People who are motivated by money have been saying this for decades. And they’re still wrong because not everyone is motivated by money.
I kinda agree but you still need money to live and if I was able to work on open source projects while sustaining myself I would choose it anytime.
There are plenty of people who get paid to write open source software. The internet simply wouldn’t exist without OSS:
- Linux/Android
- Apache/Nginx
- MySQL/Postgres
- gcc/llvm
And that’s just scratching the surface.
Right, there’s plenty of people also not getting paid anything for their work. This “You shouldn’t care about money” feels like a straw man argument to OP’s argument which I think could also be said as “OSS isn’t sustainable unless everyone is paid a sustainable amount”.
It’s just all around frustrating. It has that same energy as “You criticize the system yet you’re a part of it” example. For example, I wont be able to show this thread to my landlord when rent is due saying, “You shouldn’t care about money, I’m an OSS dev so I dont”
So in closing, I guess I wish everyone had a UBI to be sustainable and then yeah OSS itself could be sustainable as a hobby project.
Never said devs shouldn’t care about money. If you aren’t having fun maintaining some code, stop. If it is commercially interesting, you will probably be contacted. Charge for bug bounties. Prioritize features based on compensation. Start a foundation. There are lots of business models for OSS, the author of this article talks about how this problem is already solved - just not for him.
OSS itself is not a business model. OSS is provably sustainable. Dude just wants it handed to him.
I never said someone shouldn’t care about money. That was never my argument.
My argument was that people who DO care about money have been claiming it’s going to usher in the demise of OSS and yet it thrives.
And they’re still wrong because not everyone is motivated by money.
How many working people are doing it not because of the money but solely because they enjoy the work?
You’d be surprised
I seriously doubt it.
I can think of at least twenty that I know or knew personally.
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I would (and do) work on my own projects for free.
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How many hours per week do you spend working on your own project for free?
How many bug reports and merge requests do you get per day?
I promise you that the way you work on your own project does not scale to the level of big FOSS projects with tens or hundreds of thousands of users or more.
I dare to say 0.01%. Most devs, including open source devs are payed one way or another.
Sure, there are labours of love. But most aren’t.
The bigger issue isn’t compensation but rather the number of corporations who profit handsomely off of the labor of Free Open Source Software developers.
It’s okay if FOSS developers don’t get compensated, that’s part of their ethos.
It’s not okay for corporations to be like “thanks for this free thing, we’re going to take all that profit that your ethos makes you not care about, and what we give back to the open source community will pale in comparison.”
Of course that’s not always true, a handful of companies really pay FOSS developers really well. Valve for example. IBM/RedHat for another.
But for every company that respects where it’s code comes from and wants to support those developers, there’s several more companies that just use FOSS as ‘off-the-shelf’ components with no intention to do anything but use it, set it, and forget it with intent to make profit.
One way to ensure FOSS developers are paid well is to spend money at businesses who pay FOSS developers well and keep them on actual payroll.
ITT: A bunch of people who (a) likely have jobs that pay them for their time and (b) have probably never maintained or contributed to a FOSS project, saying that FOSS developers shouldn’t be able to make a living doing FOSS.
But somehow FOSS development is totally sustainable in their mind because once you burn out working for free you can be easily replaced?
Please just forget the fact that many large and successful FOSS projects (Linux, Blender, Wine, Gnome, Ubuntu, Godot, the list goes on and on) are maintained and developed by professional developers, who are paid, and who ought to be paid for doing what is very much a full-time job at scale.
As an older programmer who has written and contributed to lots of FOSS while working at various institutions and companies, I don’t understand the idea that people should be paid for FOSS work.
I’m not saying I think it’s wrong, I am just curious how and why people believe that FOSS development should be funded.
I am willing to be convinced, but I can’t help but think that software you get paid to write is a capitalist business, subject to all the enshittification problems that brings. Why do we want that in FOSS?
Edit/ps: title is saying FOSS is unsustainable but we are here decades later with Linux the dominant server platform (I was there when this was very much in doubt) and tons of our infrastructure continues to run on free and open software. It seems sustainable to me based on the evidence.
I’m not saying I think it’s wrong, I am just curious how and why people believe that FOSS development should be funded.
Why FOSS development should be funded is the easy part… At scale, FOSS maintainership and development often becomes a full-time job, just like any full-time software development job.
Users file bug reports of varying degrees of urgency. Community contributors submit merge requests (patches) that need to be tested, reviewed, iterated upon, and merged. Changes need to be documented and releases need to be made and delivered to users all over the world. Finally, for projects to improve, a future direction for the program needs to be planned and features need to be designed so that the project isn’t just aimlessly stagnating. That’s why people are paid full-time salaries to work on projects like Linux or Blender, because otherwise it is almost impossible for FOSS projects to handle a large number of users and contributors. (There are exceptions to this, but keep in mind that they are exceptions)
Lots of volunteer contributors obviously do good work for FOSS projects for free out of pure generosity and wanting to make things better. I appreciate that and I think we should all appreciate that. But unless they are independently wealthy, they are very unlikely to have the time to commit to spending 32 hours or more per week on contributing to FOSS. In our current world, most people have to make a living and they spend most of their time doing just that. They might have enough free time and energy to write a one-off feature/bug patch to some FOSS project, and that’s a great and noble thing, but they likely do not have infinite time to continually maintain or develop a large project.
How FOSS projects get funded is the tricky part, because FOSS funding mainly relies on corporate support (as in Red Hat paying developers to maintain and work on the Fedora Project, for example) and individual user donations (like the ones that you might find on the Blender Development Fund, for example). Sadly many users don’t value FOSS, as can be seen in this thread, and so they may never see the need to contribute to FOSS development funding.
I don’t understand the idea that people should be paid for FOSS work.
In an ideal world, nobody would need money for anything (food, water, shelter, education, healthcare, infrastructure). We would all do exactly what we want, when we want, and society would just take care of itself.
In the slightly less than ideal world that we live in, everybody should be compensated for work that they do, and people who volunteer their extra time for free to some project or ideal should at the very least be appreciated.
title is saying FOSS is unsustainable but we are here decades later with Linux the dominant server platform (I was there when this was very much in doubt) and tons of our infrastructure continues to run on free and open software.
Much of which, including Linux, is funded by companies and individuals so that talented and knowledgeable developers can afford to spend the bulk of their weeks maintaining these projects. What would happen to if you dropped Linux’s funding to $0/month? Obviously development and maintenance would no longer be sustainable.
Sadly not every project is as well-funded as Linux obviously, and there are important pieces of software at every level that are falling victim to the tragedy of the commons because, in some cases, FOSS development at scale is not sustainably funded.
I am willing to be convinced, but I can’t help but think that software you get paid to write is a capitalist business, subject to all the enshittification problems that brings. Why do we want that in FOSS?
Paying people well to do good work is not the problem with capitalism. The root of the problems concerning capitalism is when the work of others is exploited in service to profit.
People who work full-time for non-profit organizations do get paid, as they should, and fairly.
Frankly we have our priorities totally fucking backwards if we are pointing the finger at workers or non-profits for the problems of society and the enshittification of technology. But that’s something to think about as many of us collect our paychecks from our for-profit employers.
Thanks for taking the time to write this out
saying that FOSS developers shouldn’t be able to make a living doing FOSS.
No one is saying that in this thread, I don’t think. They are saying that there are some projects that are sustainable on a hobbyist basis.
I’ve contributed to FOSS project documentation for free, despite the fact that my day job involves documentation
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Or literally doing anything else
Such as whinging about someone’s blog post apparently.
Or comment on someone’s comment about a blog.
I wasn’t the one judging someone for posting complaints on the internet, while posting a complaint on the internet.
We’re all here “wasting time”.
Indeed, some people prefer to do something productive with that wasted time, though. And most of us are quite grateful to them.
OP wanted a fun child project, but it’s not fun anymore, just responsibilities.
The problem I see is just a difference between expectations and reality.
Expectations were: it would be fun to give people something for free, create open source, be part of some community. Maybe even get some recognition, maybe better job offers.
Reality is: noone cares about your open source project enough to pay for it.
And such is life. Noone stops you from just stopping working on it, and that’s an adult option. All open source licences have a clause like “I don’t own you nothing”, and maybe that’s the moment to use it.
When you release your software for free you don’t owe anybody a thing. If you’re getting burnt out or it’s impacting your personal life too much then don’t be afraid to stop and hand over control of the project gracefully. The latter is hard to do for most people though, because giving up something you’ve spent so much time and effort on is challenging. However, your irl always comes first.
Burn out and stress applies regardless of whether you get paid for your work or not. Plenty of people feel the same way about their paid jobs too. I think all being paid to continue work on this project will do is prolong the inevitable, that it’s time to move on regardless.
Not everyone is driven by money, some people care about improving computing.
What do you do for a living and why don’t you do it for free?
Nobody is forcing others to make free and open source software
That wasn’t an answer to my question.
What do you do for a living and why don’t you do it for free?
Edit:
Nobody is forcing others to make free and open source software
But clearly a lot of people here are expecting people who develop and maintain open source software to do it for free, regardless of how many hours it takes and how obviously unsustainable that notion is at scale.
Nobody is claiming that FOSS is slavery (i.e. people being forced to work for free), but expecting other people to work for free is entitlement, plain and simple.
And yet the very entitled people in these comments have the nerve to tell other people that they should donate their time for the greater good, when you can be sure they gladly pick up a check every couple of weeks for whatever they do.
It’s shameless. Remember that FOSS developers don’t owe you shit.
What someone does for a living is really none of anyone’s business.
Unless you develop FOSS, in which case clearly random entitled bitches on the internet get to tell you what to do with your time and what it is worth, judging by these comments.
Not OP, but I develop software for a living, and I also contribute, for free, to open source projects. The idea that I should be paid for some random project that I enjoyed is a nice one but also rather absurd.
If you develop software for a living that means you spend the bulk of your work week writing code for money, probably for a for-profit business writing closed-source, proprietary software.
And please don’t get me wrong… That’s not to invalidate the volunteer work that you’ve done in your free time for whatever FOSS projects that you’ve contributed to. That’s a commendable and generous use of your free time and as a FOSS enthusiast I appreciate whatever you’ve done.
But now just imagine if you could spend your work week writing code for FOSS projects, while still making a decent living for yourself or your family. Imagine how much more FOSS code you could write with entire weeks of time instead of just the odd weekend here and there. Imagine how much effort you could dedicate towards maintaining larger projects and reviewing code from other contributors to accelerate the pace of development. Imagine how much more, high quality FOSS software would be available to everybody to use, for free, all over the world if more people like you could spend their days writing FOSS code instead of writing proprietary code.
That’s the point of what I’m saying.
Obviously not every project can afford to pay every developer for their one-off patch that they submit on a random weekend. Most projects don’t have the funding to do that, and even if they did the logistics of it are unreasonable. But that’s not really the point. More sustainable funding for FOSS means that more developers would be able to spend the bulk of their time writing FOSS code and maintaining FOSS projects. Large FOSS projects like Blender absolutely rely on this concept.
In my opinion people who are genuine allies of FOSS should want more stable and sustainable funding for FOSS development, so that more talented people can spend more of their time doing work for FOSS projects instead of for-profit companies.
It wouldn’t be great to spend my work week writing code for FOSS projects - it would be great to spend my “work” week coding whatever the hell I want. In my previous job I got code upstreamed into one or two major open source projects which did occupy my work week and it was just the same as any other work - I was working on the company’s priorities, not my own. Now obviously we all try to find places to work where those priorities align because that’s what makes work pleasant, but that is the real difference. From a personal perspective, how the code I’m writing is going to be licensed doesn’t affect my enjoyment to a great extent.
My reaction to the blog post is to question who it’s aimed at, and how it’s meant to change their behaviour. For-profit businesses, maybe, to encourage them to open-source more of the code that they write? Well, that might be worthwhile, but I think a lot of tech companies already understand open source and incorporate it into their strategy. Google and Meta undoubtedly do. My current and previous employers do. For them it’s a business decision whether to open source their code and whether to assign developers to open source projects, and this post doesn’t seem focused on that business decision. Surely the post isn’t aimed at individual contributors, because the action they can take is to withhold their time unless paid for it, which is absurd, because those people are for the most part contributing because they enjoy it. Sure, that means that companies can benefit from the passion of people making things for free, but that’s not a bad situation to be in.
Yep. Same problem we have with AI use of free-to-view literature and art. The author’s intent is often to invite others to participate in a collective effort, and start an ongoing conversation where works can be shared back and forth and everyone improves as a result.
Corpo use of FOSS — and especially ML training on free-to-view works — often takes the fruits of the collective effort and then sprints directly away from the community, refusing to participate and sometimes even wrapping a thin for-profit layer around the free underlying tools.
In the case of AI, this for-profit wrapper is so comprehensive and so thoroughly obscures any reference to the source material that not only can it replace the original communities very effectively, but it denies any ability to navigate through to the original communities even if you wanted to.
If the author no longer has passion for his OSS project, and isn’t being paid for it, why is he still working on it? Why should he feel responsible for companies building their processes on a free piece of software without guaranteed support? Why the heck is he sacrificing sleep for something he claims not to care about anymore? It sounds to me like he’s not living his values.
If compensation for volunteer work is mandated, it becomes less volunteer work and more of a part(or in some cases full)-time job. My understanding is that a core pillar of open source software is that anyone can contribute to it, which should make it easier for contributors to come and go. Based on the graph shown it would take more than a full-time job worth of money to meet his demand, which seems unlikely in any case, and it’s time for him to go. Either someone else will volunteer to pick up the slack, the companies using it will pay someone to pick up the slack like the author mentioned, or the software will languish, degrade, and stop being used.
I don’t see how any of those outcomes suggest that people need to be paid for the time they voluntarily give. I could get behind finding better ways to monetarily support those who do want to get paid, but “how could it be easier to pay OSS contributors after their passion is gone?” is a lot less provocative of a headline.
Looks like he wants to create a joint venture of several companies with a couple of independent consultants. Ok. Good luck. He doesn’t owe the world any free labor. He can try to negotiate any kind of compensation scheme for his intellectual property. That’s capitalism.
On a less capitalistic note: The EU provides a bit of government funding for FOSS development on account of the public benefit.
The corporations ‘doing the right thing’ by subsidizing FOSS are under the same enshittification pressures as the rest of the global economic system, and as a consequence they will sooner or later not be doing the right thing at all.
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