The Internet Relies on People Working for Free • Hacker News Board

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#81

Post by mopsi » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

user_50123890 wrote: post #4

Not just open-source maintainers but also moderators. A bad thing about moderators is that nowadays they tend to be immature teens, it's one of the reasons Reddit content quality has been going down in the past few years. It also creates some moral questions, as companies with giant revenues are outsourcing their internet janitor duties to naive unpaid child labourers

I believe redesign is the single largest contributor to Reddit's decline. It went from text-based site (like HN is at the moment) to image-based site.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#82

Post by rhizome » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

LomaxJunior wrote: post #60

ViViDboarder wrote: post #36

“The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions.” And the catastrophic Specter and Meltdown bugs show that private code doesn’t prevent this sort of thing either...

Global Standards can be included in that list, here is one example called Signalling System 7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7#Protoc... Caller ID uses a protocol used by dial up modems, which means the telecoms hardware supporting it, is in effect, a dialup modem which makes life easier for security services to remotely access systems once they have updated the firmware on telecoms hardware, fo…

I would never rely on Caller ID, particularly for something like that. Modems have had callback for decades: call up, identify yourself, the connection is dropped and the system dials a stored number for that ID and the connection is set up for the session.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callback_(telecommunications)#...

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#83

Post by rhizome » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

drei109 wrote: post #10

user_50123890 wrote: post #4

Not just open-source maintainers but also moderators. A bad thing about moderators is that nowadays they tend to be immature teens, it's one of the reasons Reddit content quality has been going down in the past few years. It also creates some moral questions, as companies with giant revenues are outsourcing their internet janitor duties to naive unpaid child labourers

In my experience with moderators on Reddit, is that they are power driven adults who still act like teens.

It's the Stanford problem, but not everybody succumbs to the allure of power. We see it pretty much everywhere, like on IRC, where power-madness is an expected consequence of giving someone ops in a channel. You win some and you lose some, moderation isn't "set it and forget it," you have to remove some and acquire others from time to time.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#84

Post by dleslie » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

TurboHaskal wrote: post #73

I always liked this post by Erik Naggum: The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not suc…

This is incredibly insightful; particularly the final dig regarding an unwillingness to compensate others for their efforts.

It strikes me that the open source bounty model never really took off, and neither did the open source crowd funding model.

It's hard to convince users to contribute funding when many of them were drawn to your software _because_ it is free as in beer. Free2Play video games have struggled with this for years, and look at the state of monetization in that market: predatory gambling mechanics, digital storefronts tuned to maximize anxiety in purchasers, and so many hats.

Perhaps the future of open source funding is in selling personalization customizations, somehow.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#85

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 4:59 PM UTC

samuellavoie90 wrote: post #46

wslh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A rational actor never works for "free" A rational actor with emotions can work for free is that work makes him/her feel well. Some people even call this a hobby.

Isn't a rational actor with emotions called an irrational actor? ;p

Why did you define money as a goal?

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#86

Post by ip26 » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #68

There aren't a lot of totally free, open-source, end user products. In the 90s FOSS devs though one day GiMP would surpass Photoshop, we'd see Linux on at least 8% ~ 10% of laptops at coffee shops, Inkscape would be better than Illustrator, etc. Today, a lot of FOSS is corporate sponsored. But it's not end-product. It's all middleware. Hophop/Hack, Lightbend libraries like Slick, React, etc. It's all to help you buil…

My perception was always that the FOSS hopes of GiMP, Inkscape, etc flopped mainly because nobody in FOSS put work into UI/UX. So, it kind of makes sense that FOSS found a niche somewhere that UI/UX didn't matter.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#87

Post by jsty » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #80

kfrzcode wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$50k-100k seems a bit high for a bugfix.... else I'm desperately undervaluing my worth in salary negotiations

High for salary, yes. High for buying enterprise support on mission-critical software? Perhaps the value might be different.

I was about to comment that most customers might expect more support than a bugfix for a $100k support contract, then I remembered my last few interactions with enterprise software vendors.

If anything, it'd probably exceed expectations.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#88

Post by jxramos » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

chipuni wrote: post #33

jxramos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually wondering if there's licensing that has a notification clause or what an attribution clause would look like.

It looks like this: https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

Is that to say the attribution is contained solely in the line:

    Copyright

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#89

Post by joshlemer » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

Some other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so.

I now am starting to rethink this sentiment because the vast majority of the benefit of open source contributions on github, be they to languages, runtimes, application frameworks, databases, etc, go towards increasing the bottom line of for-profit companies, not to developers. And the vast majority of the beneficiaries of open source will never support the project even when they are fortune 50 companies saving millions of dollars by using the work of one volunteer.

There is also the idea that contributing will be great for your career development. I have found that not to be the case at all, I think that no potential or current employer has ever given a rat's ass about open source contributions, and do not consider that work as valuable when making hiring decisions. The work you are paid to do is the only thing anyone cares about. I'm not saying that that shouldn't be the case, but just that that is the case.

Given then, that there's very little upside to doing open source, and most/all the benefits go to profit-making corporations, it is puzzling why do we even push for greater involvement in open source at all? It seems we shouldn't be, we should be warning people who want to contribute to Open Source that they should probably spend their time doing their own studying and personal/skill development which will allow them to succeed in the roles that they have with their current role or a role they'd like to obtain one day, for money.

Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

#90

Post by svavs » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #29

I feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor. I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren't grasping. Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software. And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for. It's only collecti…

> Nobody is doing anything they don't want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software.

Many job postings list OSS contributions as a requirement / desirable for employment. So, I'm not sure if your statement holds up.

I personally know developers that contribute to OSS because of this. And many that have burnt out because of the constant need to contribute.

Most OSS contributors do it for fun - but there is a section that do it because it's becoming part of the interview / job hunting process.