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0 pointsajross5mo ago0 comments

To a large extent they do and always have. It's not as broad or fair as it should be[1], but for almost any economically important project all the major contributors and maintainers are on the payroll of one of the big tech interests or a foundation funded by them.

The hippies writing that software may not be compensated at the level you'd expect given the value they provide, but they'll never go hungry.

[1] LLVM and Linux get more cash than they can spend. GNU stuff is comparatively impoverished because everyone assumes they'd do it for free anyway. Stuff that ships on a Canonical desktop or RHEL default install gets lots of cash but community favorites like KDE need to make their own way, etc... Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.

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6 comments · 3 top-level

Foxboron5mo ago· 3 in thread

> but for almost any economically important project all the major contributors and maintainers are on the payroll of one of the big tech interests or a foundation funded by them.

"almost" is the load bearing word here, and/or a weasel word. Define what an "economically important project" is.

> Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.

Is "povertyware" what we call software written by people and released for free now?

ajrossOP5mo ago

> "almost" is the load bearing word here, and/or a weasel word. Define what an "economically important project" is.

Linux, clang, python, react, blink, v8, openssl... You know what I mean. I stand by what I said. Do you have a counterexample you think is clearly unfunded? They exist[1], but they're rare.

> Is "povertyware" what we call software written by people and released for free now?

It's software subject to economic coercion owing to the lack of means of its maintainership. It's 100% fine for you to write and release software for free, but if a third party bets their own product on it they're subject to an attack where I hand you $7M to look the other way while I borrow your shell.

[1] The xz-utils attack is the flag bearer for this kind of messup, obviously.

cudder5mo ago

Unfunded is kind of a stretch, but at least libxml2.

Essentially "povertyware" as you call it when you consider the trillion dollar companies built on top of them? Now that's way easier: SQLite, PostgreSQL, ffmpeg, imagemagick, numpy, pandas, GTK, curl, zlib, libpng, zxing or any other popular qr/barcode library, etc...

Foxboron5mo ago

> Linux, clang, python, react, blink, v8, openssl... You know what I mean. I stand by what I said. Do you have a counterexample you think is clearly unfunded? They exist[1], but they're rare.

For Linux "all the major contributors and maintainers are on the payroll of one of the big tech interests or a foundation funded by them" is simply not true. It's trivial to prove this by just looking at the maintainers of the subsystems. Making this claim is nonsense to begin with.

Same is true for several major contributors to the Python compiler and subsequent libraries as well.

You will move the goalpost by trying to narrow down what "major contributor" means.

> It's software subject to economic coercion owing to the lack of means of its maintainership. It's 100% fine for you to write and release software for free, but if a third party bets their own product on it they're subject to an attack where I hand you $7M to look the other way while I borrow your shell.

So without knowing anyone you are making a value judgement on the (probable?) lack of ethics? Excuse me?

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kolbe5mo ago

> LLVM and Linux get more cash than they can spend. GNU stuff is comparatively impoverished because everyone assumes they'd do it for free anyway. Stuff that ships on a Canonical desktop or RHEL default install gets lots of cash but community favorites like KDE need to make their own way, etc... Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.

This is often the problem with charity in general. It's hard to find good organizations that actually need your money. Great ones self-sustain on their own revenue. Good ones are saturated with donations from their own users. There's just a small sliver of projects that are awesome, and could productively use financial support. From personal experience, identifying these is often far more costly than the act of writing a check.

embedding-shape5mo ago

What is a "economically important project"? A company that makes a lot of money?

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