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GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

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Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#101

Post by arjie »

This transformation of open-source into rent-seeking behaviour is quite distasteful to me. If you don't want to share your stuff without taxing everyone, then don't share it. Other licenses exist. You don't have to use MIT or the GPL.

Meta has even demonstrated an alternative with the Llama 4 License which has exclusion criteria:

> 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 4 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.

Go put such terms in your licenses.

This is particularly rampant in the Rust community and if I'm being honest this forced tithing church nonsense from people who want to be priests makes participating in that community less desirable. I don't even want to donate to the RSF as a result.

All the other projects I've donated to in the past have been much more reasonable. This kind of pushy nonsense is unacceptable.

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#102

Post by securesaml »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #98
securesaml wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen small utility libraries like tj-actions get compromised because there aren't any security specialists looking at the library. My main concern is supply chain compromise.

Unless you're talking about a different event, tj-actions wasn't "compromised because there aren't any security specialists looking at the library" . Instead, an API key was used, maybe by the author, maybe by someone else, to replace good code with bad code, including modifying historical release tags to point to the bad code. That said, everything in my previous post still applies: a nonzero buglist is totally norm…

I'm not too sure about the root cause about tj-actions. IIRC there are some libraries that compromised by actions injections vulnerabilities, where a security specialist could have helped.

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#103

Post by zemo »

spullara wrote: post #84
bsnnkv wrote: post #82

Not a great take. Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software, but they don't want to, which is why they'll happily spend money promoting the use of corporate-friendly and maximally exploitable open source licensing among the passionate individuals who maintain the lions share of their dependency tree. https://lgug2z.com/articles/on-evils-in-software-licensing/

If you don't want to give your software away for free, don't give your software away for free. When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes. If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.

> When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes.

Maybe, but also maybe they just fork internally and fix the bug internally and don't publish the bugfix. And maybe it's never in their best interest to pay for it, maybe it's in their best interest to just freeload forever.

> If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.

I think it's good when we expect corporations to write checks to the people that write the open-source stuff they rely on. "A rising tide lifts all boats" is not automatically true in software, we have to choose to make it true. I think a world in which we make that choice is a better world. I'm not convinced we currently live in that world.

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#105

Post by tracker1 »

So you sprinkle a few tens of thousands of dollars across a few hundreds of thousands of developers every month? Thanks for the $0.48 Github.

s/thousands/millions/ the point stands that there are way more devs than commercial accounts, and even then, even if it's 1:1, you get $1?

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#107

Post by luqtas »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #37

OSS works partially because a lot of stuff is free as in beer. I rely on probably many thousands of OSS projects directly or indirectly on a daily basis. So does everyone else. The problem for some people is that they want to get paid for their work and just aren't; or not enough. I won't judge that. Writing software is hard work. Whether you donate your time and how much of your time is a personal choice to make. Bu…

> OSS will be here to stay

OSS literally runs the modern infrastructure... https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#108

Post by tracker1 »

nottorp wrote: post #83
Unfunkyufo wrote: post #71

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the solution to the open source funding problem is to force people to pay for it. I think that goes against the spirit of open source. If there is forced payment, or even the expectation of payment, then we're not really doing the whole original open source thing, we're just doing bad source available commercial-ish software. I think the solution is for people to understand that…

There's also the problem of who decides who gets paid? If they pay by popularity most of my $1 would go to javascript. I'd rather it went to libraries I actually use.

Even though I like JS/TS, I agree... not to mention that at even 10x the suggested amount for paid accounts, or even $1 per private repo per month, it still wouldn't be significant to any individual developer... More along the lines of thanks for the cup of coffee money as opposed to income money.

As suggested, I do think there should be room for grant funding, especially in the case of govts switching to open-source (LibreOffice, Linux, whatever) and open-source individuals and orgs can apply and granted each year dependent on actual use. Though, even then, govts should probably do more for funding, but I don't want a situation where the org just spends more money than they actually distribute for dev (looking at you Mozilla).

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#109

Post by skinnymuch »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #51
pixelready wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, craft…

The hikikomori [1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple. There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.

No that wouldn’t. If the zeitgeist, culture, society at large are antagonizing toward you, if you are meant to feel like a useless negative part of society, why would we expect amazing output from them?

This reinforces others talking about the flaws of hustle and grind culture. The status quo create the conditions for the negatives and then point to that and say “see”.

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#110

Post by remove-resolve »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #51
pixelready wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, craft…

The hikikomori [1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple. There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.

People who are specifically not employed because they aren't motivated to do anything at all don't seem to be the best sample for what average people could do if they had more free time during their waking hours.
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