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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

#261

Post by elihu »

I think the article is based on a misconception. Just because software (including source code) can be obtained by anyone at no cost does not mean the developer was not paid to create it.

The important question here is "why was this software written in the first place?" If you think that the purpose of software is to make money through licensing fees, open source doesn't make any sense at all. However, if you take a contrary view that the primary purpose of software is to solve problems (with revenue generation as an optional secondary goal), then it does make sense that a developer could get paid quite well to create something they give away for free.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#262

Post by navigatesol »

alephnan wrote: post #20

As Elon Musk described in the Joe Rogan interview: cybernetic collectives

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who doesn't comply with GPL but spends $50k trying to dig up dirt on a person he accused of being a pedophile to avoid lawsuits? That guy?

Who cares what he says.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#263

Post by Sargos »

I think the open source space will benefit tremendously from DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) that direct funding for projects or new ideas of note.

The most famous example is Moloch DAO which funds things ranging from entire software teams building Ethereum clients to individual positions like a test plan runner for coordination across multiple organizations. These are the types of things that are traditionally hard or impossible to get funding for as the smallest unit of funding typically falls to VCs who fund an entire company for many years.

Anyone can submit a funding proposal which is akin to a business plan that doesn't aim to make money and it is voted on by members of the DAO. A lot of interesting ideas are debated and refined with the best ideas making it to the front and being funded by democratic vote.

We are still within the first few years of the existence of DAOS and there are already a dozen DAOs focused on funding various aspects of tech and design with likely many more coming in the future. Open source has always had a hard time competing with corporations but with DAOs like Moloch and others the future is starting to look bright.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#265

Post by gitgud »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #227
gitgud wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We should strive to make things easier. If open source packages can make software easier to write, that's a good thing and devalued labour is a sign that the labour is easier.

Much like the improvements in farming and agriculture have changed from manually reaping the fields to AI controlled harvesting equipment.

There will always be software engineering problems to solve, they just move up the stack...

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#266

Post by Matumio »

Liquix wrote: post #121
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…

Traditionally, OSS contributions are selfless labors of love and curiosity. These people are flexing their intellect and creativity doing something they thoroughly enjoy: solving problems in the most elegant way possible. Code is shared with an air of positivity, camaraderie, and we're-all-building-this-together. At the risk of sounding kitschy, it's this sense of collaboration that enables the open source community…

Enjoying to solve problems, yes. And curiosity too! Both are great motivators.

But selflessness? That's the lie we tell ourselves when the true driver is something else, like narcissism.

It's not a bad lie. The outcome is pretty much the same while it lasts. But altruism is not a reliable motivator, and certainly not a requirement for volunteer work. A requirement is to have basic human needs met with some minimal security. Like, not having to judge everything you do by how much money it will earn you.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#267

Post by ewzimm »

antpls wrote: post #253
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…

> Given then, that there's very little upside to doing open source, and most/all the benefits go to profit-making corporations I partially disagree. Yes, the benefit will not be fairly shared. However, the volunteers' works accelerate entreprises' works, which can then provide new services and new products faster. Imagine some ML algorithms could find the cure to aging. You have two options : either wait that some co…

Thanks for pointing this out. The quoted statement is only true if "benefit" is restricted to meaning "financial benefit." In whatever people do, not just in software, most of the financial benefit goes to profit-making companies because everything they do is directed toward making profits. But what about the unquantifiable benefits that come from improving people's lives?

How would you weigh the benefits of millions of people using and loving a piece of software, even if no profits are generated? What if they are able to free up time which they use to improve their communities, spend more time with their friends and family, maybe even make money for themselves?

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#268

Post by pjmlp »

TuringNYC wrote: post #216
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…

Do you remember being a developer in the 90s? It was horrible and you were stuck in the confines of truly for-profit companies and for-profit platforms and paradigms. One benefit of OSS is to lead the world to a place where you want the world to go.

Having started to code during the 80's, what was so horrible about the 90's?

I had access to Amiga and PC, bough my software tools that I actually cared about (with student discount), and did some programming gigs already before getting into university.

Back then, making a living from selling developer tools still looked like a possible way of life.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#269

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> aren't worth enough individually to charge for.

The downside I see is that leads to a lot of “just good enough” solutions out there. There are things like the Spring “framework” that kind of sort of almost do something useful but add conceptual overhead and leaning time and subtract troubleshoot-ability in exchange for not much, but enough that the people in charge push you to use it since it’s free anyway. On the one hand, if not for open source, Unix, vi, grep, awk, sed, lex, yacc and bash would all be long dead and buried now - there was a time before I came across Linux that I was starting to try to implement all of these myself in DOS because they were so useful and there was no available equivalent. On the other hand, if not for open source, I wonder if we ever would have gotten PHP or Java or a lot of the monstrosities that hang off of them like Zend and Hibernate.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#270

Post by jpetso »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #153
lucb1e wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is, in fact, an excellent charity called Doctors Without Borders who are all about doctors giving their labour force for much less than society would generally value it for. They're not the majority of doctors, just like the majority of software engineers are not charitably motivated open source developers. They are, however, doing immensely valuable work serving people who would otherwise not have a shot at getting any sort of proper treatment.
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