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“Open source” is not broken

nadh.in

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Re: “Open source” is not broken

#241

Post by wutbrodo »

DarylZero wrote: post #222
wutbrodo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still doesn't make UBI relevant to this discussion. It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over to dedicate to open source, and yet this path is relatively untrodden. Plenty of engineers (myself included) already…

> It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there I wish that were true...

I'm not sure if we have misaligned expectations of how much income a reasonable UBI is likely to provide, or of how much income you can make contracting.

The range of incomes I've seen from UBI proposals range from 10-20k/yr, with the high end generally applying to people with 2+ children. This is partially constrained by political reality, but politics aren't the only thing putting an implicit ceiling on the amount of UBI (as a reductio ad absurdum, consider why we wouldn't just give everyone $500k a year and all just retire onto our yachts).

Taking the midpoint, $15k pa means $1250/month, which means you'd need to make _$30/hr_ on software contracts to match UBI. You don't think it's plausible to fill the pipe with a 10-hr week of contracts over $30? Bear in mind that this means you'd need 3 hours a week or _12 hours a month_ with a more realistic (yet still quite conservative) income estimate of $100/hr, and that the type of person who's currently maintaining an OSS project is already increasing the quality of the talent/income potential distribution.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#242

Post by wutbrodo »

kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #221
wutbrodo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still doesn't make UBI relevant to this discussion. It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over to dedicate to open source, and yet this path is relatively untrodden. Plenty of engineers (myself included) already…

Do you know any developers consistently working just 10 hours a week, by their choice? (honest question…this sounds kinda appealing!)

I don't think I currently do, but that's sort of my point: people don't want to do this, for reasons ranging from the income left on the table to the type of work not being fulfilling.

Note that both of these are handled by the premise, which was that OSS maintainers would be materially unblocked to focus on OSS by a UBI-level income. This assumes that there are a non-trivial amount of OSS maintainers that don't care about the couple hundred thousand dollars they're forgoing, and that they have at least 30 hours of their week filled with fulfilling work.

Tangentially, I match the motivations you're asking about, but not the exact implementation. I spent the early half of my 20s with a far higher income than I wanted, and definitely didn't (and don't) enjoy working 40 hours a week. Given how motivated I am by intellectual challenge, I came to the realization that it was damnably hard to find a job that would give me a suitable intellectual challenge but not require me to be full-time. I "solved" this by interleaving 2-3 years of working with 1-2 years of travel/personal development a couple of times during my 20s.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#243

Post by wutbrodo »

caconym_ wrote: post #188
wutbrodo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still doesn't make UBI relevant to this discussion. It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over to dedicate to open source, and yet this path is relatively untrodden. Plenty of engineers (myself included) already…

> already fairly trivial for a talented SWE This level of subjective qualification makes everything that comes after it essentially meaningless.

Only if you're incapable of making basic inferences and uncomfortable with thinking about distributions and error bars instead of forcing everything into artificial certainty.

If, like many people, you need things shoved into an imaginary concrete, low-dimensional, binary box: "the type of person maintaining an OSS project can trivially make >$30/hr[1] on 10 hrs of contract work a week". If you still think this is too subjective to infer anything from, enjoy your onanistic "nobody can ever really know anything maaaan" perspective, but it's not really relevant to this conversation.

[1] See another comment of mine in this thread for back-of-the-envelope math

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#244

Post by wutbrodo »

dmitriid wrote: post #178
wutbrodo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still doesn't make UBI relevant to this discussion. It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over to dedicate to open source, and yet this path is relatively untrodden. Plenty of engineers (myself included) already…

> It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. What about less talented ones that can still contribute, but need to work 20 hours a week? Or 30 hours a week? Or gasp 40 hours a week? > Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over No. There isn't plenty of time le…

This is a textbook Gish gallop, so I'll avoid the trap of responding point-by-point and address all the irrelevance and inaccuracy of your comment simultaneously.

The premise I responded to was that UBI was the only way to free up OSS maintainers, and that they wouldn't care about the lost hundreds of thousands of income if their basic needs were met. My point was that if this was the case, you would already see the low-hours-per-week strategy in place as a non-trivial factor in OSS funding. And yet you don't, because the foundational assumption is incorrect.

Also note that 10 hours a week is hyper-conservative. The population of people maintaining OSS projects are more than capable of pulling eg $70/hr for contracts[1], especially at the low volumes we're talking about. To reach UBI levels of income at this rate would require _1.5 hrs/wk_ of work, or 6 hrs per MONTH. This allows you to drop the required talent level pretty low, despite already pulling from a population that's selected for "ability to maintain a useful OSS project".

[1] also very conservative: I wouldn't be surprised if a median estimate came closer to $150/hr for your average OSS maintainer

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#245

Post by ajross »

pjmlp wrote: post #225
ajross wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure sure, but my point was really that all nitpicking aside, Open Source is everywhere. Given the opportunity, engineers everywhere will share their work with others and build on that shared work to do more stuff, then share it. An argument from a frame of "Open Source only succeeded because ..." just seems obviously wrong to me. If not ITS then Unix. If not BSD then Linux. If not Mosaic then Chrome. If not gcc then…

Linux only evolved beyond a hobby project, because IBM, Oracle, Compaq, Sun decided to cut down costs on their own UNIX (thus we are back again into corporations and their relation with FOSS), and yet many still have to reverse engineer hardware capabilities despite the big names involved in it. clang is the more recent example, it is becoming visible how it is lagging behind other compilers in C++20 support, not eve…

Again, though, Linux needing that stuff[1] doesn't explain why BSD happened, which needed different stuff. clang needed other stuff still. But... they all got their stuff!

It's a Jurassic Park point, really: life will find a way. Free software beat the world already, and it really strains logic to argue that that only happened because of a giant phonebook filled with special advantages for every individual piece. The much simpler theory is that it was clearly going to happen regardless.

[1] In fact that's really not the way it happened anyway. Linux on whitebox PCs was dominant in the early internet world for pure cost reasons, long before any corporate names got behind it, and that leveraged it into datacenter environments where it became clear people were willing to pay real money. Red Hat's IPO was well in the past and Google had launched on custom Linux motherboards long, long before Oracle or IBM got serious about the OS.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#246

Post by dmitriid »

wutbrodo wrote: post #244
dmitriid wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. What about less talented ones that can still contribute, but need to work 20 hours a week? Or 30 hours a week? Or gasp 40 hours a week? > Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over No. There isn't plenty of time le…

This is a textbook Gish gallop, so I'll avoid the trap of responding point-by-point and address all the irrelevance and inaccuracy of your comment simultaneously. The premise I responded to was that UBI was the only way to free up OSS maintainers, and that they wouldn't care about the lost hundreds of thousands of income if their basic needs were met. My point was that if this was the case, you would already see the…

> This is a textbook Gish gallop, so I'll avoid the trap of responding point-by-point

And this is textbook avoiding an answer

> My point was that if this was the case, you would already see the low-hours-per-week strategy in place as a non-trivial factor in OSS funding.

Yes, and your point is based on the flawed premise that there are many engineers who can do that.

> The population of people maintaining OSS projects are more than capable of pulling eg $70/hr for contracts[1], especially at the low volumes we're talking about.

And you pulled this estimation out of which crevice?

> To reach UBI levels of income at this rate would require _1.5 hrs/wk_ of work, or 6 hrs per MONTH.

Ah yes. Because there are plenty of jobs which will gladly pay you for 6 hours of work a month.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#247

Post by gopher_space »

wutbrodo wrote: post #240
gopher_space wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If picking up software contracts here and there is consistent enough for you to count on then it's either already a full time job or the end result of years of networking and experience. UBI would let people devoted to a subject pursue only that.

Sure, I'm not suggesting that it's as easy or as comprehensive as UBI, of which I'm a strong and longtime supporter. I'm saying that the existence of this weaker alternative is illuminating: there's a non-trivial subset of the population for whom this is an option, including many OSS maintainers, and they don't seem especially jazzed about the idea of making an income that's 10% of what their skills could bring in.

Personally speaking I wouldn't see that as an alternative. Just doing a little above-the-table consulting work comes with periodic obligations. Why make a fraction of your income to still deal with the distractions?

I think you could just ask retired people who volunteer about the subject and get a good take on it.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#248

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

wutbrodo wrote: post #242
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know any developers consistently working just 10 hours a week, by their choice? (honest question…this sounds kinda appealing!)

I don't think I currently do, but that's sort of my point: people don't want to do this, for reasons ranging from the income left on the table to the type of work not being fulfilling. Note that both of these are handled by the premise, which was that OSS maintainers would be materially unblocked to focus on OSS by a UBI-level income. This assumes that there are a non-trivial amount of OSS maintainers that don't care…

That’s probably how most people do that. I have to admit that programming less than full-time was hard for me, because I tended to go flat out. And then burn out, LOL.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#249

Post by DarylZero »

pjmlp wrote: post #225
ajross wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure sure, but my point was really that all nitpicking aside, Open Source is everywhere. Given the opportunity, engineers everywhere will share their work with others and build on that shared work to do more stuff, then share it. An argument from a frame of "Open Source only succeeded because ..." just seems obviously wrong to me. If not ITS then Unix. If not BSD then Linux. If not Mosaic then Chrome. If not gcc then…

Linux only evolved beyond a hobby project, because IBM, Oracle, Compaq, Sun decided to cut down costs on their own UNIX (thus we are back again into corporations and their relation with FOSS), and yet many still have to reverse engineer hardware capabilities despite the big names involved in it. clang is the more recent example, it is becoming visible how it is lagging behind other compilers in C++20 support, not eve…

All of the commercial Unix vendors had as their fundamental technical goal user lock-in, while Linus had technical goal of performance + stability and maybe popularity.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#250

Post by caconym_ »

wutbrodo wrote: post #243
caconym_ wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> already fairly trivial for a talented SWE This level of subjective qualification makes everything that comes after it essentially meaningless.

Only if you're incapable of making basic inferences and uncomfortable with thinking about distributions and error bars instead of forcing everything into artificial certainty. If, like many people, you need things shoved into an imaginary concrete, low-dimensional, binary box: "the type of person maintaining an OSS project can trivially make >$30/hr[1] on 10 hrs of contract work a week". If you still think this is to…

Insults and snark don't change the essential uselessness of your previous comment, though I can see how they might be a welcome distraction from it.
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