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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

#301

Post by shimman »

spullara wrote: post #189
shimman wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can make similar arguments for the corporations: if you want to sell your software in the US market, you need to pay for a VAT for digital services that fund national endowments giving grants to individual US developers that apply to the program. Corporations should start paying their fair share, they've scammed society enough.

They aren't scamming anyone by using open source software made available to them for free.

The are purposely ruining the commons as any corporation does to society. Companies take advantage of open source all the time without ever truly giving back, which is why we should lobby the government to compel big tech into this.

If it helps, voter sentiment against big tech is quite high and the profit margins that big tech has means there's a lot to plunder for the public.

The only question is who do you want to do the plundering?

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

#303

Post by carlosjobim »

ranguna wrote: post #287
carlosjobim wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fre…

Agree completely, that's why I don't understand these people who demand payment for open source code after having given it away to the world.

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

#305

Post by awkward »

Deeply hate this. Just add a small fee. It's just a couple bucks. What are you, cheap?

Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games little notes apps and digital art run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.

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

#306

Post by ericmay »

moring wrote: post #285
ericmay wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ..…

I don't disagree with any of what you wrote here, but I don't think the solution is "well we haven't figured this out, OSS who talk all the time about free as in beer free software now all of a sudden want to get paid for their work" is to just go around uncharging other people/organizations to support their projects, especially if not all OSS projects are worth supporting.

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

#307

Post by zigzag312 »

lesuorac wrote: post #298
zigzag312 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equation…

Most work is worthless for progress though. No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society. But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketr…

But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.

You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc. While they might not make progress directly, they enable other people to make progress.

> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody

Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of anything is completely relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.

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

#308

Post by grayhatter »

lelanthran wrote: post #277
grayhatter wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.

I also don't think all software needs to be free. I also don't think all software needs to be a gift. (But then I just said the same thing twice.) The part that I care about is which direction the default [default definition?] shifts.

In my perfect world, more code would be MIT not GPL. But in my perfect world, the GPL wouldn't be useful in practice. The world is far from perfect.

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

#309

Post by boomlinde »

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…

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

If we can't tell, the "they aren't" bit is of course made up. Are you not arguing in good faith, or are you just not paying attention to what you're quoting?

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

#310

Post by pamcake »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #149
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…

I've made my living working fulltime on a single open source project for more than 15 years now. I think it is important to differentiate between different kinds of projects that people might undertake, and 3 particular categories always come to my mind (you may have more): * "plumbing" - all that infrastructure that isn't something you'd ever use directly, but the tools you do use wouldn't function without it. This…

If a "well-defined goal" project gets popular and sticky enough, it can metamorphize into an "ever-evolving" project by injection of VC capital.
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