Professional maintainers: a wake-up call • Hacker News Board

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#391

Post by pas » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 10:57 AM UTC

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #67

daenz wrote: post #26

I'm an open source author and maintainer of a somewhat-popular python package[0] (~1M downloads/month) that I've maintained for over 10 years. I don't recall ever receiving a donation. I am still maintaining it, but I just don't have time to add the improvements that it needs to keep up with the ecosystem (asyncio, for example). If organizations who use it got together and chipped in some non-negligible amount, I wou…

Good for you. The welfare queen megacorps have been too comfortable expecting handouts like open source charity work and public bailouts. Open source software has served the elite executive class while leaving working people to depend on anti-freedom proprietary offerings. I am sick of watching it go down like that. The never-ending data leaks, dark patterns, lock-in strategies, and attacks on encryption and freedom…

it serves everyone. it's technology. free intellectual "property". free and open innovations.

obviously these tools amplify their user's productivity. corps are organized to be economically productive, hence they benefit enormously from free power tools.

hobbists benefit too, but since their productivity is low they benefit relatively little in terms of economic surplus.

(sure, I might do my taxes using free software, but my taxes are also trivial, two lines and that's it. sure, I might whip up a blog/website using free software to share stuff with people, but again it's economic productivity is already zero, it doesn't matter if now it's a technologically amazing site.

and sure, I work as a freelancer using these free tools, but again my productivity is very limited compared to, relative to the systems I work on for corps.)

the solution is probably a mix of a bit of wealth tax and consumption taxes.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#392

Post by jokethrowaway » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 10:59 AM UTC

usrbinbash wrote: post #11

1_player wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are salary discrepancies everywhere in the world. If you mean the salaries across countries, you're comparing apples and oranges. €100k in Berlin goes much further than $100k in Houston (a random big city in the US, I don't think Berlin is comparable to NYC)

Not to mention the person in Berlin has access to state funded medical support, a state funded pension, paid sick leave, paid ma/paternity leave, ... Salaries are lower, but expenses for essential services are simply A LOT less in most of Europe.

The problem with that is that you end up paying everything twice because state funded healthcare sucks, the state pension sucks and the state paid ma/paternity leave is quite short.

If you're in a good tech company in Europe you generally end up having private healthcare, a private pension with employer's top up and extended ma/paternity leave.

The problem is that taxes in the USA are still fairly high and comparable to the ones in EU - you would expect some services for the amount of money you're paying. That said, having lived in countries with state run services all my life, I don't think the solution is state run services, but cheaper private services. The problem in the USA is that governments and insurance companies inflated the cost of healthcare ridiculously. Similarly the cost of universities in the USA has been inflated following government intervention.

Talking about state run services: Between waiting times, poor support and the lack of competition the quality is pretty bad, despite what the state propaganda will tell you. Having lived in the UK and in Italy I cannot but laugh hearing that NHS or the SSN are "the best healthcare systems in the world". The amount of bad experiences I had is ridiculous (some of which could have damaged my family health, had we not had the money to pursue private treatment). Universities in Italy, which are pretty cheap at 3-4k€ per year, have several deficiencies and, despite having a handful of great professors who do it out of passion (maybe while running a profitable business on the side), it has its fair share of problems. Not to mention the amount of freelancers in Italy who pay pension contributions every month who will never see a penny for their money.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#393

Post by the_af » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 11:02 AM UTC

moksly wrote: post #374

the_af wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In-house development ... keeps resulting in shit code, too! There's no evidence standards of quality are rising. In my own extremely limited view of in-house software -- i.e. my own professional experience -- code quality is crap, standard quality practices are very low and actually worse than in FOSS projects (I've seen someone mention more than once that "this crap PR simply wouldn't fly if this were an open sour…

I didn’t say in-house code was good, but it does keep you from being exploited by things like what recently happened with NPM. Companies genuinely don’t care about the software they use, as long as it works and isn’t hacked. This is especially true in non-tech enterprise. At my former place they still had hundreds of ASP Webforms with custom in-house ASP libraries that were utter shit, but they worked. What I’m postu…

> At my former place they still had hundreds of ASP Webforms with custom in-house ASP libraries that were utter shit, but they worked.

But the same is true of open source. I thought you wanted non-shit software.

In-house software is easily exploitable and full of security bugs as well.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#394

Post by pas » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 11:09 AM UTC

moksly wrote: post #48

The alternative to what we have now is not going to be a healthy OSS community. The alternative is going to be big companies insourcing more of their libraries. The only reason why OSS has seen the up-pick it has is because major companies profit from it. Microsoft didn’t embrace open source because it had a change or morals, it embraced open source because it started making so much more money from enterprise orgs sw…

the mindset is important. MS open sourced things because devs working there pushed for it.

it's a good thing even if MS benefits more than others. it's not a zero sum game.

the problem is on the other end, where the produced economic surplus is distributed to a very few.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#395

Post by hiq » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 11:15 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #389

jbk wrote: post #74

> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices. Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone…

Change the license. Make it so that large companies have to pay, and small companies can still use it for free.

You're saying that they should make their software proprietary to solve the problem of FOSS maintenance. That's forgetting the implicit requirement that it should remain FOSS.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#396

Post by charsi » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 11:17 AM UTC

Here is an idea. Make your code royalty free for up to 364 days a year. "MIT-364" is a catchy name right ?

Any company that cannot afford to go without your software for 24hrs per year should pay full whack for a commercial license.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#397

Post by wila » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 11:22 AM UTC

jbk wrote: post #116

bdcravens wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would following an open core model work better, like it has for Hashicorp, Sidekiq, Tailwind, etc? Also, would focusing more on the low 4 figures result in more revenue? I feel the crowd sensitive to open source has that kind of spending authority, but once you get into the enterprise amounts, it's out of our reach to effect change.

> Would following an open core model work better, like it has for Hashicorp, Sidekiq, Tailwind, etc? Yes, I think this might be a better model, indeed. But I did not start either of those projects, I came on board later; and those models are difficult to back-fit into an existing project.

I don't think it matters much that you didn't start the projects, you are the one who is responsible for them now. That is the part that counts.

If the project improves by making a difficult change then that is still your choice to make. Sure some people will complain, but there is always someone that complains when things change.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#398

Post by michaelt » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 11:33 AM UTC

tomerv wrote: post #379

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I've gone through all the hoops to get paid (PO, billing, invoices, registering to large companies is a lot of paperwork, tbh, but well..) and we try and bill small to large companies that depends on those projects. I see an opportunity to create a "create-a-company"-as-a-service, to help tons of other maintainers to do this with ease.

According to GP that's still the easier part. A more valuable service would be a "bill-a-company-for-your-open-source-work"-as-a-service.

Although being capable of sending a bill is part of the problem, I suspect a bigger problem is getting your bill in front of someone who has the budget, the mandate and the inclination to pay it.

A lot of companies have a lot more controls on purchasing than they do on employee salaries. So a manager who has ten $100k developers reporting to them might only have $10k they can spend at their own discretion.

And the unix philosophy of having many small tools and libraries means practically nobody is _just_ using one open source product. So even if you can get your bill to someone with a million dollars to spend, if they have to share it between 1000 open source projects it's not going to go very far.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#399

Post by gilleain » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 11:35 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #326

wpietri wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't "the world". It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history that see themselves as entitled to make endless profit without ever worrying about where that comes from or who it hurts. It's not a sustainable mindset, so it never lasts. Look at the shift in attitudes toward the environment in the last 100 years as an example. There was a point where executives thought it absolutel…

> It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history I think it’s a fairly large chunk of history (e.g. all the time humans were a thing) that this applies to. The fact that it weren’t executives but kings, queens and nobles thinking this way doesn’t really change much. It’s not even necessarily malicious, but you really don’t want to think about the fact your life is so comfortable at the e…

I agree with your general point, but Kings and Queens absolutely had to consider other people.

Specifically, most rulers had some kind of patronage network where they gave out 'gifts' like land, or the right to collect taxes, in return for loyalty. Princes did not generally just sit on a huge pile of money, like a dragon. If they wanted to go to war or build a palace, they had raise taxes, which meant concessions to their power.

Anyway, slightly off-topic! Still, the analogy holds - you don't get to be a prince of the internet without the work of a lot of minor nobles.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#400

Post by moksly » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 12:04 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #393

moksly wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say in-house code was good, but it does keep you from being exploited by things like what recently happened with NPM. Companies genuinely don’t care about the software they use, as long as it works and isn’t hacked. This is especially true in non-tech enterprise. At my former place they still had hundreds of ASP Webforms with custom in-house ASP libraries that were utter shit, but they worked. What I’m postu…

> At my former place they still had hundreds of ASP Webforms with custom in-house ASP libraries that were utter shit, but they worked. But the same is true of open source. I thought you wanted non-shit software. In-house software is easily exploitable and full of security bugs as well.

I think I’m too senior to believe in non-shit software.

I work in non tech enterprise. You’d think that things like the ransomware scandals, GDPR, the increased risk-awareness would have improved the business processes or management awareness or all the things are “corporate digital maturity” but the pressure to get things done fast with minimal resources has frankly never been higher.

In that environment we’re always going to have shit-software. If anything I agree with you, which is why I said that I thought that the current status quo was the best ever.