Comment by dessant
2 years ago
> Oh, no. I liked those tools, but I don't let them update since they started having "premium versions".
Expecting project maintainers to solely fund the development of open source projects used by millions of people is the leopard that keeps eating our faces.
I wonder how much universal basic income, or at least a stronger economy, could spur FOSS development. I feel like the 2008 crisis and the rise of the precariat put a permanent dent in the phenomenon of non-professional devs maintaining free-software projects as a hobby.
A universal basic income, that is an income which is _universal_ and _fixed_ in its amount, will only create inflation: everyone gets equal additional money, everyone gets additional purchasing power, everyone creates more demand, prices go up.
A stronger economy is always better, but politicians usually manage to screw that one up, also.
But I don't think all of that is a major issue here. Microsoft and IBM are taking open-source projects and closing them up. Google is offering FLOSS projects to get users, then poisoning the well. I don't know what's happened to Mozilla, but it's destroying itself.
Lots of individuals are still writing FLOSS projects, but hobbies get picked up and dropped often -- for something to last, you usually need an organization (even if it's just 3 people) and it can easily become a _job_, even if it's a non-paying job. Even if their finances are fine and they still have spare time, most folks don't want a second job with a second source of deadlines and stress etc. And if a for-profit giant sees their project and offers them a LOT of money to stop working on it, most folks will say yes -- even if they were making decent money already.
> A universal basic income, that is an income which is _universal_ and _fixed_ in its amount, will only create inflation: everyone gets equal additional money, everyone gets additional purchasing power, everyone creates more demand, prices go up.
Not really, it will also redistribute wealth.
Let's say I have $1000 and you have $100. If we get additional $100 each, your purchasing power would now be 2/11 of mine instead of 1/10, even with prices adjusted for inflation.
I'm not advocating for UBI though – stronger economy is the more sustainable solution here.
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Somehow this leopard only exists on systems like Android and Google Play Store or web browser extension stores, but notably not in places like F-Droid or the repos of any common GNU/Linux distribution.
"Leopard eats face" is a dumb reddit thought-terminating cliche. I invite you to actually think about the problem and ask yourself why developers of FOSS tools selling out happens in some domains but not others, and effects some users without warning but not others.
Some of the largest projects on F-Droid are all funded either by having a paid version on Google Play, accepting donations, or a company funding their development by hiring the maintainers. Most of the software you can install from a distro repository are also developed in large part by people that are compensated in some form, if the project requires continued development.
Money always ends up in the equation when you have to invest years of your life maintaining and supporting a project. And that's perfectly fine and healthy, because it means you can find a path that does not result in either side being exploited.
As for your last point, I was not responding to developers selling out their users, which is unfortunate, but to the expectation to not have a premium/paid version of a software project distributed. I think the developer even shared the pro version for free on F-Droid (OsmAnd does the same), yet the existence of a paid version was regarded as something negative by the user above.
If you're uncomfortable with the taught of you or at least someone else funding the development of the software you use, you're only setting yourself up to be exploited.
You're missing a big part of the equation: the leopard exists in places where developers can push updates directly to users with minimal if any oversight from commercially independent reviewers. Debian and F-Droid build packages from source given to them by the developers, they don't trust developer builds. Therefore even though these Simple apps have sold to a malware company, that company won't be able to push updates to users. On platforms where this leopard is common, there may be some lip service paid to review but it's almost always completely automated or performed by low-skill contract labor who have no personal commitment to the process.
Another aspect of leopard territory is API churn. On Android and to a lesser extent browser extensions, regular rebuilds are necessary to keep the application up to date. This sometimes necessitates reworking parts of the application, not just rebuilding it. This recurring chore places a constant burden on developers, they can't "finish" an application then forget about it and move on with their lives; doing so would see their work vanish. On the other hand, on GNU/Linux desktops it's perfectly feasible to "finish" an application and leave it unmaintained for 15 years, people will still be able to use it. And on Android with F-Droid, most of the burden of rebuilding applications to keep them running is taken on by F-Droid volunteers, reducing the burnout pressure on application developers.
The conclusion is simple: Strict separation of the developer and packager/distributor roles keeps the leopard away.
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Exactly what kind of funding does it need?
I suspect you’re mistaking commercial companies pretending to be doing open source with actual community-driven open source.
> Exactly what kind of funding does it need?
I assume your time also has value. Open source software does not have to be shared free of charge, especially not when you need to invest your time and money to package and distribute the software and offer support for the project. The kind of puritan definition of open source that you're alluding to is only playing into the hands of the megacorps that are exploiting their users.
People deserve to be compensated for their work, especially when their work finds an active audience, even if they maintain an open source project.
So again, how many man-hours does it take, monthly, to maintain those apps? Note that I’m a programmer myself and so I’m not asking about the usual enterprise-level fake numbers.
Also, while open source definitely needs some funding, it can become badly harmed by too much of it, when code becomes developed purely for money and not for the usual ESR’s open source incentives.
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Simple Mobile makes apps like file managers and image galleries. Just how much work is required to maintain this besides keeping the file access API up to date? Not sure if that's even had any breaking changes on Android in the past several years.
This isn't win32 or posix. You'd be surprised how often Android breaks APIs for no fucking reason. It's a Google product, after all.
I'm not familiar with these projects, so I'm not sure how much time it would take to just keep them afloat, but I've seen they are popular and beloved apps. Looking at the GitHub activity, they have been actively developed for years, and several releases a year also contain new features. This was more than likely a full-time job for the developer.
It's regrettable that the funding model of these projects did not work out, and that the developer sold these apps without informing users about the change of ownership.
Though it feels like at this point we are bargaining for the amount of free work we are expected to get from this person, while sneering at the prospect of there being a paid version of the app published on Google Play as part of the original funding model that was in place long before the sale.
I want the maintainers to stop "enhancing" them. These tools don't do much, and they don't need to do more. That's the whole point.
Unless the authors themselves set those expectations...