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No Free Features

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Re: No Free Features

#31

Post by dahart »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #28
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…

Totally, I think you’re right, a lot of companies are open to paying for it if it’s saving money and providing value. I mean, all companies already do have a software expenditure budget for commercial software.

But I guess it is not simple to just put OSS projects in the same budget bucket as proprietary software. Companies have a special aversion to unexpected expenses. I’ve done business with companies that would rather pay a known monthly fee for all their licenses than only pay for the licenses that get used every month, simply because they can’t account for what it will cost in advance. Practically speaking, always paying bounties for changes would turn OSS into pure commercial software from the buyer’s point of view.

There are a ton of OSS projects that are supported by the author’s day job at a for-profit company. I guess I’m not convinced that if software is offered for free in the first place that it always makes sense to expect money to be offered without asking for it. If an OSS project needs funding, maybe it’s best to just offer it commercially in the first place?

I just don’t necessarily agree with the hyperbole that unpaid labor is “wrong”, because that undermines the initial OSS transaction. The software was offered for free-as-in-beer in the first place, and that is unpaid labor. It’s perfectly fine to request pay for changes, so isn’t that better and more straightfoward than not asking for money but complaining when none comes?

Re: No Free Features

#32

Post by dahart »

alangibson wrote: post #29
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 compani…

Having a payment processing vendor that handles OSS projects is an interesting concept. That sounds like a large hill to climb before we can get OSS project changes funded, but regardless it seems like a viable idea. As an engineer, what would you do internally to nudge things in that direction? What would you say to your manager to plant the seed and encourage it to grow upwards?

Re: No Free Features

#33

Post by llimos »

What about documentation? The maintainer doesn't need to document the package in order to solve their own problem (at least, not to the same level.) Should that be chargeable too? In which case the project will likely never get off the ground, and there'll be no money coming in for other change requests either.

Don't get me wrong, I agree in principle. There are just too many grey areas to make a blanket rule.

But what this is leading me to, is that if we go down this path, it just becomes another business model - where you build some things, and give them away, because you need to do so to have a product. And then charge for others. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it isn't as simple as the article makes out.

Re: No Free Features

#34

Post by jefftk »

> I look forward to a day when asking anyone to do unpaid labor is considered unethical by our industry. That goes for feature requests on open source projects ...

While I'm sure there are some open source developers who see feature requests as a burden, lots of us just want to make useful software. If someone lets me know about a way that icdiff or anything else I maintain could be better, I'm happy to hear it.

I'm not always up for implementing changes, in which case I'll typically say whether a PR implementing the feature would be welcome, but it is extremely far from unethical to file a feature request.

Re: No Free Features

#35

Post by wbond »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #27
mfer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discuss…

No bullying, but Facebook wanted a change in one of my repos. The engineer said it was important for “security”, but had no motivation to contribute: https://github.com/wbond/asn1crypto/issues/59. Eventually I ended up having to do the work because other organizations didn’t like that I didn’t bundle 3MB of test fixtures with the releases on PyPi.

Re: No Free Features

#36

Post by throwaway894345 »

dahart wrote: post #31
throwaway894345 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally, I think you’re right, a lot of companies are open to paying for it if it’s saving money and providing value. I mean, all companies already do have a software expenditure budget for commercial software. But I guess it is not simple to just put OSS projects in the same budget bucket as proprietary software. Companies have a special aversion to unexpected expenses. I’ve done business with companies that would r…

> If an OSS project needs funding, maybe it’s best to just offer it commercially in the first place?

There’s quite a lot of overhead involved in running a business relative to an open source project, and this is probably not the kind of work that an open source developer would find fulfilling. Additionally, even if the developer is also able and willing to quit his job to bootstrap his business, that overhead adds to the cost of the software. On the other hand, it would be easy enough IMO to get companies to set aside $20K/year (give or take based on the size of the business) and task a few principal engineers with divvying it out among their open source projects. That would be a pittance for companies but it would be a big infusion for open source.

Re: No Free Features

#37

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

wbond wrote: post #35
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discuss…

No bullying, but Facebook wanted a change in one of my repos. The engineer said it was important for “security”, but had no motivation to contribute: https://github.com/wbond/asn1crypto/issues/59 . Eventually I ended up having to do the work because other organizations didn’t like that I didn’t bundle 3MB of test fixtures with the releases on PyPi.

Sure, I'm not at all surprised that bigcos make bug reports or feature requests from time to time. This one seems like an issue that was also important to Ubuntu, so a good contribution from them? Or no? And it seems like the person was pretty polite about the request?

Admittedly they could have been more specific, but that seems like a generic newb developer issue than a FAANG-specific problem.

Re: No Free Features

#38

Post by alangibson »

jefftk wrote: post #34

> I look forward to a day when asking anyone to do unpaid labor is considered unethical by our industry. That goes for feature requests on open source projects ... While I'm sure there are some open source developers who see feature requests as a burden, lots of us just want to make useful software. If someone lets me know about a way that icdiff or anything else I maintain could be better, I'm happy to hear it. I'm…

> extremely far from unethical to file a feature request.

I'm suggesting that it is in fact an ethical problem to try to get something for nothing if you break it down. It's no different than walking into an artists shop and asking if you can just have a painting. It doesn't make you a terrible person, but I think it's a problematic norm.

Now there's no requirement that the developer actually take the compensation (whatever it is). If you don't want it, add that to your README and never think of it again.

Re: No Free Features

#39

Post by monetus »

alangibson wrote: post #38
jefftk wrote: post #34

> I look forward to a day when asking anyone to do unpaid labor is considered unethical by our industry. That goes for feature requests on open source projects ... While I'm sure there are some open source developers who see feature requests as a burden, lots of us just want to make useful software. If someone lets me know about a way that icdiff or anything else I maintain could be better, I'm happy to hear it. I'm…

> extremely far from unethical to file a feature request. I'm suggesting that it is in fact an ethical problem to try to get something for nothing if you break it down. It's no different than walking into an artists shop and asking if you can just have a painting. It doesn't make you a terrible person, but I think it's a problematic norm. Now there's no requirement that the developer actually take the compensation (w…

Hmm, more like walking into a public installation and asking the artist if they considered adding X, since they are mostly losing time while adding to the commons.

Re: No Free Features

#40

Post by autarch »

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.

The term "free software" predates "open source" by many years. Stallman started work on free software (the movement and the code) many, many years before Eric S Raymond coined the term "open source".
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