As someone trying to make a living out of my OSS work, this kind of clickbait titles really get on my nerves. Just yesterday, like most week a company did contact me to get support but when sent a payment link and instead of ignoring me took the path of questioning why would they pay for OSS. This kind of behaviour is so common, I have a canned answer for all those companies oss attracts trying to get things for free:
OSS doesn't mean free labour and I value my time. FYI I would have made better money flipping burgers than working on this and I can't realistically extend that principle to help everyone on the internet with a rate that's below minimum wage where I live.
The author did say that open source maintainers should be paid and was harsh about exploitive corporations. They were simply stating that we should not expect the maintenance problem to be solved by paying developers. Whether that's true or not is debatable. Historically, some have certainly made a living off of developing OSS since their work was valued enough for someone to hire them or because there have been people willing to pay for their services. On the other hand, many more have not been given that opportunity. Perhaps paying them will solve the maintenance problem, or perhaps it will only reveal other underlying hurdles with open source development.
I just thought of another possible explanation to give them. "All software has a marginal cost of $0, so all effort is in improvements and that still needs to be paid for."
Corporations use OSS for avoidance of paying tax and labour. There is plenty of activist, idealist developers that can be tricked into doing work corporations need but without receiving remuneration.
That's why OSS is being championed by big corporations as it saves them a ton of money that they otherwise would have to spend on R&D etc.
With OSS they can cherry pick ripe OSS projects, appropriate them and use to make millions or even billions and original developers won't see a penny.
You know you may get the so called "exposure", but try to pay your rent with it.
OSS really needs to be regulated, so that for profit businesses pay OSS contributors living wages at very least, if they use their projects.
The article contains a number of problematic statements. One is for instance the statement that Linux destroyed value. It may have for the proprietary UNIX vendors. But this should be balanced by the value Linux and OSS has created overall. Cloud Computing would never have scaled the way it has, if there would be operating system licenses and cloud computing providers would not be able to modify the OS according to their needs. I doubt that the profits of the proprietary UNIX firms over their lifetime are larger to what Amazon Web Services makes in a month.
OSS is basically exploiting a network effect that aggregates a lot of smaller contributions to a large one. Learning how to use a specific open-source software is the contribution the corporate free riders make.
The question is, how can the maintenance work be decentralized and distributed. Kubernetes changes the release manager for every version, so distributes the work over time. As long we rely on the single maintainer the results will not satisfy expectations. BTW a commercial company providing the support needs to solve the same problem.
The statement about Linux "destroying value" reminded me of Bastiat's famous satire, The Candlemaker's Petition [1]. Saying that Linux is a net negative value because it reduced demand for proprietary Unixes is like arguing that the sun is a net negative value, because it reduces demands for light bulbs.
The way modern economists analyze this, any transaction creates value for both the buyer and the seller.
If owning a Thingie is worth $60 for me and $20 for you, we both gain $20 when I buy yours, and the world is $40 richer. You can think of all wealth as created by trade from this perspective.
In the Linux case, it destroyed value for proprietary UNIX vendors, and created value for millions of UNIX users.
Linux and open source removes the capacity for people to compete against it commercially. It takes air out of the room. Why would we pay you when we can get this for free?
free as in 0 cost is very difficult to compete against unless you are 100, 1000x times better.
There is the value that would have been provided (generated) in revenue to UNIX manufacturers had Linux not existed and the value that exists with Linux being free. These are two numbers.
One is a tangible financial number, the other is another tangible financial number from profits not needing to pay for a UNIX manufacturer.
It's difficult to say what would have happened, but you cannot deny that prices for corporate UNIX DID in fact exist, and they were not getting paid due to the availability of the free option.
Also, remember that the UNIX manufactuerers would have produced value too, so you need to include the value produced by UNIX versus the value produced by Linux minus licence costs.
If you're using the argument that if everything was free then there would be infinitely more value than things being commercial, then why isn't everything free, if that truly produces more value?
I would expect everything to be free if that was truly the better option.
Nobody claimed that. Paying maintainer is a start.
Ideally any "important" project would have organization behind it, with some people ready to react when security problem hits (even if usual maintainer/developer takes well-deserved vacation) but the whole problem is convincing corpo it's worth investing outside of disasters like OpenSSL which was essentially paid to make code worse.
I'm always interested in discussions about this topic on HN. I will toss this out there in hopes of fostering discussion of how to actually solve this problem:
I think we would do well to develop some systems for helping people monetize their thing if it gets popular. But we could also work on the cultural side of this and help people understand that you need to think about how much you are willing to give and that if your thing gets popular, making money with it is an additional job to do, not an entitlement.
I say that as someone who does a lot of stuff "for free" and hopes it will pay off because I'm handicapped and can't work on a schedule and can't do a normal job and blah blah blah. I keep hoping that if I deliver value, someday that will somehow lead to sufficient money for my needs.
So I am not attacking people who feel they add value and should get money for it. I'm on their side.
But the reality seems to be that extracting money from people is additional work on top of providing them with something of value, like it or not. I really wish we would get better about finding ways to uncouple certain things and help people who provide value to live comfortably. I recently left a comment on HN suggesting a lot of really aggravating products that cause problems are likely due to the fact "people gotta eat."
I would really love to live in a world where people doing genuinely valuable things and not great at selling get comfortable lives and people great at selling and happy to make the world worse by it would get actively encouraged to find a better way to live their lives. I just don't know how to get there from here.
Obviously I’m biased because I have skin in the game but articles like this really do a disservice for getting maintainers paid, something the author purports to support, because it gives people yet another excuse not to fund maintainers and maintain the status quo. I have yet to see illustrative examples in posts like these that show well funded projects doing worse because they got money.
I mean, it's the downfall of all facile answers, isn't it? "If you aren't the customer, you're the product" falls down when closed-source companies turn around and sell their smaller customers to their bigger customers, and the idea that you can't dictate terms to someone you're not paying falls down when someone debunks the contrapositive by saying no to a paying client. There's no silver bullet to make software always do what you want, so why should there be a silver bullet to always make humans always comply?
So much hate for this article in the comments. Are we really such a one sided community?
This article makes some great points which hurt to hear but should be addressed if we don't like them. Economically, it is true that paying and maintainer who is already trying to spend lots of his time on open source isn't going to make him spend more time on it. You might still be a jerk if you don't pay him, but we should address the fact that this is true to some extent.
It's also a great point that helping open source maintainers maintain their product can sometimes be better than payment to achieve your goals. What open source maintainer would turn down the help of some intern willing to write all the unit tests?
Whenever someone says they are for open source but then cry when someone makes money off of their open sourced code all I see is some greedy mf crying he didn’t figure out how to make money out of his project.
Almost always your open source project is nothing special when it is used by “everyone” you just happened to either be first or by pure luck were picked up by some other project that made your famous. That is the beauty of open source it doesn’t live or die based one one individual. If you don’t like the project anymore do something else if you want to make money then you need to start with that in mind. Trying to pivot to for profit after decade of free software is pure bait and switch.
I want good things to spring up and come up and exist, so I am happy paying for things. If I wasn't, those things shall eventually go away.
Free things take regular effort to maintain, if everybody that produced something that was free ceased work on it, it would too become less valuable with time and finally it would shut.
We have a societal cultural attitude problem that people expect others to do all their work for them and produce things for them with nothing in return.
This post sows the seeds of its own best counterargument: time is money and maintainer money means maintainer time.
There's no sharp either-or between just a hobby and full-time job. There are some inflection points, as where money becomes enough to take one fewer contract client, devote a day or afternoon per week, or leave a current full-time job. Overall, paying a maintainer who has to manage money enables them to spend more time. That addresses the fundamental unbalance between demand and capacity that risks burnout.
I think of burnout risk as having another key factor that isn't mentioned here: psychology. It isn't just demands versus wall-clock capacity. It's your perception of demands versus the focus you can bring in time allotted. Paying someone for their work is a very direct, accountable, and socially recognized way of confirming the value of their effort. Not feeling exploited changes how maintainers relate to bugs, patches, planning, and support.
As a maintainer of a slightly popular project I totally agree with the fact that paying maintainers would not fix much.
First of all, the project I maintain would likely lose 99% of users if we charged money. Being free (as in beer) is a large part of its appeal. And that's okay.
Secondly, the project is currently being maintained by a few people in their spare time. If you paid me, I wouldn't have any more free time, so to make it worthwhile, you would have to pay me enough so I would give up my job. And it just sounds unlikely that someone would pay so much for our project.
I really don't think Open Source needs fixing with regard to money. I like that Open Source is not about money. Not every thing has to be profitable.
[+] [-] mickael-kerjean|3 years ago|reply
OSS doesn't mean free labour and I value my time. FYI I would have made better money flipping burgers than working on this and I can't realistically extend that principle to help everyone on the internet with a rate that's below minimum wage where I live.
[+] [-] II2II|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw903290|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varispeed|3 years ago|reply
OSS really needs to be regulated, so that for profit businesses pay OSS contributors living wages at very least, if they use their projects.
[+] [-] WrtCdEvrydy|3 years ago|reply
Sorry, I thought you wanted support, not a therapist... Here's a local listing of professionals nearby.
[+] [-] sieabahlpark|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kune|3 years ago|reply
OSS is basically exploiting a network effect that aggregates a lot of smaller contributions to a large one. Learning how to use a specific open-source software is the contribution the corporate free riders make.
The question is, how can the maintenance work be decentralized and distributed. Kubernetes changes the release manager for every version, so distributes the work over time. As long we rely on the single maintainer the results will not satisfy expectations. BTW a commercial company providing the support needs to solve the same problem.
[+] [-] quanticle|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://fee.org/articles/the-candlemakers-petition/
[+] [-] BurningFrog|3 years ago|reply
If owning a Thingie is worth $60 for me and $20 for you, we both gain $20 when I buy yours, and the world is $40 richer. You can think of all wealth as created by trade from this perspective.
In the Linux case, it destroyed value for proprietary UNIX vendors, and created value for millions of UNIX users.
[+] [-] pjmlp|3 years ago|reply
Cloud computing is basically timesharing rebranded.
Even containers were already a thing in big iron UNIX, e.g HP-UX vaults introduced in 1998 thereabouts.
[+] [-] samsquire|3 years ago|reply
free as in 0 cost is very difficult to compete against unless you are 100, 1000x times better.
There is the value that would have been provided (generated) in revenue to UNIX manufacturers had Linux not existed and the value that exists with Linux being free. These are two numbers.
One is a tangible financial number, the other is another tangible financial number from profits not needing to pay for a UNIX manufacturer.
It's difficult to say what would have happened, but you cannot deny that prices for corporate UNIX DID in fact exist, and they were not getting paid due to the availability of the free option.
Also, remember that the UNIX manufactuerers would have produced value too, so you need to include the value produced by UNIX versus the value produced by Linux minus licence costs.
If you're using the argument that if everything was free then there would be infinitely more value than things being commercial, then why isn't everything free, if that truly produces more value?
I would expect everything to be free if that was truly the better option.
[+] [-] ilyt|3 years ago|reply
Ideally any "important" project would have organization behind it, with some people ready to react when security problem hits (even if usual maintainer/developer takes well-deserved vacation) but the whole problem is convincing corpo it's worth investing outside of disasters like OpenSSL which was essentially paid to make code worse.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|3 years ago|reply
I think we would do well to develop some systems for helping people monetize their thing if it gets popular. But we could also work on the cultural side of this and help people understand that you need to think about how much you are willing to give and that if your thing gets popular, making money with it is an additional job to do, not an entitlement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824166
I say that as someone who does a lot of stuff "for free" and hopes it will pay off because I'm handicapped and can't work on a schedule and can't do a normal job and blah blah blah. I keep hoping that if I deliver value, someday that will somehow lead to sufficient money for my needs.
So I am not attacking people who feel they add value and should get money for it. I'm on their side.
But the reality seems to be that extracting money from people is additional work on top of providing them with something of value, like it or not. I really wish we would get better about finding ways to uncouple certain things and help people who provide value to live comfortably. I recently left a comment on HN suggesting a lot of really aggravating products that cause problems are likely due to the fact "people gotta eat."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33827984
I would really love to live in a world where people doing genuinely valuable things and not great at selling get comfortable lives and people great at selling and happy to make the world worse by it would get actively encouraged to find a better way to live their lives. I just don't know how to get there from here.
[+] [-] nevernude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msla|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|3 years ago|reply
Nothing is a magic bullet, and we all know that.
[+] [-] sgjohnson|3 years ago|reply
Except for Apple, HP, Oracle and IBM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification#Curr...
Oracle is not in the list because they just decided to stop paying for certification, other than that Solaris should still be compliant.
[+] [-] djha-skin|3 years ago|reply
This article makes some great points which hurt to hear but should be addressed if we don't like them. Economically, it is true that paying and maintainer who is already trying to spend lots of his time on open source isn't going to make him spend more time on it. You might still be a jerk if you don't pay him, but we should address the fact that this is true to some extent.
It's also a great point that helping open source maintainers maintain their product can sometimes be better than payment to achieve your goals. What open source maintainer would turn down the help of some intern willing to write all the unit tests?
[+] [-] nextlevelwizard|3 years ago|reply
Almost always your open source project is nothing special when it is used by “everyone” you just happened to either be first or by pure luck were picked up by some other project that made your famous. That is the beauty of open source it doesn’t live or die based one one individual. If you don’t like the project anymore do something else if you want to make money then you need to start with that in mind. Trying to pivot to for profit after decade of free software is pure bait and switch.
[+] [-] TheRealPomax|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samsquire|3 years ago|reply
I want good things to spring up and come up and exist, so I am happy paying for things. If I wasn't, those things shall eventually go away.
Free things take regular effort to maintain, if everybody that produced something that was free ceased work on it, it would too become less valuable with time and finally it would shut.
We have a societal cultural attitude problem that people expect others to do all their work for them and produce things for them with nothing in return.
[+] [-] kemitchell|3 years ago|reply
There's no sharp either-or between just a hobby and full-time job. There are some inflection points, as where money becomes enough to take one fewer contract client, devote a day or afternoon per week, or leave a current full-time job. Overall, paying a maintainer who has to manage money enables them to spend more time. That addresses the fundamental unbalance between demand and capacity that risks burnout.
I think of burnout risk as having another key factor that isn't mentioned here: psychology. It isn't just demands versus wall-clock capacity. It's your perception of demands versus the focus you can bring in time allotted. Paying someone for their work is a very direct, accountable, and socially recognized way of confirming the value of their effort. Not feeling exploited changes how maintainers relate to bugs, patches, planning, and support.
[+] [-] newaccount74|3 years ago|reply
First of all, the project I maintain would likely lose 99% of users if we charged money. Being free (as in beer) is a large part of its appeal. And that's okay.
Secondly, the project is currently being maintained by a few people in their spare time. If you paid me, I wouldn't have any more free time, so to make it worthwhile, you would have to pay me enough so I would give up my job. And it just sounds unlikely that someone would pay so much for our project.
I really don't think Open Source needs fixing with regard to money. I like that Open Source is not about money. Not every thing has to be profitable.
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|3 years ago|reply
New personal mission statement: destroy as much market value as possible.
[+] [-] xchip|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adql|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyliematthew75|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]