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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

#271

Post by saghm »

john-h-k wrote: post #203
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…

> 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 “pa…

If you think that literally no one is motivated by making more money than the minimal amount they need to survive, how do you explain rich people who still work? UBI isn't a proposal to make salaries illegal, so the problem of "how do we financially motivate people to work" isn't going to change if people happen to get a subsistence wage without employment. The assumption that there's a binary of "people will either be motivated to work or they won't" is nonsensical; there's a entire spectrum of what motivates different people (and how much they're motivated by them). Some people who work now might stop under a system of UBI, but plenty still would continue to. There's a fair question about what the correct amount of money for this is to balance things properly, but without the flawed assumption that motivation is a binary, I don't think the answer is nearly as obvious as you imply.

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

#272

Post by 7bit »

No, they shouldn't. Microsoft has so much money, they couldn't spend it in a thousand years. Much of that money earned, because they had not have to spend it on developers because they just use open source software. They should just invest more into open source, but out of their pocket.

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

#273

Post by ssdspoimdsjvv »

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…

You, as a maintainer, are free to ignore any such expectations and do what you want. There are no obligations. You only risk disappointing people (or corporations), and losing Github stars. If that leads to unmaintained libraries, that probably means the open-source model doesn't work for this project. And that's fine.

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

#274

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

derektank wrote: post #240
piekvorst wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Strong” social safety can be achieved only by enslaving producers who have to provide the ground for “many many” caring people. This is always the case. Consider Russian support of young families: the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have. Personally, I cannot imagine a worse moral depravity than supporting this atrocity as a matter of justice. Capitalism is not “sl…

>the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have IDK, this seems perfectly reasonable if the state also provides an old age insurance / pension system for retirees. Without a younger generation of people paying into the system (i.e. the children of parents) these systems collapse. It seems appropriate to support the people that keep the government functioning. Of course, I…

Giving uncharacteristically large direct stimuli for procreation disproportionately incentivizes the people in dire need of money, meddling with the rationality of the decision and increasing social tension later.

The only other way to be promised a big pile of cash from the govt there is a military contract.

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

#275

Post by lelanthran »

k2052 wrote: post #213
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study. I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisibl…

>> 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.

> Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about.

Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?

> A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.

"likely", "might" - this is all speculation on your part too. There is no reason to believe that a lot of humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would, in fact, contribute more to society, nor that the contributions from those that do would, in fact, offset those that don't.

It's speculation on both sides of this particular argument I see no compelling evidence at all.

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

#276

Post by lelanthran »

ericmay wrote: post #130
gregsadetsky wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time. I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the…

Instead of forcing Github to force users to pay a fee to support OSS, why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work? Then that requires 0 coercion and those who feel undervalued for their work/projects can be compensated as the market dictates the value of their projects. There are a lot of dumb and even disagreeable open source projects. Why should someone be de facto forced to fund those projects? It's like…

> And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe if it wasn't released as MIT but released as GPLv3 you'd actually get compensated in the form of patches, bugfixes, features, etc in "your" software.

The whole RIIR movement is doing this - replacing as many GPL components as possible with rewritten MIT components. I find this completely disrespectful: trying to displace pro-user software with pro-business software.

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

#277

Post by lelanthran »

grayhatter wrote: post #140
gregsadetsky wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time. I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the…

I agree with echelon; don't apologize. I'm not objecting to the message, only to the framing. How to create more code I can enjoy using has been something that I've been thinking about for a long time. I've even advocated for a stance[0], similar to yours. While I don't agree it's correct to conflate the malign intent surrounding the xz takeover, with the banal ignorance as to why so many people don't want to support…

> Equally I think the idea that OSS should move towards a transactional kind of relationship is just as bad.

GPL is transactional; that's the whole point. What you are calling OSS includes GPL, true, but it also includes BSD/MIT, which are not transactional.

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

#278

Post by joe_mamba »

AngryData wrote: post #262
joe_mamba wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the only reason since the dole exists today too and there's not as much good music coming out. Jazz and other music genres in the US came without government welfare, they came from struggle and oppression. Motivated artists will still work part time to fund their dream, they don't necessarily wait for welfare to start making art. IF you were to give a lot of people free money today, will you get…

What do you mean there isn't much good music coming out? Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preference, or you aren't looking for it and are just relying on major media companies to show it to you, but ive never had more high quality music of more variety than ever before. Much of it is farther in the electronica genres that many people somehow still ignore the existence of but I h…

>Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.

How is that proof of "good music"? That's just background noise.

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

#280

Post by k2052 »

lelanthran wrote: post #275
k2052 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study. I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisibl…

>> 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. > Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"? > A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would…

"they aren't, plain and simple" is the made up bit I was calling out. There is literally not much more to the original comment to be calling made up.

"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.

Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.

The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.

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