Alt text; An image showing a meme about open source software. The top part shows an elephant standing on a beach with text reading “The entire world’s IT infrastructure” superimposed on the elephant. Below this is a large, colorful beach ball being supported by tiny ants, with text reading “Unpaid open source devs.” The meme illustrates how the global IT ecosystem heavily relies on open source software that is often maintained by unpaid volunteer developers who carry a disproportionate burden despite their small numbers.
“cOmMuNisM wOuLdN’t WoRk BeCaUsE hUmAnS aReN’t MoTiVaTeD wItHoUt MonEy!!!”
Yeah, that was always a bad argument. The truth is it will always fail in the transitional step where the state owns everything. People in power do not want to give up that power, so it inevitably leads to dictatorship followed by eventual collapse.
Capitalism is the gold standard in economic systems, but we’re living the end game where so much money has funneled up that the rich own us and our legislatures. Not sure how that trap can be avoided. How do we propose to tax the snot out of the very people and institutions that own our collective ass and write the tax laws?
The problem is the concentration of power. We need enough different groups in power that they’re too busy undermining each other to consolidate.
This is the most interesting thing I’ve seen on the subject of motivation, and one of the most interesting videos I’ve ever watched. 10 minutes. Do it y’all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
It explains so much of why I happy or unhappy at jobs, even if being paid far more for less work. Making more money does not equate to satisfaction or better productivity. It explains why we work for free, the very subject at hand. There’s much I’m unhappy about working at Lowe’s, quite the pay cut from my IT career and it’s physically beating my old ass, but I have the 3 things he talks about in the video, and it turns out, those things are gold.
Projecting a bit are we?
They’re literally mock-quoting people who make that claim, as OP is a great example as to why that claim is fucking stupid
No where in this post was communism mentioned
The fact that they are commenting stuff like this shows that they believe this narrative in some form or another.
How the hell did you arrive there? Their entire point is that SO MUCH of our IT infrastructure is community built and supported, no capital incentive required, regardless of what capitalists claim.
I don’t want to start a political debate here so I’ll keep it brief. Foss is mostly supported by corporate interests. Sure there are plenty of community projects but the core stuff is funded by big tech companies.
I don’t like the idea of Foss being mixed in with Communism and Authoritarianism.
I love how the title is basically also the problem.
Who the fuck has some obscure library that is the basis of many other tools as their “favourite project”, even though it might be a fundamental part of many other things that are actually the favourites of people.
Exactly, that’s why we need to convince governments to pay for FOSS.
Anyone having success with monetising their OS software? I have a library with many users that I recently switched to AGPL, but noone wants to pay for it to use it in their company.
Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) has written a little bit about his journey working on curl: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/10/26/working-open-source/
I now work for wolfSSL. We sell curl support and related services to companies. Companies pay wolfSSL, wolfSSL pays me a salary and I get food on the table. This works as long as we can convince enough companies that this is a good idea.
The vast majority of curl users out there of course don’t pay anything and will never pay anything. We just need a small number of companies to do it – and it seems to be working. We help customers use curl better, we make curl better for them and we make them ship better products this way. It’s a win win. And I can work on open source all day long thanks to this.
The problem is the people who use the library don’t have access to the money. They’re just some dev trying to build something and your library is one of their 500 dependencies. The idea of needing to pay for a license means they have to stop building and get other people involved who may or may not approve, which may not be an option if they have a deadline. They will probably just try to find some work around to avoid this.
I wonder if a better approach is to move hundreds of libraries into some kind of joint bundle (a humble bundle). Let companies buy access to them all with one procurement, and also you’ll have more negotiating power and pull if you have a bigger group.
For individual projects the way this usually works is one of the larger companies that rely on the project hires the developer as an employee to maintain the codebase full-time and help integrate it with their internal processes.
Larger projects might form their own company and sell integration & support to other companies (e.g. Red Hat, Bitwarden).
Otherwise you’re basically dependent on donations or government grants.
There’s a Wikipedia article on this subject: Business models for open-source software
And there’s various industry opinions:
Demystifying the Open Source Business Model: A Comprehensive Explanation
How to build a successful business model around open source software
Open Source Business Models (UNICEF course)
I think monetization is easier for user-facing software though, which a lot of this material is written around, and harder for projects like libraries.
Why do you want to monetize it?
You could create a donation page. If no one wants to donate it is probably because there isn’t a perceived benefit of the software.
Where is big tech in this picture? They are the ones making the billions from it.
Governments should be funding the most popular open source software that the world relies on. And big tech should not be allowed to just take it and make billions from it. That was never the intention. It was open source because profit was not the end goal.
Germany is currently paying out a little through the “sovereign tech fund”
