of you live in where you expect corporations to cut you a $100k check, no strings attached.
It's not enterprise support, it's simply paying for priority and nobody would be forcing them to participate in this scheme anyway.
And yes, this would be the only voice they get in the development process. Why shouldn't it be? Apple's had a 12 year free ride so far.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#310Earlier 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…
Why can't the person from Amazon reporting the bug just submit a pull request?