Comment by BeetleB
2 years ago
> 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.
The point is maybe that corporations are proven to be poor stewards of who deserves sponsorship/patronage, so while sponsorships/patronage are the things that make the most sense as sustainable under our current economic models and corporate ones are currently the only ones that seem reliably sustainable yet there aren't enough of them and a lot of important labor is getting underfunded/unfunded, maybe that deficiency points to our economic models themselves as the problem.
Sure, we don't have a better economic model on hand. That's most of what I was pointing out. I don't know what the answer is, but root cause analysis suggests we may have some flaws in our root economic models that as a society it would be great to fix and raise a lot of boats, not just open source developers but artists and craftsmen and writes of all sorts that are also under-appreciated in the current economic models.
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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.