321–330 of 464 posts
This isn't a problem of shaming businesses. This is a government and multi-government concern. It's a national security issue. There should be BILLIONS of dollars of funding coming from all portions of governments: the military, universities, regulatory agencies, research agencies, any and all departments using IT systems.
Corporations don't even need to fund it. They just need to have the government fund it.
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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…
How has the strategy of "companies should just be nicer" worked for things like minimum wage, health insurance, workers rights, ect... It's getting to the point of insanity (in my opinion) that people keep thinking this is going to magically appear if they ask for it. It arguably flies in the faces of thousands of years (or millions if you count pre-humans) of evolution. At the least people suggesting this should ack…
As an example, note that the Fortune 500 spend $20bn annually on corporate social responsibility: https://econreview.berkeley.edu/stocks-sustainability-how-th...
That's not because they just had some good feelings. It's because people expect them to be at least slightly non-awful. We can accomplish something similar here. If programmers start insisting that companies take open-source funding seriously, it will happen. Not quickly and not easily. But if people start taking action (e.g., turning down jobs when companies are parasites on the open-source ecosystem), things will change.
> 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…
I'm the creator (often with others) and maintainer of some very popular Perl distributions that are used either by many other libraries, many applications, or both. The most notable are probably DateTime ( https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime ), Log-Dispatch ( https://metacpan.org/dist/Log-Dispatch ), and Exception-Class ( https://metacpan.org/dist/Exception-Class ), among many others. The first release of DateTime was…
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>This can lead to corporate capture. We see this in some projects already. Could you share some examples that weren't corporate projects to begin with?
The Linux kernel, take a look at the LWN stats about who develops it; mostly large corporations.
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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.
That isn't "the world". It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history that see themselves as entitled to make endless profit without ever worrying about where that comes from or who it hurts. It's not a sustainable mindset, so it never lasts. Look at the shift in attitudes toward the environment in the last 100 years as an example. There was a point where executives thought it absolutel…
I think it’s a fairly large chunk of history (e.g. all the time humans were a thing) that this applies to. The fact that it weren’t executives but kings, queens and nobles thinking this way doesn’t really change much.
It’s not even necessarily malicious, but you really don’t want to think about the fact your life is so comfortable at the expense of other people.
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It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. 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 mo…
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…
You never need an excuse to ask, but neither side should feel compelled. The transaction is already complete.
Once you give something away, it doesn't matter if someone else gets rich off it. You gave it away. You're not, and shouldn't feel, entitled to anything.
If this bothers you, maybe you shouldn't have given it away for free?
> Anybody that says "nope, their money, they do what they want" is spouting the same flavor of dipshittery as "free speech only means the government can't censor, private companies are free to do what they want".
I don't know how to respond to this. This statement seems entirely paradoxical to me. Yes, it is their money, and they can do whatever they want. And also you accurately describe how free speech applies to private enterprises. Why are you so bothered by this?
There is a question of morality, sure, but that's a fruitless conversation to have. It's one thing to wish the world were different, but another to be angry with people who live in this world. Does this make me a person who merely spouts dipshittery?
You seem to acknowledge that the world is a certain a way, but feel shocked to find, and subsequently rebel against the idea that yes, it is actually that way. I don't understand this at all.
I for one appreciate that this site and others are moderated and restrict and remove posts containing hate speech. I imagine that the majority of readers and contributors would agree with me.
> Americans used to understand this. Know why there are schools all over the country named after Andrew Carnegie?
Perhaps it's because I, and the rest of the world, are not American, but I can't say I've ever given a moment of thought to the names of schools in your country, or Carnegie for that matter.
Perhaps America's fetish for capitalism is at the root of these divides. If you want to get paid and work on open source software full time, I can't think of a better way than under some form of universal basic income, but your capitalist infatuations make that unlikely. Charity is not the solution.
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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.
Is it "sour grapes" if I bring a big dish to a potluck to share and I get mildly irritated if someone walks over and takes the whole thing to their table, ensuring nobody else gets any of it? Is it fine if a crowd of strangers shows up to my potluck without bringing anything, takes all the food, and leaves? Should I be able to go to a food-bank-for-the-poor and walk out with a big crate full of food since it's free?…
Instead you brought your big dish to a food stall on a street corner that has the sign "FREE FOOD" in large font. Folks of all backgrounds, shapes and sizes show up and soon your food is gone.
If after that, instead of feeling warm and fuzzy that you did the world a solid, you wonder if any of those patrons were wealthy and could afford to pay for what you gave away for free, then maybe next time you should put a price tag on it.
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> 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…
Would it be unethical to refuse to fix bugs reported by employees of large corporations, unless those corporations pay a support contract or contribute a patch themselves?
If you want it fixed now submit a PR that I can accept. That’s what I do anyway.
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> 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?