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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)

#51

Post by malandrew »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #44
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…

Lucky for you that you can show your work to people outside of your company, right? > Also the author says she knows "many" women who have had trouble contributing to OSS based on how they were treated. GitHub should make it easy to provide examples of this right? Now you're being deliberately obtuse. Not everyone uses github, and not all communication happens through github.

I can't tell the gender of many people in opensource unless they use a username that indicates their gender. Looking at #thrift right now (a project I contribute to). I see 40 people not counting the channel bots. I count only 6 nicknames that suggest that they are likely to be men because they begin with names that are typically male names. The same is true for a lot of the github usernames I see. I wonder how of this self reporting by women who say they have trouble contributing because they are women is actual gender discrimination and how much is due to people who have grown accustomed to committing the fundamental attribution error [0] on themselves, instead of applying the rule of parsimony [1] and looking for alternative explanations that might better explain their difficulties.

It's also important to apply Hanlon's Razor [2], "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.". Sometimes that stupidity (or ignorance) is the person rejecting your contributions, but it could also be your own stupidity (or ignorance). I have found that most people who try to contribute to open-source and fail have never read esr's classic "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way" [3]

If you eliminate all identifier's of gender by using non-gendered handles and initials for your first name in your git config, you can safely look for other explanations for your difficulties contributing to open-source besides your gender. It's called applying the scientific method. If you hypothesis is "I'm having trouble contributing to open-source because of my gender", you should obfuscate your gender in your contributions to control for that variable. Once you eliminate it as a possible confounding factor, you're free to come up with alternative hypotheses for your difficulties.

Personally, I don't have my name, gender, or location on my github profile. It's a community for contributing code, so all such metadata is irrelevant. I'm genuinely curious what percentage of github users cannot be determined to be male or female (which is a figure the author did not cite).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

[3] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

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

#52

Post by uiuixqqxxq »

Justsignedup wrote: post #6

As a father of 1, I must agree to this: - I lose ~ 2-3 hours a day every day on commute alone. - I lose an additional 1-2 hours daily on getting my daughter ready, taking her to school, pickup from grandparents, and other daily needs of my daughter. - My income is SIGNIFICANTLY lessened by the expenses of my daughter If I was not a father, I would have the following: - I could live 15 minutes away from work by foot,…

As father of one I have completely opposite experience.

Children (and sick wife) forced me to stay at home and quit my 9-5 job. Only option was to start working on OSS and turn it into paid job in a few months. We moved from expensive city center, sold car and cut our expenses by 50%.

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

#53

Post by mhurron »

cwyers wrote: post #49
mhurron wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not splitting hairs. You made work freely made available for others to use, they used it, this somehow exploited you. > 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. Again, what did you think was going to happen to work you freely made available for people to use as they saw fit. They used it as they saw fit. You…

Think of it this way. Community-developed software kinda runs on a stone soup model -- everyone brings something to the pot, everyone gets something back OUT of the pot, everyone gets something that is better than the sum of the parts contributed to it. This can be a good thing. It doesn't stop you from being miffed if you figure out that there's a restaurant in town that's coming, dropping off a bit of mirepoix, hau…

> Community-developed software kinda runs on a stone soup model

That's a nice idea, and many people do operate that way, but in no way is it required, enforced or the norm.

Most people use OSS without ever contributing back. They find what solves a problem they have and they use it. They can do this because the explicit license allows them to do it. You might have had the intention of 'share and share alike' but the explicit permissions say otherwise.

> It doesn't stop you from being miffed if you figure out that there's a restaurant in town that's coming, dropping off a bit of mirepoix, hauling off a cauldron's worth and selling it the next town over.

It makes your anger over it occurring irrational.

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

#54

Post by jallmann »

What's puzzling is how often FOSS advocates, especially from the permissive camp, frame the idea of contributing code as a purely altruistic action, in that code should be open-sourced and contributed back to because it is the Right Thing to do, resulting in warm fuzzies. The code is both the means and the end: you have the code, do as you wish with it, and please do contribute back if you've made any useful improvements.

Now consider the original motivation behind the GPL, which is to ensure software freedom [1]. Being open-source is merely a necessary prerequisite for software freedom. The GPL is much less idealistic than permissive licenses, and more practical about ensuring its goals. RMS had no illusions about the motivations of people and companies; the GPL's absolute requirement for open-ness is an acknowledgement that there will be licensees who are more than happy to use FOSS software against the spirit in which it was intended.

One side effect of the GPL's demands for open-ness is that when FOSS usage reaches a critical mass, companies will have no choice but to employ programmers that work on free software. These programmers will then contribute back as necessary, creating a self-sustaining FOSS ecosystem. This is already happening with Linux.

In a perfect world full of truly free/libre software, we probably wouldn't have articles like this complaining about "unpaid OSS labor" and GitHub resume padding. The playing ground will be evened out, and there will be proportionately fewer developers contributing because of "love and a lot of free time." In that sense, developers who contribute to FOSS under non-copyleft licenses are doing a disservice to the rest of us who don't have that luxury.

[1] The phrase 'software freedom' is used very specifically to refer to software that satisfies the four freedoms: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

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

#55

Post by SrslyJosh »

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?

> What you contribute and the quality of what you contribute defines the respect and influence you receive as a result

Except it doesn't. Racism, sexism, personal arrogance, etc. all influence the way that people treat each other. People who feel they are not being treated with respect may never make it to the point of contributing anything, or they may decide it's not worth the emotional burden of dealing with assholes.

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

#56

Post by peri »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #46
Justsignedup wrote: post #6

As a father of 1, I must agree to this: - I lose ~ 2-3 hours a day every day on commute alone. - I lose an additional 1-2 hours daily on getting my daughter ready, taking her to school, pickup from grandparents, and other daily needs of my daughter. - My income is SIGNIFICANTLY lessened by the expenses of my daughter If I was not a father, I would have the following: - I could live 15 minutes away from work by foot,…

> As a father of 1, I must agree to this Yep, and people who are disabled (or act as a caretaker) are in a similar boat. Ironically, you are probably a better bet for a lot of employers than that average young single male because you value stability. You're not gonna jump ship because you want a foosball table or expect to have lunch catered every day.

> Ironically, you are probably a better bet for a lot of employers than that average young single male because you value stability. You're not gonna jump ship because you want a foosball table or expect to have lunch catered every day.

Unfortunately, the market for labor is notoriously unequal and illiquid. The desire to save via a large workforce of what you're calling "averge young single male"s often looks much better on a balance sheet than a few well-paid older folks. There's lots of different kinds of capital, but SEC filings definitely favor "objective" measures like number of desks filled.

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

#57

Post by peri »

malandrew wrote: post #51
SrslyJosh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky for you that you can show your work to people outside of your company, right? > Also the author says she knows "many" women who have had trouble contributing to OSS based on how they were treated. GitHub should make it easy to provide examples of this right? Now you're being deliberately obtuse. Not everyone uses github, and not all communication happens through github.

I can't tell the gender of many people in opensource unless they use a username that indicates their gender. Looking at #thrift right now (a project I contribute to). I see 40 people not counting the channel bots. I count only 6 nicknames that suggest that they are likely to be men because they begin with names that are typically male names. The same is true for a lot of the github usernames I see. I wonder how of th…

Hi, I don't know your gender either, but I know lots of F/OSS developers whose names and legally represented genders have changed, even in projects I've committed to. There's a fairly big mix of attribution errors available, and ignoring the presence of silent women, non-binary folks, and transgender developers hasn't made my communities more welcoming to those folks.

Community building is very, very hard work and it involves a lot more than linking to classics like ESR's smart questions. In fact, in my experience, those responses tend to put off newcomers with backgrounds that are different than programmers like me (and presumably you) who have been tinkering in this community since the early 90s.

YMMV, of course, but I think personalities are incredibly important and the most valuable thing you can do in building big communities is making sure that as projects grow they gain stewards, shepherds, or whatever metaphor you prefer that can welcome as well as gatekeep.

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

#58

Post by peri »

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…

I've posted about my personal experiences and how I've personally discouraged all sorts of contributors by ignorance in the past here on HN. For example, I re-submitted recently this blog post on a back and forth that I had with antirez: http://jculpon.github.io/fighting-sexism.html

We were able to resolve that via some twitter messages and some time to let both of us calm down, but at the time I was ready to stop using redis, much less helping folks via bug reports and patches.

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

#59

Post by glyph »

edleafe wrote: post #50
glyph wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 a…

Symphony orchestras used to claim to be the equivalent of a 'meritocracy' (don't think that they used that term, though). They selected strictly by audition, relying on the ears of the (male) conductor/director, and less than 10% of the musicians selected were women. When they changed to have the musicians perform behind a screen, and without identifying them by name, the number of women selected increased dramatical…

This exact example features in the blog post draft I copied most of my comment from :-).

Even more pernicious than that though - you say "the men think they are being fair and honest", but research repeatedly shows that women are also less fair to other women. This is important to keep in mind because it reinforces the fact that most of the biases that work against objectively determining merit are part of the fabric of our society. They are biases that you will tend to hold even if they hurt you personally.

Many men bristle when they are confronted with this sort of research and say "I'm not a sexist" or "I'm not a racist". That's the wrong way to think about it. We live in a deeply unfair society, and unless we constantly, mindfully, consciously work against that unfairness all the time, we will fall victim to it ourselves and perpetuate it.

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

#60

Post by Mc_Big_G »

malandrew wrote: post #38

Does the design community, which expects job candidates to have a portfolio of work in order to be considered for a position, have these same debates that we have in software engineering?

Designer portfolios aren't typically closed source and represent paid work.
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