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I'm not good enough to work on open source software

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Re: I'm not good enough to work on open source software

#51

Post by aliguori »

I'm paid to work on Open Source full time and have been for the better part of a decade.

I don't really agree with anything the article says. Open Source development is a segment of the industry. Getting a job in Open Source is really no different than getting a job in Game Development, Robotics, or any other niche market.

You generally have to (1) be willing to accept less pay (2) be more flexible about relocating (3) have specialized skills and experience or just get really lucky.

Re: I'm not good enough to work on open source software

#52

Post by davidw »

ajross wrote: post #49
davidw wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a ton of money out there that pays for full-time open source developers. I don't know... I'm not sure it's really a ton. And a great deal of it comes from companies that derive their revenue from something else - in many cases, proprietary software. Ubuntu, for instance, is all about Mark's millions made from the sale of Thawte. > So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your…

For some definition of "ton" anyway. Developers are cheap, comparatively. But the point remains: all the major kernel developers are paid for. All the big X.org people too; the Gnome people (though I'm told that investment is lacking on KDE); virtualization folks behind Xen and kvm; Android obviously comes right out of Google's payroll, likewise Chrome and Mozilla products. Really, if you were handed a big check and…

Anecdote time:

My last big open source effort, Hecl, weighs in at something like 100K lines of code. LiberWriter, my first real "pay for it if you want to use it" project, doesn't quite pay me enough to live on, yet, but earns decent money at around 10% of the lines of code.

I did make some money consulting on Hecl, so it's not a total loss, and I had fun with it, and learned a lot. But in terms of the money, there's simply no competition: LiberWriter wins by a huge margin, even though it's simpler code that doesn't do as much.

The big difference is with LW, people pay me directly. With Hecl, it was a matter of hoping someone would come along and pay to have some work done on it. It's just so much easier to deal with the former in terms of cash coming in.

Re: I'm not good enough to work on open source software

#53

Post by antirez »

jonstjohn wrote: post #39
antirez wrote: post #26

I guess that in some way a lot of companies are taking from open source without giving enough back. Open source is much cheaper than proprietary software to produce, a team of a few guys do the work of what would be a much bigger team in a proprietary software, and there is no need to have a profit, paying the developers is enough, so... if companies using open source would give back even a small amount of money... B…

My company, probably like many, uses a majority of open source software but rarely contributes back. As an aspiring open source developer (several projects in the works, not yet released), this has always felt wrong. Honestly, I haven't really raised it much with my company, though. Guilty as charged, although we've made some movement to release a few bits of code under an open license. Interesting thing is that we c…

"Interesting thing is that we currently give 1% of our profits to an environmental program through Patagonia called 1% for the Planet."

I think you are already doing it right, honestly. If you devolve 1% to whatever non-profit / good cause IMHO it's already enough. The real problem is that most companies will not do anything like that (1% is a lot), otherwise a few 1% to environment, a few 1% to open source, the world wold be a different place, entirely.

Re: I'm not good enough to work on open source software

#54

Post by antirez »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #33
antirez wrote: post #26

I guess that in some way a lot of companies are taking from open source without giving enough back. Open source is much cheaper than proprietary software to produce, a team of a few guys do the work of what would be a much bigger team in a proprietary software, and there is no need to have a profit, paying the developers is enough, so... if companies using open source would give back even a small amount of money... B…

IF open source is The Way, it wouldn't need subsidizing. It sounds like all utopian arguments: If Only everybody came around to the right way of thinking, we'd all be better off. Sure its true, but it aint gonna happen.

yep, but it's strange because it's hard to think at the whole IT economy of today without open source. The idea of startups itself was completely different. What Unix? buy a license, with proprietary hardware maybe, and then purchase the web server license, and the compiler...

So soon or later it's gonna happen maybe as everything is posing on this base.

Re: I'm not good enough to work on open source software

#56

Post by smsm42 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #22
msie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, I hate the use of the Chinese as the boogeyman.

Then imagine the Indians, or the Germans, or (to a much lesser extent) the Israelis. The point is, what if someone says, "My comparative advantage will be that I steal your code and localize it for people who don't speak your language"? Baidu is Chinese Google, Wallah is Israeli Yahoo. Once you've got web designs out in public, or important algorithms like PageRank in published research papers, these supposed "trade…

Baidu and Wallah did not "steal code" from Google and Yahoo. You can argue they "stole" ideas of search and portal, but that would imply there's ownership of these concepts and it belongs to Google and Yahoo - which is wrong on both counts, both ideas existed long before their implementations by current kings of the hill, and nobody owns them.

If you think copying Google is "dead easy", you're well on the way to become a multi-millionaire. I've tried recently a number of emerging search engines, and none of them is as good as Google, despite the fact that copying PageRank is supposed to be dead easy. On the other hand, I'm sure Google's understanding of Chineese or Hebrew or Russian is not perfect and specialized engines can do much better (I know about Yandex on Russian market, but I'm sure there are more).

There's a place on these markets for much more than one player, so treating everybody being in the same search engine market as Google as "stealing intellectual property" makes zero sense. It's like treating everyone that makes smartphones as "stealing Apple's intellectual property". Maybe some hardcore Apple fanboys think that way, but this is not useful for anybody but them and Apple, certainly not for the consumers or for the public.

As for "respect for intellectual property", I don't see why Chinese should necessarily respect artificial mental constructs that were erected by Western politicians in order to produce some utilitarian value. These things are defined as utilitarian, the only reason that is being argued of why somebody can use the idea and somebody else can not is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". If Chinese do not agree that this would promote Progress and useful Arts for them, why they should feel obligation to respect it?

Re: I'm not good enough to work on open source software

#57

Post by herval »

npsimons wrote: post #27
bunderbunder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might be instructive to think of what the world was like before the idea of letting people who create intellectual products maintain some ownership of (and therefore be more able to make a living from) their work: - Serfdom was still legal in most of Western Europe. - Professional artists occupied the same social rung as prostitutes. - An intellectual professional's primary option for making a living off h…

I can play this game too: you know what the software industry was like before Microsoft and Apple? EVERYTHING was open source. When you bought a program (if they didn't throw it in for free with the bloody expensive hardware) you ALWAYS got source code. People still sell open source software; I've never understood why people think that commercial software is incompatible with open source. It isn't.

your own statement explains why it was like that: because software was just a small commodity passed along the real stuff (the hardware). Not much of an industry there...

Re: I'm not good enough to work on open source software

#58

Post by ajross »

davidw wrote: post #52
ajross wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some definition of "ton" anyway. Developers are cheap, comparatively. But the point remains: all the major kernel developers are paid for. All the big X.org people too; the Gnome people (though I'm told that investment is lacking on KDE); virtualization folks behind Xen and kvm; Android obviously comes right out of Google's payroll, likewise Chrome and Mozilla products. Really, if you were handed a big check and…

Anecdote time: My last big open source effort, Hecl, weighs in at something like 100K lines of code. LiberWriter, my first real "pay for it if you want to use it" project, doesn't quite pay me enough to live on, yet, but earns decent money at around 10% of the lines of code. I did make some money consulting on Hecl, so it's not a total loss, and I had fun with it, and learned a lot. But in terms of the money, there's…

Isn't that just saying that LiberWriter is a more successful product than Hecl? I mean, if Google or whoever wanted to base a service on Hecl, they would have hired you, right? My analogy was to startup funding, not sales, but I think it still holds.

Certainly if you make something people want, people will pay you to develop it. I don't see a real problem with the model, though for obvious reasons the incentives are going to drive more people to startups than to new open source projects.

Re: I'm not good enough to work on open source software

#59

Post by SirDinosaur »

For those interested in sustaining themselves by making open / libre software, I plan on dedicating my next summer to starting a cooperative for hackers. The basic idea is that if we can create a decentralized ecosystem for exchanging currency, ideas, and goods in an open and cooperative manner, we can solve our needs as hackers without resorting to non-free alternatives. You can find my early planning here: https://github.com/SirDinosaur/hackercoop, and I'd greatly appreciate any questions, comments, critiques on how to make my / our dream possible.

Re: I'm not good enough to work on open source software

#60

Post by DanBC »

SirDinosaur wrote: post #59

For those interested in sustaining themselves by making open / libre software, I plan on dedicating my next summer to starting a cooperative for hackers. The basic idea is that if we can create a decentralized ecosystem for exchanging currency, ideas, and goods in an open and cooperative manner, we can solve our needs as hackers without resorting to non-free alternatives. You can find my early planning here: https://…

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