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The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

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Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#121

Post by cxr »

halukakin wrote: post #63

I think there should be some serious changes about this. Github already knows which software packages a company uses. They could facilitate this. For example if the OSS maintainer asks for it, any company more than say three members should pay a monthly fee per package. Even 1 USD per package per month would make a huge difference for OSS. So if your javascript package.json has 20 dependencies, and you are actively d…

> 1 USD per package per month would make a huge difference for OSS. So if your javascript package.json has 20 dependencies, and you are actively developing, every month you should expect to pay 20USD

The proliferation of tiny NPM packages is bad enough already. It will only be made worse by the cobra effect.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#122

Post by IshKebab »

eschneider wrote: post #6

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's perfectly ok to charge folks for software and if you're OSS project isn't motivating you like it used to, it's perfectly ok to charge users for support/updates/bugfixes.

Yes exactly. You can say "I don't have much time to work on this project I'm afraid, but I am available for consulting if you really need this fixed."

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#123

Post by FridgeSeal »

pjmlp wrote: post #89
anonymous_sorry wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main benefit of using open source in a corporate environment is that there is usually zero paperwork involved. As long as the licence is approved, have at it! As soon as you pay money for something, either a fee or a donation, you've got to email someone. Almost certainly someone outside your team. Companies don't make decisions on individual OSS dependencies. Individual engineers and engineering teams do. That's…

Only if they don't care about liability. Those that care, CI/CD only fetches from internal repos, and stuff is only uploaded into them after an audit.

> Those that care, CI/CD only fetches from internal repos, and stuff is only uploaded into them after an audit.

It would be really interesting to do a survey about this, so that we can get some stats and breakdown by industry, language, size, etc about where this happens. I gather some places do this, but I’ve never met anyone, or worked anywhere that does this.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#124

Post by IshKebab »

anonymous_sorry wrote: post #48
benj111 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do companies use open source because it's free? Cost may be a component. But not the only component, and cost doesn't have to be binary. You can charge and still be less than the alternatives.

The main benefit of using open source in a corporate environment is that there is usually zero paperwork involved. As long as the licence is approved, have at it! As soon as you pay money for something, either a fee or a donation, you've got to email someone. Almost certainly someone outside your team. Companies don't make decisions on individual OSS dependencies. Individual engineers and engineering teams do. That's…

This 1000%.

It's not my money. Why would I particularly care if we have to pay for some software?

But it is my time and effort. If I have to go through a lot of red tape and politics just to use some library then ... screw that. Doesn't matter how much it costs.

That's one of the reasons it generally makes no sense to offer enterprise software for a low cost. Even if it only costs $1, your users still have the red tape to deal with. You may as well make it cost $1k, so you actually make some money from the few users who fight the tape.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#125

Post by sirsuki »

I’m curious if it makes sense to have a distinction between source code existing for the purpose of discovery versus software for fitness of purpose. In other words this is similar to the Cathedral and the Bazaar as OSS used as a tool by users compared to the Bazaar where the focus is on displaying the source code. Much of my interest in contributing to OSS is more about offering examples and ideas via source code and not if the utility of the software fits specific users’ purposes.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#126

Post by FridgeSeal »

Devasta wrote: post #116

This is why everyone should switch to AGPL3. You can use MIT/BSD/Apache/GPL3 dependencies without issue; never need to worry about derivative works or anything like that, just set it and forget it, and because corporations avoid you like the plague you can code away without a care in the world for backwards compatibility. The BSD/MIT license is free as in free tech support, always has been.

Agreed.

“It’s too hard for dev teams to fund open source”: yes, it is; but we’re not going to fix that by giving them the code for free. If businesses really want something, they’ll pay. What’s missing are better ways for commercial entities-and dev teams therein- to monetarily support devs when they need to use a licence for commercial purposes because clearly the current parasitic economic model isn’t working.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#127

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

j7ake wrote: post #98
amelius wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So the end result is that you live in a society where the average quality of education and health care slowly plummets to zero? That is not a sustainable solution for society.

I'm not quite following - are you criticising modern late stage Captitalism or some imaginary implementation of bureaucracy?

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#128

Post by ahepp »

hypfer wrote: post #81
ahepp wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this and it makes sense that a minority of users sucks up a lot of time, but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people. I've never maintained a popular open source project so maybe there's something about the situation I just don't understand. But it seems like: > Thank you for your feature request, we will add it to the backlog. The core team doesn't work on unfunded feature requests…

> but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people. One reason is that you're being told that that's an awful thing to do by basically every resource on "proper open-source" you can find. Another is that these people are pretty good at starting shit storms trying to ruin your reputation if you don't comply with their unreasonable demands. It's also worth nothing that some requests/issues/questi…

I've never read any resources on what constitutes proper open source. It seems like there are a lot of different and incompatible goals in the world of open source. For example, if I wanted to get paid I definitely wouldn't be reading something by Stallman.

Sure, reviewing and maintaining PRs is work too. If I wasn't willing to do it for free, I'd be clear and upfront, and say

> Unfortunately we don't have the time to review PRs without funding. If you are interested in having a PR reviewed, you can sponsor the project or contract a maintainer. In the past, it's taken a couple hours to review PRs. Keep in mind that even after your PR is merged, it will need to be maintained. If there are no volunteer maintainers able to keep your code in a decent state, it may be removed in future releases.

There's a very real chance someone won't use your project if you say this. They might use a competing project with maintainers that will work for free, or they might even fork your project. That's certainly their right.

I don't think I've ever seen a shitstorm arise from clear and open boundary-setting by maintainers. I'm sure I don't have an extensive catalog of every internet shitstorm, but the ones I can recall off the top of my head are usually situations that I'm sure felt like rug-pulls or shakedowns to users. I'm also having trouble thinking of a shitstorm over a minor incident that truly ruined someone's reputation, but I might just not run in the right circles to know about that kind of thing.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#129

Post by DonHopkins »

halukakin wrote: post #63

I think there should be some serious changes about this. Github already knows which software packages a company uses. They could facilitate this. For example if the OSS maintainer asks for it, any company more than say three members should pay a monthly fee per package. Even 1 USD per package per month would make a huge difference for OSS. So if your javascript package.json has 20 dependencies, and you are actively d…

Once you make a system like that distributing money, it becomes a game and people start exploiting it, and it all turns to crap.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#130

Post by dtx1 »

sofixa wrote: post #108
agent327 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still beats having a central planner from the politburo tell you to work in the mines for zero compensation.

You know that's not how central planning worked, right? You were told to live in a specific place, with a few (narrow) options on where to work at (unless you were (un)specialised, then there was sometimes zero choice), for meagre but sufficient compensation. You could have a place to live, food to eat. The place to live might be a room in an apartment shared with other families, the food to eat might be bread with b…

And by everyone you of course mean everyone that wasn't arrested because he thought maybe bread with bread and a shared appartment is kinda shitty.
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