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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#441

Post by mbrodersen »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #408
deterministic wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are not getting my point. I am reacting to the OSS maintainers that get upset when the intrinsic value of their work doesn't automatically convert to market value ($ in their pockets). My point is to stop blaming the world and instead put a market value on their work for corporations.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#442

Post by dang »

mbrodersen wrote: post #441
selfhoster11 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are not getting my point. I am reacting to the OSS maintainers that get upset when the intrinsic value of their work doesn't automatically convert to market value ($ in their pockets). My point is to stop blaming the world and instead put a market value on their work for corporations.

Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been it a lot in these threads. I'm afraid it's repetitive and it lowers the quality of the discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#443

Post by wpietri »

mbrodersen wrote: post #439
wpietri wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've the one making a positive claim. Let's see your evidence that this was the dominant mode of thought in all places and all times.

What are you talking about? You are the one that's making the following claim: > 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 ... Which is a claim that can't be proven either way since you are talking about how people in all of history was thinking . In other words, you are making a claim that is just wishfu…

You have made a claim about "how the world works". Where's your backing for it?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#444

Post by wpietri »

mbrodersen wrote: post #438
wpietri wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you made a claim about "how humans function" over "millions of years of evolution". I guess you're abandoning that claim now? If so, maybe do it honestly.

No not at all. My comment was a reply to your argument: > One of the things that distinguishes humans as a species is how extremely social, how extremely cooperative we are Where I point out that what you are saying is not true in general. But it is true within a group (say a company) and not between groups (say between companies and OSS maintainers). Groups that corporate well within the group have an evolutionary a…

Again, you made a claim about the evolved nature of humanity. It seems like you can't back it up. Bluster all you want, but if you can't come up with actual citations, I think we're done here.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#445

Post by wpietri »

mbrodersen wrote: post #437
wpietri wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that you're trivializing the problems and insulting all of the people who have been trying to make it work for decades. I too have started successful businesses. What I learned from that was to respect the people doing the actual work, rather than to run around arrogantly blustering, "It isn't rocket science."

You are attacking a point I am not making. My point is that some OSS maintainers don't understand that they have to think about their work as a business if they want to see any $ thrown their way. That's the part that isn't rocket science. I agree with you that actually doing it is hard. My message is to stop whining that companies/people don't give them $ out of the kindness of their hearts and instead accept it and…

No, I'm "attacking" a point you're making.

This notion that one has to think about it as a business is just false. That is one way to do it, but open source funding happens other ways too. Your attitude that anybody must be an idiot if they want to solve in a way incongruent with your hypercapitalist fantasies is both rude and ignorant. If anybody's being childish here, it's the person treating them as "whining".

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#446

Post by wpietri »

dang wrote: post #442
mbrodersen wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not getting my point. I am reacting to the OSS maintainers that get upset when the intrinsic value of their work doesn't automatically convert to market value ($ in their pockets). My point is to stop blaming the world and instead put a market value on their work for corporations.

Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been it a lot in these threads. I'm afraid it's repetitive and it lowers the quality of the discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks. My apologies for taking the bait.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#447

Post by cxr »

wpietri wrote: post #413
Aeolun wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So what's your evidence here besides some hazy gesturing at "kings, queens and nobles"? 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 Histo…

You haven't worked enough shit jobs if you think that un-"moneyed" plebs aren't similarly willing to fuck someone else over if it means they have the opportunity to three-quarters-ass their work and leave the rest to a coworker who they are on a first-name basis with and is otherwise friendly to them.

"IDGAF, it's not me" and "ask for forgiveness, not permission" is not in any sense a minority viewpoint. Even people who insist they don't follow those creeds have the issue of being, more often than not, unreliable narrators of their own actions—not to mention: economically irrational in ways that extend to the economics of non-monetary, give-and-take systems.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#448

Post by moksly »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #70
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…

The welfare queen megacorps have been too comfortable expecting handouts like open source charity work and public bailouts. Open source software has served the elite executive class while leaving working people to depend on anti-freedom proprietary offerings. I am sick of watching it go down like that. The never-ending data leaks, dark patterns, lock-in strategies, and attacks on encryption and freedom of speech, are…

Did open source ever serve working people?

Where the GNU project always fell short in my opinion was that it thought there was a difference between free to use and free as in beer.

There was an abundance of people who predicted where the internet would head once big corporations got into it. There is an entire genre of cyberpunk authors who did after all, and I guess Stallman gets credit for trying to stop it, but it always comes down to money.

It’s very easy to fool yourself into thinking differently, but the harsh truth is that everything you do for money is being weighed and evaluated by someone in the management chain whom, at the very least, considers if you’re worth your cost, every three months.

I just don’t see how OSS is supposed to have changed in that regard. Maybe it was more ideological when it was mainly paid for by academia, but someone still paid for it, and considering how much OSS has improved in the wake of corporate capitalism taking over, academia don’t appear to have paid enough.

That’s easy for me to say of course, I have no solutions, but I still think we’re better off now than ever.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#449

Post by pabs3 »

mbarbar wrote: post #325
pabs3 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux kernel, take a look at the LWN stats about who develops it; mostly large corporations.

I knew it was largely corporations but thought the final call was with Linus/the lieutenant system, and that Linus specifically wasn't beholden to any particular corporation (well, barring binary blobs I suppose). Is that no longer the case?

Linus is paid by the Linux Foundation, which is funded by corporations. I don't either LF or their funders have any influence over Linus. The funding side of things doesn't seem to matter though, because those corporations contribute directly. For example, there was some DRM enforcement code added to Linux and more recently Intel is trying to get their "software defined silicon" stuff into Linux.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#450

Post by deterministic »

wpietri wrote: post #445
mbrodersen wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are attacking a point I am not making. My point is that some OSS maintainers don't understand that they have to think about their work as a business if they want to see any $ thrown their way. That's the part that isn't rocket science. I agree with you that actually doing it is hard. My message is to stop whining that companies/people don't give them $ out of the kindness of their hearts and instead accept it and…

No, I'm "attacking" a point you're making. This notion that one has to think about it as a business is just false. That is one way to do it, but open source funding happens other ways too. Your attitude that anybody must be an idiot if they want to solve in a way incongruent with your hypercapitalist fantasies is both rude and ignorant. If anybody's being childish here, it's the person treating them as "whining".

There is no need to be rude. I have no “hypercapitalist fantasies” thank you very much :)
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