It’s a little bit like forming one major workers’ union for open source maintainers.
It’s not at all like that. It’s a de-productized Glassdoor (which does sound good) glued to some sort of coop/corporation/nonprofit.
Virtual penny for your thoughts.
It seems like all this is re-inventing “taxes” and “regulation” but with less teeth and more computers.
If we instead forced these companies to pay just amounts of taxes, made the companies worker-controlled, and provided social services such that people didn’t need a job just to exist, all these problems would also be solved. And, as a bonus, it’ll be solved for people that aren’t professional computer botherers.
Well sure, let’s take it all the way to Universal Basic Income while we’re at it, I’m with you all the way! But that’s no doubt decades away still. Don’t dismiss a solution viable in the short-term just because there’s a better way to solve it in the long-term.
Don’t dismiss a solution viable in the short-term just because there’s a better way to solve it in the long-term.
I’d hesitate to call it a “solution” when I don’t see it as engaging with the real problem, namely extracting value from a de-commoditized commons. Getting compliance with the scheme would be a huge lift with a fairly narrow focus. The political infrastructure required (unions, guilds, activism, etc) needs to be built in both the private governance model and the “traditional” governance model, so why not embark on the project that has a larger pool of people to draw from?
If it’s decades away then solving the problem is decades away. It gets further away every time someone dismisses it in favour of some short-term ‘solution’ that doesn’t solve anything.
Don’t dismiss a solution viable in the short-term just because there’s a better way to solve it in the long-term.
I don’t think this solves anything. I think it makes everything worse, just like everything that isn’t actually free software.
It’s a little bit like forming one major workers’ union for open source maintainers. As long as a critical mass of workers abide by the rules that they themselves have laid down, i.e. “do not work for a company that does not pay their Fair Share Fee”, then the industry has no choice but to play by those same rules.
If you want to form a union, form a union. This is not a union. It’s nothing like a union.
Union guy here. Completely agree. Anything other than resistance to companies at risk of your future to force them to sign reasonable terms to improve working conditions isn’t a union. It’s just talk that has no impact on companies now with a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of doing so later. These freeloading companies prefer we put our time into stuff like this instead of stuff that impacts our bottom line. I’m fine with article as just thinking about stuff that might help, though. People just thinking and sharing ideas.
Aside from union thing, it’s hosted via this company that brings them more users and revenue if such articles are successful. That has negative impact on other providers with more ethics. It’s a minor detail for sure that one can easily overlook. Spotting and dodging this stuff where pragmatically possible is good habit aka vote with your wallet. Article oversells it but it helps sometimes.
Open software and the open internet have been the two greatest economic engines the world has ever seen.
There are the obvious immediate benefits: a free, high-quality operating system or editor or compiler or whatever. A communications medium that gives your message the same reach as Microsoft’s or Apple’s.
And then there’s the enormous intangible benefits. The vast majority of my computing knowledge comes from using, studying, inspecting, and writing software. If Linux and GCC and Perl and Python hadn’t been trivially available to me to tinker with and study and learn and write programs with, there’s no way I’d be where I am today. Not even close.
In my licensing essay, I pointed out a proprietary license can be constructed with every benefit you just described. Even free distribution and modification. The only difference is commercial or profit-generating use past a certain point requires a paid license to support core developers who must maintain and support the software in return. Recently, some have added a convert-to-OSS/FOSS option if they don’t want to support it any longer.
That matches your goals of building, inspecting, and freely acquiring software as an individual. Anything else bother you about it that I might try to mitigate with extra provisions?
Anything else bother you about it that I might try to mitigate with extra provisions?
Yes, that it isn’t free software. It doesn’t follow the four freedoms. It doesn’t give people the right to use it for any purpose.
requires a paid license to support core developers who must maintain and support the software in return.
No. You’re under no obligation to work on the software. You’re under no obligation to maintain and support it. Nobody is forcing you to do so. A company using software you’ve written are free to maintain it themselves, that’s the whole point.
“Yes, that it isn’t free software. It doesn’t follow the four freedoms. It doesn’t give people the right to use it for any purpose.”
It starts out with them preserving most of their benefit. Then, it modifies them to fix the problem of for-profit freeloading without giving back. Quite the opposite of how a commons is supposed to work. That’s where payment comes in. Let me get right to details, though. In my model, paying customers or those with free licenses can use, inspect, modify, and distribute among licensees as they please. The licenses might even be given out for free for non-commercial use or commercial use under a certain revenue/profit. Let’s talk the latter with it free under $1,000,000 a year.
So, a company under $1,000,000 a year or non-commercial user gets to use it for free, they get the source, they can do mods/forks they share with other customers, and so on. Any changes go back to the owner so they can optionally put them in the main product. If not, the forked copies still exist and are permitted in use by licensees. Payment kicks in only when the company using it is making over a million dollars doing it while giving nothing in return. If you insist on four freedoms, it appears you’re drawing the line in the sand at letting millionaires or just profitable companies get something for nothing from developers putting lots of free labor in.
I don’t think that’s morally defensible if we want contributions going back somehow given freeloading ratio and fledgling projects that currently exist in FOSS. I think making folks who profit massively off of others work give something back, what being definable by the authors/owners, makes a lot more since then helping all the benefits go one or a few ways away from author/owner. Unless the owner specifically wants their work to primarily profit others. Some do. FOSS licenses for them. Lots of people want widespread benefit of the masses while hopefully getting something in return from those really benefiting from it. If they give nothing, they’re just being greedy assholes. Not forcing them to give back protects greedy assholes at altruistic peoples’ expense. In those situations, better to remedy that somehow. hence these experiments.
“No. You’re under no obligation to work on the software. “
In my comment, I said it was a paid offering with payment leading to maintenance and support that paying customers will expect. So, yes, the people getting paid to work on the software have an obligation to work on the software or decline payment. With F/OSS, there’s no obligation since there’s no payment and/or agreement for them to work on the software. However, some individuals and companies enter into voluntary agreements to work on the FOSS for money. That’s the proprietary model with free-er results. Dual licensing and/or charging businesses directly for F/OSS is the current path I recommend until something better is determined. There’s also Open Core but it’s incentives are sketchier. I recommend it for enterprises where you can be sure features like Active Directory integration probably won’t hurt majority of individuals, small businesses, or FOSS-using companies that would use the software.
It’s not at all like that. It’s a de-productized Glassdoor (which does sound good) glued to some sort of coop/corporation/nonprofit.
It seems like all this is re-inventing “taxes” and “regulation” but with less teeth and more computers. If we instead forced these companies to pay just amounts of taxes, made the companies worker-controlled, and provided social services such that people didn’t need a job just to exist, all these problems would also be solved. And, as a bonus, it’ll be solved for people that aren’t professional computer botherers.
Well sure, let’s take it all the way to Universal Basic Income while we’re at it, I’m with you all the way! But that’s no doubt decades away still. Don’t dismiss a solution viable in the short-term just because there’s a better way to solve it in the long-term.
I’d hesitate to call it a “solution” when I don’t see it as engaging with the real problem, namely extracting value from a de-commoditized commons. Getting compliance with the scheme would be a huge lift with a fairly narrow focus. The political infrastructure required (unions, guilds, activism, etc) needs to be built in both the private governance model and the “traditional” governance model, so why not embark on the project that has a larger pool of people to draw from?
If it’s decades away then solving the problem is decades away. It gets further away every time someone dismisses it in favour of some short-term ‘solution’ that doesn’t solve anything.
I don’t think this solves anything. I think it makes everything worse, just like everything that isn’t actually free software.
Let’s not…most workers have the business sense of a stoned rabbit.
If you want to form a union, form a union. This is not a union. It’s nothing like a union.
Union guy here. Completely agree. Anything other than resistance to companies at risk of your future to force them to sign reasonable terms to improve working conditions isn’t a union. It’s just talk that has no impact on companies now with a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of doing so later. These freeloading companies prefer we put our time into stuff like this instead of stuff that impacts our bottom line. I’m fine with article as just thinking about stuff that might help, though. People just thinking and sharing ideas.
Aside from union thing, it’s hosted via this company that brings them more users and revenue if such articles are successful. That has negative impact on other providers with more ethics. It’s a minor detail for sure that one can easily overlook. Spotting and dodging this stuff where pragmatically possible is good habit aka vote with your wallet. Article oversells it but it helps sometimes.
Open software and the open internet have been the two greatest economic engines the world has ever seen.
There are the obvious immediate benefits: a free, high-quality operating system or editor or compiler or whatever. A communications medium that gives your message the same reach as Microsoft’s or Apple’s.
And then there’s the enormous intangible benefits. The vast majority of my computing knowledge comes from using, studying, inspecting, and writing software. If Linux and GCC and Perl and Python hadn’t been trivially available to me to tinker with and study and learn and write programs with, there’s no way I’d be where I am today. Not even close.
Same with Wikipedia, for that matter.
In my licensing essay, I pointed out a proprietary license can be constructed with every benefit you just described. Even free distribution and modification. The only difference is commercial or profit-generating use past a certain point requires a paid license to support core developers who must maintain and support the software in return. Recently, some have added a convert-to-OSS/FOSS option if they don’t want to support it any longer.
That matches your goals of building, inspecting, and freely acquiring software as an individual. Anything else bother you about it that I might try to mitigate with extra provisions?
Yes, that it isn’t free software. It doesn’t follow the four freedoms. It doesn’t give people the right to use it for any purpose.
No. You’re under no obligation to work on the software. You’re under no obligation to maintain and support it. Nobody is forcing you to do so. A company using software you’ve written are free to maintain it themselves, that’s the whole point.
“Yes, that it isn’t free software. It doesn’t follow the four freedoms. It doesn’t give people the right to use it for any purpose.”
It starts out with them preserving most of their benefit. Then, it modifies them to fix the problem of for-profit freeloading without giving back. Quite the opposite of how a commons is supposed to work. That’s where payment comes in. Let me get right to details, though. In my model, paying customers or those with free licenses can use, inspect, modify, and distribute among licensees as they please. The licenses might even be given out for free for non-commercial use or commercial use under a certain revenue/profit. Let’s talk the latter with it free under $1,000,000 a year.
So, a company under $1,000,000 a year or non-commercial user gets to use it for free, they get the source, they can do mods/forks they share with other customers, and so on. Any changes go back to the owner so they can optionally put them in the main product. If not, the forked copies still exist and are permitted in use by licensees. Payment kicks in only when the company using it is making over a million dollars doing it while giving nothing in return. If you insist on four freedoms, it appears you’re drawing the line in the sand at letting millionaires or just profitable companies get something for nothing from developers putting lots of free labor in.
I don’t think that’s morally defensible if we want contributions going back somehow given freeloading ratio and fledgling projects that currently exist in FOSS. I think making folks who profit massively off of others work give something back, what being definable by the authors/owners, makes a lot more since then helping all the benefits go one or a few ways away from author/owner. Unless the owner specifically wants their work to primarily profit others. Some do. FOSS licenses for them. Lots of people want widespread benefit of the masses while hopefully getting something in return from those really benefiting from it. If they give nothing, they’re just being greedy assholes. Not forcing them to give back protects greedy assholes at altruistic peoples’ expense. In those situations, better to remedy that somehow. hence these experiments.
“No. You’re under no obligation to work on the software. “
In my comment, I said it was a paid offering with payment leading to maintenance and support that paying customers will expect. So, yes, the people getting paid to work on the software have an obligation to work on the software or decline payment. With F/OSS, there’s no obligation since there’s no payment and/or agreement for them to work on the software. However, some individuals and companies enter into voluntary agreements to work on the FOSS for money. That’s the proprietary model with free-er results. Dual licensing and/or charging businesses directly for F/OSS is the current path I recommend until something better is determined. There’s also Open Core but it’s incentives are sketchier. I recommend it for enterprises where you can be sure features like Active Directory integration probably won’t hurt majority of individuals, small businesses, or FOSS-using companies that would use the software.
I agree, I think? Not sure what exactly you’re trying to get across here.
I was agreeing with you, in my usual, unnecessarily verbose way. :)