People who are motivated by money have been saying this for decades. And they’re still wrong because not everyone is motivated by money.
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 can think of at least twenty that I know or knew personally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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