What the author thinks is that paying him is not a magic bullet, and so must be true for everyone else.
Would you say "X is not a silver bullet" is a silver bullet for losing attention of clued-in audience ? :D
Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#32The article contains a number of problematic statements. One is for instance the statement that Linux destroyed value. It may have for the proprietary UNIX vendors. But this should be balanced by the value Linux and OSS has created overall. Cloud Computing would never have scaled the way it has, if there would be operating system licenses and cloud computing providers would not be able to modify the OS according to t…
Sun's motto was the network is the computer for a reason.
Cloud computing is basically timesharing rebranded.
Even containers were already a thing in big iron UNIX, e.g HP-UX vaults introduced in 1998 thereabouts.
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux and open source removes the capacity for people to compete against it commercially. It takes air out of the room. Why would we pay you when we can get this for free? free as in 0 cost is very difficult to compete against unless you are 100, 1000x times better. There is the value that would have been provided (generated) in revenue to UNIX manufacturers had Linux not existed and the value that exists with Linux…
>It's difficult to say what would have happened, but you cannot deny that prices for corporate UNIX DID in fact exist, and they were not getting paid due to the availability of the free option. Yes, this is the problem of "the seen and the unseen" in economics. Prices for corporate Unix did exist, and they are not getting paid now. That is the seen. What is unseen is the value that was created by having a cheap (Linu…
Since when does iPod have anything to do with Linux?!?
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> was harsh about exploitive corporations taken from the article: "it’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a consequence to be embraced and exploited (if you’re clever enough)" another interesting quote: "Microsoft and other companies railed about Open Source being a cancer on intellectual property: because it is" none of the points made by the author are fundamental truth and most of his actual points are in direct op…
Read the sentence in its entirety, dropping the parenthetical comment: > If you follow the above, you’ll see the supposed “free rider” problem is simply a natural consequence of open source being free as in beer: it’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a consequence to be embraced and exploited. "to be embraced and exploiting" is referring to the consequence, not to the open source developers. What the author is trying…
That is how I read the bit about exploitation as well.
> That sounds like a problem, and it is if you are narrow-mindedly thinking about how to monetize the open source software directly.
That may be true, but there is another thing to consider: earning a living by running a business is challenging. Many people do not earn enough money for it to be worth while. Most will have to put up with other businesses trying to freeload, or at the very least cut an unreasonable deal. It is easy to claim the difficulties with open source exist because the software is free (as in beer). Indeed, it is probably more difficult to make money because of that. On the other hand, it is also a difficulty faced by all businesses.
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#35So much hate for this article in the comments. Are we really such a one sided community?
This article makes some great points which hurt to hear but should be addressed if we don't like them. Economically, it is true that paying and maintainer who is already trying to spend lots of his time on open source isn't going to make him spend more time on it. You might still be a jerk if you don't pay him, but we should address the fact that this is true to some extent.
It's also a great point that helping open source maintainers maintain their product can sometimes be better than payment to achieve your goals. What open source maintainer would turn down the help of some intern willing to write all the unit tests?
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read the sentence in its entirety, dropping the parenthetical comment: > If you follow the above, you’ll see the supposed “free rider” problem is simply a natural consequence of open source being free as in beer: it’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a consequence to be embraced and exploited. "to be embraced and exploiting" is referring to the consequence, not to the open source developers. What the author is trying…
That is how I read the bit about exploitation as well. > That sounds like a problem, and it is if you are narrow-mindedly thinking about how to monetize the open source software directly. That may be true, but there is another thing to consider: earning a living by running a business is challenging. Many people do not earn enough money for it to be worth while. Most will have to put up with other businesses trying to…
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Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hard truth is that these "for profit businesses" wouldn't use many of the projects if they weren't free and open source in the first place. This is why the moral argument falls on deaf ears. Relicensing is an increasingly popular choice for OSS devs to to try to monetize usage, and it works since it is oftentimes cheaper to just pay than to rewrite software.
> The hard truth is that these "for profit businesses" wouldn't use many of the projects if they weren't free and open source in the first place. This is why the moral argument falls on deaf ears. There is no evidence for that. If something is good for business and cheaper to buy than develop in-house, business will buy. > Relicensing is an increasingly popular choice for OSS devs to to try to monetize usage, and it…
> If something is good for business and cheaper to buy than develop in-house, business will buy.
Sure, but "free" is frictionless for most developers at any business while "cheap" would still incur going through the purchasing process (at bigger corporations and/or governments) or asking your manager to pull out the company creditcard. From my experience with bigger orgs, it would be MUCH cheaper for the organization to write most dependencies in-house than to go through the process of buying it off the shelf. Even if the OSS dependency would only cost 1 USD for lifetime use or something.
This goes for most small-ish dependencies like test runners, API clients and even simple ORMs. Very small things like left-pad or faker.js would be much simpler to write in-house.
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#38> there’s really no proprietary UNIX maker left
Except for Apple, HP, Oracle and IBM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Curr...
Oracle is not in the list because they just decided to stop paying for certification, other than that Solaris should still be compliant.
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The hard truth is that these "for profit businesses" wouldn't use many of the projects if they weren't free and open source in the first place. This is why the moral argument falls on deaf ears. There is no evidence for that. If something is good for business and cheaper to buy than develop in-house, business will buy. > Relicensing is an increasingly popular choice for OSS devs to to try to monetize usage, and it…
> If something is good for business and cheaper to buy than develop in-house, business will buy. Sure, but "free" is frictionless for most developers at any business while "cheap" would still incur going through the purchasing process (at bigger corporations and/or governments) or asking your manager to pull out the company creditcard. From my experience with bigger orgs, it would be MUCH cheaper for the organization…
> Sure, but "free" is frictionless for most developers at any business while "cheap" would still incur going through the purchasing process (at bigger corporations and/or governments) or asking your manager to pull out the company creditcard.
This is really a non issue. Developers can evaluate whether the product meets needs and then get whoever is responsible to pay. In every company I worked, when I needed a commercial product, I put my case forward and most of the time got the company card to pay without issue.
I simply can't see how this is a valid excuse. No amount of friction can justify people not being paid for their work.
After all we can say why pay workers at all if there need to go through payroll, it's such a hassle...
Re: Paying maintainers isn’t a magic bullet
#40The article contains a number of problematic statements. One is for instance the statement that Linux destroyed value. It may have for the proprietary UNIX vendors. But this should be balanced by the value Linux and OSS has created overall. Cloud Computing would never have scaled the way it has, if there would be operating system licenses and cloud computing providers would not be able to modify the OS according to t…
The way modern economists analyze this, any transaction creates value for both the buyer and the seller.
If owning a Thingie is worth $60 for me and $20 for you, we both gain $20 when I buy yours, and the world is $40 richer. You can think of all wealth as created by trade from this perspective.
In the Linux case, it destroyed value for proprietary UNIX vendors, and created value for millions of UNIX users.