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Paying people to work on open source is good

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Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#111

Post by benatkin »

mixologic wrote: post #98
benatkin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate would be for a new meaning of the term open source , which has already been established. People can create a new meaning but it doesn't change the original meaning of it, which I like to call the true meaning . The license is far from being the only thing about open source. What makes open source what it is are its triumphs, such as the popularity of Linux and how many developers prefer open source tools a…

> What makes open source what it is are its triumphs If you define triumphs to include only 'popularity' and developer preferences, then sure, its triumphant. > using a license like the Business Source License indicates a lack of belief in the vision of open source The issue is that the vision of open source itself is lacking, because it doesn't recognize that it fails to provide a pathway to being compensated and re…

Popularity is absolutely part of the triumphs I had in mind. It is often a very good thing in open source. It meant Internet Explorer 6 being less popular, as well as Windows on servers.

As far as the pathway to being compensated and rewarded - I want the community to be compensated and rewarded, not just those that started the project. We've seen this play out with ElasticSearch and OpenSearch, as well as Hashicorp. Even Sentry has an alternative https://glitchtip.com/

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#112

Post by richardfontana »

cipherboy wrote: post #60
cratermoon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By picking his own definition of what open source means, is the author really arguing for paying people to work on open source? Or is his argument more one of being in favor allowing a bunch of things that happen to pay people to work on them be counted as "open source"? For example, if RHEL still counts as open source, then Red Hat's programmers are paid open source developers, but if RHEL is now proprietary, then t…

Even with the changes to RHEL licensing, Red Hat developers are still encouraged to upstream changes before landing them in Fedora (and in turn, before landing them in CentOS stream and ultimately RHEL). Nearly every developer at Red Hat working on RHEL will do work in the public, on OSI-licensed packages upstream, before landing changes in RHEL. The change to RHEL licenses is not around source availability of the pa…

There were no changes to RHEL licensing whatsoever.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#113

Post by cipherboy »

richardfontana wrote: post #112
cipherboy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with the changes to RHEL licensing, Red Hat developers are still encouraged to upstream changes before landing them in Fedora (and in turn, before landing them in CentOS stream and ultimately RHEL). Nearly every developer at Red Hat working on RHEL will do work in the public, on OSI-licensed packages upstream, before landing changes in RHEL. The change to RHEL licenses is not around source availability of the pa…

There were no changes to RHEL licensing whatsoever.

I agree.

I think what OP is talking about is change in the (for rebuilders) source distribution availability, e.g., https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s... -- but as a later blog post points out (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-sour...), the source is still available in a different location, though perhaps at a slightly different point in the release cycle: forward looking to RHEL next.

My response is in that context, that even if one were to consider the removal of those source locations somehow a "license change" (and I agree with you, it is not), nearly everyone working on RHEL would still be an OSI developer, for reasons pointed out by Mike.

Which is a very good thing, and as a former Red Hatter, thank you for helping to keep that possible Richard!

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#114

Post by wslack »

palata wrote: post #100
simonw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author was fed up of people saying "well actually your achievement in getting paid to work on open source shouldn't be celebrated because of " - one of which was license definition arguments. That's why he chose to be controversial about that.

I read the article again. Twice. To me the point is really that he is fed up of people criticizing the people instead of the system. And there are interesting discussions to be had around that, e.g.: is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad? Instead, for some reason he just spends a whole section redefining concepts instead of just admitting that he may have used them wrong…

> is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad?

I think OP would say its better to work on open source at Meta than closed source at Meta, and we should celebrate someone being paid to write open source. We can also condemn their specific employer while not denigrating their open source compensation.

re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#116

Post by sattoshi »

While I have made a few OSS donations, I want to avoid doing so out of principle. I, a lone developer, should not be funding the work my peers do.

How much does openssl benefit me personally? How much does eslint? However much, it’s negligible to how much it benefits my employer. Which in turn is negligible to Google.

This is a responsibility that big tech ought to pick up, not random people.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#117

Post by mcmoor »

preommr wrote: post #43
gustavus wrote: post #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 s…

Perhaps unpopular opinion, but it's because the 0$ cost is what 99% of OSS users care about. Since it requires no investment on part of the user, it increases the potential target market to a much larger size than it would if it were paid. There's just something about things being free that break people's minds. There's even a study on this where they offered chocolates for free vs 0.01$, and the free option was much…

I think this is more that pay barrier significantly raises obstacle no matter how much money you actually have to give. Even as little as 10^-10 cent. Just by nature of transaction verification have a hard cost no matter how much money actually transferred.

What would finally vanquish ads off the internet is micro transaction that is actually able to bypass this barrier entirely. This is what bitcoin promised to do but of course, they don't solve real problems.

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#118

Post by skybrian »

This blog post interprets saying “it’s not open source, though” as if it were a criticism of releasing software under various other source-available licenses.

Maybe some people mean it that way, but for me it’s purely about not watering down terms that have a clear meaning. Sometimes source-available licenses are better for the business and it’s understandable why some businesses do that. It’s less generous, but still a good thing.

(Just like it’s understandable that people don’t make source code available for all their software.)

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#119

Post by skybrian »

acdha wrote: post #99
samatman wrote: post #30

A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea. I will never compromise on the definition of open source. I'm not particularly hard-nosed about proprietary software, or source available software either, they're fine, with some caveats I'll leave out. But it'…

You’re talking about someone who’s been working in open source for decades, on pretty successful projects. He knew with absolute certainty that mentioning licensing will lead to pedantic rancor, and that’s unavoidable: there is literally no way to raise this topic in a way someone will not passionately disagree with, and that’s going to distract from the more important topic he wanted to discuss. For example: > But i…

I think you misunderstood “use restrictions.” I interpret it as “anyone can use the software built with this source code themselves.” The GPL and MIT license don’t have any use restrictions. (In the case of the GPL, there are restrictions on distribution, but that’s different.)

Re: Paying people to work on open source is good

#120

Post by sumuyuda »

“Far too often I see arguments like: “maintainers shouldn’t be paid by private companies because the government should be supporting them.” Sure, this sounds great – but governments aren’t doing this!”

Governments are doing this. The German government funds https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/

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