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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

#391

Post by matheusmoreira »

WorldMaker wrote: post #390
matheusmoreira wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> corporate sponsorship/patronage Those are the only things that make any sort of sense. The alternative solutions require a reality distortion field to even begin to work. Copyright? It's logically reducible to attempting to sell numbers. It just isn't going to work in a universe where globally networked computers exist. Intellectual work is infinitely abundant once created. We gotta figure out new business models.…

The point is maybe that corporations are proven to be poor stewards of who deserves sponsorship/patronage, so while sponsorships/patronage are the things that make the most sense as sustainable under our current economic models and corporate ones are currently the only ones that seem reliably sustainable yet there aren't enough of them and a lot of important labor is getting underfunded/unfunded, maybe that deficienc…

I believe the only answer to human misery is no economic model at all. Post scarcity. Economies only exist if scarcity exists, thus we need to eliminate scarcity. The goal is to automate all work and achieve an unending abundance of food, energy and goods.

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

#392

Post by calamari4065 »

mikrl wrote: post #223
andsoitis wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment of "Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing" That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain (so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise, rather than try to engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when users do not feel the desire to contribu…

>so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise I believe this is called “please use the template when submitting an issue” and we all know how that goes. I’ve honestly found myself laughing like a madman at GitHub issues where the maintainer calmly and repeatedly tries to explain to the increasingly disgruntled reporter to UTFT (use the fine template)

I got so sick of people uploading screenshots of the in-app log console that I spent significant effort to make that control not render during a screenshot.

Taking and cropping a screenshot takes more time than just uploading the plaintext log file conveniently and lovingly placed right next to the executable. Please, just upload the file. Please.

The project was a Big Deal in the circles I was in. Hundreds of thousands of people knew of it, we had hundreds to thousands of active users each with dozens of clients. It was so stressful and I caught so much abuse that I exited software altogether. We did get some money, but my cut worked out to $60 a month.

I still write and publish code, but I don't work on anything that anyone wants to use. I don't get involved in communities and I don't interact with users.

And you know what? I am much happier now.

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

#393

Post by BeetleB »

jjav wrote: post #360
BeetleB wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path. As is true for many (most?) crafts. If I am an artist (e.g. painting, digital art, etc). and give my work away for free, my fellow artists are not going to sympathize with my inability to make a living. Ditto photography ("look at all these companies taking my free stock photos and not giving me any mo…

> It's silly to expect SW to be any different. True, I can't disagree. However, it's important to note that there is something different about the software world, in that very large subsets of applications and infrastructure of large for-profit companies are built on top of the free labor of open source. Not sure if that's true in any other craft. If unpaid open source were to magically disappear overnight, all of th…

> Not sure if that's true in any other craft.

It isn't, but that may be because other artists don't give out their work for free.

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

#394

Post by BeetleB »

WorldMaker wrote: post #356
BeetleB wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path. As is true for many (most?) crafts. If I am an artist (e.g. painting, digital art, etc). and give my work away for free, my fellow artists are not going to sympathize with my inability to make a living. Ditto photography ("look at all these companies taking my free stock photos and not giving me any mo…

Or maybe that's a large neon sign that we should fix those, too? Why isn't it a sustainable career path to be an artist or photographer or musician or writer or open source contributor? (Outside of the lucky 1% or so at the top of those crafts, of course.) Why are creative pursuits so much harder to make a sustainable wage on in our society? Why do we expect most of them to be unpaid hobbies? Why do we expect the art…

These are age old questions. I don't have answers, and you admit you don't either. Until we find a way, we can't cling to a belief that it is possible.

Incidentally, in the past, great works of art did come out of government funded initiatives (TV shows, etc). In the countries that had such programs, though, I think you'll find a very bipolar distribution. The very few who made high quality art got funded, and the rest had no option to make a living (or even money) for their work.

In places like the US, it's been more of a continuum due to a much larger focus on private funding. It results in the median piece of work to be crappier than in those countries, but a lot more artists actually can make a living as a result.

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

#395

Post by gonzo41 »

skrebbel wrote: post #34
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.

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 feel like public project roadmaps would really help here. If only for the maintainers to be able to flat out reject stuff because it's not on the map.

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

#396

Post by agent327 »

sofixa wrote: post #379
agent327 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take away capitalism, you are still going to need a system. The alternatives are either anarchism (and I don't fancy living in a Mad Max-style world), or some form of dictatorship: either communism, or outright dictatorship, or theocracy, or some neofeudal BS. In all of them there is a single strong man at the top who will tell you what to do, and kill you if you don't. Capitalism at least gives you the freedo…

I don't know why you're mixing political and economic systems. The two are often related, but not intricately linked. Capitalism and democracy are orthogonal, and there have been plenty of capitalist but undemocratic (e.g. fascist) regimes out there, like there have been democratic countries with social democratic (aka not unfettered capitalism) economic systems.

You have to, because people do not work for free ("each to the best of their ability, and taking according to their need") if they can freeload. The only way to get them to be productive members of society is either a carrot (the capitalist system, which offers an improved standard of life for those who work hard), or a stick (the communist system, which offers imprisonment or death if you do not work hard). That force is political in nature. You cannot have a communist system without it also being a dictatorship.

So I'd say that having a capitalist system is a requirement for also being a democracy. Moreover, the rapid fall of the fascist nations suggests that having a capitalist system is, in fact, also conducive to not having a dictatorship: economic freedom leads to people wanting political freedom as well.

The problem with capitalism is that people misunderstand it to mean that some billionaire owns 'everything' - whereas it really is YOUR freedom to choose how YOU lead your life. I'm all in favor of curbing predatory practices, but all too often 'taxing the rich' turns out to mean 'taxing the middle class'. The drive towards ever-heavier taxation, where tax rates only ever go up, and never down again, can only be fought by striving for more capitalism.

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

#397

Post by pydry »

TillE wrote: post #389
pydry wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair the UX on those things is abysmal. Github could improve the experience 10 fold.

UX can help a bit, but fundamentally the problem is people who have an issue or question but are completely unable to communicate it in a way that can be understood and addressed. The garbage bug reports I see on my projects and others are like, either one sentence or rambling nonsense. The templates don't help much, these users will do their best to ignore them. As long as you're not doing that, your bug report is p…

UX is partly about how to accommodate that without throwing up hoops to jump through to the people who aren't a waste of space.

Most bug reports, especially on complex software should follow something resembling a kind of wizard/state machine (e.g. state: OS has/has not been specified) but instead everything is a text box with a dump of contextual questions, half of which don't even necessarily make sense for the specific bug report you're making.

>As long as you're not doing that, your bug report is probably very welcome.

When barriers are thrown up to the other kind of person it will often make it seem like they are very unwelcome even when they're not - e.g. the first message you see may be a hostile list of "DON'T DO THESE 5 THINGS" because somebody once did each of those things. I'm pretty sure a lot of good bug reports are lost this way.

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

#398

Post by mnky9800n »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #325
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 think the general pattern is that someone releases something for free, then people start using it, and start depending on it, and then start opening PRs and issues, and then the person who did it for free in their spare time is expected to respond to those issues, etc. Now other people are making money from your work, but demanding that you work on it for free. Mostly this is the point where people start thinking a…

The book shareware heroes discusses this at length through the various solutions shareware developers came up with on how to monetize software written and given out for free.

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

#399

Post by nunez »

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…

Exactly. Open source has always meant exactly that and _only_ that. Support has always been (and should always be) on a best-effort basis. If you absolutely need the support, pay for it! If you can't or don't want to and need to fix it now, fork it!

(I maintained a small OSS project for a few years. I loved the folks that would get all mad when it didn't do x even though the code should theoretically be able to do it and "it's not that hard!". If only they submitted pull requests with their issues...)

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

#400

Post by yencabulator »

marcosdumay wrote: post #301
mikrl wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise I believe this is called “please use the template when submitting an issue” and we all know how that goes. I’ve honestly found myself laughing like a madman at GitHub issues where the maintainer calmly and repeatedly tries to explain to the increasingly disgruntled reporter to UTFT (use the fine template)

I keep thinking that GitHub (and GitLab, and etc) made the initial costs to interacting with the developers unhealthily low. The barrier of having to create an account or adding your email to a newsletter on the older distributed systems was extremely good on filtering out that kind of thing. Also, "Issues" should really, really have a different name.

Issues is where you find all the people with issues...
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