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My apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time.

I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.

If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work they hadn’t necessarily signed up for (who signs up for burnout?) - it’s ok/necessary/mandatory to see how everyone (and or Nvidia/Google/OpenAI etc) can, like, help.

My insistence is on the opt-out nature of this so that people who would be ok being compensated don't have to beg.

Consider how the xz malware situation happened [0]. Or the header & question 8 from the FAQ for PocketBase [1].

[0] https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500

[1] https://pocketbase.io/faq/

4 comments

Instead of forcing Github to force users to pay a fee to support OSS, why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work? Then that requires 0 coercion and those who feel undervalued for their work/projects can be compensated as the market dictates the value of their projects.

There are a lot of dumb and even disagreeable open source projects. Why should someone be de facto forced to fund those projects?

It's like this ass-backwards way of selling something because you're allergic to markets or something. Honestly, it's quite rude to go on and on about free software and liberation and all these things and then turn sour grapes years later because everybody took you up on it. Nobody is forcing anyone to maintain any of these projects.

And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.

> And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe if it wasn't released as MIT but released as GPLv3 you'd actually get compensated in the form of patches, bugfixes, features, etc in "your" software.

The whole RIIR movement is doing this - replacing as many GPL components as possible with rewritten MIT components. I find this completely disrespectful: trying to displace pro-user software with pro-business software.

You just read the title don't you?

> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month

It's about org, not about every single person using Github.

The idea is basic and should have been written in the article. When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.

A contributor wouldn't like a free for personal use either. The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue) »

> you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.

It happens so many times and no just about software (but then it's not a million dollar company). It's not that you are dump, you done the right thing and some companies with money/power/opportunity to capitalize on it, did it and didn't compensate you fairly.

> When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.

Nope.

Put it in the license, sell the software, or work for free, but stop complaining about it.

It's nice if businesses who benefit from specific software packages want to pay or show support, but it's not nice to release something "for free" but then jump on a moral grandstand and demand everyone pay so you can feel good about your ideology at the expense of everyone else.

> The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue)

Then make that your license?

You're not wrong, but I feel like a lot of people are hung up on the purism of the OSI definition, and a license that's not so blessed may prevent a project from gaining significant traction, if that is part of their goal.

I think it would be nice if there were a license that was more widely accepted that introduced a monetary component that could compensate the developer(s).

> why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work?

What if we turn this from a rhetorical question to an actual question?

My totally unverified take:

1. Missing transaction / Payment infrastructure. The same reason why paid music streaming services were successful depite piracy being a thing.

2. Bureaucracy associated with earning money. In many countries, going from "unpaid" to "€1 per month" is a nightmare.

... and a suggestion to make both less dire: A transaction infrastructure that allows small projects (that wouldn't be a cash cow anyway) to forward all payments to another project of the project Author's choice.

Edit: See https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...

I don't disagree with any of what you wrote here, but I don't think the solution is "well we haven't figured this out, OSS who talk all the time about free as in beer free software now all of a sudden want to get paid for their work" is to just go around uncharging other people/organizations to support their projects, especially if not all OSS projects are worth supporting.

I agree with echelon; don't apologize. I'm not objecting to the message, only to the framing.

How to create more code I can enjoy using has been something that I've been thinking about for a long time. I've even advocated for a stance[0], similar to yours. While I don't agree it's correct to conflate the malign intent surrounding the xz takeover, with the banal ignorance as to why so many people don't want to support people creating cool things, (and here I don't just mean financial support.) I do acknowledge there are plenty of things about the current state we could fix with a bit more money.

But I don't want open source software to fall down the rabbit hole of expectations. Just as much as I agree with you, people opting-in to supporting the people they depend on is problematic. Equally I think the idea that OSS should move towards a transactional kind of relationship is just as bad. If too many people start expecting, I gave you money, now you do the thing. I worry that will toxify what is currently, (at least from my opinionated and stubborn POV), a healthier system, where expectations aren't mandatory.

The pocket base FAQ, and your hint towards burnout are two good examples, describing something feel is bad, and would like to avoid. But they are ones I feel are much easier to avoid with the framing of "this work was a gift". I have before, and will again walk away from a project because I was bored of it. I wouldn't be able to do so if I was accepting money for the same. And that's what leads to burn out.

I do want the world your describing (assuming you can account for the risks inherent into creating a system with a financial incentive to try to game/cheat), but I don't want that world to be the default expectation.

[0] https://gr.ht/2023/07/15/donations-accepted.html

> Equally I think the idea that OSS should move towards a transactional kind of relationship is just as bad.

GPL is transactional; that's the whole point. What you are calling OSS includes GPL, true, but it also includes BSD/MIT, which are not transactional.

To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.

I also don't think all software needs to be free. I also don't think all software needs to be a gift. (But then I just said the same thing twice.) The part that I care about is which direction the default [default definition?] shifts.

In my perfect world, more code would be MIT not GPL. But in my perfect world, the GPL wouldn't be useful in practice. The world is far from perfect.

> To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.

Well, yeah. I think we agree. That's why I said it is transactional - you get software in exchange for any future potential improvement you make to it.

It's a transaction.

MIT is not transactional, it's charity - you get software without having to trade anything for it.

If people make their software MIT or GPL, they should not complain when it is used in a way that they are unhappy with. With MIT, it can be used in almost any way the user wants, including closing it off, and depriving the community of improvements.

>The simplistic answer is the same for why seemingly everyone chooses proprietary software; it’s just easier.

This is honestly the exact opposite of my experience. Though I may just have very different desires and frustrations

Don't apologize.

"Open Source" is hugely conflated in terms of the reasons people write open source software.

There are people who truly don't care to be compensated for their work. Some are even fine with corporations using it without receiving any benefit.

Some people prefer viral and infectious licenses the way that Stallman originally intended and that the FSF later lost sight of (the AGPL isn't strong enough, and the advocacy fell flat). They don't want to give corporations any wiggle room in using their craft and want anyone benefiting from it in any way to agree to the same terms for their own extensions.

Many corporations, some insidiously, use open source as a means of getting free labor. It's not just free code, but entire ecosystems of software and talent pools of engineers that appear, ready to take advantage of. These same companies often do not publish their code as open source. AWS and GCP are huge beneficiaries that come to mind, yet you don't have hyperscaler code to spin up. They get free karma for pushing the "ethos" of open source while not giving the important parts back. Linux having more users means more AWS and GCP customers, yet those customers will never get the AWS and GCP systems for themselves.

There are "impure" and "non-OSI" licenses such as Fair Source and Fair Code that enable companies to build in the open and give customers the keys to the kingdom. They just reserve the sole right to compete on offering the software. OSI purists attack this, yet these types of licenses enable consumers do to whatever they want with the code except for reselling it. If we care about sustainability, we wouldn't attack the gesture.

There are really multiple things going on in "open source" and we're calling it all by the same imprecise nomenclature.

The purists would argue not and that the OSI definition is all that matters. But look at how much of the conversation disappears when you adhere to that, and what behavior slips by.

> If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work...

You're only responsible to the people who pay you to deliver something. It's not complicated.

> that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.

Exactly what burden?