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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

#201

Post by layer8 »

nickff wrote: post #163
anonymous908213 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting GGGP: >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, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them whil…

I have no problem with people doing whatever they want, but if nobody else values it, there’s no ‘contribution’ to society, art, or anything else.

People valuing something is not at all the same as people spending money for it. For one, there is always competition with an abundance of freely available material. At the very least, you’d have to compare with a situation where nothing of the sort whatsoever would be freely available, and that’s very hard to do.

That being said, I’m skeptical of UBI being workable as well.

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

#202

Post by nickff »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #167
nickff wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem with people doing whatever they want, but if nobody else values it, there’s no ‘contribution’ to society, art, or anything else.

I think that's an unbelievably cynical worldview, one I don't agree with at all, but within that view: what of the things people value, but which they do not pay for? Much of the tech of the world is built on the free labour of FOSS developers. Are they not contributing to society because they are not compensated for their contributions?

I contribute to FOSS, and everything from issue reports to branches and pull requests are indications of a project’s value! True value is difficult to measure, but there are many projects which contribute no value.

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

#203

Post by john-h-k »

pixelready wrote: post #36
grayhatter wrote: post #11

> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments. I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default. I…

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…

> There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it

Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books.

But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need

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

#204

Post by mook »

nickff wrote: post #163
anonymous908213 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting GGGP: >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, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them whil…

I have no problem with people doing whatever they want, but if nobody else values it, there’s no ‘contribution’ to society, art, or anything else.

It's quite possible to be creative while not contributing to society or whatnot.

A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.

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

#205

Post by chrysoprace »

dgacmu wrote: post #46
grayhatter wrote: post #11

> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments. I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default. I…

I agree with you, but I do think we have a bit of a problem in which an open source creator makes something and then suddenly finds themselves accidentally having created a load-bearing component that is not only used by a lot of people and companies, but where people are demanding that bugs be fixed, etc., and we lack great models for helping transition it from "I do this for fun, might fix the bug if I ever feel li…

In that case the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything. If somebody depends on the maintainer's package for a critical component then they should consider paying them and possibly drawing up an explicit contract. That's what we did at my work for a critical open source component, where we paid the maintainer to add several features we needed.

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

#206

Post by zorpner »

nickff wrote: post #163
anonymous908213 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting GGGP: >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, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them whil…

I have no problem with people doing whatever they want, but if nobody else values it, there’s no ‘contribution’ to society, art, or anything else.

Even given the other objections to your argument, there are an extraordinary number of examples of now-very-appreciated artists, writers, etc whose work was not valued at the time they were creating it.

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

#207

Post by nickff »

mook wrote: post #204
nickff wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem with people doing whatever they want, but if nobody else values it, there’s no ‘contribution’ to society, art, or anything else.

It's quite possible to be creative while not contributing to society or whatnot. A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.

I never disputed the fact that shut-ins can be ‘creative’, but instead focused on ‘hotbed’. I would characterize artistic failures as being more ‘original’ and perhaps ‘creative’ than successes, but they still lack value (to anyone but the creator). Regardless, this seems pointlessly semantic.

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

#208

Post by dwaite »

securesaml wrote: post #35
Dilettante_ wrote: post #10

>it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments Yes it absolutely is. That is the exact social contract people 100% willingly enter by releasing something as Free and Open Source. They do give it as a gift, in exchange for maybe the tiny bit of niche recognition that comes with it, and often times out of simple g…

The problem is more so maintenance. The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues. However many companies will dump these issues to the maintainer and take it for granted when they are resolved. It's not a sustainable model, and will lead to burnout/unmaintained libraries. If the companies don't have the engineering resources/specialization to com…

> The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues.

This depends a lot on the users, and then somewhat on the maintainers.

I have seen a lot of end-user facing software where people do not understand that features and fixes do not magically materialize - that there is a person on the other end likely working on this in their free time, with their own prioritization on how they will use that limited time.

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

#209

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

I donate to specific projects through OpenCollective. I do not want Github to take extra money from me and then redistribute it to projects I don't care about according to some formula that will inevitably be exploited to get free $$$.

If you want to support a project, submit a PR or send them a check. Don't force me do it for you.

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

#210

Post by prussia »

kjgkjhfkjf wrote: post #100

Proposals like these seem to assume that FOSS is mostly produced by unpaid volunteers. But a lot of the open-source stuff that I personally use is produced by massively profitable companies. For example, I am currently working with React, which was produced by Meta. I write the code using TypeScript, which was produced by Microsoft (and other corporate behemoths such as Google). I am writing this comment in Chrome (p…

Chrome is not FOSS btw. Google Chrome is proprietary software based on the open-source Chromium (also created by Google), which in turn is a fork of Webkit (by Apple, and with many corporate and non-corporate contributors), which itself is a fork of KHTML/KJS from the KDE project.

You are still right that corporations found and contribute to countless open source projects though.

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