I've regularly heard something similar said of consulting work, too. Many people new to the game worry about charging too much, because if a client is paying more then surely the pressure will be higher. Instead they end up experiencing the opposite: charging a higher rate tends to get them a better kind of client. I'm not sure what the exact lesson is here. Something about stingy people not being nice to work with,…
Not to mention that "OSI open source" is basically sponsored and advocated by the firms that stand to benefit the most: hyperscalers that will embrace, extend, and encrust the thing you built with their monetization tendrils and leave you without a way to make money on it yourself. See: Redis, Elastic, etc. Not an ounce of AWS or GCP is open source, yet they'll happily spin up a managed version of your thing and make…
Firecracker and gVisor are used by AWS and GCP, respectively, are open source. That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's more, there's also the whole Open Compute Project, after all.
I don't think it is a crazy opinion to think the desire to be rich is morally troubling. It is a desire to consume more than your share of the world's resources.
Easy to say that, isn’t it? I can almost guarantee that YOU also want and do consume much more than an average human on this planet. Never mind the fact that humans consume more than their share of the planets resources anyway. Whatever the definition of “their share” is.
This is why I used the word troubling, instead of wrong or evil or anything like that.
Yes, the devil is in the details. I just don't think it is unreasonable to be troubled by people wanting to be rich.
I don't think it is a crazy opinion to think the desire to be rich is morally troubling. It is a desire to consume more than your share of the world's resources.
And if you invent or create something which brings a lot of value to other people, then your share should be just as big as everybody else's? 30% of the food eaten on the planet by people today is grown thanks to a German scientist who invented a way to extract fertilizer from air. He is directly responsible for the ability of billions of people to live and survive. What would be his fair compensation?
I don't have some sort of definitive answer to this, and I don't think there is an objectively right answer. It is very open to debate.
My point is that it isn't unreasonable to think it is troublesome to want to be rich.
Personally, I think there is some appropriate compromise between "people should take as much as they can for themselves, however much they can negotiate" and "people should never take more than the poorest person". So no, I don't think everyone should get the exact same share as everyone else, but I also don't think anyone should take a million times as much as the average person.
> So helping them with what they want could mean that you've just tipped the scale enough for hundreds or thousands of people to become new customers. Sure, if the request is reasonable and sensical. I entertain those and even help them formulate the request better if needed. That’s true of both commercial and open-source. But I’m more talking about the users who demand features. Those who say the tool needs to have…
No other customers asking for the feature is not a signal that its not wanted by many others. Other people suggesting the same thing is a terrible measurement, as suggestions from paying users is already an incredibly small amount of users and some users may just thing it would be nice but not enough to warrant sending in a request. For example: it would be nice if I had a one-click export of my favorites on HN to a…
In other words, you’re agreeing with me. Again:
> Those who say the tool needs to have whatever idea they just thought of 2 minutes ago, despite no one else ever having asked for it and it not really making sense.
If no one is bothered enough by the lack of the feature to mention it, then the software doesn’t need it. And you’re ignoring the “and it not really making sense” part. If a feature is well-reasoned and makes sense in scope, I always consider it.
Or don't. I've done both, published OSS projects and sold some software. The level of entitlement in some comments I received on the OSS side was pretty crazy at times. While with the paid software, all of the interactions I had were so much more constructive. YMMV, but willingness to pay is a great filter.
A TV-presenter of a fairly popular TV-show with an audience in my country once told an anecdote that they wanted the admission for the audience to be free. But when the tickets were free, a lot less people showed up. When they changed the ticket to be the quite arbitrary amount of 7 EUR, suddenly the theater was full every time.
> But when the tickets were free, a lot less people showed up.
I can think of several reasons for that. It would be nice to know for sure which was the right one (or if there’s a combination).
E.g. Maybe being free, people reserved the tickets but then didn’t show up. Or if you didn’t have to reserve, people only went on a whim. Or they always assumed they would all be reserved in advance so didn’t bother to try.
I suspect that when you pay for an event you’re more likely to make a concerted effort to attend lest you “lose the money”.
No other customers asking for the feature is not a signal that its not wanted by many others. Other people suggesting the same thing is a terrible measurement, as suggestions from paying users is already an incredibly small amount of users and some users may just thing it would be nice but not enough to warrant sending in a request. For example: it would be nice if I had a one-click export of my favorites on HN to a…
In other words, you’re agreeing with me. Again: > Those who say the tool needs to have whatever idea they just thought of 2 minutes ago, despite no one else ever having asked for it and it not really making sense. If no one is bothered enough by the lack of the feature to mention it, then the software doesn’t need it. And you’re ignoring the “and it not really making sense” part. If a feature is well-reasoned and mak…
need is a weird thing to hinge off of as software itself doesnt have "needs" and most software thats made doesn't fulfill a true pure "need".
They'll find loopholes around that too, in time - they already found some, which led to the SSPL being created. What you actually want is some kind of noncommercial clause: you can use my free shit as part of your free shit. If you want to make money off my shit, the rules change to "fuck you, pay me" "But what if a company just wants to try it out?" well they can live within the already existing exception called "no…
What are some good licenses for that? I generally do want fellow programmers to enjoy my work but I don't really want corporations finding ways to make trillions off of it and leaving me with nothing. I've been slapping AGPLv3 on everything I make for that reason. Any "open source" nonsense is just wealth transfer from well meaning developers straight into the pockets of corporations, so I picked the most copyleft license imaginable. I'm open to even stronger AGPLv3 alternatives. Anything that helps individual hackers and gets corporations to pay.
Like your vibe. One question : what would be, solely according to you, the best policies to get "us" out of this mess ? Tax wealth ? Nuke inheritance ? Something else ?
I don't think it's a mess: it's all going according to plan and maybe 100-300 families worldwide are very happy - the capital-holders. I'm from the Global South, and most people here are from the North, so to answer your question I'll have to be a little bit vague: I'm a communist [0]. 0: Good introduction if anyone needs it: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
In small tribes you don't need as much organization, but the larger the scale the more organization you need. Weak and powerless people are usually that way, because it is natural to them. It is nonsense to say that only a tiny number of people have any influence over the world. Some people have more influence than others, yes, but that exists even in tribes.
Every country that ever aspired to communism had people who were at the top and people who were at the bottom, far more so than free market countries.
How many of the famous names you can think of that changed the modern world started off from old money? A lot of these things come from new money private investors or government incentives and grants, or they just bootstrapped themselves and grew organically.
It might be fair to say that we should do more to preserve inexpensive rural life as a viable alternative to many people, because a lot of people born in cities today may more realistically be better suited to the pace and burden of rural life.
Alternatively, we should renormalize people living together in larger numbers the way they did in the 1800s and early 1900s (though not to the same extreme). Individualism is expensive, but many people preserve a more individualistic lifestyle even if their personal finances don't easily support it and then they blame everything outside of their life rather than their own choices.
A lot of comments can't help but mention the constant looming threat of potentially permanent destitution that pervades our society. It's increasingly hard to understand the position of people who think that this is a feature, excepting of course those very few with the resources to use that pressure rather than be driven by it
I'm not sure what you mean by "permanent destitution" but certainly life is full of struggles. It's not just a feature of our society, but of the universe itself. Without struggle and pain there is no life. Fighting entropy is a constant battle. The good news is, life has been winning the battle for many millions of years.
Well, in our current world, one species of apes has, by banding together into coordinated groups and allowing individuals to specialize in building various skills and knowledge, discovered numerous complex mechanical properties of the universe and created technologies that have over time accumulated to obviate a giant subset of struggles that define the lives of most living organisms, and certainly comprised the majority of those apes' activity and struggle in all but the most recent few millenia, itself less than a percent of the time their species has existed, effectively eliminated the overwhelming majority of threats to their survival that doesn't arise from the activity of other members of their species, and even made some progress toward eliminating those. I think you'll find that this is a fairly weird position for a species to find themselves in, but a consistent strategic element of this success has been that periods of greater discovery, economic activity, and improvement of conditions have mostly come from increasing the number of apes that are, rather than desperate and focused on their short-term survival, free to pursue weird projects like figuring out how plants grow and change over time, how electricity propagates through various materials, how to build a better mousetrap, etc. Now, most existential threats to these "humans" are of their own making, both on a micro and macro level. Desperate humans commit crimes or wage wars over resources. On a larger scale, incredible advances in technology have created weaponry capable of wiping out entire groups of humans or ecosystems, possibly even planet-wide ones, on a number of different timescales. Meanwhile, an incredible amount of these things are busy toiling away at things they call "jobs" in order to make "money", a system entirely constructed by humans, and now those people increasingly feel that this arrangement isn't benefiting them and doesn't incidentally create opportunities to do things they consider meaningful, and a bunch of loud and powerful voices among the ever-shrinking segment that does not feel this way are increasingly loudly announcing at every turn that they'd very much like to reneg on their end of the bargain, deem those other people unnecessary, and implicitly, eliminate them. I speak of "destitution" because this is a name for the means by which the current arrangements among humans achieve this elimination most often. In fact, there's no natural universal law that says that we can't use this "economy" thing we've invented to double down on the basic strategy that got us here, guarantee access to a small share of resources and technology to everyone to a degree that provides them the freedom to specialize at their leisure, possibly going down dead ends, or possibly solving real problems out of sheer curiosity or idiosyncratic obsessions, starting businesses about it, or joining ascetic sects to hunker down and research together, as humans have basically always done. Instead, we have for some reason arranged several systems to create holes in the social fabric. Circumstances in which several things going wrong can cause someone to lose a job, their home, and eventually their freedom entirely. This seems sub-optimal, and it's at this point entirely a choice we've collectively made. We have some evidence of what outcomes may result from such disparities in priorities, and generally solutions that involve eliminating the threat of destitution result in more economic activity, discovery, and the thriving of apes more generally, and solutions that don't involve lots of murder and strife. I know which kind of outcome I prefer, and so I think it's quite wise to consider strategies of the former kind