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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

#281

Post by croon »

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…

I'm generally an advocate for a robust safety-net such that people shouldn't be on their knees every month just to scrape by with food/housing/healthcare, and would love it if we reached Star Trek/The Culture levels of post-scarcity, but I'm simultaneously not convinced by this idea, but possibly from another angle.

1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists).

2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded.

TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.

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

#282

Post by zigzag312 »

locknitpicker wrote: post #251
john-h-k wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 You're making the mistake of conflating UBI with "no one works anymore". This is a silly mistake to make. It's like believing that providing a universal healthcare servic…

> Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs

But what are these basic needs that are not much? Housing costs, medical expenses...?

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

#283

Post by SPICLK2 »

Not much money * quite a lot of people = not very much money

(this holds true for all of the other times this idea has been suggested, too).

And this does not take into account the various fees, taxes etc, that will be removed before any money gets into an OSS developer's bank account.

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

#284

Post by claudex »

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…

> I am writing this comment in Chrome (produced by Google).

Which depends on a lot of code not produced by Google, like libxml2 which was on the news recently because the maintainer step down.

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

#285

Post by moring »

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…

> why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work?

What if we turn this from a rhetorical question to an actual question?

My totally unverified take:

1. Missing transaction / Payment infrastructure. The same reason why paid music streaming services were successful depite piracy being a thing.

2. Bureaucracy associated with earning money. In many countries, going from "unpaid" to "€1 per month" is a nightmare.

... and a suggestion to make both less dire: A transaction infrastructure that allows small projects (that wouldn't be a cash cow anyway) to forward all payments to another project of the project Author's choice.

Edit: See https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...

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

#286

Post by zigzag312 »

saghm wrote: post #271
john-h-k wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Seems like you are making same binary assumption that people either work or they don't. The important question is probably how well/hard do people work. Lower productivity means people that work produce less so prices rise. Many make mistake thinking only about having money, but forget the supply part of the equation. If productivity is lower, there are literally less things available to everyone. And these equations are not linear. Look at the current RAM situation for example.

But the major issue is that the progress slows down. Effects of slower progress accumulate with time. At first you are only a few years behind, then you are a few decades behind etc. Imagine inventions, cures being available decades or hundreds of years later (depending on what timescale we look at).

I think UBI sounds nice, but is far from an optimal solution. Wouldn't be better, if we could solve same issues UBI promises to solve in a more efficient way (with less negative side effects)? UBI is just throwing money at the problem, hoping it will solve itself.

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

#287

Post by ranguna »

carlosjobim wrote: post #215
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…

1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free. 2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything. 3. Now I'm really angry! I should have gotten some money from them! 4. The government must force my neighbours to pay a salary to me! 5. Continue to work for free making open source code for giant corporations, so they can profit. How about instead?: 1. Don't work for free or give a…

I think you've missed the point again, it's more like this:

1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.

3. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

If you can't go to step 3, then you are doing it wrong and need to change step 1 from "giving it away for free" to something like "giving it away for free to the common people and at a price for corporate."

Which you could say "but that's not open source!" and you'd be right, which is exactly my point here: I don't think you want to do fully open source software, you want to do software and get paid for it somehow. If you do open source and get paid eventually and non binding, that's a nice little bonus, but it's not the main goal, never was with open source.

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

#288

Post by DrScientist »

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…

> I think that goes against the spirit of open source

Strictly speaking open source originally was not to do with whether you paid for something or not, it was that if you did pay for it, you got the code and had the rights to make your own changes.

Think Free speech, not free beer, or the software equivalent of right to repair.

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

#289

Post by Dilettante_ »

securesaml wrote: post #48
Dilettante_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(And on the flipside, nothing is owed for a bugfix the maintainer made out of their own free will. Again, a gift.)

The problem is lots of open source is unmaintained/insecure, and there aren't any security engineers on those open source libraries. For the library to be secure, there needs to be funding, not by magic and expecting maintainers will do stuff on there free will.

Is your perspective here "these things need to be useful/stable/secure, how do we make them/create incentive for them to be what we need them to be"? Because my view is more like "open source is a sprawling wild garden and occasionally a tree bears fruit, and anyone gets to have some for as long as it does."

The assumed base state we're looking to augment via open source software being: "Fully working software"(Augmented: free) vs "No software" (Augmented: yes software)?

Like, what you seem to want is business, plain and simple. Pay a guy, have your specs filled, get guarantees. That would be expecting open source to fill a role it just isn't made for.

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

#290

Post by worthless-trash »

locknitpicker wrote: post #250
somenameforme wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like it'd be one of the many ideas that sounds great on paper but in reality just creates an even greater stratification in society. I think you're completely correct that in many places, particularly higher end - people would come together to keep the place looking great, possibly even better since you get to 'own' it on some ways. But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less mot…

> But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other…

> You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.

I think that is what observation actually is, you get to see what others have done in the recent and not so distant past, or am i missing your point.

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