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The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

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Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#41

Post by mcpackieh »

bboozzoo wrote: post #35
mcpackieh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users. From another angle, if I gave a dollar a month to every Free Software program or library I used that month, it would cost me thousands of dollars a month. Obviously that isn't realistic. I have donated to…

I don't think anyone is expecting you to donate to literally every project you use. However, say your business is to build and sell a product done in JS. You already have a bunch of JS devs, whom you may have even bought those sweet MacBooks. Let's also say, you're invested in keeping the code quality high, which you boast about in your product web page. Why not donate a $100/month to the JSLint project which is part…

That's a fine pitch for the merit of donating to ESLint, but if that pitch isn't working for the developer then he should either make peace with doing the work for free, or stop doing the work.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#42

Post by JoshTriplett »

dale_glass wrote: post #9

One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking donations is hard work. I live in a country completely unsuited to making money from a hobby project on the side. To take donations I'd need to register as self-employed, and pay monthly for social security as long as I'm registered, even if I make no revenue whatsoever in that month. That's an absolutely awful idea for a project just getting started. I'd…

> One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking donations is hard work.

As many problems as there are with GitHub (social lock-in, Copilot laundering Open Source license violations), GitHub Sponsors is incredibly valuable and substantially reduces the friction for getting support for an Open Source project.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#43

Post by siva7 »

komali2 wrote: post #37

I agree, however, compensation in general is reaching a point where rational value calculations are fraying. I can't explain why an engineer, though well paid, is making .01% of the CEO's salary, nor can I explain why an engineer doing the same work but in the Philippines is making 40% of the salary of the one in the USA. I was very inspired by "Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow. It involves a world where people detach them…

>> I can't explain why an engineer, though well paid, is making .01% of the CEO's salary, nor can I explain why an engineer doing the same work but in the Philippines is making 40% of the salary of the one in the USA.

That's economics 101 and not the problem of a particular profession

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#44

Post by phpisthebest »

lakpan wrote: post #7

The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it. Don’t do it! Who’s asking you to work on it? I say this as a minor OSS developer who receives some donations. I love the money, but it would be pretty dumb for me to say they oughta pay me, because the only reason I work on it is addiction/compulsion/procrastination of real work. If it bothered me that people…

You mean you would write your own leftpad function instead of pulling in a $1 npm dependency

That is crazy. /s

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#45

Post by johngossman »

seydor wrote: post #39
csneeky wrote: post #25

Most complex, unique, value producing things have a path to monetization for the builder of the thing. If the money isn’t there for the builder they are either not leveraging their relationship to the thing correctly, or the thing does not have the value the builder may think it has.

> have a path to monetization for the builder The existence of the path to monetization is entirely outside their control though. Millions of people make viral videos, very few have benefited from it. The financial system disincentivizes or outright bans open-product monetization.

The many startups built around OSS projects such as Mongo, Kafka, Spark, and Linux seem to have found a way.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#46

Post by okraigher »

I think an open source compensation system could work similar to how artists are payed when their song is played on the radio.

Radio stations in Sweden pay a fee to an organisation which distributes the money to artists in proportion to the amount of playtime.

Imagine a new type of open source license that mandated paying a membership fee to a global foundation to use the code commercially. Non-commersial use would still be free.

Companies would have to pay royalty to this organisation in proportion to their size or some other metric. The organisation would distribute the money to projects according to some usage criteria such a download count or similar.

For it to work there would have to be one or very few such organizations to that it is easy for the companies to handle. It should also not be very expensive for the companies. But even if it gets every company to contribute just a few thousands to open source it would still inject a lot more money into the system.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#47

Post by boxed »

PeterisP wrote: post #36

The article doesn't make any argument why the current situation is unsustainable - it does point out some problems, but as far as we can see, there's no reason why current situation, with all its drawbacks and limitations, couldn't go on for ever, i.e. be sustainably sustained. Some contributors will quit, but that doesn't imply that the system is unsustainable, as long as some more people will temporarily make some…

100% agreed. I've had my response to this sitting in my drafts folder for years now. Finally published it now after reading this thing.

https://kodare.net/2023/11/17/open_source_could_be_better.ht... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38302122)

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#48

Post by anonymous_sorry »

benj111 wrote: post #8
vikmals wrote: post #3

The problem is that you ask for money on OSS. Companies use OSS because it is free. If you try to force them to contribute or pay money, there will always be someone who has more passion than you to do it for free. At this point, just pass on your OSS project that is highly demanded but you have no passion for.

Do companies use open source because it's free? Cost may be a component. But not the only component, and cost doesn't have to be binary. You can charge and still be less than the alternatives.

The main benefit of using open source in a corporate environment is that there is usually zero paperwork involved. As long as the licence is approved, have at it! As soon as you pay money for something, either a fee or a donation, you've got to email someone. Almost certainly someone outside your team.

Companies don't make decisions on individual OSS dependencies. Individual engineers and engineering teams do. That's if anyone actually spares a thought at all (eek)!

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#49

Post by lynx23 »

lakpan wrote: post #7

The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it. Don’t do it! Who’s asking you to work on it? I say this as a minor OSS developer who receives some donations. I love the money, but it would be pretty dumb for me to say they oughta pay me, because the only reason I work on it is addiction/compulsion/procrastination of real work. If it bothered me that people…

This! Its always the same. When volunteers start to complain they aren't compensated for their work, things start to smell fishy. And this kind of behaviour seems to have increased lately. Rather sad. Either I do something for the love of it, or I am going for a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and these two are the same, but that is very much the exception.

Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable

#50

Post by marviel »

> Quick, name all the dependencies of Kubernetes. You can’t, and I can’t either. There’s just too many. It shouldn’t be only end user facing products that get appropriate compensation. It should be these products that send a portion of their contributions (money and developer time) down to these dependencies in a big happy tree of contributions.

Thought this was a good quote to pull.

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