I'm curious on your thoughts about the difference between publishing this post and publishing oss/foss code.
To me, it seems like this blog post is something you've shared freely with the world, with no expectation of getting direct financial compensation for it. You have an idea you want others to read and think about, so you wrote it down.
To me, this act of publishing and sharing your thoughts freely in the hopes others might find them interesting shares similarities to free software. You wrote something that you think others might find interesting or useful, and you want to share it. That statement applies equally well to FOSS and blog posts.
What do you see as the major difference? Is it that OSS rejects copyright, so the code can be used for profit, while your post can't freely appear in, say, a published for-profit book of opinions on OSS? Would you be opposed to this post being published by someone else and you not getting money for similar reasons that you blog about here?
Is the difference in expectations, that people expect support for software, while people expect nothing of blog posts? That a blog post is finished and may be thrown over the wall, comments ignored, typos uncorrected, and that feels "fine", while software thrown over the wall with issues ignored and no future changes planned feels "weird"?
Is there some bigger difference?
Is there a way to reduce this difference, to create an environment or structure where you would share code, just as you currently willingly share your thoughts and writings on this blog?
I actually do make a very small amount of money for my posts. I make about $120 per month on Patreon (I more accurately make $175-ish per month but I also donate back to the amount of about $55 per month to other projects) and this blog is frequently brought up in interviews, which means that it becomes an impetus for people to hire me. I'm not sure how to quantify that, but either way it offsets the costs of hosting the server, even though I have kind of a ridiculous level of overkill (Ryzen 5 3600, 64 GB of ram) for that server.
As for the time to write these posts, yeah I'm making nowhere near my market value for this kind of writing. I've considered adding ads to my blog, but I still feel kind of philosophically uncomfortable with "selling out" like that. My job really does make sure that all my needs are accounted for and I am blessed to be in a state where I have financial excess and can make additional private contributions to other projects.
At some level though my blog is really a sink for my anxiety. Just being able to put words out into the void and knowing that someone is gonna read them helps a lot when it comes to making things a lot less scary in the world. I really do just throw them over the wall when I'm done though lol. Sometimes I'll do a typo pass but most of the time I write well enough that my first pass turns out to be the last pass unless some critical problem is found. This doesn't happen often though.
I do occasionally make volumes out of my writing and sell them on Itch (https://withinstudios.itch.io/), but I have only ever made $250 on there in total; nowhere near enough to fund the creation of the media in question. I also don't advertise my Itch shop very well so that may be partially on me.
Mostly though the goal of this post was to make people think about the issue. I have succeeded.
> This is why I am very careful about how I make "useful" software and release it to the world without any solid way for me to get paid for my efforts. I simply do not want to be in a situation where my software that I develop as a passion project on the side is holding people's companies together.
Isn't this the best position to be in if you want to get paid? "You've built your company on top of my project and now you need this bug fix/feature yesterday? My hourly rate is $$$"
No. It's really not. Every company that has previously obtained your work for free will be offended by having to pay for it. Worst case, you'll be attacked for rent-seeking. Best case, you'll be ignored but your work will used for someone else's profit
I agree with the author: it's time that value be compensated by real financial capital, not empty promises of status in some mythical open source community.
I always think about paying for the open source software that I use and I try to be more dilligent in paying for it.
The problem for me is, that while calculating how much I theoretically should spend on the OS I use for example (gnome+fedora+linux kernel,etc), it would be actually cheaper to pay for a windows version+microsoft cloud/office suite or switch to the apple ecosystem.
Same applies for programming frameworks I use.
Doesn't that mean opensource is inherently impossible to use ethically as a private person?
So how do you decide on how to deep and how much one should pay?
If everyone paid 15$ (+-Netflix sub price in my country) to single favorite FOSS project they use, we'd be in a much better place. In case of libraries/frameworks - they should be founded by companies.
Thanks for the thoughtful article. I've always viewed Free software and to some extent OSS as by programmers, for programmers, period. Contributing code back supports the other programmers who use it. If commercial businesses want to use the software then they are free to contribute back (monetarily to support programmers or with their own code) or not. There is a long history of volunteerism in maintaining the Internet via open standards and I see a lot of OS/Free software in the same way.
It doesn't make sense that businesses don't invest enough in the software they use (paid commercial software or otherwise). That is only to the detriment of the businesses that don't care to invest (their unique use-cases are not improved). It's not quite a tragedy of the commons because nothing prevents the people who do care (Google, MS, Amazon, FB, IBM, to name the large ones) from contributing their improvements back to the ecosystem, and they retain the full benefit of their work.
It is absolutely an unequal exchange of goods for labor for most businesses but the near+zero marginal cost of replicating software means that it's a negligible loss for the authors, if that. The solid benefit for most programmers and system administrators is that they get to use high-quality Free/OS software in the jobs where they do earn money. At least for me, business concerns are secondary; I want to use quality software with a good ecosystem rather than know for sure that my employer paid money for the software that I have to use.
it's a well written article and you got me agreeing with what you are saying. it's surprising to read comments here that start with "open source is not broken" but proceed to repeat everything you wrote in the article...
The title of the article is "Open Source is broken" and its subtitle is "Why I Don't Write Useful Software Unless You Pay Me"
And I disagree with both of these statements. Open source is not broken and I'll continue to write useful software, even if you don't pay me, because it's fun.
The actual problem is concisely present in the article:
> There is this culture of taking from open source without giving anything back.
The problem is not with open source, but with how capitalistic systems interface with open source - the same way the interface with any public good.
It's the capitalist culture that's broken; the capitalist culture of rent extraction and of short-term profit optimization.
Careful license choice and intentionally crippling things such that they are objectively useless unless you meet the exact needs that I have.
I've kind of given up on elemental-ircd and left it unmaintained and archived, but I would probably send a job application in to that place if said unicorn startup happened. A few people have tried to take over elemental in the past, but as a whole the IRC ecosystem is on a downturn so they don't last long. It's a complicated situation though. At some level I'd be shocked that they managed to turn that pile of shit into something usable!
A thoughtful piece, and most supporting points are real and I think I agree with them. However, I don't think the conclusion "Open Source is broken" follows from the arguments.
The most concise counter-example I can come up with is: What would change if that XKCD picture had the critical log4j2 component replaced with closed-source "McA$$hat logj2+ ENTERPRISE" trialware+commercial $$$$ licensed product that was thanklessly maintained by severely underpaid hire-and-fire contractors in a 3rd world country? Nothing. Well, it'd be a lot worse because you couldn't fix it.
What's broken is larger umbrella projects and products, open-source and commercial, not understanding that they own and are responsible all the dependencies. All of them. Down to the very bottom of the stack. Whether they bought them or got them for free. Each and every dependency must be evaluated, and if it's appropriate, you could delegate the risks to a trustworthy sub(contractor) or project.
What if that project gets abandoned? What if "McA$$hat Inc." goes out of business? Or either just changes direction or quality suddenly? Will the security bugs be reported or covered up or remain undiscovered because nobody uses the thing?
I currently trust Linux. I trust the "big" distros. I trust a lot of larger, well maintained opensource projects. I'm very hesitant about things like node.js and others that have very fine grained and super-easy automatic dependency management and build systems the just pull whatever the latest thing is for hundreds or thousands of dependencies. I really don't trust most commercial software because it's always just as broken, but you can never see it nor fix it.
A lot of the article focuses on getting paid. I totally agree and the market will definitely correct when it becomes visibly critical. You can get paid to maintain opensource commercially and that's probably the best of both worlds. There's going to be a lot of people working for a lot of companies getting paid to fix or replace log4j2. There's going to be a lot of people paid to figure out how to get better control over that XKCD picture situation.
But Open Source isn't broken, it's the cure just working it's way along by making that picture visible.
