I really fear for startups and OSS these days. The co-founders are arguing about 30k's worth of shares. The reality is that with their talent they could earn that *per month* at FAANG.
Who is going to build the next generation of tech, if everyone is sitting at cushy remote jobs building ad-tech?
> The reality is that with their talent they could earn that per month at FAANG.
You are making the mistake in assuming that the FAANG interview process is not based on a tradeoff: they rather send away many competent people than hire incompetent ones. Due to this, many people with deep technical expertise don't get into FAANG. Think of neuro divergent people. Someone like RMS would not ever pass the cultural fit interview. Think of people who know how to code well in the problem domain but can't do so on a whiteboard. Think of people who have the expertise but lack a degree. Yes, examples exist where such people made it into FAANG, but this doesn't mean that it's really possible for someone like them to make it into FAANG.
Yes, many famous OSS people would be hired by FAANG in a heartbeat. But this isn't neccessarily the case for most folks in OSS.
Also don't forget that you make 30k per month when in the USA. Quite many senior developers with "FAANG talents" work in lower dev income countries on proprietary software and for some reason don't relocate to the US. Often, a lot of OSS contributions come from them. Godot for example was founded by someone living in Buenos Aires.
I think it will be self-correcting since those cushy jobs pay well enough to let you quit while being financially secure, so they need to pay even more to keep people, compounding the situation.
If you want to build innovative things or contribute to society, the best strategy right now seems to be dividing your time between (1) making a lot of money and (2) making no money.
That's what I've been doing for a few years, doing about 6 months freelancing followed by a year of personal projects. If I were to go back in time it may have made more sense to spend 3-4 years at a FAANG then 10 years independent, but I also worry it may have changed my perspective.
I thought about this, but then thought why would I spend my savings doing the same thing I do at work only to be making no money and have a wave of whinging users furious I didn’t fix their pet bug. When I could instead spend that time sitting on a beach sipping martini’s.
I think it’s about makers gonna make mindset. If you like building things you spent all time building things. Sipping martini’s may be fun for the first week.
That's fine in a truly affluent laissez-faire society that we've enjoyed
through the 80s and 90s and some of this century.
But here's what might happen when the good will and good faith of free
labour that supports the machine is pushed too far. A little fictional
retelling of "The Golden Goose" for our time [1]
The makers who are going to make are making now, not making money at Facebook so they can later make. I have no idea if I'm going to die tomorrow and I'm not going to do so as a Facebook employee dreaming of the day I'm not.
Getting paid a lot to sit behind a big desk on week days and occasionally write C++ in order to support my own venture eventually became untenable. I couldn’t bring myself to take the day job seriously: it’s useless corporate shit that does nothing but make the world a worse place, and it took time and attention away from making my own customers happy.
Edit: the worst of it was that because I stopped caring about office politics, I ruthlessly called out process problems, and accumulated ridiculous amounts of responsibility far beyond my job description. I hope everything went OK after I stopped showing up.
Exactly. Given unlimited budget of both time and money, how would I amuse myself with it?
Buy a big house. Ok then what? Sit on my couch in my big house? What about the 2nd hour?
Sure I'd travel and consume amusements like ziplining in the jungle or something and seeing plays and concerts.
Ok but then what?
What I would do is buy a big workshop and fill it with all kinds of tools in all kinds of different disciplines, from woodworking to 3d printing to welding to machining to chemistry to glassworking to software to electronics... (ok I lack imagination because in fact my garage, basement, guest room, and a rented 10x20 self storage unit are already stuffed to the gills with those exact things, plus guitars and aquarium stuff and cycling stuf...) and not just to look at them but to play with them.
That IS my maitai on the beach.
The beach is very enjoyable, and I do enjoy it, but it is not interesting.
The users who get my stuff for free don't matter at all. I owe them nothing. If I care about a project or a project's reception or usefulness or quality, then I care about it. The users don't extract unwilling care out of me, I have to already care on my own, which means adressing bugs or features is just more of the same work I WANTED to do just like the developing in the first place.
It's totally backwards to think of the users as some kind of burden you hate.
I mean, let's say you do hate that burden: ok then just don't release any of the stuff you built. But then what was the point in that? Yes you can't help building stuff and it was engaging and interesting to build, and you chose to do it when you had the choice to do anything you wanted... but still, part of what makes something worth doing is that it's at least theoretically not totally pointless. Even if in reality your github gains no real audience, it's good enough that it's at least published and out there and could possibly be found interesting or useful by someone else sometime. The mere possibility is enough. But to me unreleased code is a dead end. It's maybe good for exercise but what good is the exercise if not to eventually use the strength for something somewhere that is something other than exercise?
So you build and publish and so what if some users whinge?
but it's not about making cool new things that everybody is interested on
by this point the issue is maintaining boring old stuff everybody depends on
maybe that's what happens to most (google for example), from being a cool new research program in search and document analysis to just another company trying to make money to keep up
I have played around with elementary OS for a bit, and even though it was "coding like at work", it was really refreshing to see how much elementary's tiny team has already achieved. At the MegaCorp day job, every new button requires a meeting marathon only to fail in unforeseen ways.
Martinis on a beach and hobby coding are also compatible.
In my experience it’s definitely about company size / stakeholder count rather than user base. You don’t need a bunch of people to sign off if there aren’t a bunch of people.
It's entirely about company size and profit. Small companies can't afford to have their limited staff wasting time on bullshit. Big companies tolerate or even encourage it, for various reasons.
> why would I spend my savings doing the same thing I do at work
If you are spending your time at work exactly the same way you would spend your freetime then yeah, it doesn't make any sense.
Many of the jobs that pay well don't make you do things that are fun though, but more things the business needs in order to make more profit. Since it is like that for most software developers, I think that's the perspective that
akvadrako has as well.
With that perspective, then it makes sense to work (on unfun work) for X amount of years in order to afford spending Y amount of years on actually fun work.
History shows that programmers tend to build more useful and groundbreaking work when there is no deadlines and it's for their own fun as well.
> If you want to build innovative things or contribute to society, the best strategy right now seems to be dividing your time between (1) making a lot of money and (2) making no money.
I am figting for the bad guys in my work time and for the good guys in my frer time?
To me, ad tech isn't inherently bad, although some uses of it definitely are... the main problem with it is, it makes way too much money. From this standpoint, taking these companies' excess cash and putting it to better use seems like the best possible thing an individual could do, if they have the skills.
Ad tech is absolutely inherently bad, and it is not a fixable problem.
Just off the top of my head, there are multiple unsolvable problems with the market. There are principal-agent problems between ad brokers and both buyers and sellers [0],[1] and attribution is nearly impossible [2] - which leads to increasingly invasive surveillance tools being deployed. Then there's the issue of asymmetric information: most consumers have no idea what information is being collected about them, or even by whom. Just outside the market, there is also the "clicks and attention == revenue" externality that is extremely costly to society. Every single ad tech company is either exploiting these problems in the market to generate outsized profits, or selling increasingly invasive surveillance technology to try to "solve" them.
The problem isn't any individual bad actor's behavior - it's the entire structure of the digital advertising market. There is no solution, because even assuming everyone is acting in good faith and in their best interests you'll see the exact same devolution to "What if we just find ways watch everything everyone does and track everything they do on and off their computers all the time? That's both profitable and clears up a lot of the market failures. Let's do that!"
Those are all good points. You certainly seem more informed about it than me.
Some of these points seem to apply to traditional advertising as well, although arguably traditional advertising isn't great either. Attribution is an eternal ad industry problem. Principal-agent issues exist too, but might be worse now, with the layers of tech abstraction that only the "agents" understand and manipulate. OTOH attribution is easy for agents to manipulate even in low-tech contexts.
The relentless digital surveillance is new, and yeah, pretty awful, and hopefully we see it getting shut down by moves in consumer tech, e.g. that privacy thing Apple did that pissed FB off (I don't recall exactly what it was).
I think the basic idea behind Google AdWords is pretty neat, although now they're trying to extract maximum value by clogging pages with ads and reducing the distinction between ads and organic search results.
You're not taking excess cash, you're providing them value (in the form of engineering expertise) in excess of the value you extract as a salary. That's the whole reason companies hire employees!
Unless you're advocating for getting hired in adtech and then sabotaging their projects from within while collecting a salary, but I don't think that's ethical, legal, or what you're describing...
At this point the bad guys are the good guys. React, Kubernetes, and Go are A) paid for by B) really popular because of Facebook and Google. The only question I have is if the bad guys will stop being the good guys (aka funding OSS ).
Haven't looked into Go too deeply, but React and Kubernetes are toxic technologies. Their strategic purpose is to disempower indie devs and small enterprises, who have no say in what the "new normal" is.
>React and Kubernetes are toxic technologies. Their strategic purpose is to disempower indie devs
Wut? ...You're ...gonna need to defend that assertion. Just because BigCo's tooling is fit for BigCo's purpose does not mean they set out to harm smaller devs.
You don't turn a bicycle for the mind into a monorail for the soul without doing some serious, respectable engineering, of the kind you and I will probably never be let anywhere near.
at least in the US that's a lot harder because the health insurance for my family of 5 is through the roof. even if i saved a whole lot of money it would be burned through easily by health care costs in months.
health care is more expensive for my family than my property taxes + mortgage
There are around 25 million software developers in the world. Total number of software engineers in FAANG, is around 50,000 from the published number from those companies.
So software developers just have to:
- Have the time and patience to spend weeks to months practicing
coding quizzes unrelated to their actual software engineering work...
- Pass HR teams arbitrary filter definitions of what is a good university.
- Pass the filters of random interviewers definition of cultural fit.
- Hope the experience and knowledge of these developers, intersects with the knowledge of the developers driving the interviews on the days of their onsite.
- Be able to put up with recruiters processes.
So as to eventually be hired into a bubble representing 0.2% of that software set of 25 million, and get most of their compensation in flimsy stock options.
Is that really easier or even a more interesting option, just to then spend your days maintaining the latest deluded take
of somebody else JavaScript framework? :-)
I based myself on published numbers from the companies, but would like to have a more precise number. Note I am thinking Software Engineers not Employees.
Really? Where'd you get the numbers for, say, Google? As of 2021, looks like they hire 21,000 engineers, which is almost half your FAANG engineer budget, and while they're big, they're not _that_ big.
I feel this is going to turn into a discussion of what a SWE is, and are Data Scientists or SRE's also Developers or not. For Google I think their number is probably 25,000.
As of 2016 they stopped reporting their split of employees. Something that is actually a decrease in material quality of reporting that Wall Street analysts don't seem to have complained about...
Their last 10k to have those numbers said:
"December 31, 2016, we had 72,053 full-time employees: 27,169 in research and development, 20,902 in sales and marketing, 14,287 in operations, and 9,695 in general and administrative functions."
Alphabet had in the meanwhile 200 acquisitions and their total current number of employees is 156,500 employees ( As of end 2021). Taking the very, very, optimistic view that the number of R&D employees augmented in the same exact proportion and that 1 in 2 R&D employees is doing software development we get a number in the
25,000 to 30,000 SWE's
Netflix has only 11,300 employee and it seems most are content development so lets says 2000 SWE's
Apple has a little bit less employees than Alphabet ( 154,000) and I dont believe in more SWE per employee than Google so let's say another 25,000.
Facebook had 71,970 full-time employees as of December 2021 so I am going to
say 10,000 SWE...
For Amazon get's difficult as you need to split with AWS plus you cannot the
number of 500,000 employees at Amazon for nothing. Let's say they have 25,000 SWE what looks like a massive number both for AWS and Amazon.
So I am probably in a range of 50,000 to 100,000. Would still mean we are talking about working on small set of 0,2 to 0.4 % of the worldwide professional software developers and I guess the core point still stands:-)
I debated replying to this, since the thread has long since moved on, but FWIW, I work for Google, and I’m in a position to know how many SWEs we have.
In general, looking at the companies you cite, I would estimate that roughly 40-50% of the employees are SWEs, with some variability based on industry. It’s a lot more people than you think.
Apple and Amazon both are way less than 40% SWEs because they employ a lot of lower paid workers (Apple at their stores and AppleCare help desks, Amazon at warehouses and logistics). Facebook, Google and Netflix may be closer to the 40-50% mark.
No offense, but it's hard to monetize FOSS operating systems.
I've yet to see a scalable business model.
All FOSS OS's rely on either donations or consulting/support for revenue.
There's just no money to be made there, unless someone comes up with something innovative.
But ElementaryOS is in a unique position to monetize which they don't use.
They don't allow commercial applications on their app store. I'd publish there in a heartbeat, if they did.
They are also in the position they (barely) function at a very low cost. They don't need a lot of cash flow to make a huge difference.
If someone has a way in with them, please please mention this. I'd hate for ElementaryOS to die, I really like it and have followed it from the beginning.
It's the only Linux which strikes the balance between being "normal" and caring about simplicity, consistency and ease of use.
I forgot to mention - the user can pay $0 for any app. This is the problem which needs to be fixed. All apps are donationware, enforced by the appstore.
This is exactly why I never bothered. Combine that with the fact users can pay $0 and then come to GitHub to complain (i.e. create a support burden), I figured it wasn't the best option for a solo developer to build a business model on.
It would be more interesting if there was more flexibility in the monetization. Options for a minimum price + pay more per seat (for integration with some corporate provisioning software), subscription pricing, one time price + either support subscription or support "piecework" (like bug bounties or developer consultation), and invoicing integration.
> They don't allow commercial applications on their app store.
Which I kinda agree with, as they want to promote open-source apps first, but I'd also be okay with an option to display commercial apps to purchase or install with a disclaimer that these are not open-source apps.
It'd be nice to have the ability to install Spotify, Discord, and some other popular apps and have them automatically kept up-to-date directly from the App Store. And that wouldn't negate the ability to sideload or use a third-party repo.
Their solution is to act as a proxy between your HomeAssistant installation at home and the public internet. Supposedly the SSL certificate sits on your device and they have no access to your data. I think this is the right way to do it
> It's documented how to set this up yourself if you don't wanna pay them to manage it for you too.
That right there is the best way to go. Everything in the open, everything can be self-hosted, but you can pay for the convenience of someone else doing it.
I’d normally have done that myself. But considering that having them handle it also funds Home Assistant development, it was actually pretty easy to decide for.
Always thought that Aesprite were onto something good. Assuming I've got this right, the source code is out there and free, but you need to pay for the compiled binaries. Most people can't be bothered doing the latter, so paying a bit for it is worthwhile
I'd be worried about perverse incentives. The company is now incentivized to make the build process more difficult, or at least not incentivized to try to make the build process easier for end users, which goes against the point of open source.
> I'd be worried about perverse incentives. The company is now incentivized to make the build process more difficult, or at least not incentivized to try to make the build process easier for end users, which goes against the point of open source.
Open Source doesn't imply anything on the code. It assumes to benefit from a wide range of people (and outsiders views).
Open Source projects, which would reject PRs on improving the build process will suffer contributions in the long run, risking their acceptance in the community.
It should aid itself. At least this is the philosophy I proclaim myself :)
No, but if we imagine the incentive taken to the extreme, where you have an arcane build process that makes it essentially impossible for any person who's not on the original team to build the software, then the software devolves to effectively just a source-available project, since the users have no way of actually building their own versions, which also precludes being able to make any modifications even on their own forks.
I guess the major difference vs truly only source-available is that you can still copy and paste chunks of code to use in other projects?
I am struggling to think of any open source project of any size beyond small NPM packages that I've experienced that do not have an arcane build system. At least all of the ones I've encountered have been incredibly obtuse, to the point that I've mostly just given up. Anything Mozilla, Google, or Facebook writes. Actually, come to think of it, the only open source projects of non-trivial size I've ever been able to build without dedicating several weeks of time to have been from Microsoft.
To be fair, these steps can go wrong when the project doesn't make clear that there are a lot of implicit dependencies for the configure step to even work (and then make can sometimes break if those implicit dependencies aren't the expected version).
But to your point, there are a lot of projects for which those steps work just fine.
Sure and in fact it did happen with one of the software i was trying to build, but the (first) error is usually along the lines of "cannot open include file foobarlib.h" - so i can search for that library (and many package managers let you search for the header files directly) or "this struct doesn't have that field" (common with -IIRC- libjpeg that at some point made some structs opaque). The latter is a bit more work (fixing the code) but it is also very rare.
Indeed which is why I like rust so much. The best thing they did was to make every program statically linked, so the build process succeeds 99% of the time. The only time I’ve had it fail for me really is when a project depends on OpenSSL and I don’t have it configured to it’s liking. Those time bring me back to the “make” days when I’d have to spend an afternoon installing some tool with all its dependencies, and even then sometimes I’d sometimes give up in frustration.
The problem with static linking is that if all you have is a binary (e.g. closed source program) you do not get any new fixes or features from the libraries you depend on.
For example many early 2000s games that used SDL 1.x can be made to work on modern Linux simply by removing the SDL so file they were bundled with and let them use the one the system provides (most common issue would be audio but also mode setting or full screen support).
This isn't a thing only on Linux btw, SDL games that have an old DLL can also have issues on Windows (in fact a game of mine was like that :-P) but be made to work by simply replacing the DLL with a newer one.
That’s surely a problem but I try to avoid closed source software for this very reason. Obviously there are a million and one ways closed source software can leave you high and dry, and static linking is one of those but really I think the operative word driving the sadness here is “closed” rather than “static”.
This can be an issue with open source programs as well from a practical perspective. For example let's say i modified Gtk to use a sane file dialog - i'd rather replace the system installed shared object once and have everything use it rather than recompile everything that uses Gtk.
If I think about the software that I use on a regular basis that I've built from scratch at least once, quite a few of them are fairly straightforward and basically just the two lines I indicated. Just off the top of my head all of these were just those two lines (download build tool then run the install step):
1. Kubernetes
2. git-annex
3. The new generation of replacements for various core command tools (e.g. ripgrep, fd, etc.)
EDIT:
> several weeks of time
Out of curiosity, what projects were those that took several weeks? My presumption is probably very GUI heavy ones?
I don’t know about weeks, but I remember LibreOffice, Firefox, and Clang all having their own ad hoc build systems requiring some amount of custom configuration.
Debezium is also very Byzantine, or maybe it’s just that I don’t understand maven.
There's a little more to it (deb-src into /etc/apt/sources.list), but it's super-instructive to do it on something like 'busybox' and be able to make legitimate changes to something like 'ls' ... or do it to 'coreutils' and make modifications to the "real ls".
Although the "speed-bump" to being able to build packages for the first time is a bit rough, the benefit is that the documentation is outstanding and the process is pretty seamless for most/all packages, regardless of complexity.
The docs and tools are written by engineers and maintainers for people just like you... an independent consumer/programmer, sitting at their computer, trying to (re-) build a package to add a feature or fix a bug.
The other benefit is that the process is relatively consistent across literally thousands of packages and there's a lot of docs + tools +features to handle almost any scenario that Debian (Ubuntu) supports. If you learn it for one use case, your investment pays dividends across all other packaged software.
It depends on the ecosystem (especially for tools without GUIs, I've found it usually is just two lines at the terminal: one to install the build tool for a given ecosystem and then the other to run it), but sure there are plenty of open source projects which are difficult to build from scratch. However, for most of them this is an acknowledged shortcoming that they try to fix when given the time and resources. It might be a much different world if there was a financial incentive to magnify that shortcoming.
FOSS can’t really work like this because anyone is free to compile it and stick it in a flatpak or on the distro repos. It only really works for something like iOS where there is only one store.
I've seen the pay-for-binaries model in a few places.
Not sure if it's scalable since someone can write a build script and share it with the community.
It depends -- with a community build script, you're relying on (and trusting!) a third party to maintain it and not do anything malicious. Much easier to pay a few bucks for first party binaries. At least in my eyes.
I'm not sure Aseprite is an example to follow - just as they made this license change, a fork of the previous license - LibreSprite - has popped up. It lacks a lot of the features and bugfixes of Aseprite, but hey it's free, and many open source enthusiasts view it as the morally superior version.
This simultaneously shows the weakness of the open-source development model - a non-monetizable passion project can rarely match the quality of something with full-time devs behind it, and probably isn't something that the Aseprite dev(s) are happy about - it sucks to compete against your own product sold for $0.
My impression is that RedHat is basically the only company to pull off the open source + paid support model. All other open source companies I know of either use open core or paid hosting.
Are there are any other companies like RedHat successfully thriving off just paid support? If so which ones? If not why not?
PostgreSQL has a number of companies providing support, the db is free and open source. Ray is offered for free, Anyscale provides support. Quansight offers qhub for free and provides support. Those are just a few off the top of my head. Disclaimer: I work at Quansight and contribute to ray.
Anyscale seems to follow the paid hosting (open source product + paid in-house SaaS offering) strategy though? Similarly the majority of the companies listed at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/ either provide paid hosting or some version of open core (proprietary add-ons/tools) in addition to support, or else seem to be general DB consultancies that include Postgres as one of their supported products, although it does look like there are a few small teams that focus exclusively on Postgres consulting.
Quansight is a fascinating example! Are you allowed to share roughly what ratio of revenue comes from the support side and what ratio comes from the venture fund?
I don’t really know, sorry. There are a lot of moving pieces as the company grows (we are hiring) and the interplay between the pure consulting, open source work, growing the Venture fund is dynamic.
What's wrong with paid hosting? For the people who do pay for software (essentially commercial entities), the management and support are as important (if not more) than the software itself.
The code being open-source is actually a great advantage because it alleviates concerns around lock-in and vendor going under (If e.g. AWS's RDS is for some reason no longer available to us, I can still run Postgresql myself, at least until I find an alternative).
Oh nothing wrong. I'm just on a fact-finding mission on seeing whether any other companies have successfully followed the consulting/support contract model vs paid hosting or open core (because this has rather significant repercussions on what kind of products lend themselves well to a given business model, e.g. a desktop app is not going to work well for paid hosting).
But I'm not really counting cURL because that's just one person right? The challenges faced by essentially a 1-person freelancer are quite different than a larger company. Or is cURL now a whole company at this point? EDIT: I see you mean this as a separate category of just "projects."
Proxmox projects (Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup, Proxmox Mail Gateway) are also 100% fully open source and gets the revenue through enterprise support. Works fine for us.
The thing is if you do pull off the open source + paid support model where does that leave you? Doing technical support? I suspect most of us would prefer to spend our time creating rather than answering emails and phone calls.
It feels like we have the cart before the horse, we start by deciding we want to do open source then try and squeeze the business model into it. We would be better starting with the business and customers then deciding whether open source helps or hinders.
IIRC EnterpriseDB mainly makes it money from paid hosting and I think Hashicorp makes its money from a combo of paid hosting and open core (i.e. it has other proprietary tools and add-ons). SUSE is a good example, but I'm not as sure about Canonical. Wasn't it the case that Canonical is actually operating at a loss and has been for a while? Maybe that's changed?
Oh interesting. But digging into that it looks like it's coming from adding open core and previous to that they were losing money? (Ubuntu Pro + Ubuntu Advantage providing auxiliary proprietary? tools)
My understanding is that Busybox and buildroot are largely maintained by individual consultants which is pretty similar (although there's no larger company around them.)
Funding is very good these days for OSS startups, especially related to kubernetes and cloud.
That said, I wouldn't recommend that anyone become a founder for the cash. It's just not worth the stress.
The thrill of inventing something, finding product market fit, building a team and product from zero, working on the GTM... Worth everything I own and more. Would pay to do it.
vc funding is a pattern by which autonomous entities made out of money (better known as investment funds) take over your property and wind up controlling "your" (but really their) company
If you can afford to work for free or even paying for the privilege to work, than this is very good for you, but not helpful for anyone who needs to make a living first.
But thanks for providing a counter example, that there is indeed money in OSS.
I think worse than that, lawyers are now involved. Given the cost of retaining counsel, the likelihood of either of them getting $26-30K out of this now seems remote. One or both need to smell the coffee, and realise this is a great path to both walking away with nothing...
I don't get why "lawyers getting involved" is cast as such a big deal, either in the one partner's tweet or here.
Like yeah, bringing in a lawyer can signal there's about to be a nasty fight, or if they're drastically unequal parties it's often a power move by the bigger guy.
But if (as claimed) it's for something like drafting a contract to formalize a deal that's already been negotiated to near-completion, it's a no-brainer to have one. That's a few billable hours for peace of mind that the transaction was handled thoroughly and correctly.
I think the point is they are fighting over only ~$50k (and some likely worthless equity), and involving lawyers could easily eat a majority of that money. And that's assuming they never go to court, in which case all of that money and then some will go to legal fees.
I was saying "lawyers involved" is not a meaningful demarcation point about costs. How the two partners choose to use those lawyers is.
For example, again, involving a lawyer to draft paperwork to memorialize a contract you're already in alignment on is perfectly normal and a relatively light cost of doing business.
But choosing to vindictively run up each-other's billed hours is the opposite.
I'm sorry that my previous post wasn't clear that I was communicating the possibility space.
That possibility space is important because in these kind of transactions, no matter how amicable or nasty, a lawyer is going to be involved to some extent. Therefore it's meaningless to talk about whether or not "lawyers involved."
Founder disputes (especially at this level) should be resolved through mediation before resorting to adversarial legal battles. Divorcing couples pay 1/10th by going this route.
I like how Elastic is making this work. Open source is no longer built/supported primarily by individuals (with a few notable exceptions).
Most is done by large companies with monopolies, since they are the ones that can afford it. React is a good example. Linux/RedHat another. And it makes it easy to rely on them - you know React will be maintained. You know ELK stack will be around 5 years from now.
You need a large margin to be able to give back to the community in this way, sustainably, for a long period of time.
Unfortunately the open source activism movement got political at one point, and lost its charm to a large degree. I am not going to go into the question if that was right/wrong.
> The co-founders are arguing about 30k's worth of shares.
The company is in one of those situations where it is likely to either fail in the near future or get much more valuable. Like Ford in 2008 at $2, or AMD under $2 prior to their Zen architecture. Arguments about why someone cares so much about so little are equally valid on either side and are not terribly useful.
If the solution to keep afloat was to take 5% haircut than the money situation was not bad. Bigger issue is that apparently there's no agreement between the founders how much company they own and the value of it.
Nice thing about OSS is that Elementary OS license is GNU GPL3.0 which means that project can live on if there's interest in it.
Apparently, most people on Reddit and HN feel that Solus lost its momentum after Ikey left. The relatively conservative development Solus is seeing with Josh Strobl et al. isn't sexy enough!
I'm not a 'pure tech guy', but I know enough to do project management and challenge devs of tech choices given a business objective.
I work at a startup for 50% of my normal wage. If the project fail, I simply go back to BigBankInc, work there 1 year or 2, and start again. Easy!
Of course my personal budget and lifestyle are very minimalist, I basically sacrificed my hobbies for my busines project. However I am totally happy with this decision, it improved my mental health a lot. I attribute this kind of 'needs arbitrage' as an outcome of my meditation practice.
Do note however that I do not have a family (yet)...
We get what we pay for. Nobody pays for high quality OSS but advertisers pay very well for surveillance driven adware.
It’s tough for startups too but for different reasons. Startups doing interesting work can recruit top talent but they usually have to offer a good equity package too. Equity is tough since the supply is so limited in a growth company.
If your startup is doing something that is boring as hell or worse adtech, the only option is to have a high margin business or a lot of VC to try to compete with the FAANGs on raw salary.
This always have been the case, I think. If not with IT then with other jobs in the world. Teachers and healthcare workers have been criminally underpaid, and yet they don't all quit. Which really sucks but shows that the issue is not that simple.
Who is going to build the next generation of tech, if everyone is sitting at cushy remote jobs building ad-tech?