The community aspect used to be the most enjoyable part of open-source, and I gladly donated (a lot of) my own time. It’s about people coming together around a common need - if there’s enough demand more people will join in. I loathe the current state of marketing/funding/clout based OSS where projects become institutions of their own and break the natural attention balance.
I am one of those people who write software for fun. I'm guessing I'm wired to get a dopamine rush from solving an interesting programming challenge the same way that someone doing the NY Times crossword puzzle is when they get all the words. Nobody claims that someone who spends hours doing crossword puzzles over the year is an underpaid crossword puzzle solver.
So when people have do things for themselves, perhaps their compensation is in the doing.
But when someone else decides to use some open source software, they are in a different place. They are using it as a tool that gives them value. Using our crossword solving problem; the person who gets a copy of the puzzle solver's answers and just fills in the squares is a user not a developer.
This is where the open source contract breaks down, because you can get user's who file issues to be fixed but supply no money or manpower to fix them. And the people who are writing the software because they enjoy writing software, may have no interest in your particular interest, it might bring them no joy at all to work on it, so they don't.
And in that gap, you get CVEs where an issue results in security problem for the tool user, but you don't have anyone able (or perhaps willing) to stop what ever they are doing and work on it. Could you imagine a person demanding someone figure out the word for 18 down "right now" because their other project needed that work to continue?
I would be interested in seeing an open source license that made the software free to use for anyone who contributed at least one fix or one feature to the code each year, but cost $10,000/year to license to use if you chose not to contribute any fixes or features. I don't think you need to restrict it to features or fixes that eventually get integrated just contributed and could be integrated (pass all CI/CD requirements). The reason there is the user would end up having to pay a software developer, perhaps part time, to come up with those features/fixes and presumably that would cost more than the $10,000/year.
My point is that without a way to tie the economic value of using the software back into its development cost (in order to pay people to do the grunge work that often nobody wants to do) you end up with imbalanced value equations like the ones we have today where you can't charge for the source code to people who just want to exploit it and add value in their own products that they keep.
And then maintainer responds, "not on my roadmap, but patch would be welcome".
> And in that gap, you get CVEs where an issue results in security problem for the tool user, but you don't have anyone able (or perhaps willing) to stop what ever they are doing and work on it.
About time for idle users to step up and invest into their own security, right?
> free to use for anyone who contributed at least one fix or one feature
Sure, screw software freedoms, let's build unenforceable licenses with perverse incentives, driving NIH behaviour and contributions for sake of the fact of the contribution.
Free software is doing fine (and this gets better as mankind gets wealthier), thank you. Please don't contemplate force-feeding it.
Respectfully, if you read the linked article here, or the stories of people who maintain key infrastructure going broke[1], those pieces conclude exactly the opposite. They conclude that "free software" is not doing fine at all. Rather free software not benefiting at all from the wealth of the corporations exploiting it to their bottom line.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encrypti...
A model I've seen that I'm optimistic of is assigning bounties to tickets. I've seen two flavors of this:
A. Users put money on tickets. Maybe three people put $25 dollars each on a ticket, so it's now worth $75 to resolve. Someone comes along and gets a pull request merged that solves the ticket. They get the money that's on the ticket.
B. Users contribute to an overall project budget (perhaps through something like Patreon) and a project lead assigns the money to the tickets that he wants to entice people to resolve.
Any fix? I mean you can get a fix for something on Fiverr, I expect, but that might make more work for a project than it usefully resolves.
Personally I'm not a programmer, I've sent a couple of pull requests at most, but I do share stuff that I do - like I add places to OSM, upload "art" to OCAL [though it's down at the moment, worryingly], answer question on SE network sites and sometimes on Launchpad, report bugs and test other's bugs. Basically I do my best to be a contributing part of the FLOSS community.
I guess I see programmers create the many FLOSS apps I use as something like being a Scout leader (which is a volunteer position that costs you money), they do it to make a positive and lasting contribution for society with no expectation of financial gain. Though I realise, many do work on FLOSS for wages, just as many people work in outward bounds or as teachers, or what-have-you.
Contributing to a project is incredibly difficult if you are an outsider.
Healthy for whom? Creator of Vue.js pulls in like 240k. Every open source contributor of any sort of popular project should be getting at least that much through various deals or pull the plug. Hold your software hostage, get freeloaders to pay a pittance for it. Ridiculous that so many billion dollar companies use these things and feel no obligation to sustain their development and have a mechanism set in place to do that automatically or as a part of due course of using that software.
If you want to get paid, use the GPL, and offer dual licensing. It's that easy.
Oh, it's not "that" easy? So you are really just using MIT as a marketing tool until you get large enough where you can pull the rug out from under everyone and start demanding things?
The problem isn't open source. The problem is the expectation that the MIT license means more than it does. You got what you asked for.
Funny, but this was almost exactly the unspoken (and actual) ethos of the Sales department dominated old school software company founded in the late 60's I used to work for.
I'm Chris from Airwindows. I'm patreon-backed and make upwards of fourteen HUNDRED dollars a month to serve a specialty market, audio plugins, that is heavily burdened by selfish devs and burdensome DRM strategies. Some of these companies are maybe million dollar companies but many are relatively small fry who still believe they 'should' get 240k (as if! This is still the music business! Or you could say that nothing in the music business is actually popular, therefore none of these can count as popular projects were they OSS)
I license by MIT license. My pitch regarding that is that I require credit, and nothing else. From my point of view, in my business (again, the music business) since long before I was born, the only people who get to be 'popular' are those who sign off on horribly exploitative contracts and get abused just like the OSS developers people are talking about. I assume it'll be the same with me so I allow 'exploitation' on the grounds that I generate enough goodwill to slap back at anyone who's found to be ripping my stuff without credit or shout-out. It's my problem to turn that into revenue.
I can easily believe the '1% to 10% of what you'd make commercially' line. I'm seeing more like 20-25% of what I would make commercially, but if you are an entrepreneur you must consider cashflow. The commercial thing is bursty: feast or famine, and it drives you in perverse directions, makes you play to your impression of what will be the most popular thing.
If you market yourself as an OSS dev free to do anything creative regardless of market pressures, that's its own demographic. It's working okay for me, because I do not have to pay Silicon Valley housing costs, or employees. Like Robert Fripp, I am a 'small, independent, mobile and intelligent unit'.
Why?
You said freeloaders. That angers me. I have a different name. I call them 'musicians'. Often they make the musics and genres I personally like. They also have to eat. I am able to provide them with tools that become their resources. I'd do more if I could: working on it.
If you aren't living on under $1500 a month you have no business calling a sum of money a 'pittance', and in no case do you get to tell me to hold my software hostage. (so I won't. No hard feelings)
You appear to be talking from a 'capital maximization' position, and from that angle all you say checks out. I am talking from a 'providing freedom' position, from which the actions of companies mean diddly-squat. I am there because should they license my stuff (some is trivially simple, some is quite significant) they will take my musicians and hold them hostage and demand a 'pittance', or better yet they'll demand 'a lot' simply because they can.
My musicians (or at least many of the worthy ones) are starving broke, because art does not make money. OSS is a way for me to make some money in a context people understand while giving these people not only tools, but the RIGHT to own, use, redesign these tools. What I give can't be taken away.
Won't trade that for money.
If that is hard to understand ask RMS. (ironically… since I'm using MIT and not GPL. But he would understand, plus people can take my stuff and extend and GPL it if they like. I could switch to GPL at ANY point, if I wanted)
> Every open source contributor of any sort of popular project should be getting at least that much through various deals
If they don't have such deals, who is to blame? Users who are busy with their life, take a lot of things for granted and don't think much about thousands of FOSS libraries and apps they use every day? Government which doesn't subsidize FOSS contributors? Or maybe contributors themselves who are sloppy at selling themselves and getting deals?
> Ridiculous that so many billion dollar companies use these things and feel no obligation
Maybe exactly because FOSS is about terms which allow such use, and enable companies to build business models on that?
Sure, but if such a business takes off and is awash in money then the owners should help to water the tree. Maybe that means writing a check once a year (boo hoo, goodbye money uwu) or contributing some business skill/innovation so that developers or artists can concentrate on their professional discipline rather than having to gain a load of business skills that they may not be temperamentally or intellectually suited for. Why isn't it as easy to monetize as to share a repo?
I presume gp's calculation was $19,394 multiplied by 12 months equals $232,728. Monthly amount came from:
If there are other people figuring out how to exploit the tendencies of open source developers, certainly it's fair to discuss how said developers can see a bit of those resources. Especially when the big winners aren't even considering giving back in a serious manner.
Importantly; Free Public Github repositories; these aren't free to provide, they require storage and bandwidth. And not just for major projects, but any project. @ 28 million open source repositories, if you attribute that to the equivalent of $1/year; that is 10x what the author is calling for
Microsoft does a lot more too, whether it's "protecting" patents for Linux, or providing Visual Studio, Atom, sponsoring meetups and hackathons, and much more.
Disclaimer; Guest of Azure Incubation Week, had Microsoft sponsor BarCamps, and hackathons; And I host open source projects on github for free.
In contrast, Github and Microsoft are huge contributors.
There I was, thinking that hosting (through high availability, and great tooling) the repositories for free was Github's way of "giving back to the community". But apparently that's somehow not enough?
Providing free hosting didn't win sourceforge or bitbucket or any of the other firms a multibillion dollar payout. What did was capturing the mindshare of open source developers and hosting high-profile projects. Ultimately, the value is derived from the fact that "everyone is using it" and the ecosystem built around it (because everyone is using it).
If you deliberately pick a BSD-style license, then you don't get to complain about 'big winners' not cutting you a slice. They're doing exactly what you told them they could do.
And now we have people complaining about big companies literally agreeing to the terms set out by little projects and someone they are being unfair?
The thing about AGPL is that you can still dual-license if you want. AGPL by default, and allow companies to purchase a non-AGPL version if you want.
The open-core model is a good alternative if you wish to be around open-source software. Or make your project de-facto standard and charge for consulting. Or, you can make an entirely commercial project that uses and contributes to open-source projects. That way, you are surrounded by open-source and can help them financially to add features you need.
It allows the public to continue to use your work to collaborate and create better things, which is the point of open source, while allowing businesses (which should be able to afford to license a software product) to still pitch in and generate a profit. Both of these will attract talent and interest and allow collaborators to prosper.
> Many years ago, a friend of mine was asked to rerelease a copylefted program under noncopyleft terms, and he responded more or less like this: > > > "Sometimes I work on free software, and sometimes I work on proprietary software---but when I work on proprietary software, I expect to get paid." > > He was willing to share his work with a community that shares software, but saw no reason to give a handout to a business making products that would be off-limits to our community. His goal was different from mine, but he decided that the GNU GPL was useful for his goal too.
The approach is far more common in other kinds of licensed, creative work. Creative Commons' choice to standardized noncommercial license terms helped make commercial-noncommercial licensing familiar in photography, illustration, music, and so on.
The model has gone by a few names. Those researching should search on "selling exceptions" and "dual licensing", too.
I'm doing what I can to popularize through License Zero (https://licensezero.com).
People may use whatever license they wish, but it's important to be clear about what is (and is not) FOSS.
You need commercial users who want to use your stuff enough, and the GPL/LGPL/whatever license won't work for them, such that it will get pushed up to someone who'll follow through and negotiate a license.
(You also need it to not quietly be used by parties ignoring the license, like has happened many times with Linux and certain GNU-ish libraries that would be expensive to reimplement.)
The tell is a known, small, approachable target market. Especially when the developer already has positive relationships with important would-be customers.
If this was a commercial project, his income would be magnitudes higher.
Yes, $20k a month is comfortable. But is it appropriate given the popularity of Vue and considering how many organizations profit from it?
Now, if you scale this down to a framework that has half or a quarter of that popularity. When do you reach the point where it isn't comfortable at all anymore? And does that still seem appropriate?
on edit: I should have probably asked one the child comments, but this is ok here as well.
But really, I just wanted to help people.
Here is my great question, can I help more, if I charge money?
It depends on which dimension of "help more" you want to affect.
I looked at your website "efficiencyiseverything.com" and here's how I would break it down: "more people" vs "more features"...
- if you want to help more people, it's better to keep it free because no subscription/paywall payments means the biggest audience (including those without discretionary income) can be helped by your information
- if you want to help less people but add more features, you should charge money. The paying audience will always be less than a non-paying one but the ones who do monetarily support you can be assisted with new website features that requires revenue to develop
(One can sort of try to get the best of both of the above scenarios by keeping it free with voluntary donations but to me, that just simplifies down to "free" since the percentage of donators will be very small.)
I would add one more thing. It would help less people in short-term, but in long-term, it might actually end up helping more people, as those features have the potential to attract way more people than you would have gotten without those features but for free.
I have a day job that Pays great.
I need to find a way to incorporate premium features.
It does a disservice to the millions of people on the planet who do not have alternatives, and who are truly being exploited.
If no one is interested in paying for project, then people don't need it. Simple as that, when project breaks like open ssh companies will chip in...
Although, in that case, they really didn't. At least not enough. That's why you ended up with a Core Infrastructure Initiative. (Which, to be sure, is indirectly companies chipping in because that's mostly how the Linux Foundation gets funded but it's not individual companies bankrolling critical infrastructure software.)
"Author also comes from perspective that somehow research in itself is good and should be sustained. Scientific research projects are not endengered species to keep it alive.
If no one is interested in paying for research, then people don't need it. Simple as that, when science breaks like open ssh companies will chip in... "
On the other hand how much science went into SpaceX and reusable rockets? How much science is in chemistry to get new drugs because there are tons of people who would pay for that. Somehow LHC got funded and it was not cheap.
In past inventors were guys that had too much free time and too much money.
(Why you compare GitHub's acquisition price to the amount of money being put into open-source instead of seeing it as money being put into open-source is beyond me)
> ... such as Prettier, Curl, Jekyll, Electron. This doesn’t mean the people working on those projects are poor, because in several cases the maintainers have jobs at companies that allow open source contributions.
Then,
> Why you compare GitHub's acquisition price to the amount of money being put into open-source instead of seeing it as money being put into open-source is beyond me.
Because Microsoft, as a public company, cannot make an acquisition the size of 20% their profit that year without a clear plan for ROI on that cost, and this will likely happen through some integration with Azure, since the GitHub CEO reports to Microsoft's VP of Cloud and Enterprise. And even if GitHub is seen as a platform that supports open source (therefore money into the platform being a positive for open source), it is weird and unfair for a support partner to earn significantly more money than the core persons involved in open source.
I accept all of your evidence prima facie, and yet I still reject your premise. Figure it it out. I've done my part.
No it does not. Look at the definition.
I like contributing to OSS and do so frequently for fun. But the idea of it being a (sole) source of income is scary unfortunately.
They're producing immense value but other people monetise that value while they're barely receiving any meaningful compensation if at all.
It comes more easily if you accept the definition that working as an employee is inherently exploitative as you need to produce more value than you are paid in wages for your employment to be profitable to the employer (who ideally profits so much from the difference that they are compensated for the economical risk they carry and their initial investment, i.e. capital).
Certainly calling it exploitation carries a value judgement but objectively this is how open source works: in a capitalist system, most labor is exploited and because it's largely uncompensated open source is being particularly exploited.
Of course what most people overlook with GPL in businesses (as an individual) is that as using the GPL excludes you from large sections of the economy and thus carries a cost not everyone can afford. In turn companies frequently use the GPL for "open source washing" via public/private licensing.
In the 90s I used to hear a lot of people joking that the GPL view on open source is communism. After having shifted politically to the left I now think that joke is actually truer than most people realise. And the incompatibility of a communist "gift economy" (i.e. take what you need, give what you can) with the capitalist host system lies at the core of most of the problems we see with open source sustainability.
In other words: open source "economics" (voluntary mutual exchange with no strings attached) is entirely alien to capitalism because in capitalism this behavior is essentially economic suicide except for a few scenarios (e.g. general marketing like Google, onboarding and recruiting like Facebook or promoting commercial services like Microsoft). Much like how CJ characterised npm Inc in her JSConf EU talk, these companies aren't walking all over open source authors because they're evil, they're doing it because they have no useful way to interact with them except for marketing.
Your piece reads mostly like it's trying to get employees to force their employers to support open source via the usual means of labor struggle (i.e. threatening to withhold their labor, shame them so others withhold their labor) but that to me looks more like a band-aid.
So it's not just the injustice of people toiling away and eating ramen that is at issue here. What happens if people take you up on your advice? What is incentive for quality people to keep churning out open source tooling?
That said, of course I'd like to see good open source maintainers enjoy a comfortable life.
However, the author appears to live in Finland. Accepting donations is illegal in Finland, so that income model would not work there anyway.
Also claiming that people can "simply stop writing open-source software" is a false dichotomy and quite patronizing.
This is a general principal of the world. Almost everything, including customers, getting dates, and wealth follow the same pattern: Pareto.
There's even a Bible verse:
Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.
Matthew 13:12
May be more interesting to compare the jobs allowing open source contributions at the top of the scale.
Or put another way: comments closer to the top attract more karma than those at the bottom.
It applies to the article because the Pareto principle (also known as the Matthew effect [1]) explains why there's so many open source projects with low revenue and only a few with six figure revenues.
A story about loss can be a love song to one person, a dead loved one or a missed opportunity to another...
Matthew 13:11 is
He replied, "Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.
The context makes it clear that 13:12 is talking about spiritual possessions/riches, and not an endorsement of the 1 percent. Camel, eye of the needle, not serving God and mammon etc. all deal with this.
Think of it another way. Imagine two people with Tom Brady's talent: one ends with mansions in Southern California and multiple superbowl titles, the other ends up unemployed in Arkansas.
Although, technically that Bible verse has significantly richer and more useful meaning than your interpretation, I don't think it doesn't mean what you said either. St. Augustine affirms the common opinion of the Church Fathers that each Bible verse may have multiple true meanings as long as they aren't incompatible with one another.
But I've seen this principle very truly at work: you have to spend money to make money. Those who have very little money to start with, usually can make very little money in return. Especially in software, if you don't spend a decent amount of money on advertising, you will almost never get anywhere.
Fortunately for those of us who don't have that money to make more money with, there are other things in life than money, and Jesus also says "blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Promises of a better life after death are consoling if you're at the end of a terrible life on Earth but the only good they do to the poor in desperate need is that they make them more accepting of the injustice they're experiencing.
Shut up about what happens after death and help the people who are alive right now and suffering. Because if you're wrong about the whole afterlife thing, all those people who suffered got the short end of the stick and if you're right and you still helped them, the only bad thing you maybe did to them was making them have to "work" as hard as you did to get into Heaven (if your understanding of poverty easing entry was even correct in the first place) but at least they didn't have to do it on an empty stomach while unable to afford healthcare.
That's quite the opposite of what Jesus says:
> Then he will say to those at his left hand, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A31...]
Jesus was ultimately concerned with each of us relieving the suffering of others while on earth, so much so that he did this constantly himself while on earth, and told all his disciples, for all future generations, to do the same. I'm sorry that there are many "Christianities" now that have considered this teaching optional.
It is pointless to feel outraged about open source projects being "below the poverty line". Virtually no one is actually being forced into poverty by working on open source projects, and if they are, they're doing it wrong. Open source ventures are primarily a rich man's (or woman's) game.
I would like open source to be a viable model for projects run without maintainers needing to be independently wealthy or full time employed elsewhere. This article is pouting out that we’re a long ways off.
At the same time, I know for a fact that if I had my name at the top of the list of a well known open source project, I could tack an extra 50k/year to how much I ask for my next job.
The same holds true for conference speakers. People will say how much work it is and how you're usually not paid for it... But last time I talked at a conference my inbox exploded with people wanting to give me the moon and then some.
Millage varies and there are many other factors at play for sure, but there is a lot to gain by doing this stuff. There's a reason that so many people try to be the next Webpack, the next big test runner, the next big site generator, etc.
Why? There's no guarantee that's going to result in better software anyway. Sounds like a desire to just be able to work on absolutely whatever you want and get paid (very well) for it.
You can somewhat get there by purchasing the source code to closed-source products and then open-sourcing it.
The developer is gainfully employed with another source of income, but believes in that project.
If you want to make free open source software then do that.
If you want both then build a business model around your open source software.
One of the enjoyable aspects of this practice, was during the selection process for "what software do we want to use?". I didn't have to select only open source projects which were "almost a perfect fit, with XYZ problems we can live with". Instead, I got to select software with (to me) better criteria:
* what are the upstream devs like to work with?
* what is the future of this project?
* is this project something we would be proud of our association with?
* working on this project, will myself or my team be exposed to new skills and technology?
We, of course, know that's completely ridiculous. But try convincing your manager that.
I feel a bit like that with Microsoft open sourcing a lot of its projects. Ok so now I can get the MSBuild source code, great... but how the * do I understand it? And that's a developer focused company, let alone some company that paid some cheap developers to knock something up in houses 6 years ago that no one even in the company is brave enough to touch. They might not even know how to build it!
The point is to make their code open source they'd need to do a lot of work to document (at a minimum) and refactor (ideally) the code to make it good enough for open source. They'd need to remove dependencies on proprietary tools (in house or paid) as much as possible.
"We don't want our brand to be damaged by showing our bad code to the public"
How much weight would you say you give this piece of criteria in the overall decision?
You can contribue, create, participate, enjoy open source your entire life.
Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is about making the most money.
It appears to me as if open source tends to break this mechanism. The "customer" gets something that benefits them enormously. Meanwhile the project developers and maintainers sometimes struggle to make a living or earn amounts that seem to be out of touch with what one could earn in a comparable proprietary model. This is how it becomes a win-lose.
With certain open-source licenses, there's also a lack of incentive for giving back. Companies can often simply build proprietary solutions on top of the work of others without ever returning any reward (be it in the form of money or contributions).
It would really be great if there was a way to get the best of both worlds. I am afraid a lot of open-source software will not be produced anymore if the model isn't sustainable for developers and maintainers.
Just doing it for fun is surely feasible for some projects, but the bigger ones need full attention I'm afraid which they can't get without proper funding.
"Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is about making the most money."
It's not. But you will only really ever get to work on what you want when you are making enough money to quit your day job.
Contributing to open source can be a great experience. It can also be very taxing, especially when you have a family/other obligations outside of work.
Should I get free healthcare and free food and free rent if I have a passion for making a widget that nobody is willing to pay for? Should I be able to spend my days walking in the woods while a barber spends his days cutting hair for money — money that is taxed to pay for someone to spend their day walking in the woods?
To be clear, welfare is valuable as a safety net, but it shouldn’t be a safety harness. If you are disabled or lost your job, definitely welfare is important. But welfare to support some guy writing a new JavaScript library nobody is willing to pay for? That’s ridiculous. Society needs people to build roads, cook food, and cut hair. If society rewarded people for sitting around doing nothing, then who would do those jobs? If people weren’t doing those jobs, who would pay the taxes for all the people that would decide to simply walk in the woods all day?
We would all like the freedom to pursue “this sort of thing,” however, what happens when everyone pursues “this sort of thing?” Who is going to pay for it? The guy hauling freight isn’t going to take too kindly to be paying for people to do nothing.
People should be able to do whatever they want, but it crosses the line of reason when other people are literally forced to pay for it.
Of course this will be an unpopular opinion here because there is an entitlement mentality that would suggest that someone’s latest JavaScript library should be tax subsidized. However, try making that case to a freight hauler who pays the taxes. Make that case to the restaurant owner that she should pay higher taxes so someone else can sit at home writing browser plugins or painting cute rocks with animal faces that nobody wants to buy.
1. Donations directly via Patreon, Liberapay, and fosspay[0]
2. Paid subscriptions on Sourcehut [1]
3. Part-time consulting gigs [2]
[0] https://drewdevault.com/donate
[1] https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3C2019042616072...
[2] https://drewdevault.com/consulting (numbers undisclosed)
With 1 & 2 alone, I'd be making about $34,000. Not poverse, but I am preparing to move into a 200 sq ft apartment in a couple of months. Consulting gigs help a lot - working on these anywhere from 0-24 hours a week brings me up to a comfortable standard of living.
I think what helps is that I'm a person, not a project. By working on lots of different projects, I get a lot of different people interested in paying for my work. The income from any of my ventures alone would not pay me a livable wage.
I've put a lot of thought into how to make money from FOSS, if anyone has questions or wants to send me their thoughts, I'm listening.
Rationale: if a career line can't sustain supporting a family, I usually think it's a gigantic waste of time (as a a full-time career) for the average person (who will want to have a family and pay for their medical care).
However, at the moment raising a family isn't a goal I have in mind. And I wouldn't characterize a desire to have kids as "average" - the birth rate is in freefall in the entire developed world and fewer people are planning on having children today than at any other point in history.
My biggest luxury isn't money, but time and freedom from commercial pressures on my work. That's a quality-of-life issue making my subsistence WAY better than I'd experience working other subsistence jobs.
Ask a company that's using your libraries heavily to hire you full-time and have you do internal consulting for them while still working on the project, mostly. That path comes with its own pitfalls, though.
Should anyone expect to make a living writing software?
First: we don't need endless piles of software. Most of the software we actually need could be written by less than 0.001 of the programmers and "software engineers" working today. (And I could put more zeros in there and still be right-ish.)
Second: if you're not one of the truly good programmers[1] you should not be writing software for others to use. It is not needed (see point #1), and it's irresponsible. Most of us should be pulling off-the-shelf components and configuring and connecting them. Excel proves that most people's real software needs are mostly handled by Excel.
We don't write all this software because we need it, we write it because we like to write software. (And because we have tricked normal people into thinking they need us and should pay us tons of money. It's a huge scam.)
It's understood that the really good folks pretty much write their own tickets (meaning they can generally pick and choose what they work on, whether they are in industry or academia or just private individuals. I.e. Jim Simons does what he likes.)
So my question is: Should mediocre programmers get paid to produce inadequate software? At all? Regardless of the FLOSSiness of their licenses?
[1] People like DJB, Fabrice Bellard, Mark Miller, RMS, and their ilk. They're like professional athletes compared to you and I.
That assumes they know what we need. Biggest part of making the world's software is getting the requirements right. The intellectual elite have been consistently worse at that than folks with strong people skills to get the info out of the market or just folks in it that see the need(s). A recurring example is how they all think brick and mortar is obsolete due to Prime or whatever but a ton of people just want out of house or break from family. They don't know cuz they're coding amongst their peers instead of interacting with such people. So, folks with less brains who do listen wrote software and made plans to make shopping better with Best Buy, local grocers, and others slated for death thriving last I checked.
I learned long ago that intellectual superiority or best code aren't all that has value. Most people want software to get shit done or for entertainment with relatively-low standards of quality. So, anyone that can do that should jump in. Then, a small percentage of buyers and suppliers are about design or quality excellence. That's our thing. We'll keep doing that. Judging them won't help, though. Sell them on benefits after assessing if it would even have benefits from their perspective.
Maybe, but I don't think so. If anything, I'm understating things.
> The public and businesses have benefited a ton from software written by non-experts and low-quality software.
Yes but that has to be balanced against all the problems and delays and lost work, etc... that low-quality software has caused.
> I think Excel spreadsheets still drive more value creation than most professional apps.
That's what I'm saying: Excel's benefits don't require full-on programmers to reap them, normal everyday people can "program" Excel. It's not the ultimate be-all-end-all program, but it's damn near.
> The people you refer to don't usually write it.
By "it" do you mean Excel or the spreadsheets? I think you mean spreadsheets.
> They mostly go to best paying companies in tech or finance. You could say our baseline is dependent on people with less skill stepping up to do what better developers weren't willing to do.
I'm saying, in a nutshell, that the really good programmers should write infrastructure and "meta-tools" like Excel (or Elm-lang) and most folks should be able to get their daily problems solved and work done without recourse to too much technical folderol.
The world around me seems to be constantly screaming: here's yet another thing that could be made easier with better software, no stunning virtuoso performance required, just plain old hard work. Why do I have to lift my eyes from my phone to know whether or not the bus I'm waiting for is arriving? Scrolling is nice and all, but can that menu with a hundred items take up all the space available to it? The pharmacy cashier the other day asked me for the same information twice because two systems won't talk to each other. And a million other things.
I'm an outlier. FWIW my worldview is self-consistent.
> It's like saying only world-class weightlifters should work in construction carrying stuff.
No, I'm saying only world-class engineers should design the cranes, so that regular folks can use them with minimal risk.
> The world around me seems to be constantly screaming: here's yet another thing that could be made easier with better software, no stunning virtuoso performance required, just plain old hard work.
With respect, I think that's bias. Ask an Amish person how much software is required to live a successful, fulfilling life.
> Why do I have to lift my eyes from my phone to know whether or not the bus I'm waiting for is arriving?
Wow, that's so different from my experience. In all seriousness though, if you're attention is so consumed by your phone that you have trouble noticing if a bus is arriving I'd say that's a personal problem.
Given the fact that our civilization is rapidly stuffing radio-connected computers in everything, I'd say that it becomes more imperative that we ensure that only the best quality software is deployed, eh?
> Scrolling is nice and all, but can that menu with a hundred items take up all the space available to it?
That's a problem caused by bad software, a symptom of what I'm describing.
> The pharmacy cashier the other day asked me for the same information twice because two systems won't talk to each other.
At the pharmacy there might be an good reason for that, but if not then you're describing another symptom of what I'm talking about. System design is hard, it takes really good people to do it right.
We are fortunate that, once written, high-quality software is just as cheap to use (actually cheaper) than crappy software, and we should take advantage of that. (E.g. use Elm-lang rather than JS flavor-of-the-month et. al.)
And if someone really focuses so hard that they would not perceive a bus, would you really dismiss it as their own issue? What if it's a book rather than a phone? What if it's their child?
Most of the maintainers are being paid to maintain Electron full-time. I've worked in jobs before where you got to do "some open source during work hours", but in the case of Electron, most of our people are specifically paid to work on Electron.
Yes, absolutely, find and use more ways to fund Open Source, but describing Electron as a project below the poverty line is plain incorrect. Yes, we too need funding, but that description strikes me as inaccurate and thus problematic.
"Below the poverty line" means something, doesn't apply to Electron, and saying it because it sounds good trivializes a problem in a world where 1/7 children in the US live _actually_ below the poverty line.
> ...how much yearly revenue for a project goes to each “full-time equivalent” contributor. This is essentially their salary. Or, said better, this is how much their salary via donations would be if they were working exclusively on the open source project, without any complementary income. It is likely that a sizable amount of creators and maintainers work only part-time on their projects. Those that work full-time sometimes complement their income with savings or by living in a country with lower costs of living...
Later, when I specifically mention Electron, I say:
> This doesn’t mean the people working on those projects are poor, because in several cases the maintainers have jobs at companies that allow open source contributions. What it does mean, however, is that unless companies take an active role in supporting open source with significant funding, what’s left is a situation where most open source maintainers are severely underfunded.
In summary, this means that projects categorized in red or orange can be one of these cases:
- Maintainer is an employee earning fair salary, and nearly nothing (<10%) from donations: Electron et al
- Maintainer is independent, earns significantly (>50%) from donations: Sindre Sorhus (AVA), myself (Manyverse and Cycle.js), Paul Frazee (Beaker Browser) and others
- Maintainer is independent, earns entirely from donations: Titus (Unified) and others
The core message of the blog post still stands true, unless companies take a central role in sustaining open source (which is your case!), what's left is a situation of unfair compensation to open source maintainers.
[1]: https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/1139533257077338112
But I think the sentiment isn't trivializing, that 1 child out of 7 might have a parent who works on one of these projects.
Yes, very much so. It's tech. We're all really, really lucky.
Are there any licenses like this?
We need new models that don't depend on limiting access to software (or books, music...)
The author is looking at the wrong type of metric. Expecting that every open source project on Github will get donations to pay each contributor a full-time salary is nonsense.
Also, on top of the value add services profitability route, the article does not take into account how many companies have full time employees contribute to open source as part of their working hours - a very tangible open source investment. While the author asks for companies to donate 0.5% or more of their profits to open source projects, I work at an unprofitable unicorn (Uber) which is a heavy contributor to open source itself and my team contributes to open source as part of our work: both to other projects, as well as open sourcing tools and improvements we built.
The same can be said for some of the most popular open source projects. Angular? Originally by Google engineers, on Google company time. Tensorflow? Also Google. React? Built by Facebook. Atom? By Github. And the list continues with many-many projects.
It's not a coincidence that most popular open source projects come from big corporations. Their popularity has more to do with capital and social networks than actual merit. Also, I'm highly skeptical of open source projects which come out of corporations; their primary goal is not to help people, it's to gain mind-share and control.
There is not an ounce of altruism in corporations.
While I think there may be structural reasons that this is harder to do now (including increased complexity of software, and companies more ruthlessly chasing 'efficiency'), it seems important to at least include in the discussion.
For instance, OP says:
> Only accept jobs at companies that donate a significant portion of their profit (at least 0,5%) to open source, or companies which don’t fundamentally depend on open source for their products
OK, but how about "or companies that have employees, ideally including you, spending a significant amount of on-the-clock time originating, maintaining, or contributing to open source." Is this not mentioned because it somehow seems even less 'realistic' than companies donating 0.5% of profit to open source?
> This doesn’t mean the people working on those projects are poor, because in several cases the maintainers have jobs at companies that allow open source contributions. What it does mean, however, is that unless companies take an active role in supporting open source with significant funding, what’s left is a situation where most open source maintainers are severely underfunded.
It may be that most open source maintainers are severely underfunded, but your numbers alone don't show that, because they don't account for how much support there is from on-payroll work.
See the current top comment from Electron maintainers for instance.
"supporting open source with significant funding" (in the specific sense of transfering funds to an outside entity responsible for development) is not the only way of "supporting open source" financially. Paying your employees to develop, maintain, and contribute to it is another. I suspect it is the primary way historically for historically succesful open source (although research in this area would be helpful). It might (or might not) be the primary way even now; we don't know from these figures alone.
Employees paid to do on-the-clock work might (or might not) be sufficient to sustainably provide resources/"funding" to open source. Or there might be reasons it's unlikely to work, or unlikely to work as well going forward as it is historically.
I'm not sure straight-out donations to entities developing open source have ever historically been responsible for successful open source resourcing -- and yet we've built software empires on open source. There may be reasons this is not (or no longer) sustainable, but that doesn't necessarily mean this kind of fundraising will ever be more successful than it has been historically (not very, I think). Understanding what has worked in the past and making a case for why it no longer will would be one way to make the case. Just talking about current levels of direct donation without talking about how open source has actually been resourced/funded historically, to me is not a very persuasive case. (Then there's talking about the idea of monetizing open source with 'open core' or 'PaaS' or some combination, which I think some people think is what will save open source, rather than direct contribution. I have my doubts, but it's another possibility).
I think these are all important questions.
The solution is simple, having companies hire open source maintainers to work on their projects in some fashion or we need to make it easier for maintainers to start companies and build an actual business.
From that, comes hiring maintainers and contributing to open source projects, fiscally or hiring maintainers.
Second, there are plenty of accelerators like YC itself that can help maintainers start a company around their project.
The fact that open source developers aren't getting paid does not mean there is exploitation. Those developers don't have to work on FOSS. They could also work on proprietary software. The problem is that it is hard to develop a business model around developing open source software (it's also hard to develop a business around proprietary software, too).
If the current maintainer of a open-source project does not have the financial support to continue working on the project, they should put their open-source work on hold until they get their finances in order. If that software is part of a critical chain for a business, then that business should provide financial support. It is not a necessity that all current open-source projects continue to be actively maintained.
There are reputational rewards associated with open source[1]. However, if you're solely contributing to open source for those rewards, you're going to have a bad time. I would agree that there needs to be a high degree of intrinsic motivation.
[1]http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading
One such company might be Bloomberg. I've heard that effectively 85% to 90% of all the profits go to charity.
I don't know how much of that goes toward open source; but it's still great overall, if you work there, to know that most of your work is helping make the world a better place.
I fear that open source is actually just the tech industry's group of underfunded-but-vital-infrastructures that are constantly either forced to work for poverty pay or go corporate/private(and externalize the costs to society as a whole). Similar to single-payer healthcare systems, domestic violence sheltering, child protection, pet shelters, and education systems.
Specifically that I fear once these entities try demand to be paid what they're worth, there will be criticism and controversy.
The whole idea of open source is to share your code with the world without expecting payment. These developers can just as easily release a commercial app with appropriate licensing.
"Specifically that I fear once these entities try demand to be paid what they're worth, there will be criticism and controversy."
Once someone gets used to free, they will be shocked when you decode to give them a bill one day. In some sense, the open source community has devalued their own worth by giving software away for free for decades.
It's a bit like the copyright infringement discussions I see so often on HN: Most of these companies would have never paid for open source in the first place, so we shouldn't really consider it a loss of money/revenue.
Open source isn't what you do to get vc funding, it's not what you do to build a unicorn (it shouldn't be). It's in the name, open source, it's a charitable act.
I worry this attempt to commercialise open source is corrupting it. For sure a lot of companies derive a lot of value from open source software but the user is irrelevant to the act of open sourcing something.
The problem, if you believe there is one, is that work that genuinely delivers benefit for society, is not rewarded economically. While the rich have more money than they can feasibly spend. The problem then is actually how we structure the economy and society, instead of applying a sticking plaster of commercialisation around open source and getting upset when big companies use the software under the licence available to all users, or relying on generous patronage, why not envision a society in which delivering valuable software for free is treated as more valuable than building Uber for dogwalking.
I haven't fully structured my thoughts around this so they're still half baked but it seems we're discussing the problem from the wrong angle?
I'm working on it directly as I am a fairly influential (in my small pond) OSS developer working for less than the poverty line (thank goodness I live in the boonies, plus I've been fortunate)
You have to SHOW the benefit and continually make that case that you are doing something beneficial, and that you are doing it open, that you are in fact giving it away as speech that can be taken and restated and rephrased and reused, becoming a broadening language.
The marketing angle is to continue to do this publically, in contrast to the 'rich and big companies' who absolutely try to exploit everyone and everything, and are horrible to work with or for.
You can't stop them being rich, or exploitative, or even from having a lot of power. But you can make people ask 'why are we using those things again?' because to exploit at that level, competitively, involves pressuring people really hard and taking their stuff away. It feels bad and looks bad.
You can do open source and be truly kind. You must start out wealthy enough that you can survive it, because so far people still align themselves with the power, they still will tend to side with the big company or whoever wields more money. That's basic human nature: animal, even.
But we can get 'em asking questions and being open to sharing and cooperative behavior… because that is ALSO human nature.
1) In terms of financial remuneration, it's even worse than this. Consider Mastodon, which looks like it's doing pretty well. Well, according to his Changelog interview, Eugen also pays 5 moderators to help maintain mastodon.social.
2) Sindre Sorhus, statistically living in poverty, tweeted saying open source was the best decision of his life! Quality of life is increasingly diverging from income. And I hope it continues to, since mean income keeps diverging from median.
There are some really interesting angles to consider such as the more predictable income of being supported as a working developer, rather than being paid for your 'hit products' and having to generate more hits or starve. Quality of life is also whether you're subject to ruthless pressures. You can trade off income for creative freedom, in a very natural way. Do weird noncommercial stuff if that is more important than maximizing revenue at any given point. There'll be a natural balance between how hard you're trying to please a customer base, and how much that base will reward you for pleasing it.
If you start getting significant contributions from people using the GPL version, dealing with the dual license can become problematic. Best for you is if you can convince the contributors to assign they copyright to you. That lets you then fold their contributions, and continue dual licensing the result.
You'll first have to make sure that the contributors own the copyright on all the code they contribute, because they cannot assign copyright of something that isn't theirs. Remember, your contributors are working on the GPL version, so they might copy/paste useful things from other GPL projects into their contribution without thinking about it, because that is fine under GPL. They might not stop and think, "wait a minute...this is going to a dual licensed project that requires copyright assignment, so I can't bring in outside GPL code!".
That's in the best case, where your contributors are OK with copyright assignment.
You might also start getting contributions from people who are not willing to have their code go into the commercial version. There are two ways you can deal with that.
1. Maintain two branches in your project, one for a GPL-only version, and one for a dual license version. If you want some feature in the dual license version that is in the GPL-only version via a contributor who won't assign copyright, you'll have to implement it yourself. You can use the implementation on the GPL-only side for guidance for things such as algorithm selection, as long as you are careful to not do anything that would infringe the copyright on the GPL code.
2. Reject those contributions.
The risk with that approach is that if those contributions are useful enough, your GPL version might get forked, and people who don't need the commercial version will choose the forked GPL version over yours, because it has better features.
Probably best to go with the branch approach. That way you are more likely to remain the primary source (no pun intended) for the GPL version. There will be some contributors who are OK with dual licensing, and with the branch approach you get their contributions and can ask make your pitch to them for dual licensing. If some fork becomes the primary source, you are out of the loop, and will likely never find out what contributions to that are from people who would dual license to you.
React is a standout when handling large datasets, but tends to mildly underperform on small ones. Seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
It's kind of the reverse of what's described here, I do not live off donations to the project, instead I "donate" some of my paid time to the Open Source project... That way my company, the Open Source projects, and myself benefit.
What I do benefits other users of those projects and we benefit from other contributions.
Open Source is about sharing ideas and code, not about living off a project. IMHO at least.
There are actually two 'fairness' issues in open source and from my experience each one is as bad as the other:
1. Fairness in terms of projects getting the amount of attention that they deserve.
2. Fairness in financial terms.
If corporations start donating and drawing attention to some projects more than others, it will cause both problems to worsen. This is because open source projects which are backed by a lot of funding and have strong connections with corporations tend to naturally draw more attention and thus funding because developers and bloggers are more likely to talk, write and tweet about them (regardless of actual merit). It reinforces the importance of social connections and turns an otherwise honorable and altruistic pursuit into a social-climbing financial scheme.
TBH, I'd prefer it if corporations did not get involved at all. If they did, I could only pray that my project would get its fair share of funding. The unfortunate reality of capitalism is that some people will get very lucky but it's just not going to be you. Luck is often paid for at the expense of others; if your competitor gets lucky and walks into a pile of a few million dollars, that's very bad luck for you. Corporations already took the meritocracy out of tech startups, it would be a shame if they also took the meritocracy out of open source (more than they already have).
Open source is very far from a meritocracy but it's probably the closest thing possible to it in the tech industry and we should keep it that way. The best way to do this is to keep the big money out.
For example, the author lists Gatsby as "below poverty threshold". However, Gatsby raised $3.8M recently. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gatsby-e828 I'm pretty sure they are able to pay people better than poverty wages.
Another important omission is that many developers contribute to open source as part of their work for a larger company. The core React team, for example, is primarily working for Facebook. They spend a lot of their time working on Facebook-internal things, but a lot of their effort is going towards the open source community as well.
The real lesson here is that the OpenCollective model (where these numbers come from) is not where most of the funding for open source engineering is coming from. Most of the money paid to open source software engineers comes from companies that produce open source code as a byproduct of their main mission, like Microsoft building TypeScript or Google building Go.
> Open source infrastructure is a commons, much like our ecological systems. Because our societies did not have rules to prevent the ecological systems from being exploited, companies have engaged in industrialized resource extraction. Over many decades this is depleting the environment, and now we are facing a climate crisis, proven through scientific consensus to be a substantial threat to humanity and all life on the planet. Open source misappropriation is simply a small version of that, with less dramatic consequences.
Maybe that's normal, but I hope that we can find more sustainable ways to develop great projects like this.
"KeepAlive" is not sponsorship. Sponsorship has the perception/reality of being optional/nonessential and indeed there is an expectation that something further will be given to the sponsor after the money is handed over. Sponsorship isn't a great model for funding software projects. Even worse is donations.
Nor is a KeepAlive payment a support payment. in fact you might have a support system on top of your KeepAlive system. A KeepAlive payment system is simply a payment to ensure that software that a company depends on stays alive.
The super critical thing that no one seems to understand - (and Patreon is the prime culprit here) is that you simply cannot allow the money amounts to drop to the floor - it must not be possible to contribute $1 a month. This is just digital street begging.
Patreon - and any other sponsorship/donation/support/KeepAlive system that permits the payer to "choose their own price" is setting the whole system up for failure. Have you ever seen a "choose what you want to pay" system that does anything except drop straight to the pricing floor?
Any sponsorship/donation/support/KeepAlive system must assert value, must anchor the price, and must set a practical minimum that is required and not optional. For example $10/month for individual person KeepAlive payments, $200/month for small companies and $500/month for larger company KeepAlive payments. What's the value in 300 people throwing a $1 coin per month into your digital suitcase - that's what Patreon is.
Part of the problem is that software developers are typically afraid to set a realistic price point/value on their work, thus the KeepAlive system needs to do it for them - ensuring it doesn't turn into a Patreon like digital street begging system.
You can scrape by on some 5-figures in such a place (assuming no trust fund, and that parents didn't buy you a condo), especially if you have roommates and a hope in growth of circumstances (e.g., startup founder or equity-heavy employee, or the academic postdoc situation), but that's not a good plan for open source work.
Working to endow charitable trusts might be a smart move for open-source projects.
https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-fo...
1. Use open source as a way to develop your skills and increase your developer profile (for example presenting at conferences)
2. Use your acquired skills and prominence to land a job at one of the FAANG companies.
3. Bonus if you your employer allows you to work at least part-time on your open source project.
In general, open source is a lousy way to make money by building a business. However, it can be very useful in building your personal brand by both increasing your skills and demonstrating your expertise.
This is a very interesting view of the current issues surrounding the funding of open source. I think there are also some assumptions surrounding the motivations of being a maintainer that may not be accurate.
As the founder of a company that's sole purpose is to bring funding to open source developers, bloggers and app builders, I do understand the issues with the "trickle economics" of generating funds for open source.
Let me first say thank you for your contributions. I do not believe that most people become open source contributors/maintainers for the money. They do it b/c they are good people trying to give back to their community.
The way I see it, maintainers need to be open to many different paths of generating funds. Open Collective and Patreon are incredible, however they often require an active effort in fund-raising to generate any significant amount of money. Tidelift is doing great stuff in this field as well by selling SLA contracts on open source projects, although it's difficult to qualify and the developers might not want to sign a contract. There is the promise of crypto-economics and how they might impact funding OSS (see https://oscoin.io). Finally, advertising (yuck?) has been a proven and more widely accepted form of funding as long as the user's privacy is protected. That's what we do. Fund open source maintainers through ethical advertising.
It takes a village to solve sustainable funding for open source.
Maintaining commercial software is not a choice. It's done out of pure necessity. My company wants to get rid of me for what I think are bad reasons. Meaning I need to pay for a lawyer to fight them. Its just misery for people to treat each other like that. This is common in IT. It does not take much and it really does not make as much as portrayed (globally speaking, as open source is global). I used to like the company but clearly they don't give much of a damn about the law (not US law) or just being good employers. Literally all It managers are like this. All I've met anyways and I've been around. IT is a brutal world. But you will get a new job? Yes I will get a new job. Of course I will. I can't afford not to.
As far as I'm concerned open source maintainers are the lucky ones. They do not need to deal with management.
Ps: not that I begrudge them extra wages. I'm all for it.
Full reasoning here https://omar.dev/articles/why-im-charging-for-react-spho.htm...
I wanted to respond to this forum, to hopefully, demystify some misconceptions or help folks, understand, what real self-sustainability is, or what it could mean to us as people, or as a collection of individuals.
Many people believe, that, just because you are being paid, or have money, that you or your service is part of a self-sustainable system, or sociopolitical or economic circumstance. And, by using money to purchase products or services that you or your business is being sustained.
Fortunately, that's not true.
Society, or real self-sustainability, doesn't work like that.
This was proven in 1930, by the Austrian mathematician, Kurt Godel, in his incompleteness theorem, paper.
Basically, Godel concluded, that there is no such thing, as a set-of-all-sets, or superset, in mathematics, or that such a statement, or set, can never be proven, or exist in nature.
Fast forward to 1936, and Alan Turing, uses Godel’s statement, as the “process” or self-sustainable mechanism, for his Turing machine.
Input > Process > Output
Basically, Turing is saying to Godel, you’re right, there is no such thing as a set-of-all-sets or superset in nature. But, what if there was? What would that look like?
And then, Turing goes ahead, based on that supposition, to demonstrate that such a set exists in his 1936, computable numbers paper.
So every time people turn their computers on, they are basically proving Turing right, and Godel wrong, about their being a set-of-all-sets or a superset in nature.
What does this have to do with self-sustainability or human sociopolitical or economic circumstance?
Everything.
All sociopolitical or economic responses or circumstances are built on their being a “process”, or set-of-all-sets, present in every human or non-human transaction or request. In other words, we as people shouldn’t be seeking to “create” self-sustainable services or mechanisms in the world, Godel proved that, that would be a waste of time. We, should be looking at, is ways to “serve” the self-sustainable mechanism, that Turing has proven exists.
What, if we alter, what Alan Turing is saying about their being a set-of-all-sets, that can be aggregated, to a set-of-all-sets that can’t be aggregated, but could only be served. In other words a forum, or circumstance in which ‘process’ or the set-of-all-sets is the only constant in the system, and that, the forums or requests, themselves, are the things or mechanisms, that scale or aggregate in the system.
One of the biggest bottlenecks we face as humankind or a society is the ability to scale our requests, so that they can be managed by multi-individuals or organisations simultaneously.
By inverting a Turing machine, we just might be able to serve one another globally, or as a new human circumstance that can scale to serve any human or non-human request.
!DA
