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Paying people to work on open source is good

jacobian.org

11–20 of 142 posts

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#11
I want to agree, and I understand the position, but there's no room for nuance when you throw around the work 'always'.

I think I disagree that it is always good.

For instance, if a company is paying someone to work on open source, and they use that to leverage the project in a direction that is against its other users' best interest, can that be good? I don't think so.

There are numerous examples of situations and behaviors you could come up with that are not 'good'.

I'm all for people making a living, but I don't like bad behavior, no matter if it generates 'freeish' source code or not.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#12
post #10
post #7

A pro capitalist message from Jacobin? [Looks closer.] No. I'd pay for an open source project that could filter & sort news by surprisingness-for-that-news-source. This opinion would rank high for jacobin.com. The story about Zuckerberg's preference for the Quest 3 over the AVP would disappear.

https://jacobian.org is Jacob Kaplan-Moss's website https://jacobin.com is a socialist magazine This blog post is from the former!

*jacobian.org for JKM's site

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#13
post #7

A pro capitalist message from Jacobin? [Looks closer.] No. I'd pay for an open source project that could filter & sort news by surprisingness-for-that-news-source. This opinion would rank high for jacobin.com. The story about Zuckerberg's preference for the Quest 3 over the AVP would disappear.

Jacobian, not Jacobin.

But even so, paying people for their labor is entirely uncontroversial amongst socialists. Some might even argue it's the fundamental underpinning of their critique of capitalism.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#14
I don't understand when it became this was FOSS was always about "Free as in speech." But for some reason it became "Free as in beer." and many of the arguments I see around dev pay seem to be conflating the 2.

Open source merely means the source is open and free for you to view look at modify, etc. At no point does it mean it costs nothing. Now with code it's not exactly a super reasonable business model to sell a software product but make it's code freely available, but that would still meet the definition of open source.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#15

I want to agree, and I understand the position, but there's no room for nuance when you throw around the work 'always'. I think I disagree that it is always good. For instance, if a company is paying someone to work on open source, and they use that to leverage the project in a direction that is against its other users' best interest, can that be good? I don't think so. There are numerous examples of situations and b…

This is why grants are really important. That usually means deliverables in a specific timeframe. To me, that elevates open source from a full-time hobby to a job.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#16
I've put some serious thought into solving this problem. There are two main structural issues I know of:

1. Open source libraries tend to be complement goods. You're more willing to pay for a good physics engine if you already have a good rendering engine and vice versa. But a sad truth of complement goods is that they are a centralizing force - it's actually better for everyone if the physics engine maker and rendering engine maker join forces and offer a bundle discount. But the most common strategy seems to be for them to just merge into one company, and this is why you see giant conglomerate products like Unreal and Unity instead of buying each component from a different vendor.

2. Since open source software is a public good (non-rivalrous, non-excludable), the "free market" cannot really incentivize its production nearly as much as would be optimal. Let's say there are 1000 people who would each pay $10 for a feature to be added, and the maintainer would happily add it for $5000. If 90% of those people each paid $6 they would get what they want and the maintainer would be happy too, but each individual has an incentive to be part of that 10% that gets to keep their $6 and still gets the feature, so what happens is that almost no one ends up paying.

These problems can't be solved without slightly modifying open source, but they can be solved by maintaining the spirit of open source I think. What you need is to have some kind of foundation that takes money and gives it to "quasi-open-source" projects, and then only allows businesses to use those projects if they contribute a certain percentage of their revenue to the foundation. Of course, now the foundation needs to decide which open source projects to give the money too. It's an extremely tricky problem, but there's been a lot of interesting research by Glen Weyl on that exact subject and I'm confident it could be solved in a satisfactory way.

I think this proposal would create a virtuous cycle once it got off the ground. The more projects licensed "quasi-open-source", the larger the incentive to pay the foundation to use them. The more the foundation is paid, the more money these "quasi-open-source" projects get, and so more people will license their projects "quasi-open-source", increasing the incentive again, etc.

Of course, it would only be "quasi-open-source", and not truly open-source. But there's no reason the license couldn't be extremely in line with the spirit of open source. For example, it could say "if you're an individual or small company, you can use our code for any purpose for free. If you're a big company, you can use it in a way that complies with the AGPL or you can pay us, your choice".

I think employees would also encourage their employers to become paying members of such a foundation, if it lead to those employees being able to determine where some of the money goes. Everyone at my current company is a Rust developer and so we naturally like Rust, but Rust jobs aren't always easy to find. As employees, it could be in our best interest to subsidize the development of Rust open source projects, if that increased Rust's attractiveness to other companies.

If you're interested in this idea, my email is in my bio :D

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#19

The premise of paid open source devs is fine and well, but every single one of these blogs devolves into delusional utopian nonsense from people who do not understand the staggering infrastructure and maintenance cost of the modern society they think should be some sort of guaranteed right. People, please learn and understand where your food comes from before writing this kind of garbage.

TFA’s author is one of the co-creators of Django and a preeminent member of the Python community. I think it would be charitable to assume that he does, in fact, understand these things.

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Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#20

I want to agree, and I understand the position, but there's no room for nuance when you throw around the work 'always'. I think I disagree that it is always good. For instance, if a company is paying someone to work on open source, and they use that to leverage the project in a direction that is against its other users' best interest, can that be good? I don't think so. There are numerous examples of situations and b…

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