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.
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 work for money. While I enjoy my work. I wouldn’t do it for free. I have to eat, pay a mortgage, etc.
Hell even if I wont the lottery. I wouldn’t do this job for free and it’s a really good job.
I would (and do) work on my own projects for free.
You can do that now. Nothing stops you from doing free work. Most people can’t afford to work for free.
I think there should be a clause in most open source projects that you’ll donate time if used for corporate interest. That way companies would be forced to contribute which means the employee is paid.
I’ve seen many companies just take from oss. They need to give back as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not everyone is driven by money, some people care about improving computing.
The time wasted writing that whinging blog post could have been used to write working software.
Or enjoying life.
Or literally doing anything else
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”.
