The Internet Relies on People Working for Free • Hacker News Board

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#151

Post by davnicwil » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #141

davnicwil wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for I agree with your general thrust but on a tangent, this isn't true and isn't the right way to think about software contributions, even 'trivial' ones. A trivial change seems low value to you because you wouldn't have to spend much time at all doing the same thing yourself. To see its market value, you have to view it from the perspective of…

I actually completely agree with you; the value isn't how long it takes or how much effort goes into it -- it's how much it's worth to the user. The problem is that most contributions, individually , just aren't worth that much to a users individually . For example, how much would I personally for a fix to a graphical glitch fixed in the Dolphin emulator? Think how hard that is to quantify! Is it worth $20? It it wor…

A very good point and an angle I'd not considered to what you were saying. What I said of course assumes that the result of the change is worth the effort in and of itself. Usually true for a product managed by a business, potentially less true when the implementer simply chooses whatever they want to change in an open source project.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#152

Post by dkersten » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

dumbfoundded wrote: post #109

agumonkey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an issue though. You spend time as you please and its fine, but ultimately current society revolves on exchanging services in a semi quantifiable manner (transactions at price). You cannot live on free contributions. I find this hybrid situation too paradoxical.

How is it different than any other sort of hobby or volunteering?

Most hobbies don’t provide potentially large financial upside to some corporation who is unwilling to give you something in return.

If my hobby is to bake cakes, there isn’t typically some corporation making money off my cakes.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#153

Post by TurboHaskal » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #127

TurboHaskal wrote: post #73

I always liked this post by Erik Naggum: The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not suc…

This whole argument is built on the premise that when you fall ill for a while or have an accident, nobody will help you and you'll die instead (I guess they didn't mean it so literally, but that's what the text says). As far as I know, this is actually false in every part of the world that can afford it except for the USA. You may not earn a lot while ill, government support isn't everything, but roughly a thousand…

I think you haven't read the other paragraphs. Please do so if you haven't.

But nevertheless, contrary to some open source developers, doctors are not giving their labour force for free nor living below the poverty line. The value of a doctor is very clear to our society and in Europe we happily pay our taxes to keep the universal healthcare system running. The value of software on the other hand is decreasing.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#154

Post by bjornjaja » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

joshlemer wrote: post #89

Some other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so. I now am starting to rethink…

Honestly not everything is business-centric—if I’m working on something for pure love of it, that’s going to turn up the best quality I can muster. Those big companies run by business people usually just thinking about dollar signs. Just another shitty side effect of capitalism.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#155

Post by decoyworker » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

joshlemer wrote: post #89

Some other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so. I now am starting to rethink…

So since a corporation might get value from your work then nobody should get value from your work?

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#156

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #106

cheez wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: very interesting that this post is getting downvoted. I didn't even say anything controversial, just that banning people is bad. Exactly the danger we face online, which will eventually get into broader society. I got banned on a platform for saying a public figure was physically attractive to me. Prior to that, I had engaged in a perfectly factual discussion about certain statistics that were in favor of a par…

> I like HN's approach to moderation. You don't ban the person unless they are really unreasonable. You flag the comment, disappear it from the thread and tell them to behave. That does happen, but HN also silently rate-limits and downrates comments for people that have been flagged as troublemakers by the mods. I'm currently rate-limited on HN to no more than five comments in a period of, I think, several hours. Try…

[deleted]

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#157

Post by moron4hire » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

user_50123890 wrote: post #4

Not just open-source maintainers but also moderators. A bad thing about moderators is that nowadays they tend to be immature teens, it's one of the reasons Reddit content quality has been going down in the past few years. It also creates some moral questions, as companies with giant revenues are outsourcing their internet janitor duties to naive unpaid child labourers

When I first got on the internet 20 years ago, moderators were all teens, too. But I didn't notice because I was also a teenager. Then I grew up, and those mods for too, and we all went on to different things. Going back to the forums, it's just a different set of teens. It was always immature. What changed was that I matured.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#158

Post by scarejunba » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

Honestly, with bountysource and all that, I'm not too upset with the state of things. The way I see it is that you're just free agents acting in a universe with other agents. It is valuable to make open-source software because other agents will also share those with you. If someone wants a support contract or wants a one-off fix it's going to cost some amount but I'm not going to sweat my balls over trying to make it for them without money.

I'm not going to hide any software I write from big companies. They can take if they so desire so long as they adhere by the licence. The magic of software is that this community has realized the incredible value humanity can realize by open collaboration, value we realize personally. So I don't really care that the Internet relies on people working for free. It's like the government kinda relies on my reporting a pothole to fix it. But I get a fixed pothole out of it, so we gucci. It doesn't matter if someone gets more value out of it if I get sufficient value out of it. I'm all for chasing Pareto improvements to my life.

When I really really want something I take a risk to get it with money, like when I had to go fund a tiny piece of `neovim` in the beginning or when I fund a Kickstarter thing.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#159

Post by drstewart » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #80

kfrzcode wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$50k-100k seems a bit high for a bugfix.... else I'm desperately undervaluing my worth in salary negotiations

High for salary, yes. High for buying enterprise support on mission-critical software? Perhaps the value might be different.

Enterprise support and "no badgering on ETAs" don't quite go together.

I want to live in the fantasy world some of you live in where you expect corporations to cut you a $100k check, no strings attached.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#160

Post by wvenable » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #152

dumbfoundded wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it different than any other sort of hobby or volunteering?

Most hobbies don’t provide potentially large financial upside to some corporation who is unwilling to give you something in return. If my hobby is to bake cakes, there isn’t typically some corporation making money off my cakes.

If your hobby was making cake designs and you share them on the Internet to whomever wants them with a license that allows even businesses to use your designs then we are right back where we started.

That's still a perfectly valid hobby.

P.S. You give away your designs because everyone else does and you get this big collection of free cake designs to bake. That's worth more to you in your cake baking hobby than selling your designs and making it a business. Invariably someone comes along and sees all this huge body of cake designs and says "This collection is worth money, you should be rich" and completely misunderstands the whole situation.