I develop some open source software that I created. It's not very popular, maybe few use cases currently + my services hosted by me. But I still have an userbase and that userbase demands features from me. I tell them that the source code is open, you are free to create pull requests for me to review, but 95% of these people are no developers so they cannot do that. So now I have users who I care about, but who also demand me to develop the systems further. I don't know, I have mixed feelings about this situation, but in the end I drove myself in this dead-end, so it's my fault.
The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
61–70 of 413 posts
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#62The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is unsustainable. If someone releases code then that's it. You have it. Do what you want with it (within it's licence). Be thankful. Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing more you ungrateful little git. If you add this code to your project, you should fix and share any problems you e…
Those two things are connected. People will spend $10 on a coffee drink at Starbucks without blinking. Suggest that they spend $10 on a piece of software and they’ll throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on proprietary software.
Most of those people won’t spend $100 on open source software.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#63I think there should be some serious changes about this. Github already knows which software packages a company uses. They could facilitate this. For example if the OSS maintainer asks for it, any company more than say three members should pay a monthly fee per package. Even 1 USD per package per month would make a huge difference for OSS. So if your javascript package.json has 20 dependencies, and you are actively developing, every month you should expect to pay 20USDfor that package.json.
I know the math above can be challenged from multiple aspects. But we need to start from somewhere.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#64I don't agree with the author on how financial compensation should be structured or where does it have to come from.
My idea about what's currently in open-source domain is that it can be split into two categories: infrastructure projects that enable users to use their computers at the basic level, enable networking communication and maintain state-provided services land in "category A", while "category B" can be roughly described as interesting hobbies, leisure, entertainment etc.
What needs to happen, in my mind is that we need (international) organizations like eg. WHO to take care of the "category A" projects, where governments would have to allocate resources to finance and oversee these projects. Much in the same way how governments spend money on postal service or regulate / oversee banking. So, projects like Linux or OpenStack need to be under such international umbrella. This would require a bureaucratic process of examining such projects, estimating their usefulness, budgeting them etc.
On the other hand, non-essential projects, or projects that explicitly don't want government oversight / intervention could still work on the currently employed scheme: donations, sponsorship, volunteering.
In other words, I believe that some people working on open-source projects today ought to be paid. We just need a framework which establishes how much and how many such people can be employed for how long etc. It's prudent to make them (international) government employees to avoid playing into interests of sponsors who might not act in the interest of anyone but themselves.
For me, this would also solve a situation whereas employees of private companies are told / paid to work with open-source technology, but are powerless against the maintainers of such technology, while having no plausible alternatives. A lot of such projects succeed based solely on the good will of the open-source maintainers, but some fail due to the lack of, or deliver lower quality products. Having essential services covered by a government entity, and, by extension, being open to citizen complaints and wishes would make it possible to fight back against maintainers lacking the said good will.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#65Open source and "give me money" are the antithesis of each other.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#66I think an open source compensation system could work similar to how artists are payed when their song is played on the radio. Radio stations in Sweden pay a fee to an organisation which distributes the money to artists in proportion to the amount of playtime. Imagine a new type of open source license that mandated paying a membership fee to a global foundation to use the code commercially. Non-commersial use would s…
There is a similar debate going on among musicians about how very few are compensated much if at all while a few at the top get extremely rich.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> have a path to monetization for the builder The existence of the path to monetization is entirely outside their control though. Millions of people make viral videos, very few have benefited from it. The financial system disincentivizes or outright bans open-product monetization.
The many startups built around OSS projects such as Mongo, Kafka, Spark, and Linux seem to have found a way.
very few, one would call them exceptions to the rule
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think anyone is expecting you to donate to literally every project you use. However, say your business is to build and sell a product done in JS. You already have a bunch of JS devs, whom you may have even bought those sweet MacBooks. Let's also say, you're invested in keeping the code quality high, which you boast about in your product web page. Why not donate a $100/month to the JSLint project which is part…
That's a fine pitch for the merit of donating to ESLint, but if that pitch isn't working for the developer then he should either make peace with doing the work for free, or stop doing the work.
Yes, completely. If there's no business contract in place, it's hard to expect compensation of any sort. It's all hinged on the other party's willingness to recognize the value in keeping the project alive. Very few do.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#69The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it. Don’t do it! Who’s asking you to work on it? I say this as a minor OSS developer who receives some donations. I love the money, but it would be pretty dumb for me to say they oughta pay me, because the only reason I work on it is addiction/compulsion/procrastination of real work. If it bothered me that people…
This! Its always the same. When volunteers start to complain they aren't compensated for their work, things start to smell fishy. And this kind of behaviour seems to have increased lately. Rather sad. Either I do something for the love of it, or I am going for a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and these two are the same, but that is very much the exception.
Sometimes it's that devs still like the project, but more often it's probably just the fame/exposure that they don't want to lose. If you have no compassion for a project and the demand is high, it's still your decision to invest your time for no money exchange. You can just ignore the demands, if you can accept that your project might eventually fold.
This is additionally supported by the point that only few maintainers will hand out commit rights to other devs. They rather complain about all the workload and demands than give up some of all of their control, so others with more passion or who are even paid can continue working on the project.
If you want to be paid for your code, then pick a license model that matches it, but it will mean that you won't rise to the top, as only a limited amount of people will use it.
I wrote some more thoughts on this, during the "Moq incident" earlier this year: https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2023/09/23/foss-funding/
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the evidence for this feeling of entitlement? I use tons of free software. I've never either demanded that anyone work on it for free, nor have I expressed any sense of entitlement or expectation.
You’re in the majority. But look through any issue list of popular(ish) oss projects and there’s a small but very vocal minority just sucking up the maintainers’ energies like vampires.
I hear this and it makes sense that a minority of users sucks up a lot of time, but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people.
I've never maintained a popular open source project so maybe there's something about the situation I just don't understand. But it seems like:
> Thank you for your feature request, we will add it to the backlog. The core team doesn't work on unfunded feature requests because they use up a lot of time and resources. We are happy to review high quality PRs from anyone interested in implementing the feature. We also have a variety of sponsorship options, and a list of past contributors and maintainers available for contract work.
would be reasonable and polite?