Suggesting that people “get involved” more with the FOSS they use is great, but this blog post comes across really immature, in my opinion. It may do more harm than good, making FOSS types seem childish.
Exactly. I appreciate that the author is trying to bring attention to the problem. Best route is to present it in a mature, respectable way that average consumer and business person will share with their friends. Most won’t share this. A number will even have filters blocking them from seeing it at work.
An alternative style that did get a lot of traction was Nadia Eghbal’s article. I suggest chaica do one more like that if aiming to maximize sharing and contributions.
There is a particular brand of FOSS developer who thinks that because they are donating their free time in support of some project or another, that anyone who uses their software but contributes back nothing is some kind of freeloader. I didn’t even read the whole thing because of all the holier-than-thou and meme gifs but that’s how the author of this article comes across to me. I’m sorry, but just because you put something some code on the internet doesn’t mean the users of the code owe you anything. (Or at least, anything that isn’t already spelled out clearly in the license.)
I’m sorry, but just because you put something some code on the internet doesn’t mean the users of the code owe you anything
Legally? No. Morally? Yes. Then you can convince yourself otherwise to cope with the inevitable guilt you will have by being a freeloader, but FOSS is a community and communities are built on exchange and sharing. If you want to get the fruits of their work without participating in the community you’re allowed to, because using code doesn’t cost anything, but you’re still morally in debt to a certain degree.
I guess we disagree then. Personally, I expect zero return for anything I put on the Internet. Not because I think my efforts are valueless but because the value was derived from the making of the thing in the first place and, perhaps secondarily, sharing it with others. If someone wants to contribute back in some way, that’s absolutely great, but the blatant expectation that they should is just too close to unjustified entitlement for my taste.
And then there’s just the sheer logistical problem of such an idea as well. If you took all of the different open source projects that I used to get my work done today alone, they would number in the thousands, easily. It would take me at least a lifetime to make a meaningful contribution to every single one of those just to repay my one day of work.
But you don’t have to contribute to each one of them. The nature of contribution is not transactional in nature. Since it’s a community, in theory, giving back to a single FOSS project is like contributing to each one of them. You participate as an individual but the effort is collective and you shouldn’t think about this matter as a material transaction between you and the maintainer of each one of the projects you use: “I give you 20 mins of my time and 5 dollars in donations in exchange for 5000 lines of your good code” I mean, you can, but the spirit of most of the people involved in this thing is different.
Also the way you speak about your own code shows that probably you don’t feel part of the community and so you can’t understand the behavior of others and you call entitlement. Just because you publish stuff on the internet with this attitude doesn’t mean that others do the same. You participate in this as an individual, others don’t.
I am part of an open source community and my feelings are far closer to @bityard’s than what’s described in the OP. Entitlement comes in many shapes and sizes, and some form of it is definitely on display in the OP.
My idea of what a community is is irrelevant. You just got done telling someone else they “didn’t understand” because they weren’t part of one. What I’m telling you is a fact: I am part of one and I see things very similarly to @bityard, so your model of what kinds of things people do or don’t understand needs revision.
I am mostly trying to dodge your question, mostly because I don’t think it’s a productive use of my time and also because both the question and its answer will inevitably be incredibly vague, nuanced and difficult to express in a Lobsters comment.
If you don’t want to have a discussion is fine, even though Lobste.rs comments are supposed to support a discussion.
because both the question and its answer will inevitably be incredibly vague, nuanced and difficult to express
There are things that cannot be dealt with in an analytical and dry approach. Vagueness (as intended by STEM people), subjectivity and communication issues are a necessary tradeoff to investigate matters that are complicated.
I don’t think so. The message is simple and straight. It resonates with those people that can understand life beyond consumption and maybe suggest a non-consumeristic, non-capitalistic mode of interaction to some others that are inclined to receive the message. Why is it childish? Because it tells you you shouldn’t be a consumer? That’s not childish at all. It requires a lot of effort to escape consumerist-logic, since it’s what you have learnt in school, from your parents, from media and it’s considered the standard way of living.
Maybe he’s talking about being overly idealistic? The Stallman-esque era of open source in the late 90s/early 2000s had us believe that one day Gimp would surpass Photoshop, and that we’d go into coffee shops and casually observe Linux netbooks.
For a number of reasons that never happened. I wrote a post about it a while back:
Agreed. The large majority of volunteering work is thankless work. Sadly, a lot of people are more likely to thank you when they are paying for your work. Yet, throwing a tantrum is counterproductive indeed.
I’ve written in one of the comments that if projects don’t receive sponsorship in some form, money or contributions from people on a payroll, such projects die. But here’s the other edge of that knife …
—
Projects get built for 2 reasons:
self interest, to solve your own problems
to have users, either to sell a complementary or maybe because we like the thrills or we have some higher ideals
When you have users, you cannot complain that those users don’t contribute. That’s not how this works. This is why I don’t like the usage of “Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)” to describe such work:
either you believe in Free Software, in which case the contributions have a sociopolitical factor to them
or if not then “Open Source” is already that neutral term to describe what you’re doing
projects can be both, you can say about Firefox that it is FOSS; but not people, i.e. you can’t say that you’re working on FOSS; your motivation perfectly describes the camp you’re in and you’d better have that motivation clear
This is relevant because:
Open Source is driven by self interest; if projects die, it’s sad, but if you’re not paid to work on that project, you need to learn to let go at some point, it’s OK, you don’t owe anybody anything
Free Software is driven by ideals, but ideals don’t survive without a business model; so if your project dies, maybe it’s because the market doesn’t want it, so time to refocus
As for getting money or contributors, personally I found that a good strategy is to just ask. OK, I know people that could barely make a living from contributions, but just ask is a simple and effective strategy that’s apparently not common knowledge.
And there are always plenty of newbies lurking in the background willing to contribute, all they need is a little guidance which starts with a simple call for help. Well maintained projects are those providing guidance on what low hanging fruits exist for newbies ;-)
The article also describes the self-entitlement complex of some users. Note for the wise: this happens with free services in general, the most annoying people, the most costly for support, being the ones that don’t pay.
As a software author being too nice is a recipe for burnout. Don’t be an asshole of course, you’re not Linus Tolvards, but do enforce a professional conduct on all communication channels under your control. Remember that the community follows the leaders and their behavior. And also learn to say no to requests which you cannot honor.
You know what makes this even sadder? That although this article target audience is FOSS consumers, most people reading will probably be the FOSS maintainers.
yes that’s true, but I already received 1 kind comment telling me this person will contribute more from now on. Of course this article won’t reach people completely outside of the community, but if it could motivate some people to contribute more, that’s already a great step in my opinion.
It would be great to have more repo statuses on GitHub / GitLab. Are the moment there is either active or archived. Some projects are prototypes, some of them are write-only, some of them are actually maintained, community-maintained, …
The best thing to do as a FOSS publisher is to clearly delineate how to interact with the project in my experience. This helps to set the expectations. Having issue templates, contributor guide, … But that takes a long time to put in place unfortunately. That’s why I think we’ll see some repo status archetypes emerging in the future.
As a maintainer you can choose how you want to spend your time. By making it clear what you are willing to spend it it reduces uncertainty on the other end, which is the cause of a lot of bad attitude. Some people get anxious and don’t know how to communicate clearly.
The lead dev asks for money/recognition through social networks? What a bunch of beggars! He needs money? Me too! Does this person have a Patreon? Who cares! This guy owes me to use his software, he loves coding for free, the sucker.
I think it’s great when people help out or donate to OSS projects, but I’ve been getting a little nervous some of the attitudes towards project funding/sponsorship I’ve seen lately. Corporate sponsorship of projects gives those sponsors a fair amount of power over those projects. Personally I’d rather use software that was produced by someone who’s able to make it without a for-profit company subsidizing development. I think it also makes forking a project more difficult as you won’t be able to carry that revenue stream with you to the fork and is an extra hurdle to competition with the original software .
I’m not saying it’s wrong to accept money for work on an open source project, just that there’s a risk of harmful commercialization when we push for monetary support of OSS.
I’m speaking as an open source author with contributions that were never sponsored, everything being entirely in my free time …
What you want is not sustainable due to these facts:
people need to put money on the table, so they need jobs
working in their free time cuts into their personal life, which is especially hard when you have a family; and let me tell you, OSS work may be fun, but it is NOT relaxing; in fact when you have users, it’s more stressful than your day job
not having a personal life is a recipe for burnout
You may ask yourself, given that I confessed to doing this in my free time, how I cope with it?
The answer is that I don’t. And I don’t know for how long I’ll manage to keep it up.
Of course, highly popular projects can afford a good churn out rate, however such projects are also sponsored and have long timers available to train new contributors. For medium projects (e.g. most programming libraries) long timers are very hard to replace due to having specialized knowledge that’s hard to pass on to the next guy. And sometimes the problem domain is a difficult one, therefore the buss factor isn’t great.
The cold, hard truth is that projects eventually die without eventually receiving sponsorship in some form.
So if you want healthy projects, either donate money or contribute. Because otherwise, frankly, the wishes of non-contributors aren’t very relevant.
I’m not convinced that people have to choose between a personal life and OSS work. People’s capacity to work on OSS on top of a job varies, maybe instead of working 8 hours a day on OSS projects some of us only have a couple hours here and there and the amount of work you can do in that time will be different from person to person. But personally I’d rather use a piece of software with a slower release cycle that’s produced and maintainable by hobbyists than one that has full time developers but is beholden to a sponsoring organization.
And realistically I’m skeptical that it makes economic sense for anyone involved. If the cost to a company of using OSS is to pay one or more developers of that software anything close to their market value they’d be better off actually hiring someone to do it, then either keeping it inhouse to have a competitive advantage, or release under their copyright/license for the PR. For developers, donations for OSS work is probably the least you’ll ever be paid for your time.
Out of curiosity, have you done meaningful open source work? Have you led any projects that have users?
Note that I am not talking of occasional bug fixes or personal code that you end up storing on GitHub and that nobody uses.
I’m asking because I believe that no OSS software author with serious contributions would ever claim that working in your free time is doable long term.
And if you’re new to this, just give it 2-3 more years, we can talk then :-)
I’m not sure what your criteria for “meaningful” is but I have run projects with a userbase in my free time.
You’ve referred to your experience a couple times now and questioned mine, that’s fine, but I feel like you haven’t really touched on the main points I raised: OSS development by corporate sponsorship poses a risk of commercialization that we should be wary of.
Suggesting that people “get involved” more with the FOSS they use is great, but this blog post comes across really immature, in my opinion. It may do more harm than good, making FOSS types seem childish.
Exactly. I appreciate that the author is trying to bring attention to the problem. Best route is to present it in a mature, respectable way that average consumer and business person will share with their friends. Most won’t share this. A number will even have filters blocking them from seeing it at work.
An alternative style that did get a lot of traction was Nadia Eghbal’s article. I suggest chaica do one more like that if aiming to maximize sharing and contributions.
There is a particular brand of FOSS developer who thinks that because they are donating their free time in support of some project or another, that anyone who uses their software but contributes back nothing is some kind of freeloader. I didn’t even read the whole thing because of all the holier-than-thou and meme gifs but that’s how the author of this article comes across to me. I’m sorry, but just because you put something some code on the internet doesn’t mean the users of the code owe you anything. (Or at least, anything that isn’t already spelled out clearly in the license.)
Legally? No. Morally? Yes. Then you can convince yourself otherwise to cope with the inevitable guilt you will have by being a freeloader, but FOSS is a community and communities are built on exchange and sharing. If you want to get the fruits of their work without participating in the community you’re allowed to, because using code doesn’t cost anything, but you’re still morally in debt to a certain degree.
I guess we disagree then. Personally, I expect zero return for anything I put on the Internet. Not because I think my efforts are valueless but because the value was derived from the making of the thing in the first place and, perhaps secondarily, sharing it with others. If someone wants to contribute back in some way, that’s absolutely great, but the blatant expectation that they should is just too close to unjustified entitlement for my taste.
And then there’s just the sheer logistical problem of such an idea as well. If you took all of the different open source projects that I used to get my work done today alone, they would number in the thousands, easily. It would take me at least a lifetime to make a meaningful contribution to every single one of those just to repay my one day of work.
But you don’t have to contribute to each one of them. The nature of contribution is not transactional in nature. Since it’s a community, in theory, giving back to a single FOSS project is like contributing to each one of them. You participate as an individual but the effort is collective and you shouldn’t think about this matter as a material transaction between you and the maintainer of each one of the projects you use: “I give you 20 mins of my time and 5 dollars in donations in exchange for 5000 lines of your good code” I mean, you can, but the spirit of most of the people involved in this thing is different.
Also the way you speak about your own code shows that probably you don’t feel part of the community and so you can’t understand the behavior of others and you call entitlement. Just because you publish stuff on the internet with this attitude doesn’t mean that others do the same. You participate in this as an individual, others don’t.
I am part of an open source community and my feelings are far closer to @bityard’s than what’s described in the OP. Entitlement comes in many shapes and sizes, and some form of it is definitely on display in the OP.
Then what’s your idea of community? I mean, in general, not in Open Source.
My idea of what a community is is irrelevant. You just got done telling someone else they “didn’t understand” because they weren’t part of one. What I’m telling you is a fact: I am part of one and I see things very similarly to @bityard, so your model of what kinds of things people do or don’t understand needs revision.
I am mostly trying to dodge your question, mostly because I don’t think it’s a productive use of my time and also because both the question and its answer will inevitably be incredibly vague, nuanced and difficult to express in a Lobsters comment.
If you don’t want to have a discussion is fine, even though Lobste.rs comments are supposed to support a discussion.
There are things that cannot be dealt with in an analytical and dry approach. Vagueness (as intended by STEM people), subjectivity and communication issues are a necessary tradeoff to investigate matters that are complicated.
I don’t think so. The message is simple and straight. It resonates with those people that can understand life beyond consumption and maybe suggest a non-consumeristic, non-capitalistic mode of interaction to some others that are inclined to receive the message. Why is it childish? Because it tells you you shouldn’t be a consumer? That’s not childish at all. It requires a lot of effort to escape consumerist-logic, since it’s what you have learnt in school, from your parents, from media and it’s considered the standard way of living.
Could you elaborate on this one?
Maybe he’s talking about being overly idealistic? The Stallman-esque era of open source in the late 90s/early 2000s had us believe that one day Gimp would surpass Photoshop, and that we’d go into coffee shops and casually observe Linux netbooks.
For a number of reasons that never happened. I wrote a post about it a while back:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/
I note that we go into coffee shops and do observe Android phones.
Agreed. The large majority of volunteering work is thankless work. Sadly, a lot of people are more likely to thank you when they are paying for your work. Yet, throwing a tantrum is counterproductive indeed.
I’ve written in one of the comments that if projects don’t receive sponsorship in some form, money or contributions from people on a payroll, such projects die. But here’s the other edge of that knife …
—
Projects get built for 2 reasons:
When you have users, you cannot complain that those users don’t contribute. That’s not how this works. This is why I don’t like the usage of “Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)” to describe such work:
This is relevant because:
As for getting money or contributors, personally I found that a good strategy is to just ask. OK, I know people that could barely make a living from contributions, but just ask is a simple and effective strategy that’s apparently not common knowledge.
And there are always plenty of newbies lurking in the background willing to contribute, all they need is a little guidance which starts with a simple call for help. Well maintained projects are those providing guidance on what low hanging fruits exist for newbies ;-)
The article also describes the self-entitlement complex of some users. Note for the wise: this happens with free services in general, the most annoying people, the most costly for support, being the ones that don’t pay.
As a software author being too nice is a recipe for burnout. Don’t be an asshole of course, you’re not Linus Tolvards, but do enforce a professional conduct on all communication channels under your control. Remember that the community follows the leaders and their behavior. And also learn to say no to requests which you cannot honor.
You know what makes this even sadder? That although this article target audience is FOSS consumers, most people reading will probably be the FOSS maintainers.
yes that’s true, but I already received 1 kind comment telling me this person will contribute more from now on. Of course this article won’t reach people completely outside of the community, but if it could motivate some people to contribute more, that’s already a great step in my opinion.
Spam it on every slack you know, eventually it will leave the bubble.
It would be great to have more repo statuses on GitHub / GitLab. Are the moment there is either active or archived. Some projects are prototypes, some of them are write-only, some of them are actually maintained, community-maintained, …
The best thing to do as a FOSS publisher is to clearly delineate how to interact with the project in my experience. This helps to set the expectations. Having issue templates, contributor guide, … But that takes a long time to put in place unfortunately. That’s why I think we’ll see some repo status archetypes emerging in the future.
As a maintainer you can choose how you want to spend your time. By making it clear what you are willing to spend it it reduces uncertainty on the other end, which is the cause of a lot of bad attitude. Some people get anxious and don’t know how to communicate clearly.
I think it’s great when people help out or donate to OSS projects, but I’ve been getting a little nervous some of the attitudes towards project funding/sponsorship I’ve seen lately. Corporate sponsorship of projects gives those sponsors a fair amount of power over those projects. Personally I’d rather use software that was produced by someone who’s able to make it without a for-profit company subsidizing development. I think it also makes forking a project more difficult as you won’t be able to carry that revenue stream with you to the fork and is an extra hurdle to competition with the original software .
I’m not saying it’s wrong to accept money for work on an open source project, just that there’s a risk of harmful commercialization when we push for monetary support of OSS.
I’m speaking as an open source author with contributions that were never sponsored, everything being entirely in my free time …
What you want is not sustainable due to these facts:
You may ask yourself, given that I confessed to doing this in my free time, how I cope with it? The answer is that I don’t. And I don’t know for how long I’ll manage to keep it up.
Of course, highly popular projects can afford a good churn out rate, however such projects are also sponsored and have long timers available to train new contributors. For medium projects (e.g. most programming libraries) long timers are very hard to replace due to having specialized knowledge that’s hard to pass on to the next guy. And sometimes the problem domain is a difficult one, therefore the buss factor isn’t great.
The cold, hard truth is that projects eventually die without eventually receiving sponsorship in some form.
So if you want healthy projects, either donate money or contribute. Because otherwise, frankly, the wishes of non-contributors aren’t very relevant.
I’m not convinced that people have to choose between a personal life and OSS work. People’s capacity to work on OSS on top of a job varies, maybe instead of working 8 hours a day on OSS projects some of us only have a couple hours here and there and the amount of work you can do in that time will be different from person to person. But personally I’d rather use a piece of software with a slower release cycle that’s produced and maintainable by hobbyists than one that has full time developers but is beholden to a sponsoring organization.
And realistically I’m skeptical that it makes economic sense for anyone involved. If the cost to a company of using OSS is to pay one or more developers of that software anything close to their market value they’d be better off actually hiring someone to do it, then either keeping it inhouse to have a competitive advantage, or release under their copyright/license for the PR. For developers, donations for OSS work is probably the least you’ll ever be paid for your time.
Out of curiosity, have you done meaningful open source work? Have you led any projects that have users?
Note that I am not talking of occasional bug fixes or personal code that you end up storing on GitHub and that nobody uses.
I’m asking because I believe that no OSS software author with serious contributions would ever claim that working in your free time is doable long term.
And if you’re new to this, just give it 2-3 more years, we can talk then :-)
I’m not sure what your criteria for “meaningful” is but I have run projects with a userbase in my free time.
You’ve referred to your experience a couple times now and questioned mine, that’s fine, but I feel like you haven’t really touched on the main points I raised: OSS development by corporate sponsorship poses a risk of commercialization that we should be wary of.