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.
How is software unique in this? Tons of museums around the world are visited by the kids of people who make 100k a year even though the average worker there is an unpaid intern. Do you read any news? Listen to NPR podcasts? I think NPR does pay interns, but they don't pay them millions of listeners * 50min a week of listener time * $60 an hour of average listener earnings.
What about science? If you ever benefitted from a genetic screening for any disease, your doctor made anywhere between $100 and $400 an hour, and the graduate student who discovered the function of that gene $10 an hour if you're accounting for his tuition credit. Who tells these students to stop spending 60 hours a week at the lab and start using their skills doing something people will pay for, like develop a no-palm-oil no-aspartame but-still-addictive Mars bar for 25c unit cost?
People will accept less money in exchange for doing something meaningful, like sitting in their basement painting stuff rich people will speculate on for millions of dollars after their death, or campaigning for a rich lawyer who already makes 200k and will get a good bonus post-election because he has the right party colors.
If you could literally sell meaning to people for less friction than those alternatives they'd eat it up. And they'd spend their time making money to spend it on your meaning-making money-sucking machine.
Because that's all money is for: be exchanged for things that make your life not suck. And this exchange tends to bear transaction costs.
Traditionally, OSS contributions are selfless labors of love and curiosity. These people are flexing their intellect and creativity doing something they thoroughly enjoy: solving problems in the most elegant way possible. Code is shared with an air of positivity, camaraderie, and we're-all-building-this-together. At the risk of sounding kitschy, it's this sense of collaboration that enables the open source community to produce robust software proudly capable of competing with proprietary alternatives.
If this culture is stifled the name of depriving corporations 'free labor' through OSS, the creative hacker community isn't elevated - everyone is brought down. IMHO anyone seeking to build financial value for developers or pad their resume is better off working on a side project/startup.
Perhaps I'm in my own echo chamber, but I definitely view open source contributions on a resume as a huge positive when I'm reviewing resumes (as a software dev my boss trusts to evaluate applicants), and I had thought that if that wasn't at least the norm that it would be pretty common among tech companies / companies where developers are part of the evaluation process.
edit: Also, all of the open source I do or that I know of my peers doing is 100% for the love of programming and open source culture, without a bunch of hidden motives. Open source was definitely key to me becoming a programmer when I was a kid - without it I would never have gone as deep as I did into coding (linux, gcc, irrlicht), 3D modeling (blender), etc.
But they are not working for free, they're doing this work during work hours. Individual volunteer maintainers this article is about are a minority. The majority of contributions to the open source projects that "the internet runs on" are from businesses that use the software and maintain or improve it.
I'm not talking about your small hobby project with a few dozen users - as good as it may be, the internet doesn't run on it. cURL is really an exception, not the rule.
And that's why we have things like GPL and free software, which ensure, that contributions are brought back to the community.
If you want to have contributions brought back to the communities and not only rest inside for profit organizations, then perhaps choose a license to enforce that. This is what many open source people do not get: Many "don't care, it's open source"-licenses (MIT license for example) lack the backed in ethics of the free software licenses, which in contrast have been _designed_ to force contributions to be shared with the community.
When someone chooses an open source and not free software license, they can't complain afterwards, that modifications are not brought back as contributions for the community. That's just being uninformed.
> 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
This is nowhere close to true, unless you define “benefit” as “cash profits”. Even then, it’s a tough argument.
There have been extraordinary benefits to most people in the world from open-source contributions. Without a wide range of open source code projects there would be no Wikipedia, no SciHub, no web forums, no search engines, no web maps, no movie/book/restaurant review sites, no craigslist, no online dating, no news websites, no web education platforms (MOOCs, Open Courseware, Khan Academy, ...), no technical Q&A sites, no video sharing sites, no social media, no e-commerce, no online banking, no ...
The great majority of the benefits of all of these software products and projects accrue to their many users, not to their authors or corporate hosts.
(Of course technology is not all positive, and many people have also been harmed by technology. Open source also enables surveillance, stalking, bullying, new kinds of fraud, new venues for propaganda, new legal risks, new avenues for social and political control by self-interested and unaccountable people and institutions, etc.)
Open source or not, the big companies will always win. The only real difference is that as a whole society would slow down and be worse off without open source. Either way, it'll be equally unfair.
> Given then, that there's very little upside to doing open source, and most/all the benefits go to profit-making corporations
I partially disagree. Yes, the benefit will not be fairly shared. However, the volunteers' works accelerate entreprises' works, which can then provide new services and new products faster.
Imagine some ML algorithms could find the cure to aging. You have two options : either wait that some company develops it, but you might be dead by then, or accerelate the process by open sourcing your code and hopefully get the companies closer to this goal. Now, that doesn't mean you will be able to access that cure if a company finally finds it and decides to sell it, but you increase the odds that something might be discovered.
It's like giving $1000 to charity, but with the scale of software, your coded contribution can have way more impact than $1000 on the world.
all good points. i also think what really pushes a lot of developers to do open source, and bear with me for the unpopular opinion--is ego. they love having followers, and a voice on twitter with some open source badge on their profile page. it's in a way a status symbol of "i did this important thing that a lot of people rely on, im pretty important." i highly doubt that even 5% of contributors are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or the community.
you can sort of see evidence of this within repositories filled with smug comments within the issues or pull requests
> 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.
I don't think that's true. The software itself doesn't benefit their bottom line because it's free for everyone. You can't charge a premium because your business runs on Linux.
All open source software does is provide a base-line of technology that all companies and all individuals can use. You can't directly or even indirectly profit of it -- you can only profit on the value you can provide on top of it.
As technologists, that's what we want! We want companies and individuals to stand on the shoulders of giants and peek a little bit higher. We don't need anyone to re-invent the wheel over and over.
> 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.
That is not the case with the D programming language effort. Quite a number of strong D open-source contributors have been recruited into very well paying positions directly because of their contributions.
I suspect the key is contributing to a higher profile open source project. One that is high enough that one can make major contributions, and not so high that one has a hard time standing out amongst the other contributors.
A couple of things I've been thinking of (speaking of GPL sofware)
- free software (GPL) can be used for any purpose, by the user. Yes, this means a corporation can use the software without paying. However if it tries to redistribute the software it has the obligation to distribute the source code and any improvements made to it.
- Large corporations are made of people. It is also of value that a person inside a large corporation can learn to use GPL tools, then leave the corporation and download use the same tools at home or another job and continue to use the skills learned.
- GPL software is also great for education - students can not only use tools, but can also pull them apart and see how they work
- GPL software can be a legacy if you're into that. You can write and distribute software under the GPL, and it can survive your current job, or corporation, or live on past your lifetime. GPL software has outlived most of the places I've worked. Meanwhile the non-free software those places created during my tenures have largely disappeared.
- GPL software is a great foil against our losing war with privacy. I can foresee a future where running software you can view and modify might be the only way to ensure you know you aren't being taken advantage of.
It’s part of being a professional. We even have a word for it: pro bono. Volunteering your skills doesn’t make you a sucker.
Companies may not care about volunteer work when making hiring decisions, but that should not be why you do it.
You say most open source software is used by companies to better their bottom line, but if you’re making six figures through skilled work and not giving anything back to your community, I fail to see how that’s any better.
As someone making hiring decisions, I very much do visit the github accounts of my applicants. I consider the quality of their code and look favorably on them for making code available. I look even more favorably on those who bother to make licensing decisions for their code. Do you get an extra $5k for pushing 1k lines of GNU-licensed code? No. Did you get a callback on your job application? You bet. Do I take pride in the OSS work of my people? Yes. Does that factor into their performance review? Yes. Does that factor into their annual raise and prospects for promotion? Yes.
I have also hired people who don't have GitHub accounts. In those cases, they have some other proof of work. Papers, thesis, references (which are a drag, because then I have to also figure out how to vet the reference) and, particularly valuable, referrals from people I already know personally. This last one goes both ways: not only do I have high confidence in the good intentions of the person making the referral, I can then retrospectively assess this contact's ability to assess.
> 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
I don't think you can make a sweeping generalization like that, because "employer" is not some omnipotent figure sitting in an ivory tower. It's other developers, and managers who are (typically) technical and can appreciate individuals who contribute to open source.
If I see someone is an active contributor on Scikit-learn, numpy, etc. that is a certainly a strong signal for me. Yes I'm not making the hiring decision, but I can assure you the HM is going to be influenced by those who interviewed the candidate.
Citations needed. This is just a pessimistic speculation based on your experience, but my experience is the exact opposite. So who's right? We should leave this kind of stuff at the door.
Is there research comparing the current situation with a hypothetical world where OSS doesn't exist? How many less developers would have a job? How much less would the remaining be paid? I'm imagining it and that's not a world I want to be in.
To add a bit more to the "factualness" of the conversation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Software Engineers in the U.S. took home $144 billion, which for comparison is more than the revenue of Alphabet or Microsoft. How much of that do you think can be attributed to OSS?
There's a problem with this perspective. I have an insight that would help you see the picture more accurately. I would share it, but here on HN people from profit-making corporations could also see it and benefit, so just ask me in person next time you see me.
> 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.
Isn't this kind of the problem the GPL is supposed to solve?
Sure, a company can build off an open source project to increase their bottom line, but they'll have to contribute back any changes they make. Which means their work is now benefitting other developers as well.
I feel like the GPL has somewhat fallen out of favor in recent years. To an extent I understand why, and yet...
Back when people were making a big deal about the apparent lack of women/minorities/etc in open source projects, I objected to trying to get them to give away their labor for free.
The response to that was that these contributions lead to jobs. But, that idea seems to have largely disappeared. There was a period where people were claiming your github account is your resume, but I haven't heard that sentiment in several years.
A better way to look at OSS is like charity. Giving to charity is not something you do to enrich yourself, although you will likely enrich yourself in certain ways. You don't give to charity so you can get a better job in the future. And the results of giving to a charity might result in profits for corporations: suppose the charity makes a breakthrough in medicine and a large medical research company uses that to leapfrog their R&D. That's a feature, not a bug. We shouldn't discourage people from giving to charity because of these aspects.
It's worth noting that many of these companies give back to the OSS they leveraged, and are often the genesis of some of the best OSS software themselves.
> 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 can’t see anything wrong with that, it’s like people doing favors every day for other people without asking for money
> 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.
Yes open-source improve computation as a whole, companies as well as individuals
> 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.
Not my experience, have never stumbled upon a recruiter that doesn’t value OS contributions
> 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.
Since all previous assumptios was wrong, conclusion doesn’t follow. But I agree that people should not do Open Source for money
I agree with what you are saying here. The underlying problem here is that companies (being emotionless optimization machines) aren't willing to shell out for the benefiet they are getting from open source, because people are willing to give it out for free. The only way this will get resolved is if open source contributors as a whole stop contributing leaving companies to either have to support open source in some way, or go back to developing in house. Most likely the later as it has the benefiet of retaining IP and competitive edge. What this says is that most likely open source will start to go away in the years following if corporate entities don't start sponsoring it more. Maybe some type of subscription model like academic journals, but we all know how much people like that.
Also an angle you are considering are open source projects like Spark maintained by a company (databricks) for the benefiet of being used as a sales tool. This whole class of open source exists and pulls unwitting contributors into helping out who don't realize that they are benefieting multiple layers of corporate entities not willing to pay for it. And they will not see any benefiet from it (unless they use it as a personal sales tool to get a job at those companies).
> 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 can't think of any civic institution I belong to that isn't constantly asking for volunteers, and riding the volunteers they have to do more. I'm not sure it's any different.
Society needs volunteers, and money isn't everything.
Though I now cringe at the angsty teen outrage dripping from every word of this post, it's hard to believe that I wrote this on AskSlashdot 19 years ago:
and still do not know whether any formal method exists (apart from the choice of license model) which could inoculate "Open Source" from being tragically impressed into corporate rent-seeking service. Or at least, as much of the Open Source ethic as is encapsulated in the public works of ethically motivated open source contributors; people who are essentially investing their time, skills and resources in the improvement of a lightly defended public common that continues to be parceled out to private interests.
* rereading the above I don't think I've made much progress in my posting style. Maybe it's something about the apparent structural inevitability of this problem, which seems more a recapitulation of deeper conflicts in human dynamics than something specific to "open source".
Firstly, the reason I open-source most of my libraries is because, when I was a kid and learning to code, I couldn't afford or convince my parents to buy the expensive proprietary software I wanted to play with. Open source let me have access to this technology ( and to inspect how it worked ) without having to buy anything.
This is simple stuff like having GCC to compile C programs, rather than buying the intel or MS compiler.
Those early experiences got me where I am today. I contribute open-source software so that other, more junior developers have the same opportunities I did.
> 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.
Again, I've never experienced this. I got my first programming job right out of high school, and my resume was filled only with various (small) open-source contributions. Without those I'm not sure what inspectable experience I would have had.
> 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.
Again.... the exact opposite experience. I released a moderately popular library, built a community around it, and this has opened up career opportunities for me. In the niche I work in, several interviewers had actually heard of me before I even interviewed. The scalability of open-source to distribute a positive first impression to potential employers should not be understated.
I do agree with you here:
> 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.
Lastly, I think the reason most people find open-source to not live up to its promises is that they do not take on leadership roles in open source organizations. Frankly, as a more senior developer now, simply being a casual contributor to a project would not add to my resume. However, being a project lead, or component lead, would. You need to target your open-source contributions to things your employers would find useful. For example, I work on mainly backend, low-level things in my current career. As much as I would like to contribute to GNOME or GTK or whatever (and I have the skills to do it), there is not enough reward to doing so, so I don't. Instead I contribute to projects that I know will ingratiate myself to future employers. Perhaps that's why our experiences are so different.
Do you remember being a developer in the 90s? It was horrible and you were stuck in the confines of truly for-profit companies and for-profit platforms and paradigms.
One benefit of OSS is to lead the world to a place where you want the world to go.
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 collectively that these contributions have value and we all collectively benefit from it. And for-profit companies are part of that collective benefit but that doesn't mean money needs to be involved.
I'm working on an open source project right now -- I've put a lot of hours into it -- and it's cool but there is no way to build a profitable business from it. It's an end-user product, the small number of users will like it, and I just enjoyed building it. But I also don't want to make it business. I already have a job.
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 such a bad idea.
Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get
seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people
actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and
concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be "nice" to some
"community" which turns out not to be "nice" _enough_ in return that you will
actually stay alive, is no longer an option.
“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...
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
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 build things to interact with the big commercial players.
Yes there is still a lot of FOSS that's small, 1 ~ 5 people maintainers that's volunteer. But there is a considerable about that's corporate backed. We're a far cry from the FOSS hope of the 90s. I wrote about this a few years back:
Is that really so widespread though? All of my open source contributions were done on the job, fixing a bug or adding a feature to an open source project I use at work. There is a strong incentive to improve the project rather than fork it to fix, as you don't have to keep maintaining it yourself. It also appears that many maintainers are doing so as part of their duties at work.
Just as Google maintains their search engine for "free" to show you ads, they maintain Kubernetes so that you use it on their cloud platform. You fix bugs in Kubernetes so you can have the fix you need, at work, when you need it.
The overarching problem with expecting companies to pay for open-source is that they don’t have to.
It’s often as vital to them as the publicly-provided infrastructure used by their employees to get to work, but because they never see the costs, they assume there isn’t any.
In an ideal world business-critical FOSS projects would be funded by the government the same way that other public infrastructure is.
Until that happens I think lone developers of those popular projects should start to adopt licenses that allow them to charge businesses. It’s the only way to avoid creating martyrs of them.
> The overarching problem with expecting companies to pay for open-source is that they don’t have to.
It might also be because, even when they have to, they refuse to. As in this case described in the article, for example:
"Last year, a company overseas contacted him in a panic after they paused a firmware upgrade rollout to several million devices due to a cURL problem.
"When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for [a support contract], they refused."
I understand the sentiment. However
1. Money corrupts everything. Be careful what you wish for.
2. Lone developers will probably do a better job than any sort of bureaucracy, public or private. Small-scale FOSS projects are the perfect platform for a lone developer. They can of course demand payment for their efforts, with all that it might entail regarding point 1.
>The overarching problem with expecting companies to pay for open-source is that they don’t have to.
Exactly this. Take the cURL program, as mentioned in the article. The license [1] states:
>Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
So, if an organization is free to use something, then you get upset that you don't get paid for it, why not just adopt a different license? Build a model where they have to pay for it?
It's very telling that the word copyleft hasn't appeared in this thread nor in the submitted article.
I use the AGPLv3 for most of my software and it's a feature that large corporations horrified of contributing back fear it. I'm not exploited, because I use a license that doesn't allow me to be exploited.
No one using a permissive license, which are pushed primarily by corporations that slander the GPL I think, has any right to complain about being exploited, in my opinion. Copyleft is good and copyleft software still gets paid support and other things; as many companies have found, it's also a good means to release Free Software that people will still pay for, in the form of license exceptions, even.
A rational actor never works for "free", they derive some perceived benefit (not necessarily money) from their action, like reputation or self-satisfaction or warm fuzzies. I think it's brilliant that we can use these carrots to get good work out of people that can be shared on the internet.
All the same that's no excuse to abuse people who are acting far from rationally.
It's completely normal and human to want to be productive and contribute. About half of the work that gets done is paid work. The rest, parenting, diy, housework, cooking, volunteering, creative work, is not. This work is done out of a spirit of generosity and/or reciprocity. To exploit that work without reciprocity undermines society. To be generous to billionaires is insanity. Markets are great and all (competition can be fun, after all) but they aren't in accord with every aspect of human nature. Life is better for people when they feel like they express their creative and generous aspect without being a sucker.
I'm a Bucky Fuller fanboy. He calculated that we would have enough technology to make our current economic system obsolete by sometime in the 1970's. That has already happened, but we have, in general, failed to notice.
The advancement of automation should lead to a post-historical quasi-utopia, and our biggest problem will be sorting out our personal baggage. (Like Star Trek but without FTL and teleporters.)
From my POV, charging money for copies of software is regressive and foolish.
> Because the code is available to use for free, without any commercial licensing, there’s no reason that companies need to tell him that they’re using it.
If only there was some way for people to live decently while working on anything they wanted to. Like, if there was some Universal way they could meet their Basic needs without having to devote all their energy towards extracting an Income out of for-profit companies or contract-for-hire schemes. Wow, then maybe there would be millions of people interested in computers who could work on all kinds of projects!
I think the open source space will benefit tremendously from DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) that direct funding for projects or new ideas of note.
The most famous example is Moloch DAO which funds things ranging from entire software teams building Ethereum clients to individual positions like a test plan runner for coordination across multiple organizations. These are the types of things that are traditionally hard or impossible to get funding for as the smallest unit of funding typically falls to VCs who fund an entire company for many years.
Anyone can submit a funding proposal which is akin to a business plan that doesn't aim to make money and it is voted on by members of the DAO. A lot of interesting ideas are debated and refined with the best ideas making it to the front and being funded by democratic vote.
We are still within the first few years of the existence of DAOS and there are already a dozen DAOs focused on funding various aspects of tech and design with likely many more coming in the future. Open source has always had a hard time competing with corporations but with DAOs like Moloch and others the future is starting to look bright.
Lots of interesting comments here. I have not seen anyone mention a model that means something to me.
I am an academic. Simplistically stated, students come to study with folks who have an academic reputation (yes, I know it is much more complicated than that). A person could imagine that one place to get an academic reputation is through the development of great Free software, or other Free works such as texts.
The shirt on your back cost only $10 because it was made by a kid in Bangladesh for pennies. The tunnel under the city cost millions more than planned, and somebody will have to eat that cost. Your theatre program has a page of 6-digit donors because ticket prices don’t cover half the cost of producing a show.
If you don't want companies using your tech, just use (A)GPL or anything from Richard Stallman.
But there are some of us who believe in Open Source[1] and giving value to the world, including companies. So please stop bullying us into being a victim culture, we're not.
Besides, scientific research over the decades has shown that Open Source produces valuable work specifically because it is unpaid creative work, and when pay is introduced, quality drops.
[1] Disclosure: I work on Open Source full time now because 8M people use my tech ( https://github.com/amark/gun ), but I do not charge for it and previously had to do it in my spare time (it is only its success that has lead to me being able to work on it full time - not the other way around).
[+] [-] joshlemer|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] arandr0x|6 years ago|reply
What about science? If you ever benefitted from a genetic screening for any disease, your doctor made anywhere between $100 and $400 an hour, and the graduate student who discovered the function of that gene $10 an hour if you're accounting for his tuition credit. Who tells these students to stop spending 60 hours a week at the lab and start using their skills doing something people will pay for, like develop a no-palm-oil no-aspartame but-still-addictive Mars bar for 25c unit cost?
People will accept less money in exchange for doing something meaningful, like sitting in their basement painting stuff rich people will speculate on for millions of dollars after their death, or campaigning for a rich lawyer who already makes 200k and will get a good bonus post-election because he has the right party colors.
If you could literally sell meaning to people for less friction than those alternatives they'd eat it up. And they'd spend their time making money to spend it on your meaning-making money-sucking machine.
Because that's all money is for: be exchanged for things that make your life not suck. And this exchange tends to bear transaction costs.
[+] [-] Liquix|6 years ago|reply
If this culture is stifled the name of depriving corporations 'free labor' through OSS, the creative hacker community isn't elevated - everyone is brought down. IMHO anyone seeking to build financial value for developers or pad their resume is better off working on a side project/startup.
[+] [-] miloignis|6 years ago|reply
edit: Also, all of the open source I do or that I know of my peers doing is 100% for the love of programming and open source culture, without a bunch of hidden motives. Open source was definitely key to me becoming a programmer when I was a kid - without it I would never have gone as deep as I did into coding (linux, gcc, irrlicht), 3D modeling (blender), etc.
[+] [-] wobbleblob|6 years ago|reply
I'm not talking about your small hobby project with a few dozen users - as good as it may be, the internet doesn't run on it. cURL is really an exception, not the rule.
[+] [-] zelphirkalt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobolus|6 years ago|reply
This is nowhere close to true, unless you define “benefit” as “cash profits”. Even then, it’s a tough argument.
There have been extraordinary benefits to most people in the world from open-source contributions. Without a wide range of open source code projects there would be no Wikipedia, no SciHub, no web forums, no search engines, no web maps, no movie/book/restaurant review sites, no craigslist, no online dating, no news websites, no web education platforms (MOOCs, Open Courseware, Khan Academy, ...), no technical Q&A sites, no video sharing sites, no social media, no e-commerce, no online banking, no ...
The great majority of the benefits of all of these software products and projects accrue to their many users, not to their authors or corporate hosts.
(Of course technology is not all positive, and many people have also been harmed by technology. Open source also enables surveillance, stalking, bullying, new kinds of fraud, new venues for propaganda, new legal risks, new avenues for social and political control by self-interested and unaccountable people and institutions, etc.)
[+] [-] seph-reed|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antpls|6 years ago|reply
I partially disagree. Yes, the benefit will not be fairly shared. However, the volunteers' works accelerate entreprises' works, which can then provide new services and new products faster.
Imagine some ML algorithms could find the cure to aging. You have two options : either wait that some company develops it, but you might be dead by then, or accerelate the process by open sourcing your code and hopefully get the companies closer to this goal. Now, that doesn't mean you will be able to access that cure if a company finally finds it and decides to sell it, but you increase the odds that something might be discovered.
It's like giving $1000 to charity, but with the scale of software, your coded contribution can have way more impact than $1000 on the world.
[+] [-] volkk|6 years ago|reply
you can sort of see evidence of this within repositories filled with smug comments within the issues or pull requests
[+] [-] wvenable|6 years ago|reply
I don't think that's true. The software itself doesn't benefit their bottom line because it's free for everyone. You can't charge a premium because your business runs on Linux.
All open source software does is provide a base-line of technology that all companies and all individuals can use. You can't directly or even indirectly profit of it -- you can only profit on the value you can provide on top of it.
As technologists, that's what we want! We want companies and individuals to stand on the shoulders of giants and peek a little bit higher. We don't need anyone to re-invent the wheel over and over.
[+] [-] WalterBright|6 years ago|reply
That is not the case with the D programming language effort. Quite a number of strong D open-source contributors have been recruited into very well paying positions directly because of their contributions.
I suspect the key is contributing to a higher profile open source project. One that is high enough that one can make major contributions, and not so high that one has a hard time standing out amongst the other contributors.
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
- free software (GPL) can be used for any purpose, by the user. Yes, this means a corporation can use the software without paying. However if it tries to redistribute the software it has the obligation to distribute the source code and any improvements made to it.
- Large corporations are made of people. It is also of value that a person inside a large corporation can learn to use GPL tools, then leave the corporation and download use the same tools at home or another job and continue to use the skills learned.
- GPL software is also great for education - students can not only use tools, but can also pull them apart and see how they work
- GPL software can be a legacy if you're into that. You can write and distribute software under the GPL, and it can survive your current job, or corporation, or live on past your lifetime. GPL software has outlived most of the places I've worked. Meanwhile the non-free software those places created during my tenures have largely disappeared.
- GPL software is a great foil against our losing war with privacy. I can foresee a future where running software you can view and modify might be the only way to ensure you know you aren't being taken advantage of.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
Companies may not care about volunteer work when making hiring decisions, but that should not be why you do it.
You say most open source software is used by companies to better their bottom line, but if you’re making six figures through skilled work and not giving anything back to your community, I fail to see how that’s any better.
[+] [-] killjoywashere|6 years ago|reply
I have also hired people who don't have GitHub accounts. In those cases, they have some other proof of work. Papers, thesis, references (which are a drag, because then I have to also figure out how to vet the reference) and, particularly valuable, referrals from people I already know personally. This last one goes both ways: not only do I have high confidence in the good intentions of the person making the referral, I can then retrospectively assess this contact's ability to assess.
[+] [-] andreilys|6 years ago|reply
I don't think you can make a sweeping generalization like that, because "employer" is not some omnipotent figure sitting in an ivory tower. It's other developers, and managers who are (typically) technical and can appreciate individuals who contribute to open source.
If I see someone is an active contributor on Scikit-learn, numpy, etc. that is a certainly a strong signal for me. Yes I'm not making the hiring decision, but I can assure you the HM is going to be influenced by those who interviewed the candidate.
[+] [-] guntars|6 years ago|reply
Is there research comparing the current situation with a hypothetical world where OSS doesn't exist? How many less developers would have a job? How much less would the remaining be paid? I'm imagining it and that's not a world I want to be in.
To add a bit more to the "factualness" of the conversation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Software Engineers in the U.S. took home $144 billion, which for comparison is more than the revenue of Alphabet or Microsoft. How much of that do you think can be attributed to OSS?
[+] [-] brlewis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] decoyworker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|6 years ago|reply
Isn't this kind of the problem the GPL is supposed to solve?
Sure, a company can build off an open source project to increase their bottom line, but they'll have to contribute back any changes they make. Which means their work is now benefitting other developers as well.
I feel like the GPL has somewhat fallen out of favor in recent years. To an extent I understand why, and yet...
[+] [-] nitwit005|6 years ago|reply
The response to that was that these contributions lead to jobs. But, that idea seems to have largely disappeared. There was a period where people were claiming your github account is your resume, but I haven't heard that sentiment in several years.
[+] [-] jquery|6 years ago|reply
It's worth noting that many of these companies give back to the OSS they leveraged, and are often the genesis of some of the best OSS software themselves.
[+] [-] cjohansson|6 years ago|reply
I can’t see anything wrong with that, it’s like people doing favors every day for other people without asking for money
> 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.
Yes open-source improve computation as a whole, companies as well as individuals
> 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.
Not my experience, have never stumbled upon a recruiter that doesn’t value OS contributions
> 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.
Since all previous assumptios was wrong, conclusion doesn’t follow. But I agree that people should not do Open Source for money
[+] [-] nautilus12|6 years ago|reply
Also an angle you are considering are open source projects like Spark maintained by a company (databricks) for the benefiet of being used as a sales tool. This whole class of open source exists and pulls unwitting contributors into helping out who don't realize that they are benefieting multiple layers of corporate entities not willing to pay for it. And they will not see any benefiet from it (unless they use it as a personal sales tool to get a job at those companies).
[+] [-] js2|6 years ago|reply
I can't think of any civic institution I belong to that isn't constantly asking for volunteers, and riding the volunteers they have to do more. I'm not sure it's any different.
Society needs volunteers, and money isn't everything.
[+] [-] SI_Rob|6 years ago|reply
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/00/01/22/1843258/open-defensi...
and still do not know whether any formal method exists (apart from the choice of license model) which could inoculate "Open Source" from being tragically impressed into corporate rent-seeking service. Or at least, as much of the Open Source ethic as is encapsulated in the public works of ethically motivated open source contributors; people who are essentially investing their time, skills and resources in the improvement of a lightly defended public common that continues to be parceled out to private interests.
* rereading the above I don't think I've made much progress in my posting style. Maybe it's something about the apparent structural inevitability of this problem, which seems more a recapitulation of deeper conflicts in human dynamics than something specific to "open source".
[+] [-] tathougies|6 years ago|reply
Firstly, the reason I open-source most of my libraries is because, when I was a kid and learning to code, I couldn't afford or convince my parents to buy the expensive proprietary software I wanted to play with. Open source let me have access to this technology ( and to inspect how it worked ) without having to buy anything.
This is simple stuff like having GCC to compile C programs, rather than buying the intel or MS compiler.
Those early experiences got me where I am today. I contribute open-source software so that other, more junior developers have the same opportunities I did.
> 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.
Again, I've never experienced this. I got my first programming job right out of high school, and my resume was filled only with various (small) open-source contributions. Without those I'm not sure what inspectable experience I would have had.
> 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.
Again.... the exact opposite experience. I released a moderately popular library, built a community around it, and this has opened up career opportunities for me. In the niche I work in, several interviewers had actually heard of me before I even interviewed. The scalability of open-source to distribute a positive first impression to potential employers should not be understated.
I do agree with you here:
> 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.
Lastly, I think the reason most people find open-source to not live up to its promises is that they do not take on leadership roles in open source organizations. Frankly, as a more senior developer now, simply being a casual contributor to a project would not add to my resume. However, being a project lead, or component lead, would. You need to target your open-source contributions to things your employers would find useful. For example, I work on mainly backend, low-level things in my current career. As much as I would like to contribute to GNOME or GTK or whatever (and I have the skills to do it), there is not enough reward to doing so, so I don't. Instead I contribute to projects that I know will ingratiate myself to future employers. Perhaps that's why our experiences are so different.
[+] [-] TuringNYC|6 years ago|reply
One benefit of OSS is to lead the world to a place where you want the world to go.
[+] [-] wvenable|6 years ago|reply
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 collectively that these contributions have value and we all collectively benefit from it. And for-profit companies are part of that collective benefit but that doesn't mean money needs to be involved.
I'm working on an open source project right now -- I've put a lot of hours into it -- and it's cool but there is no way to build a profitable business from it. It's an end-user product, the small number of users will like it, and I just enjoyed building it. But I also don't want to make it business. I already have a job.
[+] [-] TurboHaskal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ViViDboarder|6 years ago|reply
And the catastrophic Specter and Meltdown bugs show that private code doesn’t prevent this sort of thing either...
[+] [-] user_50123890|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] djsumdog|6 years ago|reply
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 build things to interact with the big commercial players.
Yes there is still a lot of FOSS that's small, 1 ~ 5 people maintainers that's volunteer. But there is a considerable about that's corporate backed. We're a far cry from the FOSS hope of the 90s. I wrote about this a few years back:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...
[+] [-] orisho|6 years ago|reply
Just as Google maintains their search engine for "free" to show you ads, they maintain Kubernetes so that you use it on their cloud platform. You fix bugs in Kubernetes so you can have the fix you need, at work, when you need it.
[+] [-] muglug|6 years ago|reply
It’s often as vital to them as the publicly-provided infrastructure used by their employees to get to work, but because they never see the costs, they assume there isn’t any.
In an ideal world business-critical FOSS projects would be funded by the government the same way that other public infrastructure is.
Until that happens I think lone developers of those popular projects should start to adopt licenses that allow them to charge businesses. It’s the only way to avoid creating martyrs of them.
[+] [-] pdonis|6 years ago|reply
It might also be because, even when they have to, they refuse to. As in this case described in the article, for example:
"Last year, a company overseas contacted him in a panic after they paused a firmware upgrade rollout to several million devices due to a cURL problem.
"When Stenberg asked the company that needed him to fly to a different country to troubleshoot their problem to pay for [a support contract], they refused."
[+] [-] jackcosgrove|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamuelAdams|6 years ago|reply
Exactly this. Take the cURL program, as mentioned in the article. The license [1] states:
>Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
So, if an organization is free to use something, then you get upset that you don't get paid for it, why not just adopt a different license? Build a model where they have to pay for it?
[1]: https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/COPYING
[+] [-] verisimilitudes|6 years ago|reply
I use the AGPLv3 for most of my software and it's a feature that large corporations horrified of contributing back fear it. I'm not exploited, because I use a license that doesn't allow me to be exploited.
No one using a permissive license, which are pushed primarily by corporations that slander the GPL I think, has any right to complain about being exploited, in my opinion. Copyleft is good and copyleft software still gets paid support and other things; as many companies have found, it's also a good means to release Free Software that people will still pay for, in the form of license exceptions, even.
[+] [-] Y_Y|6 years ago|reply
All the same that's no excuse to abuse people who are acting far from rationally.
[+] [-] viburnum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|6 years ago|reply
The advancement of automation should lead to a post-historical quasi-utopia, and our biggest problem will be sorting out our personal baggage. (Like Star Trek but without FTL and teleporters.)
From my POV, charging money for copies of software is regressive and foolish.
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
Well, that depends on the license.
[+] [-] CodexArcanum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjohansson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sargos|6 years ago|reply
The most famous example is Moloch DAO which funds things ranging from entire software teams building Ethereum clients to individual positions like a test plan runner for coordination across multiple organizations. These are the types of things that are traditionally hard or impossible to get funding for as the smallest unit of funding typically falls to VCs who fund an entire company for many years.
Anyone can submit a funding proposal which is akin to a business plan that doesn't aim to make money and it is voted on by members of the DAO. A lot of interesting ideas are debated and refined with the best ideas making it to the front and being funded by democratic vote.
We are still within the first few years of the existence of DAOS and there are already a dozen DAOs focused on funding various aspects of tech and design with likely many more coming in the future. Open source has always had a hard time competing with corporations but with DAOs like Moloch and others the future is starting to look bright.
[+] [-] jimhefferon|6 years ago|reply
I am an academic. Simplistically stated, students come to study with folks who have an academic reputation (yes, I know it is much more complicated than that). A person could imagine that one place to get an academic reputation is through the development of great Free software, or other Free works such as texts.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
The shirt on your back cost only $10 because it was made by a kid in Bangladesh for pennies. The tunnel under the city cost millions more than planned, and somebody will have to eat that cost. Your theatre program has a page of 6-digit donors because ticket prices don’t cover half the cost of producing a show.
Nobody likes to admit the true cost of anything.
[+] [-] marknadal|6 years ago|reply
But there are some of us who believe in Open Source[1] and giving value to the world, including companies. So please stop bullying us into being a victim culture, we're not.
Besides, scientific research over the decades has shown that Open Source produces valuable work specifically because it is unpaid creative work, and when pay is introduced, quality drops.
Here's a good summary video of the studies: https://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc
[1] Disclosure: I work on Open Source full time now because 8M people use my tech ( https://github.com/amark/gun ), but I do not charge for it and previously had to do it in my spare time (it is only its success that has lead to me being able to work on it full time - not the other way around).
[+] [-] andymockli|6 years ago|reply