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Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

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Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#181

Post by indigochill »

southerntofu wrote: post #154
cobertos wrote: post #73

Only certain FOSS is worth working on for me. Here's my heuristic as of today. * Don't work on FOSS that supports a SaaS or proprietary product. You're enriching someone else's ecosystem for no money. You take on the communication bandwidth and issue load of dealing with not only your issues but their issues too. Your software is useless if theirs fails. It's thankless. * Don't work on FOSS you aren't using yourself…

> Don't work on FOSS that supports a SaaS or proprietary product. So true. I'd expand on that with a more specific example: game modders. When i look at all the energy spent on game mods which bring significant (gratis) value to commercial games, i can't help but wonder what the FOSS gamedev ecosystem would look like if all those dedicated people put their energy on free-software ecosystem. Minecraft for example made…

On the other hand, plenty of game modders have started a productive career from modding.

In an ideal world, I'd agree it would be better that that energy would go into free software. But in our current world, if there's a proprietary game someone is hooked on to the point they get excited about modding when they otherwise wouldn't and that modding leads to a career or even just skill development and perhaps connections with other modders, then overall it seems like it's still a productive use of time, if not entirely an equitable one from a monetary perspective.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#182

Post by tonyedgecombe »

10000truths wrote: post #90
tlocke wrote: post #79

I work on a few Open Source libraries and they're used by companies that make a lot of money, and people often regard me as a mug for doing the hard work for free so that other people can make lots of money. The argument I give in response is that from an economic perspective, you can only make money from a unique advantage, and since Open Source can be used by anyone, it's not giving anyone a unique advantage. I'd p…

Also, lots of open source software only achieves widespread use because they are open source. If e.g. Daniel Stenberg had decided to charge for curl instead of releasing it under a FOSS license, very few would have bothered to use it, and in all probability, some other person would have written a FOSS replacement for it.

I'd argue that most open source software only achieves widespread use because it is free (as in beer).

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#183

Post by ahelwer »

kklisura wrote: post #100

I think all of these discussions revolve around singe point: people want all of the benefits of working on FOSS - working on what you love passionately, working at your own pace, whenever, wherever, not being responsible to anyone but yourself and also have access to large audience of developers that will use your software, but they also want all the benefits and incentives that corporate/company structure offers. I…

In my view it's about the interface. Any utopian community must interface with the rest of the currently-not-utopian world. I suspect the utopian aspect can only be maintained if that interface is very small and restricted. Otherwise the property-based wider society will grow to dominate and maximally exploit the utopia, as is its nature. This concept is explored in The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#184

Post by dspillett »

cobertos wrote: post #73

Only certain FOSS is worth working on for me. Here's my heuristic as of today. * Don't work on FOSS that supports a SaaS or proprietary product. You're enriching someone else's ecosystem for no money. You take on the communication bandwidth and issue load of dealing with not only your issues but their issues too. Your software is useless if theirs fails. It's thankless. * Don't work on FOSS you aren't using yourself…

> Don't work on FOSS you aren't using yourself anymore.

More-or-less agreed.

> This heuristic isn't fully fleshed yet

I'd perhaps extend it as:

“Don't work on FOSS you or people you sufficiently care about aren't using anymore.”

Who qualifies as those you care about and why is an entirely personal thing and I'll not judge anyone's choice there. They could be friends, they could represent a cause you support, they could be randoms and you just get off on feeling helpful, they could be important and you like to be associated, you could be being paid to care, etc.

Also it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway as I'm in a wordy mood, if you are enjoying working on something even if you don't use the output I'd still consider that to be finding some use in what-ever it is.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#185

Post by swframe2 »

A better question, should we change the license of all FOSS to require companies to pay a support fee so that a lot more people can work on FOSS full-time? Or maybe, should we create a company like redhat that hires people to work on all FOSS projects and is supported by industry and governments?

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#186

Post by onion2k »

janto wrote: post #157
onion2k wrote: post #107

If I make a pencil and give it to someone, and they use it to draw a picture that they sell for $10m, they haven't ripped me off. They've added a lot of value to that pencil. I haven't lost anything. They haven't "profited from my work". They've done something pretty amazing using a tool I created. Good for them. FOSS is the same. The idea that people are taking FOSS code and building billion dollar companies with it…

Ha! Equating the relative value and effort that went into the underlying FOSS tech to "just a pencil", is a pretty accurate description of what a company does. In reality, many a company would put a frame around the picture and market itself as an innovative artist. There's value in the frame, sure...however...

Equating the relative value and effort that went into the underlying FOSS tech to "just a pencil", is a pretty accurate description of what a company does.

Take Facebook as an example. The first version of Facebook was essentially built on 4 FOSS projects - Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Facebook couldn't exist without them (or alternatives). But of themselves nothing about those projects represents the value that lies in creating Facebook.

Suggesting that the value in a product is within the programming language, database, server software, or OS that it's built on makes no sense. Certainly no more than suggesting a valuation picture owes something to the person who made the pencil it was drawn with. It absolutely doesn't.

FOSS applications are tools that we use to build things. They're essential, and critical, and immensely useful, and companies ought to fund the maintenance of them much more, but they are not where the value in the applications that people use them to build comes from.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#187

Post by usrusr »

jasonkester wrote: post #151
99_00 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software needs to be maintained to be useful. Proofs don't. So for many, it is not the same.

Some software does. Most probably wouldn’t if the author could be convinced to stop when it was done. Personally, I’ve shipped several open source libraries that are still in use in lots of places despite me not having added a commit in over 10 years. They do the thing, don’t do anything else, don’t depend on other stuff, and thus don’t have a lot of surface to attack. Imagine if the log4j guys had built their thing…

An interesting perspective.

A late youth hobby of mine was being active in a coding community that wasn't open source, it was "lost source": based around a piece of freeware that was literally lost to a local storage hardware malfunction. But it had an API and a decade of stability (as in lack of API change, not lack of crashing unfortunately) and that caused an amazing amount of creativity, cooperation and so.

Perhaps this is an inherent weakness of open source: it's always easier to accept one more feature PR than committing to an API that remains sufficiently stable for that feature to happen in an isolated module.

I'm not saying that its always better to strive for the API instead of inclusion, it's a weakness as much as it is a strength, but chances are many situations where separation would have been better will be missed. It's a cultural bias.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#189

Post by liveoneggs »

janto wrote: post #157
onion2k wrote: post #107

If I make a pencil and give it to someone, and they use it to draw a picture that they sell for $10m, they haven't ripped me off. They've added a lot of value to that pencil. I haven't lost anything. They haven't "profited from my work". They've done something pretty amazing using a tool I created. Good for them. FOSS is the same. The idea that people are taking FOSS code and building billion dollar companies with it…

Ha! Equating the relative value and effort that went into the underlying FOSS tech to "just a pencil", is a pretty accurate description of what a company does. In reality, many a company would put a frame around the picture and market itself as an innovative artist. There's value in the frame, sure...however...

go make a pencil this afternoon

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#190

Post by adam_arthur »

cobertos wrote: post #73

Only certain FOSS is worth working on for me. Here's my heuristic as of today. * Don't work on FOSS that supports a SaaS or proprietary product. You're enriching someone else's ecosystem for no money. You take on the communication bandwidth and issue load of dealing with not only your issues but their issues too. Your software is useless if theirs fails. It's thankless. * Don't work on FOSS you aren't using yourself…

Or just wait for a SaaS to start using your project and then change the license to monetize.

Lol!

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