No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

We're a bunch of smart people here. What kind of a system can we come up with that cannot be ignored by multinationals to reap the benefits of FLOSS?

Do people really care about licenses? Large companies will bury you in costs before you get paid, right? I think by that time it's too late.

The obligation to reach towards the wallet should be earlier. As somebody mentioned somewhere, I think bounties would make sense. The dev can work in anything they like, but can be incentivised to work on something specific if a bounty is on it.

For that however, we would need a third party system where people can pay into a pot for a specific goal, define the key items that have to be fulfilled, and only when they are fulfilled + validated by a third party, is the money paid out.

Or something like that. What other ideas do you smart folk have?

Then what is the better solution? Saying it's wrong without giving alternatives isn't a very useful comment imho.

edit: And the solution needs to apply to the US, with all it's brokenness, not some other country with different social structures.

Anyone arguing how 'this is not the way to do it', 'lol open source Dev what did he expect' or explains how they have been using his software 'but it's not that important' are the Republicans of the development community. Fucking shameful to see people talk like this about folks who do good, open and free work to make things better. Go and look yourself in the mirror and repeate those words. One day your corporate owners might so the same to you.

I calculated that so far I saved with my pro-bono work in open source and documentation around 2,085,000 million hours of professional labor.

Now my hourly rate is 100 bucks, so that's about 200M worth of labor that ended up in other peoples pockets.

I could probably retire now. In a just world, we might give people credit for this kind of work or we would organize our commons more sensibly.

But in the world today, value is siphoned up - and the siphon is a very well tuned siphon.

Yeah, it's not a very good story. There are a few possible outcomes.

1. All workers start showing up later, thus the employer is motivated incentivize those who show up earlier.

2. Instead of raising wages, the employer limit the number of available position, thus incentivizing workers to show up earlier in order to be paid the denarius whereas those that show up later risked not getting the work and therefor lowered the statistical amount of money they can earn over time.

3. The workers organize together and mutually decide to bargain with the employer as a group for work hours and wages.

4. Scabs decide to work for the employer at an increased rate of 1.5 denarii.

5. Half of the crops rot on the vines, the employer raises the price of the wine to double it's original amount to recoup the losses.

6. The employer spends some additional money on lobbyists to convince Roman governors that their business is too important to fail, and receives a bailout.

7. The original workers and their families starve to death or turn to crime.

8. The bureaucrats and landowners profit and the scabs are forced to take 0.75 denarii as their wages because they have no bargaining power and they fear starvation as their contemporaries were made an example of.