21–30 of 142 posts
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…
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.
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 render…
Yes, please start by practicing what you preach. I actually donated 1% of my income to various open source projects I use.
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 render…
This has actually worked in practice: Blender was originally proprietary software, but the copyright holder agreed to release it under the GPL after collecting 100K EUR in donations. After 7 weeks they collected enough donations and Blender was released as FOSS as promised.
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…
It's a matter of not letting "perfect" get in the way of "good". You're totally right, we should work towards getting everyone who wants to work on open source code bases the public funds they deserve at every opportunity, but in the mean time, we'll have to put up with corpos funding some of the FLOSS code.
> We have to accept the world as it is – even if it’s not the world we want. This means we have to be okay with the idea that maintainers need to be paid. 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! So this argument reduces to “open source maintainers shouldn’t be paid”. I can’t get on board with that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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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…
Well that's just an implied always. Is it likely good? No, probably not. Is it always bad? No, probably not. It's conceivable that there are a lot more potential users in the direction the company wants to drag the project, and the few current users can fork it.
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's important to have a term for software which is unencumbered by use restrictions, and we do: open source. Lumping other licenses in with it should be resisted. It's like (I've never seen this, to be clear) pescatarians rebranding as "seafood vegans". What is supposed to be gained there, or by trying to bolt on various source-available licenses to the definition of open source?
So this guy picks an important topic, and right up front, he's telling me he knows that it's going to piss me off, but he's going to call not-open-source software open source anyway, and if I object, I don't care about developers getting paid.
Y'know what? You succeeded. Fuck you, tab closed.