Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
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Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
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Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#2As someone trying to make a living out of my OSS work, this kind of clickbait titles really get on my nerves. Just yesterday, like most week a company did contact me to get support but when sent a payment link and instead of ignoring me took the path of questioning why would they pay for OSS. This kind of behaviour is so common, I have a canned answer for all those companies oss attracts trying to get things for free:
OSS doesn't mean free labour and I value my time. FYI I would have made better money flipping burgers than working on this and I can't realistically extend that principle to help everyone on the internet with a rate that's below minimum wage where I live.
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#3As someone trying to make a living out of my OSS work, this kind of clickbait titles really get on my nerves. Just yesterday, like most week a company did contact me to get support but when sent a payment link and instead of ignoring me took the path of questioning why would they pay for OSS. This kind of behaviour is so common, I have a canned answer for all those companies oss attracts trying to get things for free…
The author did say that open source maintainers should be paid and was harsh about exploitive corporations. They were simply stating that we should not expect the maintenance problem to be solved by paying developers. Whether that's true or not is debatable. Historically, some have certainly made a living off of developing OSS since their work was valued enough for someone to hire them or because there have been people willing to pay for their services. On the other hand, many more have not been given that opportunity. Perhaps paying them will solve the maintenance problem, or perhaps it will only reveal other underlying hurdles with open source development.
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#4Nobody claimed that. Paying maintainer is a start.
Ideally any "important" project would have organization behind it, with some people ready to react when security problem hits (even if usual maintainer/developer takes well-deserved vacation) but the whole problem is convincing corpo it's worth investing outside of disasters like OpenSSL which was essentially paid to make code worse.
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#5As someone trying to make a living out of my OSS work, this kind of clickbait titles really get on my nerves. Just yesterday, like most week a company did contact me to get support but when sent a payment link and instead of ignoring me took the path of questioning why would they pay for OSS. This kind of behaviour is so common, I have a canned answer for all those companies oss attracts trying to get things for free…
The author did say that open source maintainers should be paid and was harsh about exploitive corporations. They were simply stating that we should not expect the maintenance problem to be solved by paying developers. Whether that's true or not is debatable. Historically, some have certainly made a living off of developing OSS since their work was valued enough for someone to hire them or because there have been peop…
> was harsh about exploitive corporations
taken from the article: "it’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a consequence to be embraced and exploited (if you’re clever enough)"
another interesting quote: "Microsoft and other companies railed about Open Source being a cancer on intellectual property: because it is"
none of the points made by the author are fundamental truth and most of his actual points are in direct opposition to what I do in my own OSS bubble everyday
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#6I mean, it's the downfall of all facile answers, isn't it? "If you aren't the customer, you're the product" falls down when closed-source companies turn around and sell their smaller customers to their bigger customers, and the idea that you can't dictate terms to someone you're not paying falls down when someone debunks the contrapositive by saying no to a paying client. There's no silver bullet to make software always do what you want, so why should there be a silver bullet to always make humans always comply?
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author did say that open source maintainers should be paid and was harsh about exploitive corporations. They were simply stating that we should not expect the maintenance problem to be solved by paying developers. Whether that's true or not is debatable. Historically, some have certainly made a living off of developing OSS since their work was valued enough for someone to hire them or because there have been peop…
> was harsh about exploitive corporations taken from the article: "it’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a consequence to be embraced and exploited (if you’re clever enough)" another interesting quote: "Microsoft and other companies railed about Open Source being a cancer on intellectual property: because it is" none of the points made by the author are fundamental truth and most of his actual points are in direct op…
> another interesting quote: "Microsoft and other companies railed about Open Source being a cancer on intellectual property: because it is"
well, that's wrong because Microsoft and other companies were worried about free (and therefore, open source) software.
IMO, open source (without any mention of the ideological aspect of liberty and freedom) is/was their remedy for this
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#8Using the argument that "X is not a magic bullet" is a pretty sure sign you're not worth listening to.
Nothing is a magic bullet, and we all know that.
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#9It sure isn't, but how about we do it anyway, and then take it from there, because it's the right thing to do?
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#10Whenever someone says they are for open source but then cry when someone makes money off of their open sourced code all I see is some greedy mf crying he didn’t figure out how to make money out of his project.
Almost always your open source project is nothing special when it is used by “everyone” you just happened to either be first or by pure luck were picked up by some other project that made your famous. That is the beauty of open source it doesn’t live or die based one one individual. If you don’t like the project anymore do something else if you want to make money then you need to start with that in mind. Trying to pivot to for profit after decade of free software is pure bait and switch.