Comment by rpastuszak
2 years ago
> The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it. > Don’t do it! Who’s asking you to work on it?
I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
The value we get from OSS compared to the monetary compensation for that work is disproportionately small.
OSS generally doesn't depend on an army of people paid to make you buy shit you don't need or want.
> I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
We do. You work for a company that needs software X, and you contribute patches and fixes to X from your paid time. Software X is essentially a collab between different companies then.
The Linux base (kernel, libc and compilers) basically works that way.
> I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
As is true for many (most?) crafts.
If I am an artist (e.g. painting, digital art, etc). and give my work away for free, my fellow artists are not going to sympathize with my inability to make a living.
Ditto photography ("look at all these companies taking my free stock photos and not giving me any money!") Ditto music. Ditto writing. Ditto anything that involves a significant amount of creativity.
It's silly to expect SW to be any different.
> It's silly to expect SW to be any different.
True, I can't disagree.
However, it's important to note that there is something different about the software world, in that very large subsets of applications and infrastructure of large for-profit companies are built on top of the free labor of open source.
Not sure if that's true in any other craft.
If unpaid open source were to magically disappear overnight, all of the Internet and all tech-using companies would collapse immediately.
> Not sure if that's true in any other craft.
It isn't, but that may be because other artists don't give out their work for free.
That's why basic income is so, so necessary.
Let people do creative work without needing to work for exploitative corporate ghouls, and let the world-killing planet-burning exploiters cry themselves to sleep on their mega-yachts about it.
Or maybe that's a large neon sign that we should fix those, too?
Why isn't it a sustainable career path to be an artist or photographer or musician or writer or open source contributor? (Outside of the lucky 1% or so at the top of those crafts, of course.)
Why are creative pursuits so much harder to make a sustainable wage on in our society? Why do we expect most of them to be unpaid hobbies? Why do we expect the arts and crafts that are the fruits of their labor to start at "cheap as free" unless they work to be insanely talented and are lucky enough to win corporate sponsorship/patronage?
I don't have good answers either, but there are a lot of questions of what actually are we valuing about our use of our labor here, as a society, in general, across the board.
> corporate sponsorship/patronage
Those are the only things that make any sort of sense. The alternative solutions require a reality distortion field to even begin to work. Copyright? It's logically reducible to attempting to sell numbers. It just isn't going to work in a universe where globally networked computers exist. Intellectual work is infinitely abundant once created.
We gotta figure out new business models. What's valuable isn't the end product, it's the labor that creates it. We need ways to get paid either before or during the creative act, not after it. Sponsorship and patronage accomplish this and are perfectly ethical. I see artists accepting commissions and requests for a price, that's another business model that satisfies the requirements I mentioned. GNU once proposed a vision where all software was free and people would hire programmers to work on the features they were interested in.
2 replies →
These are age old questions. I don't have answers, and you admit you don't either. Until we find a way, we can't cling to a belief that it is possible.
Incidentally, in the past, great works of art did come out of government funded initiatives (TV shows, etc). In the countries that had such programs, though, I think you'll find a very bipolar distribution. The very few who made high quality art got funded, and the rest had no option to make a living (or even money) for their work.
In places like the US, it's been more of a continuum due to a much larger focus on private funding. It results in the median piece of work to be crappier than in those countries, but a lot more artists actually can make a living as a result.
Where is it written that being an OSS contributor should be a sustainable career? Just go write software for a company if that’s what you want to do. But why there’s an expectation that “open” source software should pay anyone is beyond me.
I think that society and companies benefit from FOSS even if there's no or little profit in doing it. Sure that are corporate OSS jobs, but think of all the societal benefit that comes from one-man or community FOSS projects. I feel that in an ideal situation people should be incentivized by being paid for doing that work.
> Where is it written that being an OSS contributor should be a sustainable career?
Why shouldn't it?
I’m not saying it shouldn’t. I said where is it written? Why does everyone act like it’s a foregone conclusion?
>I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
They knew that before they started.
I meant it in a general sense, I think we'd be in a better place as a society if this model of work was easier to follow/more mainstream.
I am not sure what you are saying here.
Is this is a general critique of capitalist exploitation of the "software" field? Like, as in software should be a utility like fresh water or electricity?
If not, and you are relatively literal in what you write, the following question seems unavoidable:
What about coaches for youth sports? What about beach cleanup? What about a thousand other worthwhile and societally useful activities that people volunteer to do, but for which there is no sustainable career path? What makes OSS contributing any different from them?
> I think we'd be in a better place as a society if this model of work was easier to follow/more mainstream.
Why?
1 reply →
> I think the issue here is that we don't have a system where being an OSS contributor is a sustainable career path.
Why should it be? Most OSS authors get paid to work on their stuff by some company who wants it. If there's no one willing to hire you, then your software is not worth it. I don't mean this negatively. I have lots of open source projects that are not worth it. I have one that I've been hired to work on before, but am no longer working on it anymore
You can say that for a whole host of things people volunteer to do with their time. They still volunteer that time often knowing it comes with no compensation at all. There’s this idea of altruism and greater good that drives a lot of people beyond money.
With OSS, it’s more like a personal creativity outlet, or “I want this thing to exist”. It is very similar to artists and musicians. Who also have a hard time getting someone to pay for their output.