The problem for all of these categories is that lots of people want to do the job. There is basically an unlimited supply of people that like to write novels, make programming languages, play soccer, or make video games. That makes it a buyers market. "What? This iPhone game is $0.99? No way. I'll play one of the million free iPhone games instead."

For every singer, basketball player, or instagram personality that hits the big time, there are thousands that never made a dollar doing it.

For better or worse, authoring an open source library is one of those things that there is no shortage of people willing to do, so I am not optimistic about use of "business innovations" to solve this problem. If those innovations are in any way non-consumer friendly, consumers are just going to choose a different open source tool/project.

But that difference does not change the market dynamics in any way. In both cases, the effects of a near unlimited supply of creators is having the same effect, regardless of how their creations get used.

Perhaps the difference changes the ethics of the situation, I don't know, but I remain equally skeptical of "business innovations" being able to help the OSS creators as I am "business innovations" being able to help aspiring rock stars and shortstops.

That's almost exactly the opposite of very popular OSS software, which generates an endless wave of free users. And generally no whales. And high demands for bug fixes. And serious temper tantrums (this has happened to me too) when you explain to users of your free software that you owe them exactly fuck. and. all. and won't be hopping-to in order to fix something for them.

Sure there are some runaway indie hits that make money to cover the development. And Linus Torvalds gets paid $10 million per year to work on open source. But nearly all indie game developers never make anything from their games, same as OSS authors. (Indie games are an the appropriate comparison since we are talking about independent OSS authors, not Facebook developers working on React).

In any case, I am not arguing that all of these endeavors are equivalent in all ways. My only point is that all of the fields have an oversupply of creators. The result is that creators don't have leverage over consumers. To really spell it out: if OSS library creators try sticking the commons clause or other "innovations" on their projects, most businesses are just going to go find another library that does the same thing, without the restriction.

I have an OSS project used by 1000s of people and many huge companies. I don't get compensated for that directly and I don't expect to. I'm just happy to be able to use it on my own projects no matter what company I am working with.

If you think your code is worth money, sell it.

LGPL/GPL/AGPL exist for a reason. Not my fault you used BSD/MIT and didn't consider what you were explicitly allowing and encouraging people to do.

There btw.

Also, it would be common decency but we live in an era where if something cannot be enforced in court then you should not be surprised somebody is [not] doing it. Oh well.

These are people who are providing a service, potentially because it’s a passion, but other entities soak up the profit.

You seem to be arguing that these people (in the grandparent comment and my own) do get paid, but my understanding is that they don’t, or barely do.

(And I know I would have a "donation budget" if I was a businessman because I am not stupid and I know the work of which people outside my company facilitates my business further.)

But appreciation is not what businessmen do. 99% are cut-throats in all areas of their lives.

There is an unlimited supply of people who say they would like to write novels, make programming languages, play soccer [professionally], or make video games. The supply of people who have the drive and patience to complete a novel or programming language or video game for free or on spec is arguably much smaller. The same is also true of open source libraries. There may be an effectively unlimited supply of GitHub repositories containing new JavaScript frameworks and template languages, but the majority of them haven't gotten very far past the README file. And, we haven't even addressed the question of whether they have the skill and talent to make a good novel or programming language or video game or open source library.

Having said all that, I think the original article is on point in at least one crucial respect: all of these cited kinds of work require a huge investment of time, and it's very hard to sustain that investment without money. This is why I always get very frustrated with the particular kind of pseudo-libertarian who blithely asserts that artists and writers don't need to be fairly compensated for their work, because clearly they'd keep doing it solely out of the love of creation. In reality, artists and writers--and open source programmers--aren't likely to put in "second job" level hours without compensation indefinitely. They're going to have a family, or develop more relaxing hobbies, or possibly just get frustrated by the ongoing effort.

I don't know if "business innovations" can solve this problem, but I think it's worth looking for more ways for developers (and writers and artists and...) to bring in some kind of stable recurring revenue.

...but practically how do you do it?

The parent comment is quite right, going from 'pay x' to 'pay y' is one thing... but from 'pay nothing' to 'pay anything' is a massive and difficult step.

You can't make it mandatory; theres a glut of stuff out there, and people will just move on to the next free (perhaps crappier, but free!) version.

'business innovations may help' is just a nice way of saying 'well darn, nothing we've tried in the last 10 years to fix this has worked... hm. Don't really have a solution for this, but it'd be great if someone figured one out!'

...which I totally agree with, sure, but its not really helpful or practical.

Seriously, nothing people have tried (tips, patreon, foundations) has worked very well.

No one is going to solve this problem any time soon.

Of you're an open source library author/maintainer, you've got to acknowledge you're not just magically get rewarded for your efforts; you have to work for it, and (probably, for most people) your attempts to monetize it will fail.

The same is true for all creatives.

If I had an answer to that, I'd be a full-time fiction writer. :)

Seriously, I suspect most people aren't going to ever make a lot from creative efforts, which we'll lump open source libraries into; the vast majority of us are going to be much farther out along the low long tail of the compensation curve.

I suspect the only thing that will help -- not to the degree that everyone will be able to make a living wage doing whatever they want, but to the degree that more people will feel like they're getting something back for the time they're putting in beyond the Warm Fuzzy Feeling of Sharing -- is a cultural shift of sorts. We need to uncouple the concept of "zero marginal cost" from the concept of "should be free." (I'm aware that leads down a whole rabbit hole about IP and "piracy," but I'm leaving it aside.) In the open source world, we may all say we're here for the free-as-in-freedom part rather than the free-as-in-beer part...but we're sure disinclined to pay for those beers.

Who gets to determine what is “fair compensation” and to whom?

So based on supply and demand, i.e. prices?

In a pure supply/demand market races to the bottom can and do happen.

When the concept of open source software was first introduced, it was seen as a desperate way to get users but it was an effective strategy at the time.

Today, giving software for free is not enough - I think that the next trend will be to pay people to use your OSS software. Probably with cryptocurrency.

This was not the motive for free software's beginning, nor does it describe the beginning of the term "open source." The concept rose out of early computing allowing and sometimes encouraging users to share and improve software, and the true start of the movement envisioned a model similar to Red Hat, where the software is sold though sharing is not restricted.

Forcing user payment is effectively impossible for open source software, someone can just buy a copy and redistribute it without the required payment, so your prediction is a movement away from open source software.

Not particularly. It's depressing to see businesses profitably exploit that work, and irritating to see people develop a sense of entitlement without ever contributing back.

Though I wish more general users donated to projects, people using the software without paying seems better than people not using or paying for the software, and far better than paying and being unable to use the software.

In the end it's about what choice you make. If you choose to help the community then you must be prepared that it will be a thankless and hard job. If you cannot bear it, don't help the community.

Trouble with open source is, many people don't realize this phenomena until they are burned out.

Think I spotted the problem.

This whole thing feels like someone martyring themselves for a cause and being recognized as a hero, but then complaining that martyrs are heroes and we should be _supporting_ our heroes and not forcing them to be martyrs. But that was the whole point to begin with and why there was any opportunity for recognition at all.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

"Success" in the OSS world is putting code out that others can use. Either they find it useful, or they don't. If they don't that's not failure. That's ... someone else put out something better, or that your user community is small or just not out there.

OSS is not a business model. It's a SHARING model.

God it's just like the music scene these days. Did you get into it for the Art? Cool you're gonna be ok. Did you get into it wanting to be a rock star? Might as well buy a lottery ticket. Your chances are better.

OSS success is providing something of use to a community that contributes back to it.

Yeah, maybe you can find a way to make a nickel off that, but that's not what it's FOR. It's not a marketplace, it's a public library.

This celebrity/glamor seeking is so apparent on github. Every single project's readme.md reads like marketing copy these days.

Just like the music scene again. Reminds me of the 90's when the record labels still had money and steamrolled the alternative scene looking for a cash grab.

That’s the problem: we all take this particular public library for granted, but there isn’t a sustainable model for paying the librarians. Then a librarian tries a creative way to continue serving us without starving, and we tell them “you’re just doing it for fun, if you wanted to make money you shouldn’t have been a librarian!”. This is an ignorant response, because it places on the librarian’s shoulders the responsibility for solving a problem that concerns all of us - because we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.

This way of thinking is, in my opinion, destructively pessimistic. Everything is not always a zero sum gain. We can all benefit more than we contribute and it can still be sustainable. For example, 10 people can spend 10% of their time on a project, and get something out of it that is worth 50% of their time. They took the equivalent of 1 persons work and made it worth 5 people's work. I think most popular OSS projects are orders of magnitude more effective than that at creating benefit. Thousands of people contributing code, a few times a year, makes a project that supports all their careers and provides software that benefits society as a whole.

I get that the problem is the undue burden on the relatively few people who organize this work for really big projects. I've noticed that some of these people are employed by large corporations who encourage their OSS work, because the result, and the thousands of contributions from others they harness are very valuable to these organizations.

I wouldn't be surprised if the large corporations that were listed as the ones using Redis software without paying for it would be willing to sponsor a few employees to represent their interests in the OSS projects. That works for the individual engineers, but that doesn't exactly work for RedisLabs to make $$. So I still don't see RediLabs as a beleaguered crusader trying to save OSS.

I don't think the fact that RedisLabs doesn't have a sustainable revenue model indicates that open source infrastructure in general doesn't.

It's true that there are a number of relatively new venture-funded OSS infra firms that were built on a step 1, build software, step 2 ..., step 3 profit model. But I don't think that's an OSS problem so much as a startup culture problem, as the same problem is rampant in startups in other spaces.

> Then a librarian tries a creative way to continue serving us without starving

It's not particularly creative or novel; the basic outline has been tried since the 80s at least.

OSS is diverse and there are many, obviously, who don’t mind not being paid directly.

But what’s confusing is that there are proprietary licenses. Anyone who doesn’t like volunteering time to OSS can write commercial software and charge for it. That’s the model that works for them.

But the talk of a 40 year old model not being sustainable is pretty funny. It’s more sustainable because it takes so much volunteer time.

It’s not the open-source model I called unsustainable, but a particular response to new forms of open-source monetization.

At any rate, the current model - of open-source as a mainstream R&D model, and as the critical infrastructure for the largest businesses in the world, primarily funded by corporate sponsorship and venture capital... that model is definitely not 40 years old.

You could argue that the model originated at the Linux hype of 1999, when Red Hat was the hottest IPO and IBM was spray-painting penguins on the sidewalks of San Francisco... Or you could argue it really started in 2004 when the Google IPO showed how much more scalable and profitable a business can be when you don’t pay software licenses.

In any case, the current model for open-source is really not that old, and it’s too early to tell how sustainable it really is.

When Stallman thought seriously about open source in the 1980s, it wasn't because he was the only one to ever imagine a culture of sharing around software and information. I think he was reacting to a sense that an existing culture was being erased by growing commercial interests.

One could also argue it originated with gentleman-scholars circulating letters about their new physical science discoveries during the renaissance and feeding into the subsequent industrial revolution. But, I expect it is an emergent property of humanity which is probably exhibited throughout history and pre-history.

It's essentially the same idea of commons and culture applied to yet another domain of knowledge and technology. Was it sustainable for the first farmer to teach his techniques to another? For one chef to teach another how to prepare his dishes? Open source software can be sustainable as long as there are needs and resources available to produce and execute software that does something different or better than could be done without the software (or at a lower cost than other available options). The subsequent sale of additional copies need not be a motivating factor at all.

That was not motivated at all by the open source movement. The only reason AT&T Bell Labs didn't charge a significant amount for UNIX is because they were under a consent decree which precluded them from entering other industries at the time, see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...

I don't understand this. It seems the argument is "I can't keep giving away software for free unless you pay for it". Then it isn't free software, right? Nothing wrong with that, most of us write proprietary software and sell it. If it's worth more to the people who buy it than what it cost, everyone still benefits.

We use open source software to do our work more effectively. There are all sorts of OSS projects, many entirely run by unpaid volunteers. Many people, myself included, sometimes contribute code to the OSS projects, to benefit myself and anyone else who happens to use it. I don't expect anything else.

But you can't feel entitled for people to pay you for work that we all agreed was volunteer. It's not worth it to do OSS anymore? It's ok to stop doing it. There are enough of us that are rewarded by just being able to contribute, we'll have our own projects. So, it's ok for Redislabs to make their code proprietary and make money off it, if they can. There's nothing wrong with that. But the rhetoric that boils down to "people have been stealing from us by using our code and not paying for it", "it's not fair that they are using our code and making money and not giving us any" is wrong. You gave the code away for free. That was the understanding before you wrote the code, and after it was written. That was one of the reasons people were even using the code. It's not an injustice.

When someone gives you a nice gift, they deserve your gratitude. But if they turn around and say "you never paid me for that", then it wasn't really a gift was it?

The goal for RedisLabs is to make more money from the enterprise add-ons they’re developing. A lot of that money (perhaps most of it) goes right back into maintaining Redis, which remains open-source.

So it absolutely is a matter of funding more open-source gifts, and not taking back gifts.

Just a "Hey what we are doing now isn't working, for our business model we need to make more money and we need to make some of our code around Redis proprietary so we can sell it. Don't worry, Redis itself will remain open source, free to use for everyone."

Instead it was "today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings". It was open source, they could do that. If you want to make them pay in the future, that's fine. But they aren't the bad guys for using OSS.

Anyway, I hope it works out well for RedisLabs, but I also hope that the licensing of OSS software is simple and open.

Because, in your analogy, the librarians are all volunteers. That’s how we got here. If the pain of not having a problem solved is great enough the volunteers will fix it. Or they won’t. If you feel like the pain level is high enough. Hey maybe YOU should try volunteering to solve it.

This is what makes OSS powerful. It is a community service. If you aren’t happy with the service p become a member of the community and contribute.

Since we as a society rely on open-source enormously, it seems to make sense to try and allow as many people as possible to contribute as much as possible. And that requires giving up on antiquated notions that “only unpaid open-source is real open-source!”. Wouldn’t you agree?

We already do, anyone can do it and we shouldn't restrict that; that's the point.

> And that requires giving up on antiquated notions that “only unpaid open-source is real open-source!”. Wouldn’t you agree?

Not GP, but I most certainly don't, nor is it antiquated. For that matter, calling volunteer work "antiquated" is... A bit cynical, to say the least.

I also don't see how this follows from what you said before, could you walk me through your reasoning?

I emphatically did not say that volunteer work is antiquated! I myself do plenty of it - but I also acknowledge that I’m privileged to be able to afford it. What is antiquated is the notion that only unpaid work is authentic open-source work. It’s important to realize that providing unpaid labor is a luxury. If you exclude or devalue paid work, you exclude and devalue the people who cannot afford to do open-source work for free. As it turnd out, that’s the majority of people.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2017/10/2017-linux-kern...

No, it's not a community service, not really. It's a happy byproduct of some very powerful companies.

Instead of paying LF to hire devs, they hire devs who write code that is contributed to Linux.

Why is that nothing something we should reconcile? Why is that not "sharing"?

Somebody yesterday (maybe DannyBee, not sure) made a very insightful comment in saying that sometimes the value created by Open Source software is created exactly because it's Open Source.

Anyway, you can always charge for software even if the code is Open Source. You can stick it on the web and make it a SaaS app, or you can make the source available but charge to download binaries (ala JBoss back in the day), or you can make source and binaries freely available and sell subscriptions, etc. Aaah, wait, I know, you're asking "who would buy a subscription for something that's free to download?" Companies. Companies will, for things that are mission critical, because they typically need for their to be a contractual relationship (eg, somebody to sue) in place. Or you have a manager who needs to spend her budget or lose it, and she understands that you need to make a profit in order to stay alive and keep enhancing the software. Etc., etc, yadda, yadda, ad infinitum. My point is, it's not as simple as "Oh, I made this Open Source, so there's no way to profit from it".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17818407#17819123

Quote at the end:

The underlying issue they are trying to solve is that developers believe they should be able to extract some of the wealth they feel they created. In open source, that wealth is often only created because the software was free. Otherwise, people would have used something else that was free but worked well enough. Developers like to often argue this isn't true, but history shows it to be true basically always :) So saying you should be able to extract this wealth is probably wrong. Saying you should be able to get paid a reasonable amount of money is not.

His model was, that programmers are expected to donate their time to OSS creating core components, in order to get jobs integrating those core components into commercial systems.

When you think about the issue like that, it makes a lot of sense, but its a terrible deal for the programmer.

Nobody else does their job on weekends for free.

In a Star Trek utopia, that idealism would be great, but we live in a world where people are exploited wherever possible to ensure endless profit.

It's not that simple, what would be this industry without Linux, without the FSF, without the BSD network stack (that is in all the macs...)

The growth of our industry, and probably of a good chunk of the whole economy for the last 10 years has a lot to do with those people working during nights and week-ends imo.

1) the top 1% employees in the field who have the luxury to invest unpaid time, and the social clout to make their projects more successful, or to join more successful projects. (example: how much more likely are you to be a key contributor to Kubernetes if you are, or were at some point, employed by Google?);

2) the other 99% who cannot afford to invest the spare time, and do not benefit from the social proximity to successful open-source contributors (and success in open-source is as much about social proximity today than technical skills, hopefully we can change that in the future);

3) The corporations who benefit financially from open-source, sometimes enormously, with very little pressure to contribute back because of the aforementioned social pressure on individuals to contribute on their free time. The expectations are so low that even modest corporate contributions (joining or starting a foundation, hiring a few engineers, paying for a conference) will be hailed as generous and benevolent, because the bar is so incredibly low.

Is it really? Of the people I know who have had excellent career paths in software/computing none have a track record of open source contributions.

Right, that’s how they built their career in the past. All things being equal, it will become gradually harder to build a career that way in the future. I already know several major employers who look at a candidate’s github activity as a factor in the standard hiring process. And that trend is only accelerating.

If these people spend a lot of their free time, and perhaps even some of their professional time, in Github contributing to various public projects, then they might not necessarily have 100% focus on the employer's tasks. I am not sure if this is what the employers expect or even want to happen.

The intention is probably to use Github activity as a pre-screening proxy metric for technical capability and skillset. But... why would someone who is contributing a lot to public projects cease to do so, once employed? Is there a risk of getting a partially distracted, though skilled person?

If the wish from the company then is to ensure they get the most performance for themselves, the logical step would be to cut down on the public contributions via e.g. legal and contractual means.

So... why would someone who enjoys contributing to public projects join a company that selects based on Github activity, if it is in the company's interests that further contributions should be reduced?

Ahh... Maybe I am just overanalyzing it.

EDIT: people or corporations, same thing.

Then you remember that there was never any reward and you wonder why you did this to yourself. Lol.

So? What makes your "popular open source project" worth my time? Too many people are using open source as a way to try to turn it into a business, and have a problem turning it into a business. Being an open source project doesn't mean you deserve special treatment.

I think the problem is the mentality you present in your first question: "People underestimate how difficult it is to create a popular open source project."

I imagine it's very hard to create a popular open source project, when in reality, all the popular open source projects I know of started out by being useful open source projects that just happened to catch on.

Patreon is owned by the VCs and will eventually make changes that negatively impact creators.

That said, if you maintain an OSS tool, please do set up an easy way to donate. When it's easy to donate a dollar or two, I do (well...occasionally). I've found very few developers have Patreon's setup. Some will have a PayPal link, which is especially nice for random online tools that I use once or twice. Most don't provide an easy opportunity to contribute financially. Though I guess I should keep more of an eye out for them.

(While Googling for more info, I did come across https://github.com/feross/thanks -- so that's neat.)

You can't just provide software that 1000s of people use. You now have to be creating some story around it on Patreon or whatever, have a way to get people to patreon or your website in the first place, which will only take away time from your side project.

Numbers just don't add up. You can perhaps expect $50/month with those number of users if you really, really tried and spent countless hours on propagation. That's like 1-2 hours of work in a real job.

For a cli tool distributed in major linux distros you don't even have a way to get people to your website, because mostly just packagers will go there and some people with exotic preferences who build from source, which is a tiny minority.

These websites solve none of this.

In the web space maybe. The desktop and CLI sector are much more relaxed.

If you go into open source expecting to get paid, then you're gonna have a bad time.

If you go into open source for the accolades, then you're gonna have a bad time.

If you go into open source with a true desire to improve the state of the art, then you might be able to succeed.

We (https://sheetjs.com, our most popular library https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx has over 11K GitHub stars) combat that by intentionally removing our names and egos from the equation. We are happy to see others use our open source code in their applications, and are constantly surprised when high-profile projects like React end up using our code (https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/v16.0.0/src/renderers...). Our intentions are clear: the open source offerings give us a test surface far larger than any proprietary solution, and for that we are extremely satisfied with the results.

Many open source developers start with intentions like "advancing the state of the art" and over time become disappointed because others build businesses and profit off of their creations. The intention at the onset wasn't to make money, and continued investment of time and money into OSS should be weighed against the original intention.

We are elated when we find others using open source SheetJS libraries and code in their profitable business applications. Others may regret and wish they didn't open source, but you don't know how things would have played out if you didn't open source. The yardstick we apply to our open source contributions is whether we're advancing the state of the art, since that's why we entered the space in the first place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886481 is a similar comment that probably better reflects the opinion expressed here.

(note: we ended up developing paid offerings after conversations with @patio11 and others. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementati... discusses these points)

My takeaway from your bullet points is more specific – that you shouldn't bother with open source unless you want to advance the state of the art while being perpetually unpaid and unrecognized, which I can not agree with in any way.

> Many open source developers start with intentions like "advancing the state of the art" and over time become disappointed because others build businesses and profit off of their creations.

I just don't buy this distinction of starving artists vs commercial enterprises. Especially as the project grows in scope, complexity, and popularity you might need to spend more time on it to keep it in good shape, and time does not come for free.

While you might have been willing to spend 10 hours a week on it for free, the now-grown project would really benefit from you working on it full time, but that's not feasible to you, so you turn to monetizing it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to both advance the state of the art and to be paid for it.

It's not about being disappointed with others making money off of your project, it's about ensuring sustainable development of your project.

If OSS projects weren't funded by a chance of money or fame, we'd have much less such projects available to us, especially significant ones, because not everyone who currently contributes to OSS can afford to or even wants to work full time for no pay. I don't know why that would be a desirable outcome to anyone.

"advancing the state of the art" is fundamentally different from "money" and "fame" insofar as the latter involve social effects that you have less direct control over. To make money, someone else has to pay you for something.

Why should someone be forced to walk away from a project that became popular if there is an option to monetize it to support its growth?

"Lastly, we have consulting and support, which I think is a dead end. It certainly works on a smaller scale with individual developers, but it falls apart when trying to build a company. "

That seems like a very odd claim to make in support of Redis Labs making this controversial change restricting other people's rights to charge for consulting and support.

How? For me the interpretation is straightforward: if you create OSS in the hopes of making money from it, you might succeed but the odds are overwhelmingly against you.

Ultimately, the only success guaranteed when you open source a piece of code is the fact that you... Open sourced a piece of code. There's now a new library/tool/application out in the world for everyone to see.

That's how I interpreted the other comment, and I wasn't even too charitable.

In my sibling comments I explained more about disagreeing with the starving artist vs business enterprise false dichotomy.