Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

trstringer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 413 posts

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

#271

Post by JoshTriplett »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #97
JoshTriplett wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking donations is hard work. As many problems as there are with GitHub (social lock-in, Copilot laundering Open Source license violations), GitHub Sponsors is incredibly valuable and substantially reduces the friction for getting support for an Open Source project.

I don't think he is speaking about the ability to get donations. Rather about the tax consequences. It doesn't matter to governments how you got money, you have to declare it, even if it is GitHub Sponsors. He did not say which country, but my guess would be Germany. You have to declare every penny here.

The last part of the post is about the difficulty of getting people to donate, which GitHub Sponsors helps with. The first part is about the tax consequences, which Sponsors still helps somewhat with: while you still have to pay the requisite tax, with GitHub Sponsors you have one source of income to declare, rather than many small ones, which often reduces the amount of paperwork.

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

#272

Post by teddyh »

growse wrote: post #268
teddyh wrote: post #262

The feeling of entitlement of some developers is sometimes baffling. They have a position of authority in a project, and got that authority based on their demonstrated trustworthiness and ability to deliver useful software. Now they don’t feel like doing that anymore, but instead of resigning their position in the project like a responsible person, they want to use their earned trust to be paid for software developme…

> they want to use their earned trust to be paid for software development. They're entitled to do that, and you're entitled to fork it.

Everybody’s entitled to be impolite. But I can still argue against it.

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

#273

Post by growse »

teddyh wrote: post #270
growse wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> B: Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information, as being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future development. So if I had a text file in the root of my repo that said: THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHE…

That text does not disclaim support, security bugfixes, and future development. On the contrary, all three of those things are probably either heavlily implied or outright stated to be available on the project web site.

You and I are reading "SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION." very differently.

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

#274

Post by [deleted] »

candiddevmike wrote: post #251
teddyh wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A maintainer position for a software project is like any position or role, in say, a charity. You aren’t technically forced to do the work, but the charity announces publicly (on its web site, for instance) that the work will be done, and people expect it to be done. If you do not feel up to doing it anymore, you owe it to other people (who expect the work to be done) to announce your retirement and hand the position…

> B: Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information, as being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future development. Pretty sure every open source license includes this in the warranty line...

[deleted]

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

#275

Post by ejb999 »

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.

absolutely true - once sat around in a meeting which the combined cost of the contractors in that meeting was ~$2500 per hour - we met for 90 minutes arguing about which of the customer departments would be responsible for paying the $50/month subscription fee for twilio services for the year.

We could have paid for 50 months of that service with the money we spent trying to figure out who would be responsible for the bill.

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

#276

Post by Kim_Bruning »

I get the feeling that FLOSS holds the niche that software patents were supposed to hold. To wit, it publicly discloses methods of the art to a practitioner in such a way that (s)he can fully implement it.

Software patents don't actually do this to a sufficient granularity (at least imao) , but get paid for; while floss does this to sufficient granularity that a compiler actually can implement it.

Basically we seem to have a collection of loose bits that variously ensures we have a public foundation for software development, and other loose bits that ensure people get paid for disclosing things.

The thing we don't have is one single cohesive system where people get paid to disclose the state of the art as a public foundation for software development.

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

#277

Post by yawboakye »

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…

it gets complicated when the project is intentionally marketed, and users deliberately attracted. i think at that point it ceases being purely source available and burdens the creator/marketer with support duties. unfortunately at the moment, most open source projects are actively marketed, including fringe and poorly thought out products.

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

#278

Post by gruppe_sechs »

selimthegrim wrote: post #269
gruppe_sechs wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot the part where the central planners herded millions of people into Gulags, starved tens of millions more to death, then executed a few million more for good measure. Other than that, spot on though.

GULAG is an acronym for a state organ, it can’t be pluralized.

Maybe in the original Russian, but the English word "gulag" can refer to an individual camp and not just the organisation that ran them: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gulag

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

#279

Post by alfons_foobar »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #42
dale_glass wrote: post #9

One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking donations is hard work. I live in a country completely unsuited to making money from a hobby project on the side. To take donations I'd need to register as self-employed, and pay monthly for social security as long as I'm registered, even if I make no revenue whatsoever in that month. That's an absolutely awful idea for a project just getting started. I'd…

> One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking donations is hard work. As many problems as there are with GitHub (social lock-in, Copilot laundering Open Source license violations), GitHub Sponsors is incredibly valuable and substantially reduces the friction for getting support for an Open Source project.

As far as I can tell, the problem lies not with the payment processing, but rather with the bureaucracy around receiving money in OP's country of residence.

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

#280

Post by dboreham »

junon wrote: post #217
kawhah wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

I maintain some popular packages. It's not often, but it's far from never. Some people are really nasty, I've yet to figure out why.

Something like 5% of the population are insane. No need to figure out any behavior once you factor that in.
Post reply on HN