Re:Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early
by jancsika on Monday June 15, 2020 @12:39PM
(#23529320)
I thought the greater implication of your parenthetical was that there is a danger that down the line fewer books of probably less quality would end up being written.
I gave an example in the context of encyclopedias where vastly more articles of at least equal quality ended up being written.
I'm asking for any citation you can give of trends that go in the opposite direction of encyclopedias, music recordings, blogs, citizen journalism, propaganda, to name a few. It's my observation that when the cost to publish and read hits essentially zero the amount of content goes up, not down.
Re:Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early
by pabs3 on Sunday June 14, 2020 @11:49PM
(#23523609)
In case you aren't aware of it, FOSSjobs is a site where companies post jobs for working on open source. There is also a list of resources, which contains a list of a bunch of open source companies and other ways to get paid to work on open source.
https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
Yes, I've heard many authors saying that they're unhappy with the emergency library in particular because they are concerned they won't be able to get paid to write books if this happens. And, based on my training and experience, if someone isn't paid to do their job anymore, they'll look for another job.
I'm aware of GitHub. I've published things to GitHub myself. Many of them I was paid to publish. There's a lot more I would publish to GitHub if I weren't writing proprietary code all day. You can go see all the pull requests I haven't responded to. I think it's absolutely true that if you gave people a way to put a roof over their heads and food on the table, they'd do work they love anyway, and I myself point to GitHub as an example of that. I think it's also true that if you don't give people a way to put a roof over their heads and food on the table, they'll find something else to do with their life that does.
I've also visited Wikipedia. Here's a quote from the first person to make one million edits: "Being suddenly and involuntarily unemployed will do that to you." I think that demonstrates that if he could do something else and get paid for it, he would have.