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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#201

Post by smorgusofborg »

candiddevmike wrote: post #122
wpietri wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> as users expect more features

I think mobile was a reprieve for commercial software and UX specialists and the increasingly negative comments on new OS versions indicate it is close to done like desktop.

For every user that likes a change there are 19 that prefer the flow they already learned to stay exactly the same and at least half are looking for exploitive attempts to modify their behavior in anything a publisher changes.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#203

Post by hparadiz »

DethNinja wrote: post #197
jbk wrote: post #74

> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices. Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone…

Why not change the license to a revenue share agreement with a cap on total amount of revenue? For example, if a company uses ffmpeg on their products and product generates a yearly revenue of 1m then they will pay you 1k. Current open source agreements do nothing to help smaller companies or the maintainers and honestly I find it stupid and destructive. Charge larger companies more depending on their revenue and let…

I really don't understand this mentality. This is what we've all been fighting for since the 90s. A free (as in beer) and open stack of software that anyone can pull off the shelf and use.

So many commercial platforms rely not just on ffmpeg and vlc but also on nginx, php, python, nodejs, linux, mariadb, and everything else you can imagine. We also pay for some very niche things that are simply not available from the open source community.

If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable. A bunch of people would also lose their jobs in the process.

At my company we have revenue sharing so the idea of having to cut out a piece of the pie for an open source project would not be popular among staff. Most of them aren't even in tech.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#204

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

Why not start a foundation, or even a business where companies and individuals can voluntarily pay for open source software, like an online store?

Different projects have different prices, but you can pay more.

The money is forwarded to project maintainers was wages, but a "tax" is applied so that some money is redirected to small but growing projects.

Projects that see sufficient income would be certified as having certain level of guaranteed support, based on the fact that they essentially have a staff to maintain the project. The entity would ensure and manage this. Some of the money would be used to fund this process.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#205

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #204

Why not start a foundation, or even a business where companies and individuals can voluntarily pay for open source software, like an online store? Different projects have different prices, but you can pay more. The money is forwarded to project maintainers was wages, but a "tax" is applied so that some money is redirected to small but growing projects. Projects that see sufficient income would be certified as having…

You used the word “voluntarily” here, and it’s going to be the singular reason it won’t work.

Corporations ever do anything voluntarily if the alternative is tangibly worse, evidently more expensive, or existentially threatening, especially in short to middle term.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#206

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

hparadiz wrote: post #203
DethNinja wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not change the license to a revenue share agreement with a cap on total amount of revenue? For example, if a company uses ffmpeg on their products and product generates a yearly revenue of 1m then they will pay you 1k. Current open source agreements do nothing to help smaller companies or the maintainers and honestly I find it stupid and destructive. Charge larger companies more depending on their revenue and let…

I really don't understand this mentality. This is what we've all been fighting for since the 90s. A free (as in beer) and open stack of software that anyone can pull off the shelf and use. So many commercial platforms rely not just on ffmpeg and vlc but also on nginx, php, python, nodejs, linux, mariadb, and everything else you can imagine. We also pay for some very niche things that are simply not available from the…

> If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable.

Unfortunately, building a business on a limited resource that is -currently- "free," is not a particularly wise decision.

VideoLAN and ffmpeg are amazing tools, but a lot of folks have made a lot of money on wrappers (some of which, are eye-wateringly expensive). I'd be unsurprised to find a number of license violations in some of these wrappers.

History is filled with examples of people making money on resources that are not sustainable. These folks make a lot of money, until they wipe out the resources.

OS is a limited resource.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#207

Post by hncurious »

jbk wrote: post #74

> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices. Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone…

What's the largest company that uses FFmpeg and has refused? What did they say?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#208

Post by pizza »

hparadiz wrote: post #203
DethNinja wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not change the license to a revenue share agreement with a cap on total amount of revenue? For example, if a company uses ffmpeg on their products and product generates a yearly revenue of 1m then they will pay you 1k. Current open source agreements do nothing to help smaller companies or the maintainers and honestly I find it stupid and destructive. Charge larger companies more depending on their revenue and let…

I really don't understand this mentality. This is what we've all been fighting for since the 90s. A free (as in beer) and open stack of software that anyone can pull off the shelf and use. So many commercial platforms rely not just on ffmpeg and vlc but also on nginx, php, python, nodejs, linux, mariadb, and everything else you can imagine. We also pay for some very niche things that are simply not available from the…

Open source developers can still release things to everyone for free. Seems fair to say that companies derive value from open source in proportion to their scale. How about a $1m value generated threshold before it's considered impolite for a company to not at least give a little something back?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#209

Post by didibus »

wolverine876 wrote: post #199
didibus wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much do you use open source, as a developer and as a user As a user I agree, things would probably be more expensive if nothing was open source. But as a developer, I disagree, my employer would simply need to pay for the stuff I use, or they'd pay me or another developer to build them one. And this is precisely what the article argues, that companies should pay for it. If there wasn't any open source logging l…

> But as a developer, I disagree, my employer would simply need to pay for the stuff I use, or they'd pay me or another developer to build them one. Good point, but you would have a much smaller industry and platform without FOSS, and there is no way you could build all the libraries, tools, etc., yourself. Even FAANG depends on FOSS. If everything had to be paid for and professionally developed, licensed, etc., ther…

I think that's the counterargument, and I can imagine it being true, but I also think we just don't know. Maybe there'd be just as much advancement but more developers would be properly compensated. It's hard to say exactly what would have happened because we're talking an alternate history.

Lowering the barrier to entry by being able to leverage a lot of free stuff probably helps make the industry bigger in having more startups, but I also can't say for sure there wouldn't be more jobs or higher paid jobs otherwise.

In the end, I'm not trying to push to end FOSS, but I'm trying to bring to front the contradiction I'm seeing of people wanting FOSS but also wanting FOSS developers paid a full wage. It seems fundamentally at odds, if you want people working on logging libraries to be paid full wages, stop making FOSS logging libraries.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#210

Post by qwerki »

tomxor wrote: post #2

Unpopular opinion: Maybe there is nothing wrong with the "status quo", maybe we don't need yet another attempt to finance small FOSS projects where it's hard to explain how money will actually solve any of these issues. Maybe people just need to be more considerate of what they depend upon. And in the case that a popular yet well maintained project has a CVE on day, maybe we need to accept that popularity does not ma…

Open market dynamics should in theory change this one way or another. Long term you can't have some code cost $0 while an SVE's code costs $300k+ per year... Reality is open source code is badly mispriced right now.
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