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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

#371

Post by paulryanrogers »

gitgud wrote: post #360
paulryanrogers wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There will always be software engineering problems to solve, they just move up the stack... When fewer and fewer people are needed to do the same work it doesn't necessarily make for a better or more sustainable market: socially or ecologically. Consider a world where one needs 40 years of education (instead of say 20) to begin to contribute in a way the capital owners are willing to pay for. And paying for the pri…

That's true, as technology advances, the knowledge needed to maintain it increases. In 50 years the software stack could require petabytes of memory to run complex simulations.. But to me that's a pessimistic way to look at it. It's an accomplishment to need less people to build amazing things. We're already at a point where even the most experienced engineer can only understand a fraction of the stack they use. Comp…

My larger point is that there could be fewer paying roles and less willingness to pay for anything. A society of a few owners, few paid workers, and everyone else without much/any influence is not a balanced or healthy one.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#372

Post by erikpukinskis »

cheez wrote: post #74
erikpukinskis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can treat it like an “emblem of cancel culture” and if you’re right. It’s also an emblem for “people doing things other people don’t like and getting ditched for it” but which emblem you choose to see is up to you. That’s kind of the power and the weakness of emblems.

I'm sorry but I don't see any dichotomy in the two situations you've described. Cancel culture is literally people getting ditched because some people didn't like what some people did. That is, sticks and stones may break my bones but words are terrorism.

I didn’t claim a dichotomy I said they’re both true.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#373

Post by dumbfoundded »

dkersten wrote: post #359
wvenable wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's simultaneously fair to release code in an open source license that allows commercial use and then be demoralized by that commercial use. The problem there is clearly one's own. Companies may use open source software but they don't directly or indirectly profit from it; they can only profit from the value they provide on top of it. Software that is free for everyone cannot be a distinguishing featur…

I don’t disagree, when I release under MIT, I’m basically saying “go ahead and do what you please under these simple terms”. I suppose this is why people release under GPLv3 or AGPL. I’m just trying to provide commentary on why I think people are bothered by commercial use without giving back. Ultimately, I think you’re right: if I release under a permissive license, I shouldn’t get upset if people use it.

I've seen a couple different camps of OSS. Some people do it to scratch their own itch. Like building a tool because it was fun to do or solved a problem the author had. This is the perfect case for OSS. People rarely care about reuse in this case.

The other case is a project desperately needed by the community and every corporation is making their own internal version of that code. No one really wants to commit the next 10 years of their life to it but someone eventually does sensing the need. The author gets many stars and forks but almost no money. Corporations then want to twist the library to their own specific needs while an individual or small team build a necessary tool but there's no business model. Then either a corporation adopts the repo to keep it going or the author tries to turn it into a business. Both of these outcomes rarely succeed for the wider needed but no one's really willing to pay for it.

These are super broad generalizations. The big problem seems to be when some software is really needed, someone steps in to build it and then no one pays them. Need != business model.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#374

Post by wobbleblob »

aflag wrote: post #366
jchw wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contrib…

I didn't do any quantitative study, but I'd be really surprised if most maintainers in the project are not volunteers. Those contributors, though usually individually small, tend to add up. It's also probably difficult to justify Debian package maintenance to your employer, unless you work for canonical. Even products that distribute a .deb tend to do it outside of the distribution, rather than really contributing.

I haven't done a quantitative study either, but here are two examples of extremely influential open source projects that the internet runs on:

The spring framework has contributions from many volunteers, but most big contributions and all of the integration work come from Pivotal.

The contributions to the linux kernel are graphed here:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/175919-who-actually-de...

80% of new contributions are from companies. That shouldn't be surprising at all, because these companies are also the biggest users of the project.

As for myself, in the rare occasions I contributed a patch to an OSS project, most of the time it was to solve a problem I encountered at work, so I have anecdotal evidence that at least some from the category 'volunteers' also got paid to write that code.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#375

Post by jchw »

aflag wrote: post #366
jchw wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contrib…

I didn't do any quantitative study, but I'd be really surprised if most maintainers in the project are not volunteers. Those contributors, though usually individually small, tend to add up. It's also probably difficult to justify Debian package maintenance to your employer, unless you work for canonical. Even products that distribute a .deb tend to do it outside of the distribution, rather than really contributing.

Actually, there's certainly of reasons you might do maintenance work on company time. At Google for example, the gLinux distribution is heavily based on Debian[1]. Why would individuals do it on company time otherwise? One example is to solve a business problem. I have definitely contributed upstream to open source projects to solve problems at work.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gLinux

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