221–230 of 464 posts
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Tech companies also pay for health insurance, sick leave, and ma/pa leave. Sure pensions aren't a big thing, but increased savings from increased salary can make up for that (not to mention 401k).
> pay for health insurance Have cancer, or a premature baby with 90 days in Neonatal Intensive Care, in the USA, and get back to me on your health insurance.
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> Sometimes they are a public company with fiscal responsibilities. Public companies also have accounts for goodwill in their books, don't they? Also, I'd even say that depending on volunteers for everything when you aren't in dire straits isn't to responsible.
No, the companies are supposed to generate value for shareholders. They are supposed to have infinite financial growth and that is pretty much it.
No thanks. Maintaining business relationships with $megacorp is one of the primary reasons OSS maintainers (maybe just speaking for myself, but I don't think so) do their OSS work, and don't develop proprietary software and market and sell it around a business venture. If you start writing up contracts or accepting direct payments with any strings attached at all, the dynamic is completely changed.
I have asked if he has a version that addresses the history of these ideas, and how they've worked out - because the history is a very long one.
I would suggest moving away from permissive licenses, which are "just take my stuff." Companies don't even throw in their alterations.
Stallman was 100% right about the importance of software freedom, and strong copyleft. AGPL more of the things. AGPL your latest Rust libraries.
Spinning up an AWS instance costing $10 a month is trivial because the buisness has decided to empower employees with unlimited funds to spend on it.
So how can I spin up a $10 a month "instance" which goes to say ffmpeg developers, or apache developers, or openjdk developers, or whatever, with only a small overhead going to AWS and the majority of that money going to the people my business relies on.
> 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…
Wasn't there some YC company that was trying to act as a sales agent/middle-entity for this kind of situation? If not YC, they at least were on HN at one point. Curious if anyone knows.
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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?
Ultimately these tools have already been released for free so asking for a rent seeking style payment after the fact is a little bit like sour grapes. What stops me from just forking the project? Really nothing. If anything open source maintainers that want to get paid should look into a model that mirrors the bug bounty programs. Have bounties for features. Generally these projects only really need security updates.
But that's not how people use them- people commit to a solution not only because it works today but also because they are likely going to keep using it for the foreseeable future. It's the maintenance that is the costly part. Maintaining a library is a lot more involved than producing it and then vanishing w/o a trace.
Ultimately somebody publishing and maintaining a good library is a positive externality for society. It's like giving kids a good education- it helps everyone. So big corporations relying upon open source w/o putting their money up to help allow the actual 'boots on the ground,' so to speak, get the job done, is kind of like getting a good free education as a kid, making a ton of money as a grownup, and refusing to pay teachers along the way.
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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…
Making something open source is about granting freedoms for users of that thing. One of those freedoms is usually "you owe nothing and can do with it what you wish: sell it, fork it, modify it" in exchange for "the author provides no guarantees and is not liable for this software".
Open source authors that expect some benefactor to appear and sprinkle money so that they can quit their day job and work on their hobby full time are, for lack of a better term, delusional.
The default is that no one will use your thing, no one will contribute, no one will fund you, etc.
Anything beyond that is a fluke.
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> Now the best way to get a job is leet code, leet code, and more leet code. Rather than spending Maybe more broadly: The only way to prove that you're good at X, is to do X well. An artist is only as good as his portfolio. The same is true for all creative jobs. I'm thinking that these proxies (see all attempts at standardised testing) are a disease of our time.
I'm not sure I fully agree. Doing open source doesn't mean you do it well. You have no sense of how quickly, efficiently and independently they managed to achieve it. I'd much rather hear from prior experience, and probe about situations and scenarios they were in, projects and problems they contributed too, and hear the story of how they went about it, how long it took them, what they did in the face of setbacks and…