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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#401

Post by emptyparadise »

mbrodersen wrote: post #294
bhauer wrote: post #34

I feel as if engineers at firms that build systems that use open source libraries should campaign internally to create budget line items for paying non-trivial amounts to the maintainers of those libraries. I find it difficult to blame developers individually. Individuals working at these companies aren't going to see it as their role to send some of their own after-tax income to maintainers via GitHub Sponsors unles…

Why should they? Open Source developers give away their work with a price tag of $0. So why should anybody pay more than $0 for it? Do you pay more than the asking price for things you buy?

It's morally right. Not everything in the world is a business transaction.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#402

Post by strenholme »

mbrodersen wrote: post #380
strenholme wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the reply, but you didn’t address the point I am making. My argument is this: People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free . I never argued in this thread that people should pay for my open source software. What I am saying is that people are being unreasonably entitled when they expect to also have free professional level support (e.g. private ema…

> People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free I agree. I don't argue that people should expect support to be free. What I am arguing is that if you don't put a market value on your work then you are signaling to the world that your skills and hours are worth $0. Even though your work clearly has intrinsic value for companies/people. > Trollish, because telling…

If Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett all download and start using my open source project tomorrow, that’s fine and I won’t ask them for a penny until when and if they start sending me emails or bug reports asking for support.

Indeed, big companies using my open source looks really great on my resume.

Both the GPL and AGPL are restrictive enough that it’s a reasonable business model to say “GPL if you won’t pay, non-GPL if you pay” and make money. The Juce toolkit, for example, is GPL if you don’t pay, but non-GPL if you do pay.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#403

Post by tester756 »

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…

>Developer IDEs - From console editors to full GUIs to online offerings; all free

JetBrain's IDEs are considered as the "best ones" and they're indeed paid.

Visual Studio which is great for C# development is free too, but not for business.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#404

Post by amelius »

hiq wrote: post #395
amelius wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change the license. Make it so that large companies have to pay, and small companies can still use it for free.

You're saying that they should make their software proprietary to solve the problem of FOSS maintenance. That's forgetting the implicit requirement that it should remain FOSS.

It's still FOSS, except if you are making millions using it and the entire issue becomes a luxury problem.

That's what FOSS should mean anyway. The old definition can be renamed into exploitationware.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#406

Post by amelius »

midasuni wrote: post #256
StreamBright wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate?

Ffmpeg’s code is owned by hundreds of people, you’d have to get them all to agree to relicense.

Not if you only change the license of the encompassing project, and leave the license of the sub-projects intact. Corporations are too addicted to plug-and-play software to be switching away to those sub-projects; also they'd lose the benefit of the maintenance (you could choose a new license once you maintain parts of the code).

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#407

Post by selfhoster11 »

laurent92 wrote: post #184
the_af wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Very sad if this ever comes to pass. It's a world in which I would never have learned about computers or decided to work with them. I think it makes more sense to charge big companies but keep software free and libre for individuals. (I don't think this future will h…

Shouldn’t Open Source be considered the 8th wonder of the world? - OSS allowed an entire industry to flourish, - It has had so many contributions that it is easily the category which is the biggest benevolence of the world, and possibly the biggest achievement of humanity, - It allowed the entire world to go securely on the internet (launch a Debian and it’s secure and up to very high professional standards without e…

> Its results are permanent. In 2100, documents written in Office 365 or Adobe will be lost, but they’ll be able to recompile LibreOffice, Chrome (at least Webkit) or Wordpress. Benefits of OSS accrue over time, as opposed to closed-source software which is sold under closed license and DRM.

In practice, I think that only entirely cloud based ecosystems will be lost to time. As long as the requisite hardware can be emulated and there is an archived version of a local viewer, it's possible to interpret a closed source format document. People already do it with WordStar and retro games.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#408

Post by selfhoster11 »

deterministic wrote: post #271
wpietri wrote: post #107

Earlier 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…

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 c…

> If you give away your work for $0 then the value of your work is $0.

I should've been paying my mother market rates. After all, she and my father have been running at a loss for this whole "family" enterprise.

IMO, open source is (or should be seen as) more of a "friends and family doing favours for each other" kind of human activity. Some people do it for the sheer joy of it, share without expectation of more than a "thank you" (at max), and calling their work valueless is just crass marketism.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#409

Post by selfhoster11 »

mbrodersen wrote: post #352
dilyevsky wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The point is that sometimes, profit isn't the only priority, so one may choose to pay even if they didn't have to.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#410

Post by selfhoster11 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #188
DarylZero wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean just ordinary employees really wouldn't get paid at all if not for labor regulations. Just look into the amount of simple "wage theft" (employers forcing employees to work off the clock, etc.) that exists in the USA. Of course, this country fought a war over the issue of free labor from black slaves.

What you say is nonsense. Companies will try to pay as little as possible to make more profit. They won't pay you more than you can make them. Employees will try to get paid as much as possible. They won't work for something they can't live on. All is good and dandy. If employees are not getting paid, they'll go and do something else (like another job or growing food themselves) or steal and starve if there are no jo…

> They would never work for free because they can't live without eating.

Except, slavery. Sure, the master pays as little as they can to keep the person alive, but staying alive is about the only good thing they get out of life.

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