I think an issue here is that open source allows you to create what you think needs to exist without worrying about extra details like how to pay for its development. You think Thing should exist, you go try to build it. The barriers to entry are low.
If it succeeds and becomes popular, now it's a time sink. It's no longer something you tinker on when inspiration strikes. You have obligations.
At that point, it feels like slave labor, like a thing you are required to do without pay. And you feel like if people value it, they should support it somehow.
Most folks doing open source probably aren't great at monetization. If they knew how to do this as a business model from the get go, they probably would have.
Relatively few people feel free at that point to just walk away and say "Not my problem. I created this for free. If you love it, you maintain it. If you need something reliable and up to date, then pay for a commercial product. I've given you all the time I'm going to give you for free. I'm on to new hobbies."
No, instead they get all excited that people want it, resentful that people won't pay for it, and they rightly recognize that it has value. Now they want to be compensated.
And the world has Nobel Prizes intended to encourage people to create brilliant new breakthroughs to benefit humanity without necessarily knowing how to monetize it, so we have this idea embedded in our collective subconscious that if we do a good thing, it ought to be rewarded.
I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years. I've thought a lot about such issues.
I think we would do well to develop some systems for helping people monetize their thing if it gets popular. But we could also work on the cultural side of this and help people understand that you need to think about how much you are willing to give and that if your thing gets popular, making money with it is an additional job to do, not an entitlement.
And if you are bitter that it doesn't pay, one legitimate option is to walk away or only give it however much time you actually enjoy giving it and not one minute more.
What it comes down to is that many people are conflicted about whether they want more users or not. They want the fame, but not the support hassle. So they promote the software and then release it as 0.1 and say it's unstable.
Instead, we should be clear: if you are a hobbyist-programmer, more users mostly means more problems. You might want more contributors (that can fun). But you don't really want more users who don't contribute back.
Setting expectations up front will help. If you don't want people to depend on you, don't put up a marketing page explaining why everyone should install and use your software. Make it easy to build, but don't publish binary releases.
> You might want more contributors (that can fun). But you don't really want more users who don't contribute back.
IMO this is a huge problem for user facing applications (e.g. desktop applications like gimp). They have great appeal to fairly non-technical users which creates a huge support load and they often have complex internals which appears to repel many first time contributors. I know I've been watching projects like LMMS (a music creation environment) for years and it seems like a constant struggle to keep enough contributors such that the support load doesn't burn out everyone involved.
I don't know that avoiding marketing is the solution here since that just would mean that commercial alternatives would evolve quickly while the project would die off due to a lack of new contributors, though it might be one of the tools to change the contributor:support ratio.
If you can't decide beforehand if you can support an open source project or if you should go for a commercial product,
I think a solution is to time-bomb the "Commons Clause" for a 3-5 year period, after which the software reverts to full open source, similar to the GPL Time bomb discussed some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459492
This way, the developers get paid fairly, for what they actually deliver, but they can't lock the users in. If the developer dies, goes bankrupt or falls into a predatory phase where it milks the product for cash without reinvesting sufficient back (Adobe), then the project can be salvaged as open source by those who use it. An even better option is to allow any commercial developer, after the 3 year period passes, the option to fork and develop it's own version with similar licensing conditions.
This will ensure a healthy, competitive environment where the software can be monetized traditionally, yet the 4 freedoms are (eventually) satisfied. As a user, this is what you care about above all else; you will pay the commercial license fee to get the bleeding edge product, knowing you are in a way "leasing to own" the software and you will be able to fork it in-house if the way you use it diverges from what the publisher will want in the future.
The "monetization" world has a lot of incentive in keeping open source small and make money from services, this is a cause for a lot of heartburn. This is the reason why there is no linux desktop. There are too many locked-in interests with too much power.
Another reason is that the actual deployers are not the owners of the project. For example, a company asks its developers to deploy a particular open source system. These developers don't respect the fact that the system they are using is free. For them, it would have been the same if were a closed system. When these developers-on-a-deadline hit a roadblock, they start hyperventilating and ranting on the forums.
The other class is small service providers who make money off the last mile deployments. They will resist any attempt for the product to become more complete. While they cannot win in the long run, it is a huge waste of time and resources.
While the barrier to entry is low, that isn't what makes the difference. Sports is also easy to get into, but once you become good you can charge for your performance. When amateurism was enforced in sports only the rich and their associates could be athletes. That is the case if you go back a hundred years. Since open source doesn't de facto allow you control the right to your work, it is close to amateurism for the creator.
People here are saying that this "Common Clause" is just another proprietary license. But from what I gather this isn't the case. What "Common Clause" does is enforce amateurism for not just creators, but for all licensees. As long as you are an amateur you can enjoy open source conditions, but anyone can't charge for your effort. Not only is this more in line with the spirit of amateurism, but it also enables developers to go professional without being strictly proprietary.
I can't tell if this license is a good idea. I do see some problems with it. But I do think things have to change in general. Software development is a professional industry today. Many people cannot afford to work on open source. The whole situation starts to remind me of the "sharing" economy. Where large companies and their associates makes all the money why the the ones doing the work are expected to do so at cost.
Maybe the most disappointing is how threatened people seem to be by change. While at the same time accepting how the large companies behave. I do think that suggest that there is something rotten in the state of open source. At least for me the important part was the creating and the sharing itself. Not under what license that happened. People do realize that they are paying for proprietary licensing all the time and that a lot of their $3k laptop is de facto licensing?
Compensation for volunteer work has always felt like a bandaid solution to me. What would happen if everyone's needs were met? With infinite resources, space and time, would people still volunteer? This question always makes me think of StarTrek.
Does anyone know any science fiction novels that really dive into the possible consequences of a post-scarcity, post-money society?
You don't really need speculative fiction though, just look at what the millions of folks who already have basic income do with their time. Volunteering is pretty high on the list.
That's fantastic. I'll see what I can find. UBI tops the list of good things humans could do for one another in my mind. Public school, democracy, universal health care, and now universal basic income... what's next? Sometimes it's hard to remember that we do do nice things for each other every now and then.
Unfortunately if you attempt any of these things in the US you'll be branded an evil socialist. Better off slaving away your entire life to create that all-important shareholder value!
This guy got down voted just because people felt insulted. Yes there is not much prose to his words but he is sort of right. Any attempt to care for your fellow human is branded as 'communism' or 'against the american way'. Especially when you elect a president (or two) that literally say that.
> Who are the millions of folks you're thinking of?
Anyone from a family with intergenerational wealth. I haven't seen formal statistics on this, but most of the people I've talked with in this situation aren't just sitting around smoking crack or whatever the anti-UBI folks claim would happen.
Hmm, trust funds aren't like basic income at all. I also suspect people would do better things upon being freed from work than people generally assume, but "well trust fund kids volunteer a lot!" is a very uncompelling argument for that supposition.
In what way is a trust fund not like basic income? Aren’t both just money that gets deposited in your bank account every month or year? They seem identical as far as I can tell.
In the same way that being a successful lawyer is not at all like working the cash register at McDonalds: the amount of income. Trust funds provide rich people with a lot of income, basic income would provide basic sustenance level income.
YC’s UBI program is giving 1k per month, which is pretty close to the maximum tax free amount under gift tax laws. So at the least there is going to be a ton of comparables around that level.
Not quite a novel, but E.M. Forster's 12k-word 1909 story 'The Machine Stops' famously takes a long, hard look at one possible result of a society dependent on a self-repairing machine that does everything. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/machine_stops....
When i finished high school and had no money, I actually volunteered specifically because my needs were not met and I had no resources, so I needed to get my foot in the door. It actually tends to work the opposite of how you think. There's no way in hell I will volunteer if I can just laze around with my money all day.
> Most folks doing open source probably aren't great at monetization.
> I think we would do well to develop some systems for helping people monetize their thing if it gets popular.
Very well put. And I think there is great potential as well. Especially businesses that aren't very tech centered need a trusted third party (eg. Oracle for their DB) that makes sure that (A) the project is still maintained in 15 years and (B) there is sb to call when there is a problem.
Both things OSS can't usually provide. But businesses are of course willing to pay for that, they already do.
Thank you for a very thoughtful and insightful post. I think you very eloquently described an important dynamic that plays out in open-source when a project takes off.
I think it’s really worth investing time in studying this problem and looking for solutions, because the impact of open source on the economy and society is huge, and still growing at a rapid clip. So how these issues play out - who participates in open-source, how resources get allocated, how future inventors are incentivized and past inventors are rewarded - will impact everyone, not just direct open source contributors.
If you are the maintainer of a popular project which is potentially used by businesses and you are interested in monetizing it, please email me (email in profile). I have something to talk to you about which is in the works.
In practice this isn't an issue. Most open source software projects will not gain traction or become famous or have forks or any users for that matter.
There are 3 fundemental problems with open source.
First, documentation. There's no more or less standard way to document systems and the kinds of people who think to spend 9 months building Widgets are usually doing it as a learning exercise. To pick up and maintain a large solution, you need documentation, and the OSS community has not, by and large, focused on utilities to automate the process and make that happen. It is a tough problem, but I would think developers would be self-interested in building the best possible developer tools and libraries. Instead I see Vi and Vim, and people talking about how visual studio is better.
Second, forever-copyright. The US has a forever-copyright which fundementally does not benefit the public as it does not meet the criteria of enriching the public domain. A key thinking exercise is, when has any commercial software, ever, involuntarily entered the public domain? Someone somewhere owns the rights. Literally you have Nintendo sueing ROM sites for stuff they made in the 1980's and largely on the argument "we need our customers playing new games to drive new sales". Without that flow from commercial to public domain, private companies are, over and over and over again, making the same mistakes and the same software. It's a subsidy to dim-witted management. Illustrating how ridiculous this is; Government thinks removing encyption from everything is necissary to secure the public, without realizing ensuring databases have horribly inaccurate and incomplete data with varying schema's is what drives labor expense in the software market; because of forever copyright, they now have a stenographic exercise when they wiretap.
Third, lobbying. The OSS Community views lobbying as something that people aspiring to be mass-murderers do. What they need to do is view lobbying as a personal investment oppertunity that far exceeds the return of 401k, ira, or any job change. If 1 million people donated 10% of their internet bill to the EFF per month just to bring anti-trust against ISP's and restore net neutrality, it'd take 5 years of investing to wrangle the beast, but after that, your internet bill halves and your speed doubles and the speed doubling is really key, that creates a cultural revolution. Similarily, if 100k developers donated $100 a month to a lobbying firm who's job it was to fix just copyright for software, the net payoff would be far in excess of the upfront investment. The correct question to ask here ultimately is "What would Ghengis Kahn give to see a nuke go off from a safe distance, or King Charles the V for a shot of Penecillin?". The monetary returns of the investment make sense, but ultiamtely, what DBA's and Systems administrators do are largely stewardship positions within organizations and their time is spent maintaining glue. Remove the glue, and you get a renissance. You want them engaging in inventive and academic exercises for organizations, and finding ways and spending time selling technology to the organization, whether OSS or not. To do that you need a market that supports models and standards.
And I honestly think the OSS community, if it doesn't start lobbying, is rather irresponsable. I think traditional labor organizations such as the AFLCIO\Teamsters would benefit tremendously from standing up labor collectives for IT People.
The problem is we have not found good ways to market and attract technical writers. Documentation is harder than testing and having people who are both good business analysts and good writers on a project are really important.
In my view consulting companies need to prioritize and bundle these skills.
I'm a writer by trade. I am routinely told by people on HN that writing is a worthless skill, that if I want to resolve my financial problems I should "get a real job" and I'm generally pissed all over.
Let me suggest that a first step would be to stop sneering at writers and telling them what total fucking losers they are for not being coders.
I briefly tried to get involved with Open Source. It went nowhere in part because of the enormous wall of contempt with which I am routinely met.
I'm a woman and people generally seem to feel that I should do things out of the goodness of my heart and not expect any benefit whatsoever in return. I have been met with open hostility for trying to figure out how to monetize my work, network professionally, etc.
If writers tend to skew female, that may also be a relevant issue to the problem space.
I've spent years desperately poor while people piss all over me for being poor and also piss all over the idea that I could possibly have anything of value to offer. I have six years of college. I was one of the top students of my graduating class. Etc.
As far as I can tell, sexism is a very large factor in my intractable poverty. For any other issue I have, I can find a male example of someone with the same type of issue who was, nonetheless, successful. But women just seem to not be taken seriously professionally, not be treated with the same respect, etc.
I'm angry. I'm less inclined to do stuff for other people than I once was because I have learned the hard way that it simply doesn't come back to me in a positive way in most cases. In fact, I have essentially been told by someone wealthy and powerful that someone I did a lot for continues to use their personal connections to wealthy people to tell lies about me and drag my name through the mud and this snake in the grass is apparently believed.
If Open Source is generally crapping all over writers half as much as I've been crapped on, there's your problem.
(I didn't downvote you, though I can think of several reasons why others did - and a few not to)
I'm sorry for the situation you are in. You are apparently angry at the world, and whatever led you to this, I hope you can fix it. Please don't take my words below in the wrong way, I mean well.
Playing "woman", "poverty" and similar cards usually doesn't help when getting a job / work. Managers (smart ones at least) will want to hire good hires, not because they are white / black / male / female / ..., but because they will do a good job. Even mentioning such things is a strong signal not to consider you for hire, because it tells the manager that you will bring a lot of baggage. Nobody wants that, they just want a capable writer.
Open Source is not about helping people. If you know how, you can use it to build a reference, if that's what is missing from your resume, if you have time, if you know how, and if you find a suitable project... a lot of ifs.
I know someone who used their sob story to get a relatively well paid job for their demographic through HN. I have never tried to do such.
I'm in no way trying to use my gender or social status to open doors. I appear to be the highest ranked woman on HN. If I can't open doors based on competence because my gender gets in the way, I imagine it's far harder for other women.
I didn't leave that comment to complain about my situation. I left it as "testimony" and constructive feedback for the person saying essentially "writers are desperately needed". I'm a writer. For a time, I was amenable to contributing my skills to open source. It went nowhere. Here are my thoughts as to why that might be so.
Yes, I'm angry. I said that, so I'm not hiding that fact. My anger is not unjustified, nor is it reason I can't seem to open doors. Cause and effect run the other way. I'm angry because I do the things I'm told I should do that apparently work for others and it doesn't work for me.
Perhaps I will get better at making it clear that such a comment isn't intended to solicit pity or advice or whatever. Perhaps not. People seem to routinely jump on giving advice to folks who leave such comments, whether it is me or not.
I have taken to flagging and downvoting advice replies given to folks saying "Yes, this broad issue (racism, sexism, whatever) is real. I have experienced it firsthand. Here is my testimony." because giving advice in such cases serves to reinforce the idea that sexism, racism etc aren't real issues, it is just some personal problem and you as an individual must be doing it wrong.
I appreciate the opportunity to clarify my intent. It occurred to me after I left the remark that it could be easily misinterpreted. I decided to leave it up anyway.
There are ways in which HN has been really good to me and I am very appreciative of that fact. I don't want people to get the wrong idea.
But that doesn't change the fact that a) writers get a lot of contempt from coders and b) sexism is alive and well. And it doesn't change the essence of my advice above that if you really feel you need more writers in (your) open source (project), then it might behoove you to look at factors like that.
Firstly, identity politics and group politics are a lie, and they keep you from being all you can be. Please ignore them. You are clearly too intelligent to waste your time with such garbage. Jordan Peterson does a good job prooving that out logically.
Secondly, you have to decide with what you are happy with in your life and seek that out. Literally, you have an entire group of rich people who have made the poor decision in life to tie their ego to a literal number, whom actually behave exactly like WOW or EVE gamers chasing the next shiney. And worst of all, they think its a great idea to run people around. Why are you wasting your time trying to get in with these people? Go somewhere else where you are respected and admired and be happy. Some of the best managers I've had were women, including one of the mechanical engineers who I work with who has showed me so much about how act, think, and question like an engineer. I have had people who have really inspired me in life and she is one of them.
You have a gift they do not have; you have a creative mind and a soul with drive. You cannot buy that with money or any amount of training. They are afraid of you and due to that, they view you with contempt. Ego is a nasty drug. Leave it behind.
Finally, If someone really is subjugating you, then either you have wronged them seriously and did not realize it and you need to appologize and get out of that social support group, or you have become an obsession of them because attacking you gives them something they are missing in life. Instead of being indignant, or allowing them to get reactions out of you, deal with the situation. Find someone sympathetic, spring a trap, document their statements, and take the individual to court and ensure the evidence will stick and the evidence is loud and proud on public record.
Do not be one of those people who is so hurt they are incapible of thinking straight and makes overly-broad statements like "OSS just craps over writers". Such behaivour is not befitting an engineer.
If it succeeds and becomes popular, now it's a time sink. It's no longer something you tinker on when inspiration strikes. You have obligations.
At that point, it feels like slave labor, like a thing you are required to do without pay. And you feel like if people value it, they should support it somehow.
Most folks doing open source probably aren't great at monetization. If they knew how to do this as a business model from the get go, they probably would have.
Relatively few people feel free at that point to just walk away and say "Not my problem. I created this for free. If you love it, you maintain it. If you need something reliable and up to date, then pay for a commercial product. I've given you all the time I'm going to give you for free. I'm on to new hobbies."
No, instead they get all excited that people want it, resentful that people won't pay for it, and they rightly recognize that it has value. Now they want to be compensated.
And the world has Nobel Prizes intended to encourage people to create brilliant new breakthroughs to benefit humanity without necessarily knowing how to monetize it, so we have this idea embedded in our collective subconscious that if we do a good thing, it ought to be rewarded.
I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years. I've thought a lot about such issues.
I think we would do well to develop some systems for helping people monetize their thing if it gets popular. But we could also work on the cultural side of this and help people understand that you need to think about how much you are willing to give and that if your thing gets popular, making money with it is an additional job to do, not an entitlement.
And if you are bitter that it doesn't pay, one legitimate option is to walk away or only give it however much time you actually enjoy giving it and not one minute more.