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The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is unsustainable. If someone releases code then that's it. You have it. Do what you want with it (within it's licence). Be thankful. Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing more you ungrateful little git. If you add this code to your project, you should fix and share any problems you e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those two things are connected. People will spend $10 on a coffee drink at Starbucks without blinking. Suggest that they spend $10 on a piece of software and they’ll throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
Some people. There are people who think Starbucks is too expensive. There are people who donate to open source.
They seem to only be present in the big metro areas that attract a lot of tourists, travelers and immigrants who are familiar with the Starbucks brand and go for that out of habbit and know quality, similar to how McDonald's is so popular.
The feeling of entitlement people have around open source is unsustainable. If someone releases code then that's it. You have it. Do what you want with it (within it's licence). Be thankful. Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing more you ungrateful little git. If you add this code to your project, you should fix and share any problems you e…
What is the evidence for this feeling of entitlement? I use tons of free software. I've never either demanded that anyone work on it for free, nor have I expressed any sense of entitlement or expectation.
This happens less where the FOSS choice is a drop in a sea of established proprietary packages (FreeCAD, KiCad, Godot) but way way more when they have already established themselves as the popular pick (OBS Studio, Blender) so they get flooded by less tech-savy, more casual users that don't really see the value of open source other than they don't pay for it.
"Normal" people have always had stuff given to them for "free" (either "you are the product" or built-in licenses like Windows) so they don't realize the goodwill and sacrifices that FOSS goes through.
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.
I don't think this is true. You need an extra condition 'that few people want to produce'.
There is lots of good free art. Why? Because lots of people want to be artists and make art. There is tons of good free writing. Why? Because lots of people want to write. There is masses of good free music. Why? Because many, many people enjoy making music.
There aren't people who collect garbage, clean toilets, dig holes in the ground, or work in oil refineries for free. But there are people publishing science, doing research, writing philosophy, producing erotic material, designing things, putting on theatre, producing textbooks and teaching people things, making clothes, thinking of jokes, answering questions, providing peer support to addicts, playing music, making games, making animations, all without monetary compensation. This is because the people doing these things want to do them.
This isn't a failure of our economic system. It's a great thing - it makes the products better, the producers happier (provided they have the economic freedom to spend time on these projects) and the consumers better off.
First of all, it's obvious that in the vast majority of cases, writing free software falls into the 'amateur art' category not the 'dirty, boring and necessary job' category. Many, many people enjoy the time spent on writing and maintaining software, are motivated to solve their and other people's problems, and take pride in doing so well. You might expect that only games, intellectual toys or fanciful projects would motivate people to work on them in their free time. The reality is that software projects which could be seen as dry and boring to non-technical people (OS kernel design, file transfer protocols, laptop power management support, database and webserver stability, document rendering) attract many very talented people to work on them.
Secondly, if we think that there's some deep inequality or instability in our society because (for example) critical Internet infrastructure depends on hobbyists and volunteers, doesn't it make more sense to try and improve the conditions for hobbyists and volunteers, and make it possible for there to be more of them? The alternative put forward seems to be to turn them into more of the people who both don't enjoy the time spent on what they do, nor produce the best product that they can.
I wonder if the promise of a couple hundred bucks would really be all that motivating at 11:43 pm, with your new baby sleeping nearby, after a full day working at your software engineering job? You have a new son and a partner that need a lot of you right now. Those PRs and bug reports can wait. The time you have all to yourself right now is extraordinarily rare. Use it for you. That said, I do agree with the premise…
Given the current state of birth rates is that even a normal state for most developers how many developers have children or even desire children
You don't have to try turn every project into a business... There's also a pretty big catch-22 here in that most of these projects are only widely useful precisely because they are free. With that came the users, the plugins, bug fixes, and features. Take that away and many projects will have never became popular and then you'll have solved the issue of not being paid for your work (because no users will exist to buy your software.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those two things are connected. People will spend $10 on a coffee drink at Starbucks without blinking. Suggest that they spend $10 on a piece of software and they’ll throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on proprietary software. Most of those people won’t spend $100 on open source software.