411–420 of 464 posts
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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.
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> It has certainly 'worked great' for leeches, And for communities, and for sponsoring companies, and for some (although not all) authors. > if you ignore bombs like this logging bug destroying Western civilization. ...yeah, no; a library had a bug. Somehow, Western civilization is still here. > Can you explain a bit more how it worked great for the bulk of maintainers / authors who don't see any return on their work…
> library had a bug That was exploited since April https://github.com/nice0e3/log4j_POC ... this 'bug' is RCE on the logging infrastructure. > Can you explain why you think the majority of authors/maintainers burn out? Please try maintaining a popular FOSS project for a few years and explaining to your wife why you neither have any money nor have any time.
And yet, Western civilization is still here.
>> Can you explain why you think the majority of authors/maintainers burn out?
> Please try maintaining a popular FOSS project for a few years
The majority of projects aren't popular, so you're comparing apples to oranges. For many, I suspect most, projects, the user base is tiny and low pressure.
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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…
> It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history 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 e…
Because when you look at actual history, you see long-running mutual relationships. E.g. the English Commons system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land
Or you could look at the Mexican ejido system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejido
Which descends from the Aztec capulli system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calpulli
Historically, leadership was tightly bound to productive land, because that's what everybody needed to survive. Your "nobles" could in the long term only be as successful as the people they ruled over, and the feedback loops there weren't long ones. Were there sometimes bad nobles and bad kings? Sure. But overall, the badness was limited because harming the "infrastructure" of the day, land and people, was felt quickly by people higher up the hierarchy. Sustainability was a must.
That's distinct from modern capitalism in the age of industry and information technology, because the portability of wealth and the long feedback loops mean executives can get quite rich in unsustainable situations. The elevation of an IGMFY ideology to become the dominant view of the moneyed was only recently possible because for most of history one couldn't escape the consequences like people can now.
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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…
Which world are you talking about? History is full of people exploiting other people. Mention any period of history where people were not trying their damn hardest to exploit other people?
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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.
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I'm not suggesting it's magic. Indeed, what I specifically said was that we should work to build strong cultural expectations. Which are very much necessary in all the cases you name. 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 e…
Yes and no. A lot of that spending is done with a monetary incentive in mind. Companies aren’t completely devoid of understanding that there is a certain breaking point where being shitty can have financial consequences. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, not predominantly anyways. They can use charitable contributions to project a public persona (earned or not) of being good, for the purposes…
The history of the minimum wage isn't that some bureaucrat mandated it and then everybody said, "Gosh, that's a good idea, let's keep it." There was a long period of advocacy for it, a period of persuading people that it was the right thing to do. That was the ground in which all the work for the change grew.
Today, software developers are the key labor force for this change, and we aren't organized. So in practice, the first work we have to do is to persuade the bulk of programmers that it's part of their professional duty to make sure their employers support the open-source projects that their businesses depend on.
Companies will do it if we insist. In the grand scheme of things, it isn't even much money, not compared to what they're paying programmers in salary, benefits, and cushy amenities.
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Oh? Shame nobody's ever tried that. But since you've had a brand new idea that you're sure will solve the problem, how about you take a swing at it? Show us how easy it is.
Where did I say it was a brand new idea? Where did I say it would be easy? Starting a business is hard. I founded and ran my own succesful business so I know how hard it is. I am not sure what your point is?
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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…
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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…
> reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced ... free work oof, I know that feeling - that sadness that comes with the realization that the manufacturer could have saved you so much trouble but chose not to... which you then rewarded with free labor and promotion. I got it every time I disassembled binary blobs in order to get hardware to work with anything beyond Windows. For a long time there wasn't much of a…
I don't regret trying it once. It's possible, after all, that the manufacturer would have said, "Look, there's demand for an open protocol, just like some engineers have been saying. Let's take on that work ourselves." And honestly, they could have gotten away with some very modest support of the project: occasional discussions with engineers and enough free hardware that we could test new builds. But no shits were given on their part, so I also don't regret shutting the project down.
I'm glad to hear things are getting better in some spaces. Let's hope it keeps going that way!
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Would following an open core model work better, like it has for Hashicorp, Sidekiq, Tailwind, etc? Also, would focusing more on the low 4 figures result in more revenue? I feel the crowd sensitive to open source has that kind of spending authority, but once you get into the enterprise amounts, it's out of our reach to effect change.
That could work if the cost per sale were sufficiently low. But unless companies set up some sort of low-overhead system for putting that kind of money into open-source projects, I can't see it working. From what I hear, most devs can't just say, "We use project X a lot, so I'm going to fill out their web form right now and expense a $1k annual donation."