this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Paying people to work on open source is good actually (jacobian.org)
submitted 7 months ago by testeronious@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] echo64@lemmy.world 22 points 7 months ago

I feel like this is a very modern problem with the community. I've been in open source for a long time, I've been employed by some of these companies to write open source things.

Most open source stuff was created by someone who was employed to write that open source thing. There are exceptions, of course, but most things came about because of a need, and that need is often related to work. Companies used to be a lot better with allowing open sourcing of components.

Then, there are all the community contributions that come from commercial reasons. If someone working at a company fixes a bug they encounter, that's someone being paid to write open source software.

I do not understand the reaction people are having to this now. The open source ecosystem was built on this.

[–] grumpy_graph@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Richard Stallman was the first developer to get paid for selling Free Software (the emacs editor) and in the original, first idea it was always intended that Free Software may and even should cost something. It was not intended as anti-capitalism software. It's free as in freedom, not as in free beer.

The idea that it is bad or not ethical for somebody working on Free Software to get paid is absurd.

There may be different names for the same thing, like Free Software, Open Source, Libre Software, and therefore acronyms like FLOSS, however, something called Communist Software, Anti-Capitalism Software, Money-is-Bad Software or similar would be a different thing and must not be confused with the former one.

I'm not saying that nobody should impose the restriction that people working on software are not allowed to take money for it. I'm saying that software with this restriction would be something different (and does not exist afaik) and as far as I am concerned I don't care about that kind of software or philosophy behind it. Just leave the devs that manage to get paid for working on FLOSS alone and do your own thing.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 5 points 7 months ago

It was not intended as anti-capitalism software.

Anti-capitalist doesn't mean nobody gets paid, though.

[–] janAkali@lemmy.one 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It's free as in freedom, not as in free beer.

But you can't have one without the other. Putting a cost on software is adding a restriction, thus making it less free (as in freedom).

Free software should be available to everyone, even to people who don't have money to pay for it (poor third world countries, students, kids).

I personally believe, that you should pay for software that helps you earn money. For everything else - it's everyone's own decision to donate or not, based on a financial situation, beliefs, political position and what not.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Donations is a good way to handle paying maintainers, but unfortunately most people don't even know what open source software is or what software they depend on greatly that would deserve donations.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The problem is a bit deeper than this, because even if a user is familiar with open source software and is willing to support application projects that they like, they aren't going to know what other open source modules or libraries are being used in those projects and probably wouldn't think to check or to support those developers. The user front-end is visible, but the stack of dependencies often isn't and these days no software is a monolith. How many end users would think about donating to Qt directly, or alsa, or libusb?

[–] oo1@kbin.social 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

When I buy a turnip from the grocery store I don't have to pay the farmer directly.

If I donate to debian, that I depend on , then debian (morally) should disburse some of that donation to the linux kernel that debian depends on.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This makes logical sense on the face of it, but in practice dependency stacks can be very broad and very deep. I doubt there would be enough donation money to make the effort of distributing it worthwhile, and at some point there would be so many small transactions that the transaction fees would eat up a significant amount.

Especially for something as complex as an OS, the dependency inventory is less like a list and more like a fractal.

[–] oo1@kbin.social 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It's a donation so you're never going to have perfect pricing everything down to the nearest penny or remunerating each person-hour worked. I think It's about something rough and ready that is better than nothing. And it's all goverened by morality anyway . . .
so doomed to failure on that side.

Buy hypothetically a simple principle with reasonable administration cost, like each 3 months, each node shoud add up all donations, slice off 25-50% , split it equally among their top 5 or 10 most important dependencies - just guess, and maybe swap from quarter to quarter if if there's doubt. There's some wiggle room there for small projects to do less and large over funded projects to do more.

Each node in the network could follow a simple rule like that, making a limited number of transactions each time period ,and you'd probably end up with quite a complex outcome after a few iterations (years).

The real trick would be having enough nodes in the network that actually enact such a simple rule. (Apart from having enough donations flow in to the consumer level projects of course).
But enough nodes and enough inflow and the fractal would work for you - roughly.

THe speed is an issue, the more often you settle up then quicker people see money, but the more the admin cost.
But even doing it quaterly is not slower than doing nothing.

Such a model is not something anyone will be securing bank loans off though, so if that's the point then you probably need a paid licensing / service model of some sourt maybe Canonical and redhat.

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

This is one of the major universal gaps in FOSS. I have a yearly reminder set to donate, and a list of projects within it — I do it this way because a) every project I've encountered only offer MONTHLY recurring, which is stupid as fuck because b) no I'm not fucking donating the $5 a month minimum to dozens of projects and c) larger donations usually have lower fees (e.g. donating $60 usually has lower fees than 12 x $5); why the fuck would I give the banks 30% more of my donation than necessary?

Users shouldn't have to manually deal with this shit, and valuable projects shouldn't have to beg for pennies. There should be a FOSS payment management project that enables users to create an account, add ALL of the FOSS projects they use (or want to donate to), set a monthly / yearly contribution, and be done with it. Users can choose to allocate percentages or let the software divide the money between all of them evenly, including all of their FOSS dependencies.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

There should be a FOSS payment management project that enables users to create an account, add ALL of the FOSS projects they use (or want to donate to), set a monthly / yearly contribution, and be done with it. Users can choose to allocate percentages or let the software divide the money between all of them evenly

Well, sure but at some point that donated money has to get distributed out to the accounts of the individual developers, and then you still have the transaction fee problem.

It might seem like the obvious solution is to collect donation amounts for a developer until some minimum value is reached and then distribute it, but then the donation platform is holding money (in trust? in escrow? not sure) basically making them a bank, which makes the whole thing a lot more complicated in terms of financial regulation (not impossible, but probably too expensive to operate to be worthwhile).

including all of their FOSS dependencies

I think this part might be a practical impossibility. All of the larger/more popular open source projects are basically this:

[–] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

IMHO the reality is more complicated than what's described here.

  1. Open source is sustainable (in the sense that people will continue to do it), even without the maintainers getting paid, for better or worse. This is evidenced by the history and the majority of open source projects now.

  2. The bait-and-switch problem, which gets the maintainers paid, hurts the ecosystem in the long run, which relies heavily on the good faith.

[–] dr_robot@kbin.social 2 points 7 months ago

Many open source projects are not developed by unpaid volunteers. The Linux kernel, for example, is primarily developed by professionals on paid time. I'm not convinced the Linux kernel development would continue without business contribution. I'm not convinced all open source projects could just continue without any payment.

[–] ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com 2 points 7 months ago

Amen

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

At my work we use a few open source projects in critical infra, but I'm sad that we are pretty shit at budgeting for donating to said projects

[–] nutsack@lemmy.world -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

if you have your engineers developing a feature for selfish reasons, and the code is good, you can share it right?

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

"No we're not giving out our IP for free"

[–] nutsack@lemmy.world -1 points 7 months ago

open source project repos on your company github is how you attract top talent i thought :(