"I want to be the selfless craftsperson giving away work for free to anyone, but I'll also pressure profit-maximizing evil mega-corporations to give me money from the good of their heart, despite the fact that I've explicitly stated in the license they don't have to" is just not a smart position to hold.
If you want evil corporations to have to pay money in exchange for using your software, add that as a condition in the license. Ah, but then it's not "free software", sorry.
There's so much unexplored space in licenses that achieve better outcomes for both the developers and their non-giant-evil-conglomerate users, but nobody is willing to touch that subject, because then they're not writing "real free software" and the "FOSS community" will not use it.
Am I wrong that this is orthogonal to "pick a side"? It sounds like you're suggesting that the sides themselves are inappropriately drawn.
I do believe the line is inappropriately drawn, but I also have a lot of respect for what the open source/free software movements have achieved and won't spit in their face by trying to move the line or highjack the labels.
The same process is why open source is such a hit among the developers that actually accomplish real work in such corporations.
For 1 cent, we can still call it "free" even as in beer, the amount is small enough for that to be fair.
If I wanted to get paid for the software I make in my free time, I would put a price on it.
If someone likes what I do personally, they can donate on my Patreon or kofi or whatever.
If I want my project to only be used for other free software, then I make it GPL or AGPL. That's it.
If someone uses my software and works for a company and needs support, we can talk about a support contract.
The good foundations remain working quietly in the shadows.
its not actually clear what the article is about, and it has the usual journalistic conflation of concepts (market cap is not the same thing as income!).
As someone whose dream job is to just build open source software and have a comfortable life, I'm highly sympathetic to open source sustainability and I do hope we continue to seek for solutions.
But this type of statement is ridiculous. There is a hell of a lot more to business than just the code, despite what many of us software engineers want to think. It's also quite rare for a commercial company to airlift an open source project and make billions on it. There is also a massive spectrum/range of open source, from tiny nearly throwaway libraries up to massive applications.
Turning open source into commercial software is NOT the solution. Commercial software has existed forever, and continues to (try doing something non-trivial with PDFs if you want a modern painful example). If open source becomes commercial software, we'd be losing out on a mountain of greatness. Imagine if downloading a Linux distro required paying for and receiving a license? And if you want to make a distro, be prepared to buy licenses for OpenSSL and every little thing that makes up that system, and set up your accounting books and what not so you can properly distribute all your revenues to the thousands (or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands) of sub-projects. And don't forget that you also have to have technical/legal apparati capable of enforcing, maybe auditing, etc.
Nothing is stopping you from spinning your open source project into a commercial operation right now. Plenty of people do it (it's usually called "source available" because you largely have to, by necessity, restrict redistribution, which makes it no longer "open source" according to most definitions of said term). The great thing about freedom and choice is that you can go whichever direction you want.
You could make a license that makes copying and distribution not cost any money but charges for use. People who make distributions would then not have to pay anything for including the software in a distribution.
Rather than turning open source into just another commercial effort, I'd love to explore going the other way. Why do we need to pay open source developers? They need housing, food, etc. Maybe the better answer is to figure out how to make those things freely available to open source developers.
It's possible to imagine a world where everything works like open source -- share what you have in excess, take what you need, work on something you enjoy for the betterment of all.
The paradox of this kind of "anarchism" is that it works really well when it isn't being consciously pursued, i.e. when the "well being of all" is an emergent effect of people pursuing their own well being locally, trying to speculate about "the well being of all" at the macro level. The moment people start trying to consciously work toward specific outcomes at the macro level, it all starts to fall apart.
So it's really more aligned with Hayek than Kropotnik: spontaneous order as a product of human action, not human design.
> Why do we need to pay open source developers? They need housing, food, etc. Maybe the better answer is to figure out how to make those things freely available to open source developers.
And that's exactly where we begin to falter. Sitting here on HN speculating about how to make the world, as a single unit of analysis, rather people at the micro level observing and replicating what actually works in practice individually, is a recipe for creating obstacles and mechanisms of centralization which will inevitably be abused.
Oh, God, shut the fuck up. I'm sorry for being unkind but trying to box things into predefined ideology fanclubs is the most thoughtless thing ever.
Imagine if Stallman had gotten the IBM work instead of Gates, and now it was the Free Software Foundation with billions instead of the the Gates Foundation. With those resources their endowment would be generating enough income that they would be able to pay around 10000 programmers a year $100k plus full benefits to do free software work.
That would have meant less free software for those decades while there amassing their fortunes, but then an explosion of free software afterwards.
To make that happen I think companies should be more willing to develop and publish their own patches instead of relying on upstream for anything. Overall I think in the open source world the idea of (centralized upstream) "project" has gotten way overinflated.
I view it as a type of charity. I know not everybody can afford to use their time without compensation. that's ok!
but I will personally never charge, and I oppose this commercial mindset
In any case, +1, I find these posts to be pretty tiresome, and honestly, at this point irritating. Open source is open source, it's code we build in the open, together. If you don't have the time or energy to contribute, please let other people take over. It's not open source if it feels like work you should be compensated for. In my opinion, you should save that mentality for your job.
But for larger projects, on which the giants rests, (I'm thinking cURL, ffmpeg etc.) it most likely stops becoming/feeling like charity. Especially, since a lot of people do not see it as charity, and thus tries to force the maintainer(s) to do even more unpaid work.
But turning open source into a job? No thank you! Adding money to something, overwhelmingly almost always in my experience, makes it that much worse and stressful. Money is not the answer!
If you want a cut of your licensee’s revenue then it’s ok to say so in your licensing terms.
This is interesting, and the author goes on to say that 80% comes from the largest cloud providers. But I wonder how much of that is coming from CI pipelines and how much is actually the cloud provider's usage?
Something like " If you require customizations or enhancements we bill at 1000$ an hour, 8 hour minimum."
I don't particularly care if someone working at Microsoft or whatever sees my open source project and decides to use it. That's fantastic. But I'm absolutely not going to work for Microsoft for free, so they need something for one of their use cases they need to pay up.
Are you sure the money wasn't being charged by his foundations (or given indirectly - e.g. used for his living expenses)?
Hard to know what his intentions were unless there's a link to something where he explains himself e.g. he could easily just be valuing opportunity costs.
IMHO, as coding agents mature, we will see a surge in open-source projects. Most will remain obscure due to poor discoverability and growing competition for users' attention. But the same forces driving that growth in volume will likely erode quality and it most certainly raising ethical concerns. A company can now perform a clean-room reimplementation of an open-source project and potentially maintain it going forward with more resources and polish than the original.
For the most successful, high-impact projects, this creates a real problem that they risk losing momentum to well-funded clones.
At that point, what is the incentive to keep building in the open?
Also, it didn't work -- Mountain Duck is closed source.
Personally I donate €50 every now and then when the average of the donation goes below a certain value (varies by project) but it requires tracking in a Spreadsheet.
What does it mean for open source to be "eaten"?
What do you make of all of the traditional FOSS projects that are still going strong?
Paying for hosting costs seems straightforward. Sonatype has decided to host Maven Central and treat it effectively as a marketing expense, and they are free to change that if they want. Same for the hosts of PyPi, RubyGems, etc.
Developer labor is a separate issue and what most people (including the article author) seem most confused about. Open source developers generally fall into one of a few different categories: Hobbyists looking for enjoyment, aspiring professionals looking for experience, startups looking for exposure and adoption, and corporate employees maintaining software their business relies on.
Contributors to vast majority of usable software fall into the last category, yet all of the focus is on the subset of people in the first category that attract a userbase that is meaningful enough to theoretically warrant some support, which is probably the smallest faction of open source developers by a large margin.
I do not understand the angst over this. If a hobbyist gets tired of their hobby, they are free to move on. If they feel exploited by some big corporation, change the license going forward, make the repo private, push harder for compensation until they feel properly compensated, or take whatever other action resolves their internal issue.
All the other categories of developer are fine as is, and the dissatisfied category could be as well if they took more agency over the situation.
Now for a different company, IBM is completely missing and they use OpenSSH everywhere, even on AIX. And now it is even more glaring since they own Red Hat.
Yes this is a small "survey", but it shows not all large companies donates to projects that are really critical to their products.
So yes, at the very least, if your company depends upon a Open Source Project, you should throw a bit over the wall :)
So, who's going to tell Linus Torvalds (among many others) he's not writing modern software? I have a feeling I know exactly what the author considers "modern" software...
Congratulations, you rediscovered commercial software - where you are legally obligated pay to use software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
In short it says: I can't make you pay me, but I'm calling you a thief, so you should pay me anyway, or else I'll call you a thief again. Other people get paid, so I should be paid too because I like money.
The problem isn't Open Source, it's the commercial organisation of knowledge which is simply unsustainable. It is society that needs to change.
