Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
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Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
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Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#2Author here. I've maintained Homebrew since 2009. This manifesto is for the maintainers I know who have quietly built a sustainable OSS practice inside companies that directly or indirectly depend on their work. I'm also at the point in my career where I can say these things with fewer negative consequences than most maintainers can.
The "polite" channels (Open Source Pledge, GitHub Sponsors, Open Source Friday) ask companies nicely to contribute. I argue instead that maintainers inside those companies should just take the work time they need to maintain the open source those companies already benefit from.
Happy to take questions.
(I'm not a lawyer: please read your employment contract before acting on any of this!)
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#3This is a good idea, a great idea even, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to position it as "resistance".
Your job, likely, is to achieve some goal. You're the specialist who gets to decide how to achieve that goal. If open source software is part of that decision, then maintaining it is should also part of that decision. It's not radical, it's just doing your job by protecting the future stability and maintainability of things you rely on for that job.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#4Where I use to work, you got 4 hours per week to work on your on thing, but that ended when covid hit and the company started feeling some financial pain.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#5While I wholeheartedly agree this as a general concept, I find it tricky to accomplish in practice. Ianal, but afaik in general your employer owns the ip, and as such publishing it as oss requires explicit permission. And getting that permission often is difficult, needs to go through endless red tape and legal departments etc.
> In the United States, United Kingdom, and several other jurisdictions, if a work is created by an employee as part of their job duties, the employer is considered the legal author or first owner of copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
That being said, I do think open source work (maintenance/development) should happen by salaried professionals instead of volunteers begging for donations. The big question is how to make that happen, how to get companies accept oss contribution as standard practice instead of something that needs separate individual negotiating.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#6This is a good idea, a great idea even, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to position it as "resistance". Your job, likely, is to achieve some goal. You're the specialist who gets to decide how to achieve that goal. If open source software is part of that decision, then maintaining it is should also part of that decision. It's not radical, it's just doing your job by protecting the future stability and maintainabilit…
Agree. The characterization makes it seem like somebody's trying that extra attention on social media. It's sad that we're at the point where everything has to be hyperbolic
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#7This is so crazy. Companies benefit from OSS so they need to pay? Come on. Companies benefit from OSS because the core idea of most of these licenses is exactly this - everyone can benefit even without contributing back. Don’t like it? Think this is not fair? Don’t do OSS or pick a more restrictive license.
If a company pays for your work time not work products (many contracts work like this) they have the full right to expect that during this work time you do the work explicitly ordered by them. It’s not only the law - it’s common sense.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#8Author here. I've maintained Homebrew since 2009. This manifesto is for the maintainers I know who have quietly built a sustainable OSS practice inside companies that directly or indirectly depend on their work. I'm also at the point in my career where I can say these things with fewer negative consequences than most maintainers can. The "polite" channels (Open Source Pledge, GitHub Sponsors, Open Source Friday) ask…
Great post. Also thanks for homebrew! And for your post on sandboxes... secure agentic setup!
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#9This is an ethical disgrace and everyone involved should be ashamed.
Re: Open Source Resistance: keep OSS alive on company time
#10Whilst not viable in every business, I do this a lot in my research, scripts I create, custom software I make for the lab, I have been fortunate to be able to plop online. It is extremely niche software (power meter, and in the pipeline, aligning photonic chips) and often simply a linux/haiku version of existing windows based software but I like to at least give a little bit back considering all the taking the institute does.