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The perils of mixing open source and money

david.heinemeierhansson.com

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Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#41

Post by rubiquity »

hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

I don't think David's grief is with software projects receiving institutional support, his issue is with software projects putting their hands out for money with the promise of something materializing. Most often the driving force behind a "successful" open source project is the sheer good will and motivation of creating something that solves people's problems. The examples you've given (Linux, Nginx) are proof of this.

I can't help but wonder if this blog post would have been received better had it been written by someone not as wealthy as David.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#42

Post by fhd2 »

I somewhat agree with TFA, but I think it fails to consider that there are (at least) two different types of open source project:

1. Rails, nginx and other stuff that is used by developers generally has a higher chance of getting useful contributions and institutional support. People use this stuff professionally, if they run into a limitation, they contribute back for pragmatic reasons.

2. Firefox, Ubuntu and other open source consumer products are pretty hard to do with nothing but unpaid volunteers. Some projects pull it off (KDE comes to mind, although several distributions employ devs to work on it), but in general it seems pretty hard: Even if you find enough skilled developers, what about UX? What about design? What about marketing? What about PR? Would Firefox have made it in 2004 without the NYT ad?

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#43

Post by PeterisP »

hacknat wrote: post #17
dhh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're forgetting that Rails was created for free, in my spare time, while I was being paid $30/hour working for 37signals and other US clients on a variety of projects. But that's even besides the point. Companies letting their employees use company time contributing to OSS has been great. As the first sentence of the article points to, I'm talking about projects raising money directly from the community.

My point is that this is, in and of itself, fundraising. Edit Also, I don't want to minimize the effort it took for you to create Rails, build momentum behind it, and get other people excited about it. What if Kickstarter, et al is just a new medium to help empower other people to do what you did?

There are a lot of things that people are willing to do for free, but they wouldn't be willing to do it for a dollar - say, helping someone change his car tire.

There is a psychological difference - if you transfer the mindset from 'helping out' to 'work for hire', then suddenly you have to pay "enough" (which will be a huge amount for many projects) or you'll get less stuff done than you'd get for free.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#44

Post by PeterisP »

dnautics wrote: post #13
hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

While I agree with your general sentiment, there is also an observer bias inherent in your evidence that "open source is patently not better than closed source". There's a lot of closed source software that is crap, that, obviously, you won't see on github.

I have seen closed source software where the difference between crap and not-crap (for my specific need at the time) would be <5 lines of code. If I had the source to them (+ the ability to build it without spending a week), then they'd become 'not-crap' that very day.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#45

Post by [deleted] »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #32
hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support. OpenSSH might count, from the rant on their homepage: Please take note of our Who uses it page, which list just some of the vendors who incorporate OpenSSH into their own products -- as a critically important security / access feature -- instead of writing their own S…

[deleted]

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#46

Post by informatimago »

freshhawk wrote: post #35

I've made the same argument before as well. Also thinking of the great overview of market/social norms in Predictably Irrational. It consistently gets ignored when talking about trying to inject money into open source. Now I read a well written article on HN about exactly the question of how to encourage open source without ruining the exact thing that makes it work and think "Hey, there will be at least a bit of an…

Yes, this is a complex subject. I like to cite the Venus Project in these cases, but while it provides a seemingly simple solution, reaching such a situation will be very complicated both for ideologies to fight, interests to overcome, knowledge to be gained, etc.

A citizen revenue seems to be the easiest first step in this direction. You could think of it as a generalized kickstarter project, without the potential drawbacks of kickstarter.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#48

Post by quadrangle »

All this amounts to: society is better when we're motivated for things other than money. The best development is done for other reasons. Capitalist claim that profit is the main motivator is nonsense, and FLOSS developers know that.

So: the answer is to keep FLOSS development from getting funded????

The real answer is for everyone to have a Basic Income so that we can all eat and have a roof and healthcare at a minimal level. Then people can make all this great FLOSS and do it even better and it will pay off for the world FAR more than if we tried to pay directly for the development work in a type of market exchange system.

But given the actual state of the world, giving a FLOSS developer some money to pay his rent while he focuses on FLOSS is NOT a bad thing.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#49

Post by grey-area »

hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support.

Rails 1.0

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