I use tons of free software. I've never either demanded that anyone work on it for free, nor have I expressed any sense of entitlement or expectation.
I've never maintained a popular open source project so maybe there's something about the situation I just don't understand. But it seems like:
> Thank you for your feature request, we will add it to the backlog. The core team doesn't work on unfunded feature requests because they use up a lot of time and resources. We are happy to review high quality PRs from anyone interested in implementing the feature. We also have a variety of sponsorship options, and a list of past contributors and maintainers available for contract work.
would be reasonable and polite?
One reason is that you're being told that that's an awful thing to do by basically every resource on "proper open-source" you can find.
Another is that these people are pretty good at starting shit storms trying to ruin your reputation if you don't comply with their unreasonable demands.
It's also worth nothing that some requests/issues/questions might be reasonable when viewed in isolation but not if there are hundreds of them.
Think for example stuff unrelated to the project but where you as a hacker could nonetheless help because you do know the answers/possess the skill. For me at least, I find it hard to deal with that, because I know that I could in theory help that person. I just can't in practice because time and energy are both finite.
> We are happy to review high quality PRs
Are we though? There's a lot of work attached to reviewing even high-quality PRs. Also, even if the PR is high quality, the maintainers will still be the ones maintaining that new feature so it's still significantly more work.
If you go on social media and offer your well-thought-out opinions about some controversial subject, you are very likely to get large number of people sending you offensive messages, arguing with your objectionably, trying to start pile-ons, attempting to dox you, etc.
Is the correct response to announce that "your participation in political discussion for free has become unsustainable", and that you need to be paid by all the people who find your comments interesting?
Why are you asking me this? I'm not the author of that text. My take on this article can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38302098
For instance, I think it would be awesome if everyone sending an email to my main account had to send me $1. If what they are sending me isn't worth $1 to them, why should I get a buzz on my phone? Spam would be solved instantly.
I certainly don't think that every corner of the internet should be pay-to-play, and I generally don't think that the fees should be substantial to users participating in good faith. But I've got about five emails in the past two days from an airline bugging me to upgrade my seat. It costs me time and attention to weed through my inbox.
I'm sure this principle could be applied to sites like HN or reddit to raise the bar and put even just a little bit of skin in the game.
We can call it "Simple Mailing Subscription". Or "SMS" for short.
And it doesn't matter if online purchases are more expensive, because you get that money back through email receipt fees.
Tougher challenges are the traditional challenges with micropayments. And the differential incentive based on wealth. People struggling for cash would still try and minimise their communication, which is probably a bad thing for a healthy society.
As someone from Europe, the first thing that comes to mind is that PCI compliance isn't even required by law in USA, is it?
Sure, reviewing and maintaining PRs is work too. If I wasn't willing to do it for free, I'd be clear and upfront, and say
> Unfortunately we don't have the time to review PRs without funding. If you are interested in having a PR reviewed, you can sponsor the project or contract a maintainer. In the past, it's taken a couple hours to review PRs. Keep in mind that even after your PR is merged, it will need to be maintained. If there are no volunteer maintainers able to keep your code in a decent state, it may be removed in future releases.
There's a very real chance someone won't use your project if you say this. They might use a competing project with maintainers that will work for free, or they might even fork your project. That's certainly their right.
I don't think I've ever seen a shitstorm arise from clear and open boundary-setting by maintainers. I'm sure I don't have an extensive catalog of every internet shitstorm, but the ones I can recall off the top of my head are usually situations that I'm sure felt like rug-pulls or shakedowns to users. I'm also having trouble thinking of a shitstorm over a minor incident that truly ruined someone's reputation, but I might just not run in the right circles to know about that kind of thing.
It’s funny you mention shakedowns, because I’ve seen at least one or two minor shitstorms (objectively, they were pretty minor, but I’m sure they didn’t feel that way to the maintainers in the moment) because language very similar to what you proposed was interpreted as a shakedown:
> We also have a variety of sponsorship options, and a list of past contributors and maintainers available for contract work.
And I think that’s where the rub is. Almost any strategy as a maintainer for trying to establish a boundary and ignore people (close issues or PRs automatically, offer contract services, etc) can cause these kinds of issues. People really dislike being ignored, and so a policy of ignoring things will kind of inevitably lead to conflict and confrontation with some percentage of people.
>One reason is that you're being told that that's an awful thing to do by basically every resource on "proper open-source" you can find.
The solution is clear. Just apply the grandparent's advice recursively:
Ignore these "resources" (!) on "proper open-source", too.
Also, that term sounds awfully entitled to me, too.
Who the heck is anyone to decide what constitues 'proper' open source "resources"? Total nonsense.
Everyone can have their own opinion about that, or not even bother to have an opinion, and just do exactly and only what they want for their own open source project, ignoring the naysayers, free-but-unwanted advice-givers, and freelisders.
I didn't know that we were living in a socialist heaven. Hot tip: We are not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32052669
Which does go to show both kinds of opposing viewpoints about this whole "entitled" attitude of some OSS users vs. the maintainers, w.r.t. to the specific case of Calibre and Kovid. Based on that thread alone, it shows that is easy to get prejudiced by one negative comment about a maintainer, whether true or false, and not know about or ignore all the other positive work and behavior by him/her.
There very likely isn't just one reason that applies to all maintainers.
But there are some reasons one can hypothesize that probably apply to some or many maintainers.
It can be ignored, yes, but the worst offenders go beyond a polite discourse and will send emails to whatever email they can find, DM you on Twitter, Mastodon, etc., and drop weird and annoying comments anywhere they think you have a chance of seeing them.
Some people have thicker skins than others, but it's just a bit tiresome no matter how much you can deflect.
- for American developers, many of them have provisions in their employment contracts that allow them to do unpaid open source work, but ban any kind of commercial (i.e. in exchange for money) activity. The fact that this reach into off-time by employers is possible is nuts anyway, but doesn't make the problem go away.
- as soon as any kind of money is involved, a lot of jurisdictions have provisions regarding warranties and liabilities - and these can be pretty enormous, see the log4j fallout. Some of these can be put aside by contracts, but nevertheless it's a legal minefield.
- some jurisdictions don't allow you to just take money in exchange for a project, it exposes developers to tax and social security liabilities. Even labeling such stuff as pure "donations" isn't safe if your tax auditor is particularly focused on nailing you.
- what to do if someone from a sanctioned country donates you money? What to do if you're European and get money from someone in Cuba (which is not sanctioned by the EU), but are employed by / work for American companies or intend to travel to the US?
- what to do if some arms manufacturer donates you / funds money for a project that could be used in weapons? Virtually all countries have some sort of equivalent to ITAR regulations that you really don't want to run afoul of.
This happens less where the FOSS choice is a drop in a sea of established proprietary packages (FreeCAD, KiCad, Godot) but way way more when they have already established themselves as the popular pick (OBS Studio, Blender) so they get flooded by less tech-savy, more casual users that don't really see the value of open source other than they don't pay for it.
"Normal" people have always had stuff given to them for "free" (either "you are the product" or built-in licenses like Windows) so they don't realize the goodwill and sacrifices that FOSS goes through.
this was solved 30 years ago by an important socio-technical invention called the FAQ, used together with a social convention of not elevating or rewarding vexatious messages.
Weee. Exposure.
However, there are entire industries that leverage open-source / free software, and put unreasonable, uncompensated demands on it.
At the end of the day though, I don't see the problem. As a maintainer of open-source, gratis, software, just don't do the work. It isn't like it is a job. If you don't do the work, they can't fire you.
Is that good for the community? Surely not, but who is asking whether the status quo is working for the developers? Nobody but them. So look out for yourself, and scratch your own itch, but don't treat open source as a job.
People will spend $10 on a coffee drink at Starbucks without blinking. Suggest that they spend $10 on a piece of software and they’ll throw a fit and claim you are taking away their rights.
They seem to only be present in the big metro areas that attract a lot of tourists and immigrants who are familiar with the Starbucks brand and go for that out of habbit and know quality, similar to how McDonald's is so popular.
As you say, people go to Starbucks and McDonalds for familiar known quality and you should be happy for it. That way the tourists and immigrants stay out of your local cafe.
Edit: to be clear I'm not defending supranational billion dollar corporations here.
I as a tourist didn't elect your officials, so it's not on me.
This is so ridiculously optimistic and misinformed. In Poland’s cities, for example, the cafes mainly belong to chains like Costa Coffee and Green Coffee Nero, which act identically to Starbucks in terms of prices, quality, and range of drinks. There aren’t many independent cafes left, let alone ones with lower prices than a Starbucks. Similarly, in Helsinki the choice largely comes down to chains like Espresso House and Robert’s Coffee that are no different than Starbucks.
Maybe because Cluj is an overrated, overpriced Silicon Valley wannabe (sorry to be so blunt), so greedy old-town cafe owners jack up prices to match IT workers' and tourists' purchasing power. In Iasi for example, there's still small neighborhood cafes that sell affordable coffee, you just gotta avoid the old town and city center where all IT workers and tourists gather.
>then you have a very warped perception of Europe overall
Doubt it. Go to Italy, Portugal, Austria and many others, and it's full of small family owned cafes and traditional coffee houses serving just affordable coffee and cakes, not acting like a tourist trap or hipster co-working space.
“Go to Italy, Portugal, Austria and many others” The countries you mention by name are either southern European or Central European. You need more firsthand experience than that to make such blanket statements as "In any European city you'll find...", like you did in the OP.
Your idea that Starbucks is unusual in that people stay there for hours, while independent cafes are necessarily drink-and-go experiences, is horribly misinformed. Go to the Western Balkans, where there are few or no Starbucks around, but myriad independent cafes where men often spend half the day on a single purchase. The cafe has always been a community center in that region. And in areas with high unemployment, ageing demographics, and little money, they also play an important role as simply a way to get out of the house.
Seems like a lot of countries have figured it out. Just how you put it below that some old cafes serve as gathering centers instead of profit centers. Yes, if you're a business owner looking to maximize profit, then a cafe selling cheap coffee is not a good way to make a lot of money, and post '89 Romania is all about money and less about community.
Most of those people won’t spend $100 on open source software.
Easy to defeat, fatal to ignore.
If you make a purchasing decision, your ass is on the line when people ask why certain product/service isn't fulfilling some arbitrary business need. In theory, assuming the functionality is part of the advertised purchase, the liability of the thing you're paying for lies on that third party. You did your due diligence. If you chose some open source combination with in-house build, they're going to question why you didn't outsource some envisioned cheaper third party option (sometimes, this is a legitimate strategy, often from my experience it's not). So you default to big vendor big solution to protect yourself.
Apologies are made and blah blah, discussions about "what alternatives do/did we have" and you often end up landing on implementing some mixture of leveraging public domain software and in-house customization atop/leveraging it to solve the problem you were paying for. In the end, you end up doing what you probably knew was the correct path anyways: this vendor solution is questionable, it doesnt completely align with our business needs, and it's not going to get the actual need done. Conveying that to business leaders is often impossible though. So, to pass liability/responsibility and cover your ass with incompetent business leadership, you throw often thousands, tens, or hundreds of thousands away.
I've had this discussion so many times and sat in these meetings so many times it grows tiring. The fact is, sometimes a generic solution works for your business (Office for example is a pretty generic need and often aligns), often it really doesn't (some arbitrary more niche/custom thing you do? Maybe, good luck).
The feeling of entitlement people have around capitalism is unsustainable.
Have a businessmodel that allows you to make more money the harder you work. Be happy with it.
Have a job as a teacher or a nurse or a police officer where your workload increases over the years and you make the same shitty salary no matter how hard you work. Tough luck.
If that's better than some having more money that they could possibly use, many having access to amazing amenities and luxuries, but a lot struggling to eat enough quality food and not being able to have a roof over their head is IMO a philosophical question. Do you prefer everyone (of course with some minor exceptions for higher ups) to be equally "not great, but not terrible" or do you prefer some to have amazing lives, but others to suffer?
Other than that, spot on though.
This isn't the choice. Socialism (actual socialism) repeatedly starves its populations. Capitalism repeatedly creates situations where new things are created that make everyone's lives better, and existing things get cheaper and better over time.
The innovation-focused dichotomy is: should we spend lots of effort trying to precisely spread around what we have today, while still having a privileged class based on politics, or should we encourage people to do things that raises the floor and the ceiling for everyone, and have a privileged class based on value they created?
> everyone's lives better
> things get cheaper and better over time.
Oh, fuck off with that bullshit. Capitalism may appear to thrive when living in a first-world country, but only does so through exploitation and cutting corners. More to the point, isn't it funny that despite capitalism being pretty much the de facto economic system of the world only a few countries are actually deemed worth living in? No, some abstract 'informed exchange of currency' didn't magically cause things to appear out of thin air. People make things, and they are almost certainly underpaid and overworked. Behind every AI model there are X poorly paid workers around the world that curated the data that it needs to function. Behind every piece of clothing there are Y poorly paid workers in Bangladesh that made it. And behind every rechargeable battery there are Z Congolese kids risking death inside a mine in search for cobalt. We might try to (and often do) look away, pretend that those are the unfortunate results of corporate blunders that seldom happen, but they're not. Invisible exploitation is what makes the kind of lifestyle that is available in first-world countries possible.
As for cutting corners, check out some videos on tofu dreg projects, it will enlighten you on corner cutting in a communist system.
I think this is a common and really fundamental misunderstanding. It works through signalling demand through pricing, rather than through bureaucrats guessing, giving anyone the chance to take a risk and keep the reward (mostly) if they manage to create value for other people, rather than how much they toe the party line. It definitely doesn't only work "through exploitation and cutting corners". Those things happen everywhere.
Just look at the monumental change in China due to the controlled (too controlled[0]) introduction of capitalism. If you let people create value for each other and get out of their way, you get stupendous results compared to thinking a centralised bureaucracy, slave-owner, monarch, or lord making the decisions.
> No, some abstract 'informed exchange of currency' didn't magically cause things to appear out of thin air
No one would say it did.
> People make things, and they are almost certainly underpaid and overworked. Behind every AI model there are X poorly paid workers around the world that curated the data that it needs to function. Behind every piece of clothing there are Y poorly paid workers in Bangladesh that made it. And behind every rechargeable battery there are Z Congolese kids risking death inside a mine in search for cobalt.
This isn't a capitalism thing. This is a poverty thing. It's lifted unequally globally, but it is lifted. The problem isn't capitalism; the problem is that doing these jobs is currently their best option. Similar or worse conditions were found in Britain under 100 years ago[1]. That's a very short timeframe for capitalism to have lifted the entire world out of poverty; too silly to take seriously as a criticism of an economic process.
> We might try to (and often do) look away, pretend that those are the unfortunate results of corporate blunders that seldom happen, but they're not. Invisible exploitation is what makes the kind of lifestyle that is available in first-world countries possible.
No, not just that. If we replaced those miners with robots we'd still have the lifestyle. Framing everything as exploitation is a dead end.
In theory. In practice, can you really say that existing things are getting cheaper and better, generally? Most of the Western world is seeing unprecedented price increases combined with record profits in multiple industries (so it's not just general inflation) combined with drastic quality and quantity decreases, combined with "enshitification" across multiple industries.
Price increases are almost always unprecedented, unless they previously went down. They are now going up, but not because of capitalism. Because of Covid spending, fuel price increases, minimum wage increases, etc etc. Macroeconomic effects (that we can debate the goodness of somewhere else), but generally ones related to government rather than business. This is though a very recent view, though. Are car prices, for the same quality of car, really better now than 30 years ago? Or has a pretty relentless competitive market for car manufacturers made cars far better value than they once were?
I don't think there have been drastic quality reductions of any kind in many areas.
"Enshitification" is a very narrow view of I think online platforms, particularly VC-backed ones starting free and looking for a sustainability too late; definitely not generalisable to "capitalism".
[0] maybe not aesthetically
Strangely one of those things that culturally, we can't get past. It's a false dichotomy at best, and completely ignores the costs of implementing capitalism.
Capitalism at least gives you the freedom to make your own choices. All the others (except anarchism) don't.
So I'd say that having a capitalist system is a requirement for also being a democracy. Moreover, the rapid fall of the fascist nations suggests that having a capitalist system is, in fact, also conducive to not having a dictatorship: economic freedom leads to people wanting political freedom as well.
The problem with capitalism is that people misunderstand it to mean that some billionaire owns 'everything' - whereas it really is YOUR freedom to choose how YOU lead your life. I'm all in favor of curbing predatory practices, but all too often 'taxing the rich' turns out to mean 'taxing the middle class'. The drive towards ever-heavier taxation, where tax rates only ever go up, and never down again, can only be fought by striving for more capitalism.
No True Scotsman in 3, 2...
I'm not sure why this is even a question, you could have thought of this yourself: "I think I'm not earning enough. Should I stick around in this job or find a better one?"
Your snide comment is also not a response to what I posted, but I guess presenting a counter argument is just too difficult.
What freedom does capitalism bring you? Freedom only exists under capitalism if you have enough capital to avoid the bottom rungs.
Free to work 8+ hours a day at a job I'll never get the full value out of? Free to work for a sociopathic POS that only sees workers as lines in a spreadsheet?
Get real. Capitalism cannot bring good to people's lives. We frame it that way because our societies literally cannot think of another way to do things.
Imagine saying 'sorry, unilateral exploitation is the only way'.
What intellectual rot.
There's the argument that in a planned economy, things can be terrible for pretty much everyone, like in Venezuela or North Korea.
You also have to account for the central planners choosing to repress people for political purposes.
Maybe you can give us a specific example of a centrally planned society which worked OK according to you? Here's a compendium of case studies to get you started: https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Niemietz-Socia...
I many times suspect that people who yearn for communism/socialism just wish to be those who come out on top from the revolution such as the Castros, the Chavez, Maduro, Guevara, Ortega, etc.
No thanks, I’ll take the system that allows me to move up or down generally in correlation with my effort and work ethics.
People have multiple jobs and can't afford healthcare and are living paycheck to paycheck or don't have parental leave or paid sick leave or paid time off do that because they want to, right?
That is not a sustainable solution for society.
I've always seen this as the markets reflecting what we collectively actually prioritize. Sure we want to be safe and educated, but damn it if we don't really get enjoyment out of fancy new toys, vacations, and new cloths.
In this case capitalism doesn't seem to be holding down salaries of the careers you listed. Its noteworthy that most of those industries are unionized, but if the unions are worth anything at all they should be pushing salaries higher than the market would have otherwise paid.
There is still some level of market sentiment though, both in that we don't collectively prioritize politically pushing through higher wages and individuals are still willing to do the jobs for the current salary rates.
Nursing may actually get the triple wammy - unions, governments, and insurance monopolies all weigh heavily into hourly rates and salaries for medical professionals.
There is still some level of market sentiment though, both in that we don't collectively prioritize politically pushing through higher wages and individuals are still willing to do the jobs for the current salary rates.
Nursing may actually get the triple whammy - unions, governments, and insurance monopolies all weigh heavily into hourly rates and salaries for medical professionals.
Imagine visiting a coffee shop and telling the barista: "hey, by the way, I can make my own coffee at home for free, you know?"
People seem somehow OK with thinking this way when it comes to software.
That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain (so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise, rather than try to engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when users do not feel the desire to contribute monetarily.
Eh… Isn’t that fairly close to the definition of entitlement (i.e. you complain when you have no reason to)?
Instead, it is more productive to develop strategies to ignore the noise from entitled voices. You do not need to respond to them. You do not need to convince them. You do not have to keep them happy.
There is: it discourages people from acting entitled.
I believe this is called “please use the template when submitting an issue” and we all know how that goes.
I’ve honestly found myself laughing like a madman at GitHub issues where the maintainer calmly and repeatedly tries to explain to the increasingly disgruntled reporter to UTFT (use the fine template)
Also, "Issues" should really, really have a different name.
Github could improve the experience 10 fold.
The garbage bug reports I see on my projects and others are like, either one sentence or rambling nonsense. The templates don't help much, these users will do their best to ignore them.
As long as you're not doing that, your bug report is probably very welcome.
Most bug reports, especially on complex software should follow something resembling a kind of wizard/state machine (e.g. state: OS has/has not been specified) but instead everything is a text box with a dump of contextual questions, half of which don't even necessarily make sense for the specific bug report you're making.
>As long as you're not doing that, your bug report is probably very welcome.
When barriers are thrown up to the other kind of person it will often make it seem like they are very unwelcome even when they're not - e.g. the first message you see may be a hostile list of "DON'T DO THESE 5 THINGS" because somebody once did each of those things. I'm pretty sure a lot of good bug reports are lost this way.
Taking and cropping a screenshot takes more time than just uploading the plaintext log file conveniently and lovingly placed right next to the executable. Please, just upload the file. Please.
The project was a Big Deal in the circles I was in. Hundreds of thousands of people knew of it, we had hundreds to thousands of active users each with dozens of clients. It was so stressful and I caught so much abuse that I exited software altogether. We did get some money, but my cut worked out to $60 a month.
I still write and publish code, but I don't work on anything that anyone wants to use. I don't get involved in communities and I don't interact with users.
And you know what? I am much happier now.
The solution is quite simple really.
1) have your repo private and release only tarball files or have a read only repo with no pull/merge request functionnality 2) do not use an issue tracker
Basically, do not use a forge such as github/gitlab, at least not publicly. Problem solved.
Free-rider problem [1].
It's like telling people not to be Christian/Buddhist/muslim because religion is just a bunch of fantasy stories.
Any project which is not a going concern should:
A: Not, IMHO, be called a ”project”
B: Be clearly labelled, in its public-facing information, as being offered as-is, without any implied updates or future development.
Pretty sure every open source license includes this in the warranty line...
I will not help you with drinking the free lemonade; if the lemonade is too sour for you I will not be providing extra sugar; and I will not make free lemonade tomorrow.
Can you give me one or two examples of official OSS websites where these are heavily implied or outright stated? Do you mean anything beyond a roadmap?
Regarding examples, basically any software project web site which talks about the project as an ongoing thing, gives links to where “new releases” will be available. Stuff like that. All that implies that the software is actively developed and will be developed for at least the near future.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Does gorhill need a disclaimer, as you propose?
If so, please tell me specifically, where you are reading any "implied support, security bugfixes, and future development".
I am not purposefully complicated, I just feel your "implied" is doing a lot of work, and I want to see what that really means. I don't see the implication, but perhaps I am blind. So please enlighten me. (If ublock doesn't fit your argument, please give another example of your liking.).
But think of it this way. There is a prominent link to their list of releases, <https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases>. From what I can tell, the releases vary from a few days apart to maybe a month apart, with the most recent release being yesterday. What would you think if, say, six months from now, there still wasn’t a new release? No bugs fixed? And, when asked about the absence of these things, if the developer’s answer would be “You’re whiny and entitled, I have no legal obligation to do anything, read the license LOL.”? I mean, he’d be technically correct, it would be legal for him to do this. But would it be OK? What I am arguing is that it would not be OK, and that users do have legitimate reasonable expectations of any project that presents itself as being active; i.e. fixing bugs, security holes, and implementing new features. Users are not “entitled” when expecting these things.
Just so I understand, what would be the question here?
What you say is kinda true, but directly proportional to time since the last commit (currently for uBlock 9hours ago). If there has been a commit over the last few days, yes, I (not particularly reasonably, but still) expect there to be updates. But this expectation (and reasonableness) diminishes with this commit further away, if that becomes months and then years, I no longer expect that.
And in your hypothetical conversation, a lot hinges on your exact framing and phrasing of both the (non)entitled question and the phrasing of the answer. Yeah, your hypothetical developer is a dick. Don't be a dick, both sides.
Again, I feel there isn't enough disagreement here for argument. Enjoy your perspective, have a good day or night.
The warranty disclaimer in virtually every software project, regardless of license, has been around for decades. The text has been fairly anodyne except with the recent wave of parasites killing their host and trying to snake their way out of it.
So if I had a text file in the root of my repo that said:
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
Can you explain how you got to that interpretation from that phrasing?
> SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
And how is future development and / or support not covered under servicing of that clause?
> THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.
I don't understand what's so difficult to understand. It's like everyone has been captured by a machine that will conjure up the most mystifying reasoning to suit a predetermined conclusion that was never true to begin with.
Nobody expects that. But people do reasonably expect a project to recieve updates, security fixes, and new releases.
It's not reasonable to expect a project to receive updates, security fixes, and new releases for software projects the author put on the Internet explicitly with a license saying it's warrantied for no purpose.
Your starting point is to selectively ignore parts of the authors explicitly chosen license.
It's sophistry.
The problem is that the barrier to use any software is so low that it attracts people who have no clue and demand support. I am not talking about you, even the larger companies always mention a wish to force smaller developers to patch security issues for free, this is an issue in supply chain security at the moment.
The gist is that you can fix it yourself.
(This is a bit like how a stable economy depends on there being a crucial threshold number of long-term, high-trust relationships. You cannot have a functioning economy when everybody is always backstabbing everybody else.)
> The problem is that the barrier to use any software is so low that it attracts people who have no clue and demand support.
I think this phenomenon is caused by:
1. Some users being a bit whiny and entitled, just like some people are rude to waiters. Some have been taught and brought up to behave this way, and others have just gotten into bad habits.
2. Many developers being overly defensive when presented with legitimate complaints from users. This is just human nature, harmful as it may be.
3. Due to 2., users exaggerate and act rudely when reporting complaints, because they expect pushback from developers. This then exacerbates 2. again, leading to a vicious cycle.
Some developers who are burnt out by 1., and are not realizing what is going on, are, as a way of psychological self-defense, adopting an attitude of “I don’t care about you users, you’ll get nothing and you’ll ******* like it.” This then necessitates the same developers to argue that all users who expect anything are merely “entitled”, because if any user’s expectations would be reasonable, then the developer’s attitude would be unwarranted, and the developers feel that they need that attitude for their own well-being.
If you read the license (for most licenses anyway), that info is clearly right there.
Do you have standards? It doesn't sound like you do.
People with healthy boundaries set standards for themselves as far as what they give to others and what treatment they accept in return.
I think the fallacy in your argument is that you're blaming contributors for noticing that they aren't being compensated for the work they've done, rather than blaming others for using that work without giving anything in return. I see your sentiment reflected in society in the way we treat low-wage workers with disdain for not doing more lucrative work. You're applying the principle of rugged individualism to a systems-level problem.
A healthier way to approach this would be to list a number of possible solutions and debate them in an open forum like this. When we find solutions but fail to adopt them, then that's a criticism of our agency. We are all failing ourselves by failing open source contributors. Then we can look beyond that to find the reasons why. Which are obvious because they are the same as with any other power imbalance. The fault lies with the wealthy and powerful people and corporations who profit from free and low-wage labor. The solution is to organize labor into a unified front so that exploitation can no longer happen.
Our failure to solve open source compensation is analogous to failing to stop suffering in developing nations which provide labor and resources for wealthy ones. Your argument places guilt and shame on workers instead of identifying exploitation by the wealthy, which might be better spent on something like an open source endowment or UBI more generally.
That's the exact opposite of what they are doing. They are blaming the users for expecting more than they should. They should expect nothing more than literally just the current version of the code, as is.
> I think the fallacy in your argument is that you're blaming contributors for noticing that they aren't being compensated for the work they've done, rather than blaming others for using that work without giving anything in return.
Is anyone being forced to work on open source software? Unlike low wage jobs, where you could be forced in order to pay bills, eat, nobody is forcing anyone to work on open source ventures.
Just because you do something useful does not mean you are inherently entitled to compensation in the form you want.
If you are being forced to do something against your will that is bad. If it is some hobby you happen to like doing that is totally ok.
> The solution is to organize labor into a unified front so that exploitation can no longer happen.
Lol. What type of leverage do you think open source devs have to form a union? Open source in many ways is designed to remove all economic leverage from source code. Its not a bug its a feature.
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If I follow your logic, then you're saying that there's no economic incentive to work on open source software, since it's not compensated financially. Which seems to create a paradox:
A) Capitalism doesn't apply to open source software because there's no exchange of capital for labor
B) Capitalism applies to open source software because it generates billions of dollars of revenue for people and corporations
It sounds like the only rational act under capitalism is to not work on open source software, since the work is not compensated.
Meaning that any solution we come up with will act outside of capitalism.
Can you present a solution that works within capitalism to fund open source software?
Edit: I forgot to mention that the primary power of organized labor is to withhold labor until compensated. For open source, that might look like deciding as programmers to withhold all of our contributions until we solve this. Since we won't do that, we're all scabs supporting the status quo.
Do some people get rich selling paintings, sure some do. Do most people? absolutely not. Is that a problem, i don't particularly think so.
People paint for a variety of reasons, some ecconomic, but most not. Similarly people contribute to open source for a variety of reasons, some ecconomic some not.
> It sounds like the only rational act under capitalism is to not work on open source software, since the work is not compensated.
Broadly stated, i agree with this. Unless you have some specific angle or business model, contributing to open source is a terrible way to get rich.
While it would be nice if my contributions made me a millionaire, i don't see it as a fundamental injustice that they don't. I knew that going in and did it anyways. If i wanted big bucks i would be optimizing my life to work at FAANG and that has its own set of trade offs.
I got triggered (saw what I wanted to see instead of what was there) because I've been involved with so many projects that failed (say 90+%) that my average hourly "wage" probably comes out to $3/hr over my lifetime. While that's a decent wage in many parts of the world, where I live it means struggle and destitution as a starving artist. "Let them eat cake" comes to mind, because I've never had the baseline stability needed to make the contributions in my heart. So I didn't, I just spent all the years of my adult life working towards other people's dreams, and what people see of me today is the shadow left behind of someone who lost dozens of bets in a row with little to show for it.
I'm concerned that AI encroaching on the last viable artistic endeavors like painting, playing music, writing (and now designing software!) could grind us under the heal of the status quo even harder. Yet people make $100+/hr working at FAANG by standing on the achievements of open source while giving almost nothing back.
I don't see a way out of this, so without some kind of human intervention, we have maybe 10 years left before the sky falls. That could be the start of the New Age (heaven on Earth) or it could be the total subjugation of humanity beneath technology (a living hell). Unfortunately the powers that be have chosen the second route, whether they are consciously aware of it or not.
Is there anything we can do to balance the scales? All I can think of is to withhold our labor. But when AI automates that, there truly will be no recourse. The value of labor will fall towards zero and we could be looking at a luddite revolution where people sabotage tech in a misguided attempt to save themselves. When we could have planned for that eventuality and chosen something like UBI instead.
It breaks my heart, but my heart is already broken. I guess that's why I have moved to magical thinking through stuff like meditation in an effort to manifest the world that might have been. An unsatisfiable ego-driven tech can only be defeated by a conscious soul-driven love.
Like how does one contemplate zen as the world burns? That's what this problem of under-compensation hits on for me. It's maybe the central problem of our time, or at least my time. Separating me from the life I had envisioned. For me, more tech has merely resulted in more suffering at the hands of it.
More maintainers need to take the "no guarantee of fitness for purpose" part of their license more seriously. Don't fall for the temptation to be everything for everyone. Don't cave to social pressure.
I get this, as a very bottom line. But a lot of great projects are great because the developers consciously want people to use and depend on their work.
Their is a living changing informal social bargain, unique to each project, along with licensing, economic and other concerns.
Is it unsustainable like the title of the article says? I suppose, but it's not some state of affairs that is unavoidable or that we are stuck with through no fault of our own. A guy wants people to depend on his work that he does for free, a company sees a core component of their business that they can get for free, a few years later the guy is upset that he is maintaining this thing everyone depends on and the company is scared their business will fall apart without him. They each got themselves there, it's a predictable state of affairs, the solutions for each party are very clear. As a developer though, the solution is what I've outlined: take the "no warranty of mechantibility or fitness for purpose" part of your license seriously and tell entitled people to solve their own problems.
The whole point of the GPL is to change "should" into "must" for these fixes. That makes it a two-way street.
The entitlement and ranting is a direct consequence of the recent GPL-hating campaign.
If someone releases code then that's it. You have it. Do what you want with it (within it's licence). Be thankful.
Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing more you ungrateful little git.
If you add this code to your project, you should fix and share any problems you encounter as a token of gratitude.