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Comment by neom

2 days ago

Seems like a good time to throw out a reminder regarding "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure" by Nadia Asparouhova. While she may have published it in 2016, it's still relevant today and speaks to the need for the private sector generally (looking at you VC firms) to support and understand the open source work, hours of unfunded labor, powering our societies.

https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...

19 comments

neom

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godzillabrennus  2 days ago

Big Tech should really be footing the bill here as well as large established VC firms.

  • ajross  2 days ago

    To a large extent they do and always have. It's not as broad or fair as it should be[1], but for almost any economically important project all the major contributors and maintainers are on the payroll of one of the big tech interests or a foundation funded by them.

    The hippies writing that software may not be compensated at the level you'd expect given the value they provide, but they'll never go hungry.

    [1] LLVM and Linux get more cash than they can spend. GNU stuff is comparatively impoverished because everyone assumes they'd do it for free anyway. Stuff that ships on a Canonical desktop or RHEL default install gets lots of cash but community favorites like KDE need to make their own way, etc... Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.

    • Foxboron  2 days ago

      > but for almost any economically important project all the major contributors and maintainers are on the payroll of one of the big tech interests or a foundation funded by them.

      "almost" is the load bearing word here, and/or a weasel word. Define what an "economically important project" is.

      > Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.

      Is "povertyware" what we call software written by people and released for free now?

      5 replies →

    • kolbe  2 days ago

      > LLVM and Linux get more cash than they can spend. GNU stuff is comparatively impoverished because everyone assumes they'd do it for free anyway. Stuff that ships on a Canonical desktop or RHEL default install gets lots of cash but community favorites like KDE need to make their own way, etc... Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.

      This is often the problem with charity in general. It's hard to find good organizations that actually need your money. Great ones self-sustain on their own revenue. Good ones are saturated with donations from their own users. There's just a small sliver of projects that are awesome, and could productively use financial support. From personal experience, identifying these is often far more costly than the act of writing a check.

  • alain94040  2 days ago

    Really simple fix: social pressure and expectations should be that every company that uses open source pays a fixed amount of their revenue (is 0.1% low enough to be negligible for the companies). Companies that don't should shunned.

    • TrainedMonkey  2 days ago

      The problem is, people who make that decision can either spend 0.1% to support open source and get return on investment in terms of better business performance in 2-3 business years. Or they could pay themselves 0.1% in bonuses right now and get an immediate return.

    • n8m8  2 days ago

      They won’t even attempt to read ToS, you think they’ll shun companies?