Paying people to work on open source is good

This is a good thing to do, but not really the point of the article.

That's why the open source communities themselves should be funding their own projects. Because if the communities and users dont fund their own projects, private corporations will fund them and they will have the say. Open Source must not become outsourced 'free labor' which major corporations can leech on. The best way to do it has been the 'freemium' format that is used in the Wordpress ecosystem and a few others - the open source shop creates and maintains a free version of their software under GPL2+, and sells downloads, update licenses & support for more advanced addons. The WP ecosystem was able to float itself with this method without taking in investor money or corporate money, and the software shops that exist in that ecosystem are able to pay their developers living wages. The entire ecosystem was created and is still floated by the open source software producers and the community members.

Basically, open source is like politics: Who funds it gets the say. And just like politics, we need to make sure that the communities are self-sustaining economically so that external money wont call the shots.

I know that a lot of us in open source software are very proud with our voluntary work and its contributions to open source. That is accurate and praise worthy.

But what do we do when we get up in the morning and go to work?

We each work in a private company that seeks to maximize its market share and gain more control of the economy, bar a minority of us who work in actual open source jobs. In one hand, we are giving something tangible to open source with our contributions, but the work that we have to do in our day job in a private corporation takes a lot of that away because the organized, concentrated impact of a large private organization with a lot of money goes much further than the heroic efforts of collectives of volunteers.

That is why open source must fund itself and become its own economic and political power. Otherwise we will always be giving with one hand with our contributions but involuntarily taking back with the other hand because of the work we have to do in private corporations. And this is without mentioning that if we dont fund & float our own ecosystems and become a collective economic and political power as a community in our own right, we will always be rule-takers and will always have to fight the attempts of the private lobbies at destroying open source.

Basically we must create our own world. And in that world, we must be able to work in, make money with, and live with open source.

I think the thing is that it's always been both. The freedom to hack and modify has always been inextricably linked with the $0 license fee. If the early free/open licenses had allowed source access and modification but come with a license fee, or if early FOSS had cost nothing to use but disallowed modification, I don't think we'd have seen the success that we have. The two senses of "free" in "free software" are and always have been linked.

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He anticipated your comment and already replied. You're free to disagree with him, but he clearly thought that part through already and already knows he disagrees with you and with the OSI. This entire post is his justification for his disagreement, while all you have is an appeal to the OSI definition that he's specifically rejecting.

> “open source” / “free software”

> Note the deliberate use of lower case. I’m not referring to Open Source™ as defined by OSI, nor to Free Software™ as defined by the FSF. I mean these terms in the broadest, most inclusive sense: “software with source code that I can read and modify and release variants of, perhaps under some conditions.” So I’m including OSI and FSF licenses, but also the Polyform licenses and the JSON license and, yes BSL in my version of “open source”.

> This is perhaps a side point, but the “minimalist” definition of Open Source meaning “only OSI-approved licenses” – or, worse, “the GPL is the only ’true’ Free Software license” – is part of the problem here. I want to see more experimentation and variety in licensing options, and if that means introducing some additional restrictions beyond “anyone can use this for any purpose” I’m pretty okay with that. In my book, a broad spectrum of licenses from Blue Oak to BSL (and even more restrictive) “count” as open source.

> ... I’ll put it this way: if my sloppy use of these terms bothers you in the context of talking about how people make their living, it implies that you care more about terminology and definitions than about the people, and I’d like you to sit in that discomfort for a while.