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The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

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Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#21

Post by dreamdu5t »

pc86 wrote: post #17
dreamdu5t wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people actively avoid OSS with licenses like that, always opting for projects that have MIT/BSD type licenses.

I would imagine people actively avoid them if they plan on charging for something. I'm honestly not sure what you wanted. You contributed code to something, and people used it. Some of those happened to make money on code that included yours (I'm sure the impact yours had on their bottom line is debatable). Did you expect financial compensation? Did you just hope for whatever reason that nobody would make any money o…

I didn't want anything. I was stating why I mostly stopped contributing: Other people were making money off of my work without me being compensated. OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor. The hacker community just hates to hear that.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#22

Post by eevee »

timwaagh wrote: post #12

i liked the article until it became feminist. the notion that because there are less women in industry recruiters cannot use a selection criterium that has intrinsically nothing to do with gender, however somehow guys score better on that criterium, doesn't sit well with me. like i'm evil and deserve less favourable treatment because i'm white and male.

i was kinda following you until that last part, where "not getting more favorable treatment" spontaneously mutated into "getting less favorable treatment"

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#23

Post by dreamdu5t »

mhurron wrote: post #15
dreamdu5t wrote: post #5

I stopped contributing OSS lately after seeing how many startups use some of my modules. Why should I work for free to help others profit? Yet if I use restrictive licenses people just avoid the software altogether. If my open-source software is successful I just end up being exploited financially. EDIT: Downvotes? I guess it's socially unacceptable to not want to contribute to OSS because someone else will just make…

Releasing software that others are legally allowed to use, and then them using it is being 'exploited financially.' Interesting.

Because you want to split hairs over terminology, I will rephrase: I did not want to contribute to OSS anymore because watching other people make money off of my unpaid work made me feel undervalued and resentful. It also made me realize I didn't have to do any OSS contribution to get good jobs and spend unpaid time coding stuff for other people to use.

There I didn't use the word "exploited".. are you happy now?

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#24

Post by pc86 »

me1010 wrote: post #14
timwaagh wrote: post #12

i liked the article until it became feminist. the notion that because there are less women in industry recruiters cannot use a selection criterium that has intrinsically nothing to do with gender, however somehow guys score better on that criterium, doesn't sit well with me. like i'm evil and deserve less favourable treatment because i'm white and male.

I think the author is attempting to make the very valid point that not all good programmers can be expected to be giving freely of their non-work day time. In short -- life happens but then the jobs dry up and good talent is over looked or lost. And, yes, it does happen to women more than men.

I don't think even companies that "require" a strong GitHub portfolio are saying that they're not filtering out good or great programmers. It's about signal and noise.

If you are hiring for a senior development position and you have a filter you can employ that will cut out 90% of mediocre or bad programmers (or perhaps more importantly make it much easier to identify them), but will also cut out 40% of good and great programmers, it's not a foregone conclusion that you shouldn't employe that filter. If you still get enough resumes to make a decision, you've just decreased the odds that you get a shit hire by $MATH percent.

If social justice is something you care about you probably don't want to do this. If building good software is something you care about, you probably do. I think most here would agree that a random developer with a large body of public OSS contributions is probably "better" than a random developer without. I say that as someone who has pushed to a public GitHub repository probably four times in the past two years.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#25

Post by pc86 »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #21
pc86 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine people actively avoid them if they plan on charging for something. I'm honestly not sure what you wanted. You contributed code to something, and people used it. Some of those happened to make money on code that included yours (I'm sure the impact yours had on their bottom line is debatable). Did you expect financial compensation? Did you just hope for whatever reason that nobody would make any money o…

I didn't want anything. I was stating why I mostly stopped contributing: Other people were making money off of my work without me being compensated. OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor. The hacker community just hates to hear that.

> OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor.

OSS is freely given, sometimes by people who are paid to do exactly that. The term "unpaid labor" has a specific connotation akin to slavery or indentured servitude. The two are not comparable.

Complaining that someone somewhere makes money (at best, indirectly) from an OSS contribution is the same as complaining that Good Will resold my donation at a profit.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#26

Post by Crito »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #20
liveoneggs wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you do it in the first place? Here's why you might consider contributing to OSS even though others use it to make money: If you have contributed to a successful project it's a major leg up in getting hired by someone using that project If you use that product in your own work, then you are paying that benefit forward and can expect some (additional) returns in the future If you learn something new/interesting…

You can get good jobs without having an active OSS history. I'm not asking for financial compensation. I was stating why I contribute much less now than I used to.

You don't need to put your software under a GNU approved FOSS license in order to put it up on github and get all the benefits of listing it on your resume. You can easily put your code up there with a non-commercial non-free open source license, and still list it on your resume.

Seriously, companies typically give zero shits about which software license you personally prefer, they just want to be able to look over what you have accomplished.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#27

Post by Justsignedup »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #18

The article bounces around to touch so many different social issues its nearly incoherent. Regarding the main point I think it's a non issue. Companies are only interested in hiring OSS contributors to get a feel for their work. There are many other ways to do this. For example since a lot of my work is visual I maintain a demo reel. For others it may be articles you've written or even Stackoverflow contributions. It…

Most harassment is public.

- Twitter - Facebook - IRC - Twitch - Reddit - Real world (some wear hoods)

Some are more anonymous, some less.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#28

Post by frik »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #5

I stopped contributing OSS lately after seeing how many startups use some of my modules. Why should I work for free to help others profit? Yet if I use restrictive licenses people just avoid the software altogether. If my open-source software is successful I just end up being exploited financially. EDIT: Downvotes? I guess it's socially unacceptable to not want to contribute to OSS because someone else will just make…

You could use the (A)(L)GPL license. With AGPLv3 even SaaS is covered. But it's a tradeoff as companies will prefer MIT/BSD over GPL, if there are alternatives.

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#29

Post by glyph »

craigcabrey wrote: post #3

Is it just me or does this article twist the (rather simple) idea of meritocracy? What you contribute and the quality of what you contribute defines the respect and influence you receive as a result (in a given community, of course). I don't see how that can be tied into "normal" social statuses as this author is trying to imply. Thoughts?

"Meritocracy" is not a real concept of how to run a community, but rather a satirical term used to lampoon the idea that "merit" is a 1-dimensional concept which can be measured linearly and used to judge people and rank them. The term was invented as satire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

Thinking that it's a good idea is like what happened with "waterfall" development. Someone described all the problems with what big companies were doing, and then someone else picked up that description of all the problems and said "ooh! all the big companies are doing this! this must be a great way to do things!" and then everyone perpetuated that disaster for the next two decades.

The fact that "hacker" culture has uncritically picked up on "meritocracy" and doesn't realize it's a snarky joke about unfairness says a lot about the unbelievably sheltered and privileged position that most people reading this site enjoy, and our collective lack of social skills. By "social skills" I don't just mean, like, how to behave at parties, but also how to manage groups and how to be aware of the perspectives of other people.

Not to mention the fact that if your open source community isn't measuring merit on an objective, defined-in-advance, linear scale, with measures in place, then you are not even practicing the (unfair, broken) system of "meritocracy", you're just doing "rule by cognitive bias" ("biasocracy"? surely nobody is going to take that term and think it's a worthy goal to aspire to).

You can trust me, because my community _does_ practice objective, quantitative meritocracy, and therefore I am provably the best and most deserving person in this conversation: https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/

Re: The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community (2013)

#30

Post by dreamdu5t »

pc86 wrote: post #25
dreamdu5t wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't want anything. I was stating why I mostly stopped contributing: Other people were making money off of my work without me being compensated. OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor. The hacker community just hates to hear that.

> OSS is a vehicle for companies to exploit unpaid labor. OSS is freely given, sometimes by people who are paid to do exactly that. The term "unpaid labor" has a specific connotation akin to slavery or indentured servitude. The two are not comparable. Complaining that someone somewhere makes money (at best, indirectly ) from an OSS contribution is the same as complaining that Good Will resold my donation at a profit.

Yes, I should have been more clear: The idea that contributing to OSS is A Good Thing is dogma. It is a vehicle for companies to profit from work they don't have to pay for.

It has nothing to do with whatever political axe you have to grind.

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