The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software is Unsustainable
The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software is Unsustainable
It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by t...
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.
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?
Sounds like you don't know the story of core-js. Any popular open-source is basically unsustainable without profit.
https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.