151–160 of 464 posts
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No, the companies are supposed to generate value for shareholders. They are supposed to have infinite financial growth and that is pretty much it.
That's how it is most of the time but I don't see how you can say it's "supposed to" be that way. It's pathological. Essentially it's a form of group sociopathy.
Moreover, isn't this what's happening to most software, everywhere? Cases-in-point:
Compilers - when's the last time you actually paid for a programming language? I know for me: SAS C in the mid 1990's
Databases - any new solution would likely use a free DB.. and why not?
Digital audio workstations - "free" ones seem to come out monthly
Graphic editors - 2D and 3D alike - the free varieties are getting better every year
Developer IDEs - From console editors to full GUIs to online offerings; all free
Even the business model of "hoping to make server software so good that everyone wants it" fails when hosting services just grab it, re-package with their own branding and profit.
Once upon a time, the best way to get a software job was to demonstrate your ability to build useful open source projects. 10 years ago the Principal Engineers I would work with had super sized open source portfolio's which leant them both credibility and experience building products people liked. Junior devs would search (sometimes in vain) for issues where they could contribute a few PRs Now the best way to get a j…
This might sound weird, but I find every time someone publishes or contributes open source, they are stealing value from me, because it is one less thing that a company will need me to implement, build and maintain for them, instead they'll now expect me to simply use the existing free of charge open source one. Not only does it feel like I'm stolen value, open source work tends to be the most interesting, and as mor…
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> So, large SV companies and startup should also start agreeing to pay for open source, when it's the core of the tech. Companies usually have a reason to keep their expenses low. Sometimes they are a public company with fiscal responsibilities. A startup will only have so much runway and is likely trying to reduce expenses. Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free?
It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? A while back I bought a cheap robot vacuum. Their scheduling feature didn't meet my needs, so I reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced a cron-friendly CLI tool and a library so people could do other things with it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks Honestly, this was a mistak…
I've long known people who modified cars. Sometimes they did it as a business. Sometimes they helped friends out. Sometimes the work was on nights and weekends. The car manufacturer never had a responsibility to support them. They never had to support people in forums. Anything they did was their choice. Sometimes as a business and sometimes volunteering.
You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support.
Doing volunteer work and hoping for generosity from companies isn't working.
I feel as if engineers at firms that build systems that use open source libraries should campaign internally to create budget line items for paying non-trivial amounts to the maintainers of those libraries. I find it difficult to blame developers individually. Individuals working at these companies aren't going to see it as their role to send some of their own after-tax income to maintainers via GitHub Sponsors unles…
But ultimately the problem is the same: engineers, i.e. employees, don't control the money. They don't have agency to direct the money toward functions other than enriching the people who have the money.
They may have more agency relatively speaking than free software developers, but on an absolute scale, you can measure this kind of agency in dollars, and it's a pittance.
Maybe they could donate some of their own salaries. Maybe they could get employer matching. Still doesn't seem realistic, but it's closer.
Once upon a time, the best way to get a software job was to demonstrate your ability to build useful open source projects. 10 years ago the Principal Engineers I would work with had super sized open source portfolio's which leant them both credibility and experience building products people liked. Junior devs would search (sometimes in vain) for issues where they could contribute a few PRs Now the best way to get a j…
This might sound weird, but I find every time someone publishes or contributes open source, they are stealing value from me, because it is one less thing that a company will need me to implement, build and maintain for them, instead they'll now expect me to simply use the existing free of charge open source one. Not only does it feel like I'm stolen value, open source work tends to be the most interesting, and as mor…
We benefit far more than we can ever repay.
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I would say that this is different from "hard to explain". What is being proposed is essentially "OSS with a paid model for premium support / feature development." It shifts the language from "donations", which companies don't understand, to "consulting", which companies do understand. It's not completely novel, projects such as openssl and sqlite do offer paid consulting, but it's not normalized among companies to p…
> OSS with a paid model for premium support / feature development. Adding features do not reduce likelihood of bugs, if anything the opposite. It's very difficult to come up with a paid model that specifically encourages a preventative strategy towards bugs and security flaws. Currently the best we have is getting people who care about those things to build software.
Then, maybe a year later, that feature is no longer the hot new thing and it becomes abandonware inside the application. If you're app isn't cloud based you have no idea if you can rip the feature out or not as you have no idea how many people, if anyone still uses it.
I feel like the examples of log4j and ua-parser aren't that great, because it would be relatively easy for any other similar lib to take their place, as it's mostly straightforward to implement, even though it still takes time. But there are some things like Kafka, PostgressSQL, Spring Boot, Tomcat, Apache Math, ZooKeeper, the OpenJDK, and all that which are definitely non-trivial and a huge amount of time and effort…
First those developers don't get any money for their work, now you also telling them that the work they are doing isn't really valuable anyway? Did you consider the fact that half of your examples of worthy things are using the unworthy log4j?
This is how the value is measured.
But if you take a much harder task, like building a performant and safe JIT language runtime like the OpenJDK, you'll see that even in the open source model, people can't actually deliver it effectively for free. It often starts out from a company that later open sourced it, or it's backed by academia, and contributions require deep expertise, so sometimes companies had to have their own staff contribute to it on their own payroll.
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It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? A while back I bought a cheap robot vacuum. Their scheduling feature didn't meet my needs, so I reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced a cron-friendly CLI tool and a library so people could do other things with it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks Honestly, this was a mistak…
IMO, I think the golden age of completely FOSS apps (no open core) is ending/has ended as users expect more features and apps struggle to meet demands without effective monetization. I think open source will always have a place for libraries and tools, but end user applications will either become open core or no longer open source.
Very sad if this ever comes to pass. It's a world in which I would never have learned about computers or decided to work with them. I think it makes more sense to charge big companies but keep software free and libre for individuals.
(I don't think this future will happen though: I think it's based on a deep misunderstanding of what drives FOSS developers to do what they do).
The first 1/2 already exists. It's the companies which need to change.
I say this from experience. I'm self-employed, with my own company. For the first 15 years my plan was to provide commercial support for open source packages I worked on. I had an LLC, an accountant, I paid a designer for a logo, etc.
I co-founded the Biopython project and offered commercial support for it, with a couple of other Biopython developers under NDA so we could work on commercial projects that used Biopython.
Any interest? No.
I started an open source package for high-performance molecular similarity search. This got some funding, mostly from personal contacts at companies which wanted new features. And people used it.
In fact, at one conference a speaker gave a talk based in part on the results of my software. He commented correctly that it's very hard for a company to spend money on software they get for free.
I commented, correctly IMO, that I offered support contracts, and support is easy to justify to management if they really cared.
(Over the course of the conference, I learned what they liked best of "free software" was it is 1) available for no cost, and 2) doesn't come with string attached - they didn't want to care about upstream.)
My story isn't unique. I'm not the only one to try the "sophisticated counterparty" route. LLCs are cheap.
The real onus is on the big companies. And since that's not going to happen, I now offer proprietary licensing for my once FOSS-only software.