Professional maintainers: a wake-up call • Hacker News Board

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#271

Post by deterministic » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:23 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #107

mfer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It seems like you haven’t quite got the concept of capitalism and how humans and markets actually work. If you give away your work for $0 then the value of your work is $0. Yes a tiny minority may want to pay more than that to make themselves feel morally superior or to virtue signal their goodness. But most won’t. Accept it and act accordingly: make companies pay to use your work and sue the companies that fail to comply with the licence conditions. It isn’t rocket science.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#272

Post by mbrodersen » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

saghm wrote: post #260

donw wrote: post #247

Earlier 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 are absolutely right. The naivety of most open source developers when it comes to understanding how people/companies/markets work is jaw dropping. If you ask people to pay $0 for your work then that is exactly what they will pay. Wishing for things to be different is a waste of time. Accept how the world works and act accordingly.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#273

Post by mbrodersen » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #187

mfer wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few thoughts... 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. On…

>> You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support. That's true. The problems brought up in the article all stem from companies relying on open source and then getting into trouble when there are problems with it. They would pay if they had to. The core problem is that everyone wants something for nothing. Sure companies appreciate that they can get billions of doll…

It is not a problem. It just is how humans function. So act accordingly. Trying to change how humans work is a waste of times. You are fighting millions of years of evolution. Good luck with that. Try not to be bitter when you fail.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#274

Post by colinmhayes » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

another_story wrote: post #239

lumost wrote: post #42

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…

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…

Companies use Leetcode because it tests for the 2 things that are required to become a successful developer, above average critical thinking skills and willingness to spend hundreds of hours improving. Companies figure if you have those two things they can make you into a decent developer, figuring out if someone is already a good developer is much harder.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#275

Post by mbrodersen » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #238

usefulcat wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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

Those aren't the only answers. The notion that people only respond to direct incentives is incorrect and ahistorical. It's a convenient dogma for the selfish to promote, but I don't have to take it seriously at all. Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right her…

Good luck with that. I for one am not holding my breath. Meanwhile, perhaps accept the world for what it is and act accordingly? Just make the companies pay for it by licensing the code correctly. It isn’t rocket science.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#276

Post by mbrodersen » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

dilyevsky wrote: post #242

mfer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Companies usually have a reason to keep their expenses low No they don’t. That’s why they keep plowing billions into cloud infra and gazillion of saas products. They have an excuse when they think they can get it for free anyway like is the case with OSS but not an actual reason

Why should the companies pay more than $0 for code with a price tag of $0? Do you normally pay more than the asking price for things you buy?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#277

Post by nicce » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #95

moksly wrote: post #48

The alternative to what we have now is not going to be a healthy OSS community. The alternative is going to be big companies insourcing more of their libraries. The only reason why OSS has seen the up-pick it has is because major companies profit from it. Microsoft didn’t embrace open source because it had a change or morals, it embraced open source because it started making so much more money from enterprise orgs sw…

"Your tech stack isn’t actually in danger if you review that code you use." Tell that to everyone who depended on Log4j for the past 8 years!

Well, did they review that code for sure?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#278

Post by acidbaseextract » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

pxc wrote: post #249

wpietri wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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". This is demonstrably not how many people many treat open-source authors. Just look at how the Log4J folks are feeling right now: https://twitter.com/yazicivo/status/1469349956880408583 I do have some open-source code out there where people have been…

the text of the tweet: > Log4j maintainers have been working sleeplessly on mitigation measures; fixes, docs, CVE, replies to inquiries, etc. Yet nothing is stopping people to bash us, for work we aren't paid for, for a feature we all dislike yet needed to keep due to backward compatibility concerns. Why don't they 'resolve' the security issue by removing the feature and then set up a bug bounty for backporting fixes…

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. This seems like exactly the right move.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#279

Post by kevingadd » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:36 AM UTC

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. 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."

As a small business owner I understand this perspective, but if you expand it out it becomes transparently exploitative. "If my company was liable to pay for employees' health insurance, we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable." I pay 25-35% of my income every year via taxes, if I didn't have to do that my profit margins would increase. It's not hard to find someone who claims they're being "bled dry" by taxes. Egress and ingress bandwidth is expensive, imagine if you didn't have to pay for it? Companies like Walmart are able to offer low prices in part because taxpayers fund them by providing food stamps and welfare to their employees.

At the end of the day the stuff you rely on costs SOMEONE money, if you're not paying for it, someone else is paying for it with their time and possibly money. If you can't do business profitably after paying for the stuff you use, your business is already insolvent and someone else is funding it for you.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#280

Post by akagusu » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

All this crap is not maintainers fault. Companies do not want to pay, this is the reason they use FOSS code in the first place.

Do you want to force every single company that rely on FOSS to pay? Change your license.

Stop using permissive licenses like MIT or BSD and license your project with GPL. Companies will have 3 choices: use your GPL licensed code and make their software GPL too, which they don't want to; pay you in a dual license scheme, so they can keep their code proprietary; develop themselves every piece of code they need. They don't want the first option, so they will pay you or they will pay an employee. In both cases, they will pay.