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The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

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Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#81

Post by hypfer »

ahepp wrote: post #70
skrebbel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people.

One reason is that you're being told that that's an awful thing to do by basically every resource on "proper open-source" you can find.

Another is that these people are pretty good at starting shit storms trying to ruin your reputation if you don't comply with their unreasonable demands.

It's also worth nothing that some requests/issues/questions might be reasonable when viewed in isolation but not if there are hundreds of them.

Think for example stuff unrelated to the project but where you as a hacker could nonetheless help because you do know the answers/possess the skill. For me at least, I find it hard to deal with that, because I know that I could in theory help that person. I just can't in practice because time and energy are both finite.

> We are happy to review high quality PRs

Are we though? There's a lot of work attached to reviewing even high-quality PRs. Also, even if the PR is high quality, the maintainers will still be the ones maintaining that new feature so it's still significantly more work.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#82

Post by pjmlp »

mcpackieh wrote: post #17
lakpan wrote: post #7

The 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…

> I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users. From another angle, if I gave a dollar a month to every Free Software program or library I used that month, it would cost me thousands of dollars a month. Obviously that isn't realistic. I have donated to…

Welcome to the pre-2000's, when it was possible to actually make a living from selling software, without having to bundle it behind a SaaS paywall, hardware devices,...

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#83

Post by cxr »

lakpan wrote: post #7

The 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…

> I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not [have] thousands let alone millions of users.

The dirty secret of the GitHub era of open source is that many developers and open source codebases would be better off if such a thing happened.

A lot of stuff associated with the development processes that are fashionable with GitHub and programmer Twitter provide net negative value (e.g. issue close bots) or neutral value at best (because they solve a problem that really exists but not at the scale that most downstream projects that opt in are actually at). If it suddenly became necessary or even just strongly encouraged for programmers to pay a dollar a month for things that are only as pervasive as they are because they are free and give the false sense of productivity, then we'd see a huge dropoff in the adoption and use of lots of things that are of dubious value to begin with.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#84

Post by kawhah »

TuringNYC wrote: post #56
onion2k wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who’s asking you to work on it? All of the people who demand things from the maintainers are. Very few of them are willing to sponsor or pay consulting fees. If you give up they complain loudly, and then often pay a contractor to do the work they wanted . If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users. You could though, if the mindset of open source software consumers were to shift to…

Knowing most large corps, they would rather pay a contractor $175/hr for two months than sign a $20/month license. Also, you usually cannot hire the open-source maintainer as the contractor, you have to use some company with insider relationships. It isnt the engineering manager's fault at any large company. The policies make no sense, but there may be a larger wisdom that I do not understand.

So become a contractor, work for an inflated fee for two months. Then take a month off and work for yourself on whatever you want. Or just do nothing, if you prefer that to working on your own projects.

Economic injustices and inefficiencies can and do exist in free-ish markets. But this isn't one of them. It's more like "old man shouts at supply and demand".

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#85

Post by agent327 »

amelius wrote: post #71
ranting-moth wrote: post #13

The 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…

[flagged]

It still beats having a central planner from the politburo tell you to work in the mines for zero compensation.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#86

Post by balder1991 »

halukakin wrote: post #63

I 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 d…

Then suddenly a company paying more will feel like their demands are worth more than random Joey’s demands, and soon the backlog of the project is the company’s backlog and the maintainer will be treated as an employee with nonsensical deadlines and fixed long hours.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#87

Post by Qem »

johngossman wrote: post #57
Qem wrote: post #23

I wonder if, society-wide, the best way to allocate resources to free/open source software would be just reducing mandatory work hours. Say, if the average ~ 8h per day were reduced to 7h or 6h, how many of those freed millions of person-hours would be redirected to hobby software projects?

You’re suggesting we reduce the work day just for software engineers (many of whom probably work longer than 8 hours) but not other engineers, teachers, autoworkers? Or for everyone, just so people have more time to work on OSS? I’m all in favor of a shorter work week, but this seems a fringe motivation

Society-wide, for everyone. Most people would use those extra hours for things unrelated to software, like, spend more time with their children. But if even 0.1% of that goes to software, it still would be a huge amount of extra manpower. It's unfortunate despite all the productivity gains from technological advances in the last 60 years or so, the work week stayed the same size, roughly. Workers didn't earn a fair share of productivity gains.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#88

Post by sokoloff »

Qem wrote: post #23

I wonder if, society-wide, the best way to allocate resources to free/open source software would be just reducing mandatory work hours. Say, if the average ~ 8h per day were reduced to 7h or 6h, how many of those freed millions of person-hours would be redirected to hobby software projects?

I’d be pretty surprised if that increase averaged more than 15 seconds per person per day and shocked if the increase was more than 3 minutes on average.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#89

Post by pjmlp »

anonymous_sorry wrote: post #48
benj111 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do companies use open source because it's free? Cost may be a component. But not the only component, and cost doesn't have to be binary. You can charge and still be less than the alternatives.

The main benefit of using open source in a corporate environment is that there is usually zero paperwork involved. As long as the licence is approved, have at it! As soon as you pay money for something, either a fee or a donation, you've got to email someone. Almost certainly someone outside your team. Companies don't make decisions on individual OSS dependencies. Individual engineers and engineering teams do. That's…

Only if they don't care about liability.

Those that care, CI/CD only fetches from internal repos, and stuff is only uploaded into them after an audit.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#90

Post by anthk »

yu3zhou4 wrote: post #26
yu3zhou4 wrote: post #18

I'm on the same boat, so I built a marketplace for devs to charge for our software. Blueprint here: https://github.com/poss-market Long story short: I recently put the marketplace down, because I lack business skills If any of you is able to help with business side of the project, please reach out - mail in my profile

Let me just copy-paste it for easier access: - Your company's perspective: Pay for the software to receive reliable products from trusted vendors Business receives reliable open source software that is maintained on a daily basis, features are constantly developed and they receive a support from open source creators - Why? It's cheaper to pay a few (dozens / hundreds / thousands) bucks each year for a library, tool,…

That non profit license it's a big turd. It's nonfree. Period.
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