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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#351

Post by mbrodersen »

O_H_E wrote: post #347
mbrodersen wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Open Source developers who give away their work for $0 are undermining their own value and the value of other peoples skills. Open Source should always come with a commercial license for companies.

Hey @mbrodersen, this is really not appreciated here on HN. This pasting of what is essentially the same reply on every top-level comment is borderline spam.

Are you a spokesperson for HN or a spokesperson for the HN community? If not then perhaps limit your comment to saying that you don't like it? That's fine. We all have our opinions. I (for example) personally don't like people who pretend to speak on behalf of other people when all they are doing is expressing their personal opinion.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#352

Post by mbrodersen »

dilyevsky wrote: post #350
mbrodersen wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why would anyone pay for business class airline tickets instead of (subsidized) coach? They both get to the destination at the same time!

That's a good question! However I am not sure what that has to do with what I am saying? People pay for over priced luxury goods all the time. There are psychological reasons for that (signaling wealth among other things).

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#353

Post by mbrodersen »

wpietri wrote: post #319
mbrodersen wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is one of those evo-psych just-so stories. American corporate culture in the late 20th/early 21st century is not representative of all humans at all times. I get that it's the dominant experience for you, but please don't confuse that with some sort of deep evolutionary imperative. One of the things that distinguishes humans as a species is how extremely social, how extremely cooperative we are. See, for example…

I agree with most of what you are saying. Groups cooperate internally and go to war with other groups externally. However that has nothing to do with my point. I am basically making an economic statement about how modern companies work.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#354

Post by dalke »

mbrodersen wrote: post #291
dalke wrote: post #160

> Open Source maintainers graduating to sophisticated counterparties who send invoices for "support and sponsorship" on letterhead, and big companies developing procedures to assess, approve, and pay them as a matter of routine so that they can get what they need from the ecosystem. The first 1/2 already exists. It's the companies which need to change. I say this from experience. I'm self-employed, with my own compan…

If you offer your work with a price tag of $0 then people/companies will pay $0 for it. The nativity of open source developers thinking otherwise is jaw dropping. So yes I agree that commercial licensing is the way to go.

Your view of the "nativity of open source developers" is itself naïve.

To my understanding, most people who want to get paid a reasonable amount to develop FOSS go one of two routes.

1) Service-oriented, à la the Cygnus Solutions (now Red Hat) approach. FOSS developers get paid to fix bugs, add features, answer questions, and provide training. This has been my approach.

2) Employer cost savings. Work as an employee for a company which saves money by developing software, but where the employer is not interested in bringing it to market.

See the section "Professionalizing the role of maintainer" of the linked-to essay for other examples of what a company might get through funding a FOSS project. ("security practices, like two-factor authentication and mandatory code review", etc.)

None of this is "work with a price tag of $0", and the very essay we're talking about gives counter-examples to your interpretation.

Furthermore, I tried selling FOSS software for a fee ($30K, not $0), and simple commercial licensing doesn't work either. Commercial proprietary licensing addressed certain economic problems that commercial FOSS licensing didn't resolve.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#355

Post by mbrodersen »

dalke wrote: post #354
mbrodersen wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you offer your work with a price tag of $0 then people/companies will pay $0 for it. The nativity of open source developers thinking otherwise is jaw dropping. So yes I agree that commercial licensing is the way to go.

Your view of the "nativity of open source developers" is itself naïve. To my understanding, most people who want to get paid a reasonable amount to develop FOSS go one of two routes. 1) Service-oriented, à la the Cygnus Solutions (now Red Hat) approach. FOSS developers get paid to fix bugs, add features, answer questions, and provide training. This has been my approach. 2) Employer cost savings. Work as an employee f…

I think you are slightly misunderstanding my point. I love OSS. I am a big fan. What I am not a fan of is maintainers giving their work away for $0 and then complaining that nobody pays them $ for their work. That is what I call naive. It shows a complete lack of understanding of how humans and markets work. If you want to be paid $ for your OSS work then make it part of the license and sue companies that doesn't pay. Or (as you say yourself) sell it as a service. Or perhaps an entrepreneur will start a business that specialize in enforcing OSS payments as a service to OSS developers (taking a % fee in return).

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#356

Post by meribold »

pabs3 wrote: post #303
donw wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Such a license doesn't seem likely to fit the Open Source Definition.

Some projects use a copyleft license like the GPL or AGPL by default but also sell their product under another license to parties that want to avoid copyleft. This way the product is FOSS but companies that want to use it in their proprietary software have to pay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing#Business_model...

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#357

Post by makeitdouble »

mfer wrote: post #84
jbk wrote: post #74

> 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…

> 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 routinely make investments to guarantee their future revenue.

Sometimes they could keep hiring for cheap a provider for one of their core needs, but choose to pay much more to have an exclusive contract and guarantee the provider doesn’t get scooped or goes under.

There can be any rationale applied to paying more money than the minimum they could get away with.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#358

Post by sa46 »

Jupe wrote: post #152

I don't know... I just don't see how OSS will ever be a real, sustainable business. The moment it does, someone else will simply subvert the paid-for software with a look-alike that does 90% of what the original does, but for free. In my view, this is the birth story of OSS. And I don't see any real market there. Even if you manage to find a "niche", like some sustainable software-as-a-service with subscription, ther…

Databases aren't a great example. There's a rich landscape of non open-source databases that provide features not available in open-source DBs. Cockroach DB, Spanner, SingleStore, Vertica, Snowflake.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#359

Post by hparadiz »

ipaddr wrote: post #309
hparadiz wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What stops a company from forking and paying 200,000 a year for someone to maintain vs paying 20,000 back? Money.. cheaper to support than fork.

Most of the open source tools used could be forked and used as is with no need to change them for years. Sure you could say they need security updates but I could also just silo off that stuff from anything important.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#360

Post by hparadiz »

raydev wrote: post #339
hparadiz wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So your argument is that people shouldn't be paid for their labor because the companies profiting from that labor might not be able to profit?

The labor was already given away for free. Don't maintain open source projects if you don't like the license.
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