I do wonder if we need a new type of copyleft license free and open source license that permits only free noncommercial use.
Commercial use should bring with it a much difference set of obligations than non-commercial use.
Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
261–270 of 464 posts
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#262Side note but not captioning the xkcd graphic and modifying it is a bit sleazy. Yes, it is mentioned in the following paragraph but a caption would be better.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure to whom you are replying. I can't think of anyone I've ever met that started an open-source project expecting it to become their day job in short order. When your project blows up and mints a herd of new gazillionaires, yes, it's reasonable to ask those companies to fund what is now an important community project. Anybody that says "nope, their money, they do what they want" is spouting the same flavor o…
I think the point is that while it would be awesome to just have everyone pay open source maintainers what they can afford to when they use their project, in practice relying on people's (or worse, companies') good will is a losing strategy. It seem wildly unrealistic to just expect that everyone will just naturally give back to open source in a meaningful way absent any actual incentives or requirements, and even if…
You're largely correct, but I'm not speaking about peer pressure.
'Tis the season, so we've been listening to a lot of Christmas carols.
One of my favorites is Good King Wenceslas, which concludes with the verse: "Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing, Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing."
Charity used to be a behavioral expectation in the West. Charity is not "giving money to somebody else so they can do charity on your behalf" nor is it "paying taxes to fund social programs". Charity is you, directly, investing your resources in your community, with no expectation of return.
Today, this assumption no longer holds. The result is the current state of open source, which needs to figure out a license that extracts value from players big enough to pay it, without punishing upstarts into oblivion (and thus forming a protective moat for existing large players).
Some percentage of net revenue share strikes me as the right sort of license, with sensible caps and/or some sort of shared pooling mechanism.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#264Earlier 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.
I think the exact opposite. All of my open source tools in 2021 are of extraordinarily higher quality than they were 10 years ago.
All I see with the FOSS ecosystem is it picking up steam at an extraordinary pace from 2005. Postgres in particular has absolutely dominated its incumbents in recent times, an insane reversal from the situation at the turn of the millennium.
There's a guarantee of correctness, availability of auditability, and a tide of slow, iterative improvements.
The key is supply and demand.
Open source software is often not a trailblazer. Open source is often reactive to a need, and punctuated by a demand for quality, bad treatment by the commercial incumbent, and constant iterative improvement.
See the pattern of so many technologies, Docker following VM ware, open source databases following Oracle (1980s Oracle was a real pioneer).
Open source has always and will continue to be a slow rolling borg that chases commercial software. Projects will never be rushed, but the benefits of an open base has time and time again crushed closed source incumbents.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#265If the US government had any sense of strategy, they would employ these maintainers en masse, not only to create good will but to make sure that other bad actors don’t get to them first.
Interesting idea, similar to research funding I suppose. Do any governments do this, or offer grants for open source?
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#266I think think the size and niche of the open source project matters too. Just because you wrote a logging library or a parser of something that lots of people decided to use doesn’t really seem like a reason for companies to sponsor or pay for support. It’s a very small dependency. But, if it’s a database or a voice server or a web server even, those seem like something that can’t easily be replaced, so companies probably sponsor or pay for support more often. Am I wrong in thinking down this avenue?
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#267Once 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…
I'd wager companies hire based on leetcode because it's efficient from an administerial perspective. It can be easily automated and helps weed out a greater number of poor candidates than good ones. It's easier for an interviewer to pull out a set of pre-written questions than look through a github repo and ask pointed questions. Too much of what we do, from education (standardized tests) to banning of users in place…
That's a rather negative view, considering that much of software by and large is about replicating paper based processes with far less human effort involved.
It's fair to describe software engineers as a profession of the professionally lazy. "This takes too long to do, therefore I code."
I think it's better to reinterpret the problem based on what Leetcode does well, and try to invent something that does it better.
The old world of make some giant Github project a company might appreciate, or might ignore entirely, holds little attraction to me at this point.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#268Oh, yes, open source economics. Everyone wants to use open source, no one wants to pay for it, a large number of entitled people get angry when you don’t provide support or implement their feature request for free...I’m sure anyone here who has done an open source project notable enough to make the Wikipedia has seen all of this.
To keep my sanity, I had to enforce strong boundaries: No, you are not a customer until you start paying me like a customer (lots of entitled users think they can have the same relationship with an open source developer as they do as a customer of a company). No, telling me how you’re an important person or part of an important organization doesn’t change my tune, unless you’re willing to show me the money. No, you do not have a better idea which features would make my open source project more popular than I do. No, I will not support you for free via email; if you want support, you either pay me or we do it on the public mailing list. No, that’s not a security bug; that’s a feature request, and, no, I will not implement it just because you want me to.
Because I have done all of this, I am able to continue to maintain my open source project today, because the boundaries I have set up are basic self-care: Trying to please every random entitled Internet user leads only to burn out and abandoned open source projects.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Supposed as per economical theory/ideology, legal expectations and also per "what kind of CEO will get the job". It is not like most of the time randomly. It is like that, because economic system is designed to work that way.
That's a myth about legal expectations.
"every state has enacted a corporate statute giving managers explicit authority to donate corporate funds for charitable purposes"
https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi...
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#270This can work, if there's a sales team attached to the company that actually goes out and sells the idea of paying money to the open source project. For a maintainer to do an SDR and a salesperson job is just not sustainable - they are not good at it and it will take them a lot of time that they can spend writing code.
Instead, you could set up a structure where open source authors set up an LLC, and then get a salesperson hired on a revenue-based retainer. The salesperson then actually goes out and talks about "supply chain attacks" and "open source sustainability" to the target companies and tries to close deals with them. Maybe they can even work on stuff like "vendor approval assessment" and other paperwork. Maybe the salesperson hires more people that actually do the paperwork and sales development, and the salesperson themselves only does the closing. That way, the maintainer continues to write code and now it's a salesperson who actually brings in the revenue.
You can even set up a marketplace startup which caters to this whole workflow. 2 user types: open source authors and salespeople. Open source authors can create an LLC with a click (integrate with Stripe Atlas?), then they go into 'Call-for-salesperson' directory, put out a listing saying we're so-and-so open source project with 10k stars on GitHub, come represent us. Then on the supply side, a salesperson sees the listing, writes up a proposal which might include a percentage fee they'll receive from the sales (say 25%). After receiving a few offers, open source author can choose who to go with. Maybe if it doesn't quite work out with this salesperson, they go back and re-list.
Just a quick idea on how this can be solved with a marketplace model. Everyone in this structure is happy: open source authors get money, salespeople get their percentage fee, corporations get sustainable open source projects.