Comment by lynx23
2 years ago
This! Its always the same. When volunteers start to complain they aren't compensated for their work, things start to smell fishy. And this kind of behaviour seems to have increased lately. Rather sad. Either I do something for the love of it, or I am going for a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and these two are the same, but that is very much the exception.
Sometimes it's that devs still like the project, but more often it's probably just the fame/exposure that they don't want to lose. If you have no compassion for a project and the demand is high, it's still your decision to invest your time for no money exchange. You can just ignore the demands, if you can accept that your project might eventually fold.
This is additionally supported by the point that only few maintainers will hand out commit rights to other devs. They rather complain about all the workload and demands than give up some of all of their control, so others with more passion or who are even paid can continue working on the project.
If you want to be paid for your code, then pick a license model that matches it, but it will mean that you won't rise to the top, as only a limited amount of people will use it.
I wrote some more thoughts on this, during the "Moq incident" earlier this year: https://duerrenberger.dev/blog/2023/09/23/foss-funding/
> Either I do something for the love of it, or I am going for a paying job. Sometimes people are lucky and these two are the same, but that is very much the exception.
Why should that be the exception? Why shouldn't people's passions, especially when they are widely useful to others, not be encouraged and turned into paying jobs? Everyone wins. The passionate can keep doing what they're passionate about without having to split their attention to a job to pay the bills, and in exchange everyone else gets better quality output.
> Why shouldn't people's passions, especially when they are widely useful to others, not be encouraged and turned into paying jobs?
Because there is no fair way of estimating what someone's work is worth without a free market. Sometimes it turns up weird outcomes like maintaining a critical driver being worth $0.
If someone is willing to do something for free and the marginal cost of copying the work is 0 then by simple economics they will not get paid for doing the thing. Same logic applies to having children, advocating good ideas in politics and a lot of creative work.
Besides, why should someone doing what they are passionate about entitle them to a leg up? What about someone doing plumbing and hating it? They're making more of a sacrifice for the benefit of others, they deserve more money. And if someone is adding enormous value then let them who recognise it pay for it.
Nothing wrong with people working on their passions and making money of course, but words like 'should' are suspicious. Once you get to software development, people are in a world where market forces are fair and reasonable.
I think we Should - There's a ton of things like this where the benefits are huge but charging for it is impractical. And its kinda sad as a society that we can't figure out a way to fund such things
I build stuff because I love it. But why should I publish it? If I publish it, why should I release it under a permissive license?
I think people get pissed off because they're working out of a spirit of generosity, and the users who they interact with most are definitely not.
Suppose my neighborhood regularly throws a block party, and everyone makes and shares some food, because they enjoy making and sharing food. Great! But suppose one neighbor grabs portions of everyone's freely shared dishes, packages them up, and begins selling your freely-shared food as plate lunches to others, and pocketing the proceeds. They come back and ask that you use more spice, and by the way, do you have any napkins and plastic cutlery? Is the right response here "well, if you don't love making and sharing food for the love of it, you should stop?" Or is it reasonable to want to share with people who are willing to engage in the same spirit of mutual benefit?
I build stuff and keep my projects to myself. I would happily share with other people who are building hobby projects for the love of it. I would happily let almost any non-profit use my work for free (perhaps excluding some political or aggressively religious organizations). I have zero desire to gift anything to anyone's for-profit company. But for some reason, there's a strong stigma against sharing source code but not allowing a total free-for-all of what it's published for. "That's not open source," I'm told. So I don't publish at all, but that has nothing to do with not loving what I build.
Meanwhile, a hobbyist makes music, and publishes some recordings with a CC non-commercial license, people get it. No one says, "oh if you object to companies using your recording as background in their ads, it must be because you don't love making music."