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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

#311

Post by dgacmu »

jrmg wrote: post #220
dgacmu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t think the added idea of “I pay good money for my GitHub subscription and some of that pays you, you are obligated to support me!” would help here.

I agree - but maybe if there were easy ways to opt-in to "hey I want to actually get paid for this thing and in return I'm going to spend more time on it" it might be a good thing. I'm not sure the model in this post is the right way -- I like what Filippo Valsorda has done in creating a small company of developers who do contracted OSS crypto software maintenance. But complicated.

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

#312

Post by duskdozer »

carlosjobim wrote: post #293
saghm wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly that's it includes levying taxes, so that's pretty much a meaningless characterization. Let's put it in more concrete terms: if the US government passes a law to raise taxes to fund UBI, that probably wouldn't even make the last of th…

> Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly Yes, and that's why great care and respect should be applied to how the government uses the tax money which they have raised from oppression. Paying somebody to work for free for a giant corporation is not a justified use of that money. Those corporations should pay for their labour themselves. I can't thin…

>I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour.

Really?

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

#313

Post by duskdozer »

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…

>The simplistic answer is the same for why seemingly everyone chooses proprietary software; it’s just easier.

This is honestly the exact opposite of my experience. Though I may just have very different desires and frustrations

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

#314

Post by carlosjobim »

duskdozer wrote: post #312
carlosjobim wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly Yes, and that's why great care and respect should be applied to how the government uses the tax money which they have raised from oppression. Paying somebody to work for free for a giant corporation is not a justified use of that money. Those corporations should pay for their labour themselves. I can't thin…

>I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour. Really?

Not among the standard things which every government always does. Are you thinking about crimes against humanity and such?

For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost every government engaged in during the covid pandemic, and which I am against.

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

#315

Post by saghm »

zigzag312 wrote: post #286
saghm wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equation…

I don't disagree that people work with different amounts of efforts, but if anything, to me it seems far more likely that people who have to work only because they won't be able to survive otherwise are going to be more stressed and less likely to be able to work productively. If the only people who work are the ones who choose to rather than an additional set who are forced to in order to survive, the average motivation level is going to be higher, and it's not obvious to me that this wouldn't be better even if the total number of workers is lower. This just seems like another balancing problem, and there's still no obvious reason to me why the default assumption is that maximizing the number of people who work will end up being the best option.

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

#316

Post by Dilettante_ »

golergka wrote: post #247
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…

> 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 while having our baseline needs met. If people find these things useful, they can actually pay for them. If you can't find people who value it enough to pay for it, then m…

By that measure, doing something for a poor person who cannot pay would be entirely worthless, while delivering food to a particularly generous billionaire would be more valuable than an entire month of an average person's work.

The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.

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

#318

Post by saghm »

zigzag312 wrote: post #307
lesuorac wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.

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

#319

Post by Dilettante_ »

asah wrote: post #65
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'm pretty sure you didn't wake up at 5am to an urgent issue. Because I did last night, and for sure __MY WIFE__ expects me to get paid for it!! In general, people's time is not free if only because they have rent/mortgage, food, transportation, medical bills, education, etc.

>Urgent issue

Urgent issue for whom? If there is some org relying on something you maintain voluntarily, in your free time, that seems like a "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"-type situation to me.

At the risk of sounding like a poor man's John Galt: If you wouldn't like to get out of bed at 5am to work without getting compensated, then you should just not do that.

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

#320

Post by saghm »

carlosjobim wrote: post #314
duskdozer wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour. Really?

Not among the standard things which every government always does. Are you thinking about crimes against humanity and such? For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost…

> I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech

I guess we're just not going to agree on any of this then, because that's pretty much the opposite opinion of mine

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