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The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

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Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#221

Post by paulddraper »

WalterBright wrote: post #220
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…

> I think that no potential or current employer has ever given a rat's ass about open source contributions, and do not consider that work as valuable when making hiring decisions. That is not the case with the D programming language effort. Quite a number of strong D open-source contributors have been recruited into very well paying positions directly because of their contributions. I suspect the key is contributing…

Also Linux.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#222

Post by paulryanrogers »

js2 wrote: post #200
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…

> 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 can't think of any civic institution I belong to that isn't constantly asking for volunteers, and riding the volunteers they have to do more. I'm not sure it's any different. Society needs volunteers, and money…

> Society needs volunteers, and money isn't everything.

This is a great point. Still, the local church meals do not enrich multi-billion dollar companies; unlike FOSS.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#224

Post by hartator »

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…

> I think that no potential or current employer has ever given a rat's ass about open source contributions, and do not consider that work as valuable when making hiring decisions.

We do care. We're hiring for backend engineers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871478

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#225

Post by jchw »

aflag wrote: post #217
jchw wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(It is possible for there to be multiple anecdotal exceptions.)

The whole thread is anecdotal. I'm not aware of any quantitative study in the matter. There are also the distributions like Debian which is essentially run by volunteers.

I know there are volunteers that do a lot of Debian work, but that is not to say Debian is purely volunteer work. Obviously there is plenty of sponsored work. https://www.debian.org/partners/

I’d argue without trying to classify and quantify Debian contributions, there is no way to know who is doing work on Debian on their employer’s dime.

I also try to contribute to various projects in spare time as well. My contributions don’t really add up to much overall, though.

Sure, it’s all anecdotal. But otoh, the notion that FOSS is mostly volunteer work is probably worth challenging. Most non-huge projects I’ve come across only have 4 or 5 key contributors. Open source is at least, not as distributed as believed for most projects. On the other hand, companies using FOSS have incentives to contribute, and sometimes will even hire contributors on important projects.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#226

Post by ineedasername »

Well, it's not quite free, it has benefits like reputation that in theory could lead to better employment opportunities, though I'm not sure how well that holds up in practice. It would be interesting to do a study on it. Of course the results could show a negative as well: those dedicated to open source projects focus less of their time and energy on their career responsibilities.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#227

Post by paulryanrogers »

gitgud wrote: post #203
joshlemer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What open source projects specifically? I have not contributed to any of these projects but for instance: Spark, Flink, Druid, Akka, Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, Java Spring, Hibernate, etc etc.

All those (mostly distributed) systems are not exclusively used by big corporations. They are also used in research and smaller startups too. Hell I know people who use the Java Spring Framework on personal projects. The world of open source benefits the powerful entities, and that's OK that's what open source is about... Everyone gets the code for free... No matter who you are

> The world of open source benefits the powerful entities, and that's OK that's what open source is about... Everyone gets the code for free

The risk is that it devalues labor. And could build a culture where so much is expected for free that there is never enough financial support.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#228

Post by satvikpendem »

drstewart wrote: post #159
Kalium wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They'll probably lose much more than $100k on the bug impacting their systems.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#229

Post by SamuelAdams »

muglug wrote: post #9

The overarching problem with expecting companies to pay for open-source is that they don’t have to. It’s often as vital to them as the publicly-provided infrastructure used by their employees to get to work, but because they never see the costs, they assume there isn’t any. In an ideal world business-critical FOSS projects would be funded by the government the same way that other public infrastructure is. Until that…

>The overarching problem with expecting companies to pay for open-source is that they don’t have to.

Exactly this. Take the cURL program, as mentioned in the article. The license [1] states:

>Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

So, if an organization is free to use something, then you get upset that you don't get paid for it, why not just adopt a different license? Build a model where they have to pay for it?

[1]: https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/COPYING

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#230

Post by [deleted] »

wvenable wrote: post #29

I feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren't grasping. Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for. It's only collecti…

[deleted]
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