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No Free Features

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Re: No Free Features

#21

Post by falcolas »

alangibson wrote: post #6
0dmethz wrote: post #3

100% agree. "Sorry, but I don't work for free, consider sponsoring the project" should be a perfectly legitimate reason to reject a request on an open source project.

The reason that response is so rare is that people forgot the origin of open source. Once I solve my problem, it costs me nothing to give you the solution. If you just want me to solve your problem when I don't also have it, you need to compensate me for my time.

Respectfully, this is not the origin of open source.

The origin of open source is the ideal that "users should be able to see - and modify - the code that is running on their machines."

The "it costs me nothing" has also also proven to be false, because there's a pretty sizable overhead to open sourcing and maintaining an open source project, especially once it becomes popular. If there was no overhead, you wouldn't see articles like the "Pay Me or Fork This" post from earlier this morning.

Re: No Free Features

#22

Post by mfer »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #10

How often do the faang companies actually make change requests to these projects? My understanding, not working in the space, is that they will many times upstream improvements they develop. But I wasn't aware that they were hitting oss authors with a deluge of unpaid change requests. Now I know that reviewing an upstreamed change is also work. That's a big part of my job at work so I could hardly fail to recognize i…

There are people at the large tech companies who will not only push for a project to make a change they want (including doing all the coding work) but will sometimes get into the space of bullying to try and force someone to do the change for them. I've seen this numerous times.

Re: No Free Features

#23

Post by alangibson »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #10

How often do the faang companies actually make change requests to these projects? My understanding, not working in the space, is that they will many times upstream improvements they develop. But I wasn't aware that they were hitting oss authors with a deluge of unpaid change requests. Now I know that reviewing an upstreamed change is also work. That's a big part of my job at work so I could hardly fail to recognize i…

I'm be willing to bet that the majority of feature requests that happen come from people trying to make money at the time, either as employees or entrepreneurs. Just a guess though; is love to see hard numbers.

Re: No Free Features

#24

Post by alangibson »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #17

> So let’s get one thing straight: open source developers are not volunteering to fix your problem. That's not universally correct. As an open source (and non-open source too) developer I appreciate every idea of how to improve my app, by fixing a bug or by adding a feature (or even by rewriting my app entirely in a particular language - this is unlikely but may happen to be a good idea occasionally). Surely nobody s…

Fair enough. I was trying to address people that have an expectation that the maintainers are going to do work for them. I didn't have the "wouldn't it be cool if..." requests in mind.

Re: No Free Features

#25

Post by alangibson »

falcolas wrote: post #21
alangibson wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that response is so rare is that people forgot the origin of open source. Once I solve my problem, it costs me nothing to give you the solution. If you just want me to solve your problem when I don't also have it, you need to compensate me for my time.

Respectfully, this is not the origin of open source. The origin of open source is the ideal that "users should be able to see - and modify - the code that is running on their machines." The "it costs me nothing" has also also proven to be false, because there's a pretty sizable overhead to open sourcing and maintaining an open source project, especially once it becomes popular. If there was no overhead, you wouldn't…

I always understood that as a later Richard Stallman-esque take on it.

Transparency would have just been assumed by the first people to do OSS because they'd be the ones loading the programs.

Re: No Free Features

#26

Post by dahart »

I’m fully in agreement with the goal here, that for-profit companies should pay for changes they request. And some companies do pay OSS projects for support. SQLite is one high profile example (https://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html), and there are others with varying degrees of success.

The problem I see here is that there is no clear or easy path to making this goal a reality everywhere. What really happens most of the time is engineers at various companies are downloading and integrating open source code because it’s free to use as-is. These engineers aren’t managers and do not typically have the ability to spend company money on software without approvals from management, and while they should ask, the reality is that they don’t ask.

If I’m an engineer inside a for-profit company, with no explicit software budget, what steps should I take to prepare the company for offering bounties? Should something be happening before we download and integrate a new OSS project that sets a management/company expectation of paying for future changes, and what should that look like?

Re: No Free Features

#27

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

mfer wrote: post #22
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #10

How often do the faang companies actually make change requests to these projects? My understanding, not working in the space, is that they will many times upstream improvements they develop. But I wasn't aware that they were hitting oss authors with a deluge of unpaid change requests. Now I know that reviewing an upstreamed change is also work. That's a big part of my job at work so I could hardly fail to recognize i…

There are people at the large tech companies who will not only push for a project to make a change they want (including doing all the coding work) but will sometimes get into the space of bullying to try and force someone to do the change for them. I've seen this numerous times.

Would you be so kind as to point to some examples? Presumably this will be visible in a Github issue or something like that, since we're talking about OSS and presumably open issue trackers.

FWIW I just went back and did some searching over the faker.js issues and I didn't see any requests that seemed obviously corporate. (I picked faker.js because that article seems to be the most recent inspiration for this discussion on this site.) Most of the non-feature request issues were malformed or from people who obviously don't know what they are doing, but the rest were bugs that could hit big corporate users or hobbyists alike. I didn't see any request that looked like it came from someone working at a FAANG, although I guess it might be hard to tell. The overall number of feature requests filed during the repo's history was only 15.

Re: No Free Features

#28

Post by throwaway894345 »

dahart wrote: post #26

I’m fully in agreement with the goal here, that for-profit companies should pay for changes they request. And some companies do pay OSS projects for support. SQLite is one high profile example ( https://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html ), and there are others with varying degrees of success. The problem I see here is that there is no clear or easy path to making this goal a reality everywhere. What really happens most…

Honestly I think many companies would be willing to pay for open source if internally engineers could say, "look, we depend on this project for our success and we have a vested interest in seeing it maintained well and getting our features/bug-fixes actioned, and it's a lot cheaper for us to spend $1k/year (or whatever) than for us to pay our own developers to work on it (and not our own features)". I think a lot of business people would respond well to that, and if enough companies do that it could drive a lot of additional innovation and development in open source.

Re: No Free Features

#29

Post by alangibson »

dahart wrote: post #26

I’m fully in agreement with the goal here, that for-profit companies should pay for changes they request. And some companies do pay OSS projects for support. SQLite is one high profile example ( https://www.sqlite.org/consortium.html ), and there are others with varying degrees of success. The problem I see here is that there is no clear or easy path to making this goal a reality everywhere. What really happens most…

I'm in the same position. We have a huge budget, but literally no way to transfer money to individuals or even aggregators like GitHub. Corporate credit card use for software is forbidden. Everythi g has to go through an 18 month purchase process.

Sonic think a prerequisite for success would be to have a single organization that does the payment processing get set up as a vendor with lord knows how many large companies. That's probably why it's never been done at any kind of scale

Re: No Free Features

#30

Post by falcolas »

alangibson wrote: post #25
falcolas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, this is not the origin of open source. The origin of open source is the ideal that "users should be able to see - and modify - the code that is running on their machines." The "it costs me nothing" has also also proven to be false, because there's a pretty sizable overhead to open sourcing and maintaining an open source project, especially once it becomes popular. If there was no overhead, you wouldn't…

I always understood that as a later Richard Stallman-esque take on it. Transparency would have just been assumed by the first people to do OSS because they'd be the ones loading the programs.

It's worth reading into the history of OSS. There was a bit of sharing going on in the early 70's, but it was all being locked down before Richard Stallman and his contemporaries created the modern OSS movement via the GNU project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

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