211–220 of 464 posts
I maintain a tiny, tiny, unimportant open source package. It gets about 10K downloads a month. Assuming that each of those downloaders saved one minute of their time on average, and their time is worth $15/hr, I'm providing a service worth $2500/month. I'm starting to think, how could my next project provide the same value, and get paid for it?
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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?
Does this not mean it's time for a new open source license? Perhaps one that stipulates all the freedom current ones have up to a point? I am not a lawyer and know little about open source but is it possible to create a new license that allows free use up to a certain revenue level?
Some similar things have happened to mysql (to mariadb) and mongodb (to whatever the fork is called).
Dual licensing it like MySQL did is one way to approach it, but plenty of people were happy enough with what it did that they didn't pay for it.
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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…
This is just the broken window fallacy. Hobbyists giving away schematics for unbreakable windows are not stealing from your window repair business. Yes, having open source competition means you'll have to either build a superior product that customers are willing to pay for, or find another niche. That's a good thing.
Good has many dimensions. I'm saying that as a developer, FOSS means people don't need to pay you to build those things, only to use them, and that's why FOSS developers themselves don't get properly compensated, because they chose to build it for free.
You could say FOSS is a good thing if you talked about computing progress, or barrier of entry for a startup wanting to build an app, or as a great source of example to learn from, etc.
As for your comparison, I don't think it holds, because very rarely are FOSS contributors hobbyists, most of them are professionals. So it is much more akin to a professional window engineer giving away free schematics for unbreakable windows, which means that companies manufacturing unbreakable windows no longer need to pay a professional window engineer to make schematics for them.
I've been appalled at the way that older, more experienced developers are treated, and am not surprised at this.
There's a really good chance that many of these bugs were introduced by developers that are now older, and more cautious. In some cases, these may be the harsh lessons that caused these developers to become more conservative, these days.
A conservative (not political "conservative," practical "conservative") approach is generally best, when maintaining infrastructure. Be careful, test well, don't "push the envelope" too much, and, for God's Sake, don't add new stuff, until you have the old stuff completely tested, documented, and supported.
New stuff can be added via forks, and introduced via carefully-vetted PRs.
I keep thinking of the Linux core kernel project as an example of how to do it right, but I am not very involved in that ecosystem, so it may be a case of "the grass is greener on the other side of the fence."
I can tell you that I take each of the tools I make, very seriously. A quick shufti at any of them will tell you that. No one really uses them, but that's fine with me. I write them for myself.
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> 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 m…
Yes, valid and important point. We could look at how other industries develop. Software + Internet is especially condusive to 'free' products. Other industries must at least share knowledge, which arguably is embedded in FOSS software.
> 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.
An inarguable logic ...
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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…
>> Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free? > If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? That doesn't answer the GP question, which is all about incentives. The answer is, at least some parties won't pay for what they can get for free. So the options are: a) deal with it b) require payment c) come up with some way to incentivize more donations
It’s not like there is a parable about killing the goose that laid the golden egg to teach you how to appreciate these things.
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> You need a proper "asshole" in such organizations that will go and threaten complete lack of support if the bill isn't paid. That's the point, they don't pay, and they don't get support. But they still complain when there is a major CVE. > For comparison, $1M is the total yearly cost of ~3 average engineers at FAANGs. I wish we got that...
> That's the point, they don't pay, and they don't get support. But they still complain You've put your finger on the core of the issue with FiloSottile's suggestion. The problem is that to sell something to a big corporation, you need to have something tangible you can sell. What you have are enormous pieces of widely used software, being given away for free. Many companies are going to take that and run with it, an…
1) It's really difficult to donate to Open Source; 2) Companies don't get enough value in exchange for donating – They are businesses and think in dollars & cents; 3) and, Devs much prefer to write code rather than chasing companies for donations & sponsorships.
As a result of these dynamics, OSS is very mispriced at the moment. Unfortunately that is going to impact quality and we shouldn't be surprised by the Log4j bug.
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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.
It is not like most of the time randomly. It is like that, because economic system is designed to work that way.