Paying people to work on open source is good

I&#x27;ll respond to the little part where it puts using a &quot;non-OSI approved license&quot; under the umbrella of open source. It&#x27;s not OSI approved because it isn&#x27;t open source, as the community defined it long ago, and as it still makes sense for it to be defined. If you want me to agree with you, don&#x27;t do that.<p>Otherwise, I don&#x27;t feel compelled to consider a bunch of disparate things as a <i>Win</i>. Here&#x27;s one that could be more of a trap than a win, depending on the particulars of the job: &quot;Employed by Microsoft to work on Python?&quot; Look no further than <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ghuntley.com&#x2F;fracture&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ghuntley.com&#x2F;fracture&#x2F;</a>

A few weeks ago a wrote in to my Senator on the complete lack of government funding for independent engineers&#x2F;small projects building FOSS (USA).<p>NLNet in the EU is awesome. We really should have something like the NLNet in the USA.

I want to agree, and I understand the position, but there&#x27;s no room for nuance when you throw around the work &#x27;always&#x27;.<p>I think I disagree that it is always good.<p>For instance, if a company is paying someone to work on open source, and they use that to leverage the project in a direction that is against its other users&#x27; best interest, can that be good? I don&#x27;t think so.<p>There are numerous examples of situations and behaviors you could come up with that are not &#x27;good&#x27;.<p>I&#x27;m all for people making a living, but I don&#x27;t like bad behavior, no matter if it generates &#x27;freeish&#x27; source code or not.

This is as good a context as any to remind people of the origins of the Open Source Initiative and its definitions. Here&#x27;s how the OSI described its history on its website in 2007 (emphasis added):<p>&gt; The conferees decided <i>it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with &quot;free software&quot;</i> in the past and <i>sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds</i> that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. ... A month later ... the participants voted to promote the use of the term &#x27;open source&#x27;, and agreed to adopt with it the <i>new rhetoric of pragmatism and market-friendliness</i> that Raymond had been developing.<p>I find it a bit amusing that here we are, decades later, and people who use non-OSI licenses to try to thwart exploitation by enormous corporations are condemned on highly moralistic grounds for not being &quot;truly open source&quot;.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20071115150105&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.org&#x2F;history&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20071115150105&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource...</a>

The community I&#x27;ve been most involved in over the past few years has been R&#x2F;tidyverse. Some developers are paid (by RStudio [now Posit] and other orgs, like R Consortium) to work on software, docs, community initiatives etc.<p>The experience as a programmer in this domain is amazing. Having these funded full time OSS contributors lets thousands of R enthusiasts (like me) benefit because someone incredibly high-leverage was paid to give a lot of their time to a project. So when you go to use that library, its docs are immaculate (I&#x27;m thinking all the tidyverse packages, Shiny, RMarkdown etc), and the examples are simple and brilliant. Getting up and running is often as little as <i>taking an educated guess</i> at how it would work, and often that&#x27;s exactly how the function&#x2F;package was designed! Having at least one dedicated person seems to dramatically improve the quality of OSS, possibly because it helps organise the dozens of people each making smaller contributions.<p>I suspect this works so well because open source projects sometimes don&#x27;t attract attention to key areas like documentation, and UX (some of my most-loved OSS projects still have horrendous UX because, I suspect, contributors love to add things but nobody wants to be the person who organises it into a coherent package for users, much less remove people&#x27;s contributions because they&#x27;re unnecessary and confuse users).<p>When I contrast the experience with communities that have much fewer (or no) full time funded OSS contributors, there&#x27;s much more niggle and inconsistency with libraries, interoperability, and especially in documentation.<p>Sorry, I&#x27;m rambling, but the R community has been an amazing example of how paying a few dozen full time OSS people can have a dramatically outsized benefit to the community for years to come. I&#x27;m very appreciative I get to stand on the shoulders of these humble giants.

&gt; Every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, it’s a win.<p>Amen. It&#x27;s becoming more common, and there&#x27;s lots to celebrate [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fossfox.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fossfox.com&#x2F;</a>

I donate to a decent number of open source projects. Others I think are more than fine without me (Linux kernel, etc.) but I wouldn’t hesitate to donate if I believed they weren’t.<p>For the rest, I would indeed as happily see them fail than compromise on the definition of open source. The two are equivalent to me.

I don&#x27;t understand when it became this was FOSS was always about &quot;Free as in speech.&quot; But for some reason it became &quot;Free as in beer.&quot; and many of the arguments I see around dev pay seem to be conflating the 2.<p>Open source merely means the source is open and free for you to view look at modify, etc. At no point does it mean it costs nothing. Now with code it&#x27;s not exactly a super reasonable business model to sell a software product but make it&#x27;s code freely available, but that would still meet the definition of open source.

This blog post interprets saying “it’s not open source, though” as if it were a criticism of releasing software under various other source-available licenses.<p>Maybe some people mean it that way, but for me it’s purely about not watering down terms that have a clear meaning. Sometimes source-available licenses are better for the business and it’s understandable why some businesses do that. It’s less generous, but still a good thing.<p>(Just like it’s understandable that people don’t make source code available for all their software.)

I think cooperatively owned tech orgs are the future. Contribution to open source software will always lag behind private entities as people aren&#x27;t prone to work for free.<p>Are there any open source projects that are monetized&#x2F;pay their contributors?<p>If I ever get a successful startup going, I am going to explore this model.

I&#x27;m a developer with 15+ YOE, working mostly on legacy code in a govt job but I have extensive experience with modern code bases (C, Rust), and I have contributed to lots of FOSS of projects over the years in my free time as a way to learn new tech. I would work full time on Open Source if I was paid enough to leave my 9-5 job, which is not a lot in a third world country like mine. Say, $1500 &#x2F; month.

Did the author actually want to rant about the &quot;paying people to work on &lt;something&gt;&quot; part, or was it just an excuse to be controversial about the very definition of open source? Not clear to me.<p>But if it was the former, what a way to shoot oneself in the foot!

&gt; Almost nobody makes a living writing free software. As a percentage of all software engineers, it’s so few we can basically round down to zero.<p>As a member of the zero, I approve the title of TFA.

Yes, please start by practicing what you preach. I actually donated 1% of my income to various open source projects I use.

“Far too often I see arguments like: “maintainers shouldn’t be paid by private companies because the government should be supporting them.” Sure, this sounds great – but governments aren’t doing this!”<p>Governments are doing this. The German government funds <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sovereigntechfund.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sovereigntechfund.de&#x2F;</a>

While I have made a few OSS donations, I want to avoid doing so out of principle. I, a lone developer, should not be funding the work my peers do.<p>How much does openssl benefit me personally? How much does eslint? However much, it’s negligible to how much it benefits my employer. Which in turn is negligible to Google.<p>This is a responsibility that big tech ought to pick up, not random people.

I know it&#x27;s not about the definition of open source, but that&#x27;s actually what I found interesting from the article :-). It would have been so simple for the author to acknowledge the actual definition of &quot;open source&quot; and to just mention that their opinion extends to other models... Anyway:<p>- I did not know the BSL! That actually sounds like a pretty great idea: my understanding is that the company makes the code source-available but <i>with a deadline</i> (of maximum 4 years): after that deadline, the code becomes GPLv2. If more companies used that instead of proprietary, it would be a win for open source in the long run (because more code would become GPLv2)!<p>- I am also discovering Polyform. That&#x27;s fun, but less exciting to me than the BSL.<p>- The JSON license seems to be purposely annoying. Reads like some kind of &quot;Fuck you&quot; to the very concept of licenses.

There is another potential source of funding for open source that is quite congruent to its ethos and that is the public sector. For many types of software used by public sector entities it would be quite efficient to support open source development as a public good.<p>There will always be points of view that would consider this (too) as a problematic source of funding (e.g., being suspicious of government actors and their motives) and it can be a major hassle to handle public sector bureaucracy, but given the distribution of demand for software in the economy it seems something natural to some extend and it could alleviate some of the sustainability issues with open source development.

I&#x27;ve always thought a neat model would be something like: pay for convenience, for example, something like: to run git pull&#x2F;clone, you have to purchase &quot;premium&quot; access to their repo, but the code&#x27;s available and you can just download a tar.gz of it if you want. No way would a company balk at paying a little to have a more reasonable system for updates, etc, but the code is still fully open source, free software, etc.

Good piece, but it buries the lede. I suspect the reaction would be different if it started with the conclusion. Otherwise, the title and introduction sounds like another article about direct contributions to maintainers instead of being agnostic about how the maintainers get paid. I think “Purity only serves to limit open source’s value to society” is a great debate topic.

Shameless plug, but I already came up with two terms describing the author&#x27;s vision of open source.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gavinhoward.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;is-source-available-really-that-bad&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gavinhoward.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;is-source-available-really-t...</a><p>I also think that forcing companies to accept liability would fund FOSS.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gavinhoward.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;how-to-fund-foss-save-it-from-the-cra-and-improve-cybersecurity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gavinhoward.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;11&#x2F;how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro...</a><p>Do it right, and the most important projects would be the ones flush with cash.

See also Nadia Eghbal&#x27;s (IMHO definitive) work on the economics and sociology of open source software, &quot;Working In Public&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.stripe.com&#x2F;working-in-public" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;press.stripe.com&#x2F;working-in-public</a>

A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and <i>think really hard</i> about whether doing so is a good idea.<p>I will never compromise on the definition of open source. I&#x27;m not particularly hard-nosed about proprietary software, or source available software either, they&#x27;re fine, with some caveats I&#x27;ll leave out.<p>But it&#x27;s important to have a term for software which is unencumbered by use restrictions, and we do: open source. Lumping other licenses in with it should be resisted. It&#x27;s like (I&#x27;ve never seen this, to be clear) pescatarians rebranding as &quot;seafood vegans&quot;. What is supposed to be gained there, or by trying to bolt on various source-available licenses to the definition of open source?<p>So this guy picks an important topic, and right up front, he&#x27;s telling me he knows that it&#x27;s going to piss me off, but he&#x27;s going to call not-open-source software open source anyway, and if I object, I don&#x27;t care about developers getting paid.<p>Y&#x27;know what? You succeeded. Fuck you, tab closed.

Recently there was a discussion[0] around the value of open source software and how much companies would have had to pay to have it developed from the ground up.<p>The number that was thrown around was $177M.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39340146">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39340146</a>

Sidenote. Some companies offer a &quot;volunteer time PTO&quot;. You can use it to contribute to OSS

I&#x27;ve put some serious thought into solving this problem. There are two main structural issues I know of:<p>1. Open source libraries tend to be complement goods. You&#x27;re more willing to pay for a good physics engine if you already have a good rendering engine and vice versa. But a sad truth of complement goods is that they are a centralizing force - it&#x27;s actually better for everyone if the physics engine maker and rendering engine maker join forces and offer a bundle discount. But the most common strategy seems to be for them to just merge into one company, and this is why you see giant conglomerate products like Unreal and Unity instead of buying each component from a different vendor.<p>2. Since open source software is a public good (non-rivalrous, non-excludable), the &quot;free market&quot; cannot really incentivize its production nearly as much as would be optimal. Let&#x27;s say there are 1000 people who would each pay $10 for a feature to be added, and the maintainer would happily add it for $5000. If 90% of those people each paid $6 they would get what they want and the maintainer would be happy too, but each individual has an incentive to be part of that 10% that gets to keep their $6 and still gets the feature, so what happens is that almost no one ends up paying.<p>These problems can&#x27;t be solved without slightly modifying open source, but they can be solved by maintaining the spirit of open source I think. What you need is to have some kind of foundation that takes money and gives it to &quot;quasi-open-source&quot; projects, and then only allows businesses to use those projects if they contribute a certain percentage of their revenue to the foundation. Of course, now the foundation needs to decide which open source projects to give the money too. It&#x27;s an extremely tricky problem, but there&#x27;s been a lot of interesting research by Glen Weyl on that exact subject and I&#x27;m confident it could be solved in a satisfactory way.<p>I think this proposal would create a virtuous cycle once it got off the ground. The more projects licensed &quot;quasi-open-source&quot;, the larger the incentive to pay the foundation to use them. The more the foundation is paid, the more money these &quot;quasi-open-source&quot; projects get, and so more people will license their projects &quot;quasi-open-source&quot;, increasing the incentive again, etc.<p>Of course, it would only be &quot;quasi-open-source&quot;, and not truly open-source. But there&#x27;s no reason the license couldn&#x27;t be extremely in line with the spirit of open source. For example, it could say &quot;if you&#x27;re an individual or small company, you can use our code for any purpose for free. If you&#x27;re a big company, you can use it in a way that complies with the AGPL or you can pay us, your choice&quot;.<p>I think employees would also encourage their employers to become paying members of such a foundation, if it lead to those employees being able to determine where some of the money goes. Everyone at my current company is a Rust developer and so we naturally like Rust, but Rust jobs aren&#x27;t always easy to find. As employees, it could be in our best interest to subsidize the development of Rust open source projects, if that increased Rust&#x27;s attractiveness to other companies.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in this idea, my email is in my bio :D

&gt; It’s one of the few places where essentially all of humanity works together on something that benefits everyone. A world without open source would be substantially worse than the world we live in.<p>Well said and very true.

Companies should be giving employees oss budget they can use for donations.

No it’s actually terrible. Because then they will eventually abandon the project and you’re stuck with it in your stack. Now you become the maintainer.

It certainly is good, but money also turns many people bad and impacts organizational dynamics.

So many strawmen being set-up in this article the crow population is gonna take a major nose dive.<p>If I hate <i>any</i> specific business model that is used by a company that does some some open source suddenly I don&#x27;t think people deserve to be paid for their work?<p>Yeah no, that&#x27;s garbage. There&#x27;s plenty of garbage business models and they aren&#x27;t suddenly okay because one company uses it and 1% of their money funds some small bit of OSS work that underpins their business model.

Getting them to work for you for free is better! -tech companies

Did anyone following this in Mastodon-land specifically see any reaction to &quot;luxury automated gay space communism?&quot; I would be surprised if he wasn&#x27;t blasted for that.<p>This article came across as much less ranty than I expected based on his disclaimer. I think he pretty much perfectly articulated the noise around funded open source.

If we&#x27;re going to ignore the &quot;official&quot; meaning of open source, then let&#x27;s take a step back to consider why open source is worth supporting in the first place.<p>Open source guarantees to me, the user, that competition among vendors will be possible and fair in the future. This is exactly the point that many &quot;fake OSS&quot; licenses try to take away. Okay, maybe it&#x27;s possible to fork for personal on-prem use, but god forbid someone creates a competing hosted solution that gives <i>any</i> customer more choice. Furthermore, these pieces of software are fucked the day that the company folds, or gets acquired by a malevolent buyer.<p>Open source guarantees a baseline level of respect towards me, the end user. By letting anyone fork a project that&#x27;s gone too far in the wrong direction, I know that my software will continue working in the short run and of it&#x27;s important enough, a competing alternative will emerge that continues without one-sided money or data grabs.<p>There&#x27;s nothing inherently wrong with having someone from Microsoft or Google work on open source software, or any VC-funded company that will without fail turn against their users sooner or later. However, if a controlling majority of developers is employed this way, it provides an opportunity for what elsewhere is known as regulatory capture. If Microsoft&#x27;s goal is to make people dependent on proprietary GitLab and VS Code Marketplace offerings, and Google&#x27;s goal is to provide the greatest possible amount of ads and tracking to the largest possible user base, it does not matter if the software is open source or not. The end result is the same, I&#x27;m left without viable alternatives and big business gets to do with us whatever the hell they please.<p>Especially when this software becomes ubiquitous and entrenched, paying developers to work on company-controlled OSS instead of community-driven, user-respecting OSS is a net negative for everyone in the long run.<p>I&#x27;m only interested in OSS in so far as it protects my interests as an end user, and&#x2F;or our common interests as a society, now and in the future. The collaborative aspect is nice, but that&#x27;s not the reason that we should ask for better compensation for maintainers.<p>The &quot;Open Source&quot; label as such is indeed meaningless per se, and it doesn&#x27;t always protect me either, as seen with BSD+MIT software allowing cryptographically-enabled control of devices that I nominally own, or GPL being useless when there is no actual distribution of software involved. That said, I have yet to see a case of non-OSI &quot;open source&quot; that doesn&#x27;t try to tilt the playing field in biased, controlling and long-term unsustainable or user-hostile ways.<p>If you can&#x27;t build a business on a level playing field, perhaps it&#x27;s in everyone&#x27;s interest that your business and software dies, or retreats into lower-intensity hobbyist maintainership, instead of leading everyone into a hard dependency on your oh so well-intended monetization of originally useful software. Then at least someone else can take a shot at doing it better.

A pro capitalist message from Jacobin? [Looks closer.] No.<p>I&#x27;d pay for an open source project that could filter &amp; sort news by surprisingness-for-that-news-source. This opinion would rank high for jacobin.com. The story about Zuckerberg&#x27;s preference for the Quest 3 over the AVP would disappear.

Given free hosting and compute by the NSA? Win

I&#x27;ll just say this: I don&#x27;t think the government should pay for open source development.

The premise of paid open source devs is fine and well, but every single one of these blogs devolves into delusional utopian nonsense from people who do not understand the staggering infrastructure and maintenance cost of the modern society they think should be some sort of guaranteed right. People, please learn and understand where your food comes from before writing this kind of garbage.