> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default.
I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. Equally, if you expect someone creating open source owes you anything, you're also part of the problem, (and part of why people feel they deserve compensation for something that used to be considered a gift).
All that said, you should take care of your people, if you can help others; especially when you depend on them. I think you should try. Or rather, I hope you would.
I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…
I've made my living working fulltime on a single open source project for more than 15 years now.
I think it is important to differentiate between different kinds of projects that people might undertake, and 3 particular categories always come to my mind (you may have more):
* "plumbing" - all that infrastructure that isn't something you'd ever use directly, but the tools you do use wouldn't function without it. This work is generally intense during a "startup" phase, but then eases back to light-to-occasional as a stable phase is reached. It will likely happen whether there is funding or not, but may take longer and reach a different result without it.
* "well defined goal" - something that a person or a team can actually finish. It might or might not benefit from funding during its creation, but at some point, it is just done, and there's almost no reason to think about continuing work other than availability and minimal upgrades to follow other tools or platforms.
* "ever-evolving" - something that has no fixed end-goal, and will continue to evolve essentially forever. Depending on the scale of the task, this may or may not benefit from being funded so that there are people working on it full time, for a long time.
These descriptions originate in my work on software, but I think something similar can be said for lots of other human activities as well, without much modification.
> There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it
Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books.
But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
If you think that literally no one is motivated by making more money than the minimal amount they need to survive, how do you explain rich people who still work? UBI isn't a proposal to make salaries illegal, so the problem of "how do we financially motivate people to work" isn't going to change if people happen to get a subsistence wage without employment. The assumption that there's a binary of "people will either be motivated to work or they won't" is nonsensical; there's a entire spectrum of what motivates different people (and how much they're motivated by them). Some people who work now might stop under a system of UBI, but plenty still would continue to. There's a fair question about what the correct amount of money for this is to balance things properly, but without the flawed assumption that motivation is a binary, I don't think the answer is nearly as obvious as you imply.
Seems like you are making same binary assumption that people either work or they don't. The important question is probably how well/hard do people work. Lower productivity means people that work produce less so prices rise. Many make mistake thinking only about having money, but forget the supply part of the equation. If productivity is lower, there are literally less things available to everyone. And these equations are not linear. Look at the current RAM situation for example.
But the major issue is that the progress slows down. Effects of slower progress accumulate with time. At first you are only a few years behind, then you are a few decades behind etc. Imagine inventions, cures being available decades or hundreds of years later (depending on what timescale we look at).
I think UBI sounds nice, but is far from an optimal solution. Wouldn't be better, if we could solve same issues UBI promises to solve in a more efficient way (with less negative side effects)? UBI is just throwing money at the problem, hoping it will solve itself.
No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketry or some other pursuit they have interest in. Providing UBI means that geologists don't need to hoard data because they won't starve if they don't get a cut from it's usage. The people involved in technological break through are often doing it for self-interest or fame and don't stop once they've hit some financial breakpoint.
We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody and at this point it's all gravy. For obvious reasons we couldn't feed/house everybody if they wanted to solely live in NYC but IIUC no UBI proposal is about that; UBI lets you live in below median-desired places without additional income.
> So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, where a civilization decides that phone sanitizers are useless, until removing them quietly collapses everything else. Declaring work “non-essential to progress” usually just means we don’t understand its role.
But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc. While they might not make progress directly, they enable other people to make progress.
> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody
Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of anything is completely relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
> But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.
Of course money is not the only thing that motivates people. But there's a lot of empirical evidence that it matters. A lot, unfortunately. And I say unfortunately as I would rather have it matter less. But me whishing it doesn't change the data.
UBI is a high concept pitch, that is memorable and catchy, but AFAIK it's not well supported either by psychological models or by empirical economics data. It gives some social safety net. Problem is that it gives a rather weak safety net. We can actually do better.
Can I ask you why exactly does it need to be UBI? If another system (more complex, with less sexy pitch) could provide a bigger safety net and have a more positive economic impact, wouldn't you rather choose that?
> Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own.
Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.
> The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
We don't live in an ideal free market.
Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
SROs not in say NYC are cheap as well. Everybody trying to live in the same major cities will never be cheap.
> Why would we need UBI then?
Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.
You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring.
> Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
Food prices sometimes fall below costs because agriculture is volatile. It's not proof that food is inherently "extremely cheap" to produce. Also, absolute prices cannot be easily compared between countries and low quality food has negative health effects.
> Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
If basic needs are so cheap that UBI can cover it, then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
> Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Opportunity cost is the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how? And even with UBI they would still benefit, if they get that additional money.
> Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
> You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant.
We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect.
> If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before?
I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going to go up with UBI as the opportunity cost has increased.
> then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
No, I just don't think you understand the world around you. Have you never heard of remote nomads? Plenty of people work full-time for parts of the year or part-time all of the year.
> Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how?
Giving the information away for free costs you the money that you could've gotten for charging for it. When you need that money to survive then you have to restrict access. When you don't then you're able to volunteer it.
If we want to have any meaningful debate on what effect something has, we need to try to separate what are the reactions/side effects caused by it and to try to avoid additional confounding changes that were not caused by it. Trying to undo the negative side effect you don't like by, for example, introducing new technological innovations, or in your case a new optimization even though there is no increase in anything that would help do develop this new optimization, is making a confounding change.
While speculating what might happen in some particular cases can be fun, the real questions that need to be answered are regarding the macroeconomic effects of UBI. Starting with what % of GDP will be needed for UBI that will cover all the basic needs (food, housing, healthcare, etc.)? And then focus, not just on what few good Samaritans might do, but on how households, firms, and governments would respond at scale: labor supply, wages and prices, inflationary pressure, taxes, effects on productivity, growth, etc.
But I think our discussion has run its course. While we clearly have different opinions, it was still fun and I hope we both learned something. Be well!
I don't disagree that people work with different amounts of efforts, but if anything, to me it seems far more likely that people who have to work only because they won't be able to survive otherwise are going to be more stressed and less likely to be able to work productively. If the only people who work are the ones who choose to rather than an additional set who are forced to in order to survive, the average motivation level is going to be higher, and it's not obvious to me that this wouldn't be better even if the total number of workers is lower. This just seems like another balancing problem, and there's still no obvious reason to me why the default assumption is that maximizing the number of people who work will end up being the best option.
> But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
You're making the mistake of conflating UBI with "no one works anymore". This is a silly mistake to make. It's like believing that providing a universal healthcare service that provides basic care to everyone somehow meant supply and demand for private health services would be eliminated. In the meantime, look at pretty much any European country which already provides free universal healthcare.
Listen, UBI stands for Universal Basic Income. Universal means everyone gets it, Income means an inflow of cash, and Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs. Think of a kind of unemployment benefit for all that doesn't go away once you find a job. Once you get a job, you get paid an income that supplements your basic income. That's it. The biggest impact is that if you find yourself out of a job, you still get an inflow of cache that allows you to meet basic needs.
UBIs does change the economy. For example, most if not all poverty-mitigation policies can be effectively replaced by UBI. Instead of food stamps, use your income to buy food. There's no longer a pressing need for unemployment benefits if you already are guaranteed a basic income.
My main objection to UBI: won't landlords, grocery stores, power companies and the like simply raise their prices to suck up that money that everyone is guaranteed to have now until it ultimately doesn't cover basic needs like it was designed to do? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic.
I actually volunteer to take care of parts of the trash in our neighborhood. Like with a proper garbage truck. And the amount of volunteers so big that I only have to do it a few times a year. All the money they make with recycling goes to the local school. It is fun to do, even in cold rain. The garbage truck driver gets paid, but I am sure in an IBU world even drivers would chip in if they could afford it. People want to contribute and feel useful.
I’ve met a lot of people who are passionate about public cleanliness to the point of organizing rubbish pickups, beach cleanups, and river dredging using their own power. With UBI, you may have to take your own trash to the landfill but rest assured the larger ecology will still be taken care of by passionate people.
I think a bigger issue will be that the people who are passionate for a project may not be the most effective at accomplishing it, and without income you can’t motivate those more effective people into working on the project.
UBI is not in contradiction to paid work to make more than the minimum that is guaranteed. Think of it as being like food stamps that you get in addition to whatever you do or do not make.
Interestingly, UBI would be compatible with ending the minimum wage. If survival is guaranteed, then there is no reason to insist that a low end job pay a living wage. As long as someone wants to pay for the work and someone else wants to do it, let them!
This sounds like it'd be one of the many ideas that sounds great on paper but in reality just creates an even greater stratification in society. I think you're completely correct that in many places, particularly higher end - people would come together to keep the place looking great, possibly even better since you get to 'own' it on some ways.
But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. But I also think we're looking at things superficially. There's a lot of technical work that can't be casually done like plumbing or electrical that is currently moderately compensated. In an UBI world costs for this would likely skyrocket which would lead to an even higher UBI which would lead to even higher costs which would lead to Zimbabwe.
Pessimism aside I would probably actually support it, simply because I think it would be the ultimate expression of liberty - but you have to realize that you're not going to create anything like the same society we have, but with everybody being able to independently support themselves. You're going to completely destroy the contemporary economy and create a new entity that would probably be much closer to something of times long since past when the overwhelming majority of America was self employed. 'The Expanse' offers a realistic take on what UBI would probably entail.
> But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly.
You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other place, be it rural, suburban or urban. You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
Of course OP is silly in making the mistake of believing UBI will get all people working on urban waste management fired and out of a job. It's like believing that if a service provides a free tier, all other services will suddenly vanish. But presuming people don't care about their surroundings because they live in an 'urban' neighborhood reflects a problem that's about prejudice and not UBI.
This is rather a tangent but I spent years living in these areas. Have you ever wondered why it seems so many people who grew in these sort of places tend to have seemingly so much less 'empathy' for them than those who grew up e.g. upper middle class? You are probably seeing things through a foreign perspective where you assume everybody is, more or less, like you and so these awful differences must be caused by reparable externalities. You probably imagine that if you were granted infinite power, you could create a utopia.
But what you learn living in these areas for years is that no - not everybody is like you, or even remotely like it. There are a significant number of people who are simply broken and beyond repair. It reminds me of this video [1] which is from a minister of the UAE speaking on a perfect analog. The one thing I'd certainly agree with you about is that prejudice is bad, but the direction of one's prejudice, good or bad, matters not. We should always form our opinions based on reality, and not ideals.
> You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
I think that is what observation actually is, you get to see what others have done in the recent and not so distant past, or am i missing your point.
Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study.
I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisible because their extreme pathological avoidance of attention. You don't know them and their contributions because they don't want you to know that they still live at home, out of their car door dashing because no company ever hires them, are shut-in because of serious unhealed trauma, are still deeply in poverty in such a wealthy industry etc.
A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
Many prominent pseudonymous devs have had hikikomori traits.
_why practically inspired a generation of Ruby devs. visualidiot (RIP) was a crucial driver behind a lot of web dev culture in the 2010s. Heck, I made significant contributions to Joomla and WP themes back in the day -- you have probably used sites with themes or plugins I made. Also I ran a blog a decade ago that used to rank prominently in google and receive dozens of emails a month from people struggling with mental illness -- many people crediting me with saving their lives. Surely that is something of value to society.
Don't go around spreading bullshit like it is facts about a group of people we know little about.
>> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
> Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about.
Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
> A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
"likely", "might" - this is all speculation on your part too. There is no reason to believe that a lot of humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would, in fact, contribute more to society, nor that the contributions from those that do would, in fact, offset those that don't.
It's speculation on both sides of this particular argument I see no compelling evidence at all.
> Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
If we can't tell, the "they aren't" bit is of course made up. Are you not arguing in good faith, or are you just not paying attention to what you're quoting?
"they aren't, plain and simple" is the made up bit I was calling out. There is literally not much more to the original comment to be calling made up.
"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.
Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.
The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.
People who are specifically not employed because they aren't motivated to do anything at all don't seem to be the best sample for what average people could do if they had more free time during their waking hours.
It seems unlikely that the most motivated people will take up UBI; the most likely UBI recipients are those who are marginally employed, and likely marginally motivated.
a) I'm not sure it logically follows that the hikikomori would be a particularly artistic group, thus don't understand the assertion; b) how do we know they aren't? By definition, they wouldn't be out promoting their works or gaining recognition.
Also, there is at least one example of UBI contributing to an increase in activity:
"According to the research, 31% of BIA recipients reported an increased ability to sustain themselves through arts work alone, and the number of people who reported low pay as a career barrier went down from one third to 17%. These changes were identified after the first six months of the scheme and remained stable as the scheme continued." [1]
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: the flourishing of the arts in Bohemian districts[1] in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Maybe there’s a feedback loop with societal expectations regarding the hikikomori / NEETs? The more they are demonized as unproductive, the less productive they become.
Hikikomori seems to be largely a symptom of mental illness. NEETs almost by definition are not productive.
The fact that these groups are not producing mass amounts of creative works in no way implies that currently-productive people would not produce significantly more creative works if they had the time and resources to do so.
No that wouldn’t. If the zeitgeist, culture, society at large are antagonizing toward you, if you are meant to feel like a useless negative part of society, why would we expect amazing output from them?
This reinforces others talking about the flaws of hustle and grind culture. The status quo create the conditions for the negatives and then point to that and say “see”.
NEETs are, by definition, people who are either unwilling or unable to do anything productive, so I don't think they are a good example. I expect you'd get better results if you include the people who are employed today.
> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
It's funny how you chose to frame groups as "NEET", but you somehow failed to refer to "aspiring artist" or "aspiring musician" or "aspiring novelist". I mean "aspiring artist" already implies engaging in an activity albeit not professionally or reaching success.
You also somehow failed to refer to "amateur artist". As if not enjoying enough success to live comfortably with your art to the point of requiring to hold a job to pay rent is something that would validate your argument.
I'm not sure you are even aware of the fact that most of the mainstream artists you see around are not even professional, in the sense that in spite of their success and touring they still need to hold a job to make ends meet. Check out any summer festival, pick any random non-headliner band, and see how many members hold jobs, and had to take time off to go touring. Even some music legends have a history of holding humble jobs at least up to the time they made it. See Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory.
It's not just music, either. Luminaries like Fernando Pessoa could very well be classified as the ultimate NEET as he spent years of his early life not in education, employment, or training.
I don't think that's the only reason since the dole exists today too and there's not as much good music coming out.
Jazz and other music genres in the US came without government welfare, they came from struggle and oppression. Motivated artists will still work part time to fund their dream, they don't necessarily wait for welfare to start making art.
IF you were to give a lot of people free money today, will you get more and higher quality art in return, or will most people just drink and smoke that money while playing videogames at home?
Society, people and the world today are vastly different than back in the 1960s, so we need new polices targeting the society of today, not 1960s policies.
What do you mean there isn't much good music coming out? Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preference, or you aren't looking for it and are just relying on major media companies to show it to you, but ive never had more high quality music of more variety than ever before.
Much of it is farther in the electronica genres that many people somehow still ignore the existence of but I haven't had to listen to the same song twice unless I wanted to in a number of years. Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
>Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
How is that proof of "good music"? That's just background noise.
What do you think those policies might look like? It's true that we have more screen based entertainment options today. We also have a very different music distribution system that is likely influencing things substantially. In the 1960s, I imagine getting on the radio was what it took to launch a career, now it's matching the algorithm on spotify.
I don't know what the right policies would be, but I noticed that smart, driven and disciplined driven people will always find a way to work around algorithms to get to the top, it's not something the government can legislate in order to get a desired outcome.
It's not like becoming famous back then was easy either. Plenty of good bands never got anywhere. The Mona Lisa wasn't a famous painting until someone stole it in 1911, before that nobody gave damn and now it's the most famous of them all. Survivorship bias and randomness in art is real.
Um, hikikomori are a hotbed of creative works, though. Your entire premise is false. I don't know that you could get reliable statistics proving this claim, but Japan likely has the highest number of creatives per capita of any country in the world, and a ton of them are NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels. The vast majority of this creative work isn't commercially successful, of course, which is part of why they're NEETs.
> "NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels"
And you expect the voting public to be persuaded to support UBI because of the immense societal value of an tsunami of gooner fanart (yes, I do have some passing familiarity with the sort of output Japanese NEETs generate) and "trashy webnovels"? I'm pretty sure that when the person I'm replying to talked about "the incredible artworks [and] literature ... that would spring into existence", that's probably not what they were hoping for.
I'm not commenting in any way on UBI, as I try to avoid having strong opinions about topics I don't have expertise on. My only stake in this matter is addressing the patently false claim that NEETs are not creative, when the exact opposite is true which perhaps is incidentally harmful to the argument you were building against UBI given that you staked it on an inversion of the truth.
That you boil it down to "gooner fanart" reflects entirely on yourself and what you view. I believe this is known as "telling on yourself". The overwhelming majority of the artistic output is actually not lewd; somewhere in the region of 85-90% of what gets published is SFW. Not only that, a pretty considerable amount of output is in fact professional-quality; if anything keeps them from being professionals, it's merely the fact that they spend their time creating what they want to see in the world. Being an actually professional artist generally entails creating what other people want to see in the world; specifically what a critical mass of people willing to pay want, which renders commercially viable art to a limited subset of possibilities, mostly only possibilities that appeal to the lowest common denominator if you want to ensure the safety of your income.
You could indeed say that literature is a weak point relative to the very high quality art, music, games, etc, in the NEET cultural sphere, but it's because people aren't trying to be literary. There is simply a subcultural preference, among both creators and consumers, for easier-to-digest writing. The forms of creativity people take an interest in don't have to match the exact ones you value in order for them to have merit. People read and write trashy webnovels because they like trashy webnovels, and that's fine too. It is still an expression of creativity all the same. And some small percentage of those trashy webnovels do go on to be extremely commercially successful, so even if that's your cynical metric for creative value to society it would still be incorrect to say they don't have value.
>There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
As it happens, the Japanese internet is absolutely rich with content created by individuals, most of it done for the sake of love for creative work rather than financial motivation. I spend much of my free time either consuming it or contributing to the pool of such work myself. The entire point of this discussion thread was about the potential for creativity if you were to unshackle it from the demands of financial self-sustenance.
As an aside, I believe this phenomenon manifested as strongly as it has in Japan because of the extremely low cost of living relative to the level of economic development; a studio apartment can be had for less than the equivalent of $200 USD per month, and many parents can afford to and are willing to pay this price to get the NEETs out of their house. In essence enabling them, not that they want to enable their adult children to depend on them but the burden is small enough that they can tolerate it.
People valuing something is not at all the same as people spending money for it. For one, there is always competition with an abundance of freely available material. At the very least, you’d have to compare with a situation where nothing of the sort whatsoever would be freely available, and that’s very hard to do.
That being said, I’m skeptical of UBI being workable as well.
I think that's an unbelievably cynical worldview, one I don't agree with at all, but within that view: what of the things people value, but which they do not pay for? Much of the tech of the world is built on the free labour of FOSS developers. Are they not contributing to society because they are not compensated for their contributions?
I contribute to FOSS, and everything from issue reports to branches and pull requests are indications of a project’s value! True value is difficult to measure, but there are many projects which contribute no value.
It's quite possible to be creative while not contributing to society or whatnot.
A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.
I never disputed the fact that shut-ins can be ‘creative’, but instead focused on ‘hotbed’. I would characterize artistic failures as being more ‘original’ and perhaps ‘creative’ than successes, but they still lack value (to anyone but the creator). Regardless, this seems pointlessly semantic.
Counterexample:Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered in the 1840s that hand-washing dramatically reduced deaths in childbirth. The medical establishment rejected his findings, and he was institutionalized and died tragically, vindicated only after his death.
Surely this was a contribution even if not valued at the point of making it.
Even given the other objections to your argument, there are an extraordinary number of examples of now-very-appreciated artists, writers, etc whose work was not valued at the time they were creating it.
Hikkis will barely have their (speaking from Maslow) physiological needs met, and seldom their safety and security needs. This leaves them with very few mental-emotional resources to put into even having any creative thoughts. UBI would absolutely uplift these people into a position where they can start producing output.
and yet their hypothesis is true, there are already many people, with or without UBI, that volunteer, create things and in general help people surrounding them without any reward and they are the backbone of every society, not the career-chasers
I think phenomena like hikkikomori have more to do with (at least perceived) social rejection than lack of motivation. If the only acceptable message you receive from society is that you must chase the brass ring constantly and any setback means you are an abject failure, then withdrawing from the pain of that rejection makes sense for anyone who has experienced enough setbacks or strongly feels alien to that culture. A broader societal shift would occur if it was truly universally understood that everyone has value as a human being separate from their labor market leverage or capital accumulation.
There will always be strivers who measure their self worth against superficial standards (Russ Hanneman “doors go up” hand gesture here), I just don’t see why everyone should be forced to play that game or starve I suppose. Giving everyone the option to settle for a life of basic dignity while caring for those around them, or going all in on some academic / creative pursuit seems equally valid investments for society.
Yes. The only real conclusion from people like NEETs is that society failed them. Outside of a fraction of total people (or when addictions are at play), it is very rare that someone never wants to be productive.
I support UBI, funded by high capital gains taxes, to offset the growing value of capital relative to labor due to ever-improving automation, but I think it's silly to think a significant number of people will ever be happy with UBI alone.
First of all, "baseline needs" are fluid. These days, electricity and internet are broadly considered baseline needs, but would have been unimaginable luxuries for previous generations. The future will inevitably bring new "baseline needs" we can hardly yet comprehend.
Secondly, the vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum, no matter what that minimum is. If you have a friend who can afford fancy things, and you can't, then more likely than not, you will not be satisfied. It's also much easier to attract a partner if you're financially successful, for similar reasons. That's just human nature. Just because you don't have to worry about starving or succumbing to the elements does not mean people will stop competing with one another.
> The vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum
Isn't that a benefit for UBI? If everyone's basic needs are met and they want more, nothing would stop them from taking a job and making more money right?
Ya. I'm saying I support UBI, and that the concern most people raise about UBI (usually along the lines of "I don't think anybody should just coast by without working") is completely unfounded.
The parent post was talking about how everybody would have more time for unpaid pursuits if only we had UBI. I'm saying that I don't think UBI would change that much. People will continue to pursue unpaid hobbies much like they do today, but making money will still be just as important.
> Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
If people find these things useful, they can actually pay for them. If you can't find people who value it enough to pay for it, then may be it's not as valuable as you think it is.
By that measure, doing something for a poor person who cannot pay would be entirely worthless, while delivering food to a particularly generous billionaire would be more valuable than an entire month of an average person's work.
The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.
UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.
You need to impose a tax called the Land Value Tax to prevent landowners eating up the public money. Even then we got a long list of much needed public spending before we can even think about a Citizen's Dividend.
> UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.
This is only true if there’s a static supply of rental units, which isn’t true in most places (despite new construction being constrained by regulation in many places). I support an LVT, but it is not a necessary precondition for redistribution.
I'm generally an advocate for a robust safety-net such that people shouldn't be on their knees every month just to scrape by with food/housing/healthcare, and would love it if we reached Star Trek/The Culture levels of post-scarcity, but I'm simultaneously not convinced by this idea, but possibly from another angle.
1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists).
2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded.
TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.
“Strong” social safety can be achieved only by enslaving producers who have to provide the ground for “many many” caring people. This is always the case. Consider Russian support of young families: the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have. Personally, I cannot imagine a worse moral depravity than supporting this atrocity as a matter of justice.
Capitalism is not “slavery with extra steps,” it’s freedom in a fragile world repleted with conflicting goals. Just because people don’t agree with your goals doesn’t make you a slave.
>the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have
IDK, this seems perfectly reasonable if the state also provides an old age insurance / pension system for retirees. Without a younger generation of people paying into the system (i.e. the children of parents) these systems collapse. It seems appropriate to support the people that keep the government functioning.
Of course, I’m guessing you oppose systems like social security too, given your comment. I just find it odd that you can’t imagine anything worse than giving money to parents, given most governments give money to a lot of people, most of whom aren’t opting into anything as noble as parenthood.
Giving uncharacteristically large direct stimuli for procreation disproportionately incentivizes the people in dire need of money, meddling with the rationality of the decision and increasing social tension later.
The only other way to be promised a big pile of cash from the govt there is a military contract.
UBI is an idea from another money-centric ideology, namely “libertarianism”. It’s not an idea for fostering creativity. It’s an idea for dealing with less employable dependents of society, while the true dependents (parasitic capitalists) take the real spoils of industrialized productivity.
Doesn't UBI come from taxes? I can't reconcile the idea of welfare for everyone resonating very well with any of the libertarians I know. Personal charity, sure, absolutely, but not government controlled payouts to people, even if that includes everyone. They would probably consider it better than the current welfare system with all it's bureaucracy, but that's as positive a response as I can expect.
Most libertarians I know (and I consider myself an on and off libertarian as I learn more about it) want the government to stick to making sure people's rights aren't being trodden upon and otherwise leave us alone.
I'm not agreeing with the OP proposal, but with LLMs today, no matter how you license your code and no matter what ToS or other prohibition you put on it, there does not seem to be any way to prevent LLMs from absorbing and using it to implement a replacement based on your code unless you choose to only do closed source code - there's no "opt out" for someone's source code, let alone an opt-in (again, unless we give up open source). (A very different situation from the AI companies themselves, where companies such as Anthropic make Claude Code closed source, and their ToS provide strict prohibitions on using it to work on something that could compete with them - can you imagine if Windows or MacOS's ToS prohibited people from using their OS to work on a competing OS, of if the VSCode ToS prohibited people from using VSCode to work on another editor?)
> The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary
Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly that's it includes levying taxes, so that's pretty much a meaningless characterization.
Let's put it in more concrete terms: if the US government passes a law to raise taxes to fund UBI, that probably wouldn't even make the last of the top 100 most oppressive things it's done to innocent people in the past year. If the strongest objection to this policy would be "I don't want to pay taxes to fund things for other people", it's in pretty good company.
> Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly
Yes, and that's why great care and respect should be applied to how the government uses the tax money which they have raised from oppression.
Paying somebody to work for free for a giant corporation is not a justified use of that money. Those corporations should pay for their labour themselves.
I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour. When it's done to pay for an army to defend ourselves against enemies, for the justice system to protect all citizens, or for healthcare to save lives, then that's palatable. As well as for a myriad of other things. But to pay a programmer so that he can make server infrastructure so that Amazon doesn't have to pay him? That's not palatable.
Not among the standard things which every government always does. Are you thinking about crimes against humanity and such?
For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost every government engaged in during the covid pandemic, and which I am against.
I think you've missed the point again, it's more like this:
1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.
3. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
If you can't go to step 3, then you are doing it wrong and need to change step 1 from "giving it away for free" to something like "giving it away for free to the common people and at a price for corporate."
Which you could say "but that's not open source!" and you'd be right, which is exactly my point here: I don't think you want to do fully open source software, you want to do software and get paid for it somehow. If you do open source and get paid eventually and non binding, that's a nice little bonus, but it's not the main goal, never was with open source.
Although I agree with your overall point, there is a middle ground here: (commercially) non-free but open source software.
I believe that's where the biggest disagreement ITT lies. There are currently good ways to do FOSS, proprietary closed-source and free closed-source software development. But if the OSS is worth charging for (commercial) use, devs are left with asking for donations, SaaS or "pay me to work on this issue/feature".
There arguably should be better mechanisms to reward OSS development, even if the largest part of an OSSndev's motivation is intrinsic.
You're not wrong, but I think it is increasingly harder (and perhaps socially taboo) to stay far away from proprietary software while still being part of a functioning society.
FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.
My apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time.
I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.
If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work they hadn’t necessarily signed up for (who signs up for burnout?) - it’s ok/necessary/mandatory to see how everyone (and or Nvidia/Google/OpenAI etc) can, like, help.
My insistence is on the opt-out nature of this so that people who would be ok being compensated don't have to beg.
Consider how the xz malware situation happened [0]. Or the header & question 8 from the FAQ for PocketBase [1].
Instead of forcing Github to force users to pay a fee to support OSS, why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work? Then that requires 0 coercion and those who feel undervalued for their work/projects can be compensated as the market dictates the value of their projects.
There are a lot of dumb and even disagreeable open source projects. Why should someone be de facto forced to fund those projects?
It's like this ass-backwards way of selling something because you're allergic to markets or something. Honestly, it's quite rude to go on and on about free software and liberation and all these things and then turn sour grapes years later because everybody took you up on it. Nobody is forcing anyone to maintain any of these projects.
And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
> And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
Yeah, maybe. Maybe if it wasn't released as MIT but released as GPLv3 you'd actually get compensated in the form of patches, bugfixes, features, etc in "your" software.
The whole RIIR movement is doing this - replacing as many GPL components as possible with rewritten MIT components. I find this completely disrespectful: trying to displace pro-user software with pro-business software.
> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month
It's about org, not about every single person using Github.
The idea is basic and should have been written in the article.
When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.
A contributor wouldn't like a free for personal use either.
The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue) »
> you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
It happens so many times and no just about software (but then it's not a million dollar company). It's not that you are dump, you done the right thing and some companies with money/power/opportunity to capitalize on it, did it and didn't compensate you fairly.
> When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.
Nope.
Put it in the license, sell the software, or work for free, but stop complaining about it.
It's nice if businesses who benefit from specific software packages want to pay or show support, but it's not nice to release something "for free" but then jump on a moral grandstand and demand everyone pay so you can feel good about your ideology at the expense of everyone else.
> The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue)
You're not wrong, but I feel like a lot of people are hung up on the purism of the OSI definition, and a license that's not so blessed may prevent a project from gaining significant traction, if that is part of their goal.
I think it would be nice if there were a license that was more widely accepted that introduced a monetary component that could compensate the developer(s).
> why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work?
What if we turn this from a rhetorical question to an actual question?
My totally unverified take:
1. Missing transaction / Payment infrastructure. The same reason why paid music streaming services were successful depite piracy being a thing.
2. Bureaucracy associated with earning money. In many countries, going from "unpaid" to "€1 per month" is a nightmare.
... and a suggestion to make both less dire: A transaction infrastructure that allows small projects (that wouldn't be a cash cow anyway) to forward all payments to another project of the project Author's choice.
I don't disagree with any of what you wrote here, but I don't think the solution is "well we haven't figured this out, OSS who talk all the time about free as in beer free software now all of a sudden want to get paid for their work" is to just go around uncharging other people/organizations to support their projects, especially if not all OSS projects are worth supporting.
I agree with echelon; don't apologize. I'm not objecting to the message, only to the framing.
How to create more code I can enjoy using has been something that I've been thinking about for a long time. I've even advocated for a stance[0], similar to yours. While I don't agree it's correct to conflate the malign intent surrounding the xz takeover, with the banal ignorance as to why so many people don't want to support people creating cool things, (and here I don't just mean financial support.) I do acknowledge there are plenty of things about the current state we could fix with a bit more money.
But I don't want open source software to fall down the rabbit hole of expectations. Just as much as I agree with you, people opting-in to supporting the people they depend on is problematic. Equally I think the idea that OSS should move towards a transactional kind of relationship is just as bad. If too many people start expecting, I gave you money, now you do the thing. I worry that will toxify what is currently, (at least from my opinionated and stubborn POV), a healthier system, where expectations aren't mandatory.
The pocket base FAQ, and your hint towards burnout are two good examples, describing something feel is bad, and would like to avoid. But they are ones I feel are much easier to avoid with the framing of "this work was a gift". I have before, and will again walk away from a project because I was bored of it. I wouldn't be able to do so if I was accepting money for the same. And that's what leads to burn out.
I do want the world your describing (assuming you can account for the risks inherent into creating a system with a financial incentive to try to game/cheat), but I don't want that world to be the default expectation.
To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.
I also don't think all software needs to be free. I also don't think all software needs to be a gift. (But then I just said the same thing twice.) The part that I care about is which direction the default [default definition?] shifts.
In my perfect world, more code would be MIT not GPL. But in my perfect world, the GPL wouldn't be useful in practice. The world is far from perfect.
> To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.
Well, yeah. I think we agree. That's why I said it is transactional - you get software in exchange for any future potential improvement you make to it.
It's a transaction.
MIT is not transactional, it's charity - you get software without having to trade anything for it.
If people make their software MIT or GPL, they should not complain when it is used in a way that they are unhappy with. With MIT, it can be used in almost any way the user wants, including closing it off, and depriving the community of improvements.
"Open Source" is hugely conflated in terms of the reasons people write open source software.
There are people who truly don't care to be compensated for their work. Some are even fine with corporations using it without receiving any benefit.
Some people prefer viral and infectious licenses the way that Stallman originally intended and that the FSF later lost sight of (the AGPL isn't strong enough, and the advocacy fell flat). They don't want to give corporations any wiggle room in using their craft and want anyone benefiting from it in any way to agree to the same terms for their own extensions.
Many corporations, some insidiously, use open source as a means of getting free labor. It's not just free code, but entire ecosystems of software and talent pools of engineers that appear, ready to take advantage of. These same companies often do not publish their code as open source. AWS and GCP are huge beneficiaries that come to mind, yet you don't have hyperscaler code to spin up. They get free karma for pushing the "ethos" of open source while not giving the important parts back. Linux having more users means more AWS and GCP customers, yet those customers will never get the AWS and GCP systems for themselves.
There are "impure" and "non-OSI" licenses such as Fair Source and Fair Code that enable companies to build in the open and give customers the keys to the kingdom. They just reserve the sole right to compete on offering the software. OSI purists attack this, yet these types of licenses enable consumers do to whatever they want with the code except for reselling it. If we care about sustainability, we wouldn't attack the gesture.
There are really multiple things going on in "open source" and we're calling it all by the same imprecise nomenclature.
The purists would argue not and that the OSI definition is all that matters. But look at how much of the conversation disappears when you adhere to that, and what behavior slips by.
I agree with you, but I do think we have a bit of a problem in which an open source creator makes something and then suddenly finds themselves accidentally having created a load-bearing component that is not only used by a lot of people and companies, but where people are demanding that bugs be fixed, etc., and we lack great models for helping transition it from "I do this for fun, might fix the bug if I ever feel like it" to " I respect that this has become a critical dependency and we will find a way to make it someone's job to make it more like a product".
I gather that the open source maintainers who have found themselves in this situation sometimes get very unhappy about it, and I can see why -- it's not like they woke up one day and suddenly had a critical component on their hands, it kind of evolved over time and after a while they're like "uhoh, I don't think this is what I signed up for"
In that case the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything. If somebody depends on the maintainer's package for a critical component then they should consider paying them and possibly drawing up an explicit contract. That's what we did at my work for a critical open source component, where we paid the maintainer to add several features we needed.
I don’t think the added idea of “I pay good money for my GitHub subscription and some of that pays you, you are obligated to support me!” would help here.
I agree - but maybe if there were easy ways to opt-in to "hey I want to actually get paid for this thing and in return I'm going to spend more time on it" it might be a good thing. I'm not sure the model in this post is the right way -- I like what Filippo Valsorda has done in creating a small company of developers who do contracted OSS crypto software maintenance. But complicated.
I think expecting to get paid to fix bugs, add features, etc. to one’s open source code is much more reasonable and there should be marketplace infrastructure that makes this much easier to do (compared to the current system where developers have to apply for corporate grants for long running projects).
Yes and yes. I make open source software because I fundamentally enjoy the act of learning something new and then applying that knowledge by making something. I publish it for the ego boost only. I am equally likely to be irritated by contributions than to be excited by them. My day job contributions are up for scrutiny but the personal projects I publish on github are my island, my sovereign ground. As exciting as PR interest is, sometimes I don’t really want someone to paint over my painting. It’s mine after all. I obviously don’t speak for all open source contributors but I don’t want compensation. If someone wants to fork my work and turn it into a community then they are free to do so as a result of my licensing choice. If the first few contributions I receive are pleasant and someone takes over then that is great too. My point is that not all creators are aggregators. Leave us alone and stop complaining. We gave it away for free after all.
Urgent issue for whom? If there is some org relying on something you maintain voluntarily, in your free time, that seems like a "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"-type situation to me.
At the risk of sounding like a poor man's John Galt: If you wouldn't like to get out of bed at 5am to work without getting compensated, then you should just not do that.
I was going to comment exactly the same thing, thanks for expressing it so well and here's my upvote. I think part of why I wanted to comment the same, is that for me this IS exactly the reason I make open source! It is my gift for everyone, please use it well.
I do think it would be nice to get paid anything at all, but that wouldn't change at all how I do things/release code. In fact, unless it'd be really no-strings-attached, I'd prefer to keep the current arrangement than being paid a pittance per month and then have extra obligations.
People really want to have a business with none of the work of running a business. They want to make something useful, then have people just pay them for it without any of the things that go into operating a business. In a perfect world value would directly correlate to income, but it isn't even close to being the case, there's a lot of coercion and control of supply that goes into owning a business.
> I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong.
I think this is a little unfair, given that many (especially younger maintainers) get into it for portfolio reasons where they otherwise might struggle to get a job but stick around because of the enjoyment and interest. It still sucks that so many big orgs rely on these packages and we're potentially experiencing a future when models trained on this code are going to replace jobs in the future.
I think a lack of unionisation is what puts the industry in such a tough spot. We have no big power brokers to enforce the rights of open source developers, unlike the other creative industries that can organise with combined legal action.
thanks grayhatter. well said. been programming for 20+ years never earned a dime from it dont want it. its a silly assumption that everyone's motivation is money. this is very far from the truth.
>it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments
Yes it absolutely is. That is the exact social contract people 100% willingly enter by releasing something as Free and Open Source. They do give it as a gift, in exchange for maybe the tiny bit of niche recognition that comes with it, and often times out of simple generosity. Is that really so incredible?
The person needing a feature can do implement it themselves or pay for it. They may even share it, in the spirit of open source, but they probably don't have to (depending on license conditions).
Is your perspective here "these things need to be useful/stable/secure, how do we make them/create incentive for them to be what we need them to be"? Because my view is more like "open source is a sprawling wild garden and occasionally a tree bears fruit, and anyone gets to have some for as long as it does."
The assumed base state we're looking to augment via open source software being: "Fully working software"(Augmented: free) vs "No software" (Augmented: yes software)?
Like, what you seem to want is business, plain and simple. Pay a guy, have your specs filled, get guarantees. That would be expecting open source to fill a role it just isn't made for.
Help normalize saying no? As an OSS maintainer, the sense of entitlement many have is quite frustrating. After years in OSS, I have built up a thick skin and am fine saying no, but many aren't.
I’m sure many companies like to pay. It’s probably the cheapest way to solve a business problem. It should be the norm. If a company wants to have a bug fixed or a feature added, they should pay. And GitHub should make it easy to do so.
If you look at the issue list for any significant open source project, it's probably of nonzero size. That's a way of saying "no": just don't do it.
Maybe you're overloaded, maybe you just don't feel like it. It's totally normal, and different projects have different levels of resources, some with none anymore.
Unless you're talking about a different event, tj-actions wasn't "compromised because there aren't any security specialists looking at the library". Instead, an API key was used, maybe by the author, maybe by someone else, to replace good code with bad code, including modifying historical release tags to point to the bad code.
That said, everything in my previous post still applies: a nonzero buglist is totally normal and widely accepted.
I'm not too sure about the root cause about tj-actions. IIRC there are some libraries that compromised by actions injections vulnerabilities, where a security specialist could have helped.
> At some point, is open sourcing your work a liability?
I argue that open sourcing your work is no more liable than making a comment on social media. The biggest risk to an open source maintainer is publicly losing their patience and/or being heterodox in their beliefs. Code isn't a requirement for that to happen.
> Correct, maintainers can say that and get shamed.
And then they can shrug and move on with their respective days. If I open source something it's a gift to the commons, not a promise to work on it for free in perpetuity. I don't really care if someone tries to shame me for that, as there's nothing to be ashamed of.
People's expectations are not constrained by the license. They are free to exercise a sense of entitlement beyond the terms of the contract and empirically they often do. The license does not prohibit them from engaging with the authors or maintainers for any reason whatsoever, including requesting free labor.
You could perhaps add a clause in the license that restricts this behavior but then it would no longer be FOSS.
They are free to have a sense of entitlement or to try and engage with the project maintainers/owners but there is nothing that obligates them to reciprocate anything at all.
> The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues.
This depends a lot on the users, and then somewhat on the maintainers.
I have seen a lot of end-user facing software where people do not understand that features and fixes do not magically materialize - that there is a person on the other end likely working on this in their free time, with their own prioritization on how they will use that limited time.
You, as a maintainer, are free to ignore any such expectations and do what you want. There are no obligations. You only risk disappointing people (or corporations), and losing Github stars. If that leads to unmaintained libraries, that probably means the open-source model doesn't work for this project. And that's fine.
Agreed. Supporting open source maintainers is a great idea in general, but shaming people for using something according to the exact license terms it was released with is getting old.
A natural solution for this kind of problem would be either a private or public grants program. Critical infrastructure built by random uncompensated people... ideally there would be some process for evaluating what is critical and compensating that person for continued maintenance.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the solution to the open source funding problem is to force people to pay for it. I think that goes against the spirit of open source. If there is forced payment, or even the expectation of payment, then we're not really doing the whole original open source thing, we're just doing bad source available commercial-ish software.
I think the solution is for people to understand that open source goes both ways. Unlike what this post says, users don't owe maintainers anything, but maintainers also don't owe the users anything. If I build something cool and share it freely, why should users expect anything from me? Why should you expect me to maintain it or add the features you want? I think we need a mentality change where less is expected from maintainers, unless funding is arranged.
After all, it's free and open source. No one is forcing you to use it. Don't like that I'm not actively developing it? Submit a PR or fork it. Isn't that what the original spirit of open source was? I think that open source has been so succesful and good that we've come to expect it to be almost like commercial software. That's not what it is.
Even though I like JS/TS, I agree... not to mention that at even 10x the suggested amount for paid accounts, or even $1 per private repo per month, it still wouldn't be significant to any individual developer... More along the lines of thanks for the cup of coffee money as opposed to income money.
As suggested, I do think there should be room for grant funding, especially in the case of govts switching to open-source (LibreOffice, Linux, whatever) and open-source individuals and orgs can apply and granted each year dependent on actual use. Though, even then, govts should probably do more for funding, but I don't want a situation where the org just spends more money than they actually distribute for dev (looking at you Mozilla).
Not sure if github publishes their subscriber numbers but there may be quite a few, at least corporate?
Personally I used to pay 7/month for personal use, then when MS bought it it went down to 4, and one day when my card expired I noticed I'm not using any of the paid features and private repos are now free... so now I'm paying 0.
> I think that goes against the spirit of open source
Strictly speaking open source originally was not to do with whether you paid for something or not, it was that if you did pay for it, you got the code and had the rights to make your own changes.
Think Free speech, not free beer, or the software equivalent of right to repair.
If this actually happens, get ready for an avalanche of AI-generated garbage code that exists for the sole purpose of boosting a scammer's metrics, so they can maximize their slice of the pie with the minimum amount of effort. Spotify is dealing with this same issue around AI-generated music [1].
Been living off grants and donations for a few years now. My 2c is you probably don't need to invent a new platform to fund open source development. There are tons of platforms and systems in place already. That's not's what's missing. You need to get open source developers that want to get paid for their work to spell that fact out to their users and supporters.
Yes this is uncomfortable, but the simple fact is that if you don't tell anyone you want to get paid, you probably won't be given any money. Standard seem to be maybe there's a donation link somewhere on the site, buried 4 clicks deep in the FAQ, more often than not something like a paypal.
The reality is that if you do ask for money, surprisingly often people will straight up just give you money if they like what you're doing. Like people get paid real money for screaming at video games on Twitch, meanwhile you're building something people find useful. Of course you can make money off it. But you gotta ask for it, the game screamers on twitch sure do. That's the secret. Sure there's a scale from asking for donations and doing a Jimmy Wales and putting a your face on a banner begging for donations; and while going full jimbo is arguably taking it too far, it's also probably closer to the optimum than you'd imagine.
If you have corporate users, word on the street is you can also just reach out to them and ask for sponsorship. They're not guaranteed to say yes, but they're extremely unlike to sponsor you spontaneously.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
Usage is not a good proxy for value or ongoing effort. I have a npm package with tens of millions of weekly downloads. It's only a few lines long and it's basically done - no maintenance required.
I'm skeptical that there exists an algorithmic way to distribute funds that's both efficient and resistant to gaming.
The first order effect of this would be great, but the following onslaught of schlinkert spam would be devastating- its bad enough now with people making garbage dependencies and sneaking them in everywhere just for clout
Sadly I think this is true. There is already a problem with people making useless dependencies and pushing them into projects with PRs to increase their download numbers.
Showing high download numbers on your resume is more valuable than anything a fund like this could provide. There will always be a company who views high NPM download numbers as a signal of top 1% talent, even if it has become a game in itself.
Proposals like these seem to assume that FOSS is mostly produced by unpaid volunteers. But a lot of the open-source stuff that I personally use is produced by massively profitable companies.
For example, I am currently working with React, which was produced by Meta. I write the code using TypeScript, which was produced by Microsoft (and other corporate behemoths such as Google). I am writing this comment in Chrome (produced by Google). Etc.
Chrome is not FOSS btw. Google Chrome is proprietary software based on the open-source Chromium (also created by Google), which in turn is a fork of Webkit (by Apple, and with many corporate and non-corporate contributors), which itself is a fork of KHTML/KJS from the KDE project.
You are still right that corporations found and contribute to countless open source projects though.
If you willingly choose to make source code publicly available under an open source license you can’t then act all shocked that people don’t have to pay you for using that code. If you wanted to be guaranteed an income whenever your code gets used, you should have chosen a different license.
And if you're ok with not getting paid but you are shocked that corporations take it and use it in a non-FOSS-compatible way (e.g. selling their version for money) you should have used GPL instead of MIT.
perfectly articulated. Moreover, the license is whatever the copyright holder wants to put into it. They can easily dual license , copy-left variants -- there are tons of licenses that provide compensation for commercial use.
I paid 1 buck for WhatsApp back in the day. Better business model than what meta did with it. But we're moving closer and closer to 8 companies controlling the world. Both WhatsApp and github are owned by them.
> we're moving closer and closer to 8 companies controlling the world.
Which 8? In the control the world domain I see Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. In terms of Market Cap you would add Tesla, Nvidia and TSMC, but these three aren't any where close to "controlling" the world category.
I would put Disney in there. I picked 8 arbitrarily but those companies have substantial pull in governmental regulations and the state of the web. Probably missing some Chinese companies.
imo corporations have more pull on governments than governments have on businesses at this point as far as long term culture goes.
The trick will be getting around the regulations that are being set up to protect interests of government and big business at the expense of everybody else. This will only become more difficult as time goes on.
This would not fund the people you want it to fund.
Bad or borderline actors would be so much better at creating whatever metrics you're basing things off of that the actual value creators wouldn't stand a chance.
The transitive nature of dependencies makes fund allocation extremely wonky. Say you have Next.js as a dependency in your package.json file? How many dependencies does Next.js itself have? What portion of your funds go to Next.js versus all the transitive dependencies of Next.js?
$1 USD is ~90 Indian Rupees, 1450 Argentinian Peso or over 1 million Iranian Rial [1]. In some places, $1 USD could be a week's work. On the collection side, you could be seriously over-charging people. On the distribution side, you could be seriously overpaying people for their work - and encourage scams, etc.
> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month and direct it into an Open Source fund, held in escrow.
Sure. It'll be some charity, then somebody gets paid $200k+ per year to distribute what remains after they've taken the majority, all whilst avoiding most taxes. To receive the money the person has to ID themselves, financial background checks need to be done, a minimum amount needs to be reached before a payment is made, and then after passing through multiple wanting hands, they end up with a fraction.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
What even is "usage"? How many times it appears in a number of repos? How many users there are of the project? Is the usefulness and value of a project limited to the number of people that directly use it?
> Or don’t! Let’s not do anything! People’s code and efforts - fueling incredibly critical bits of infrastructure all around the world - should just be up for grabs. Haha! Suckers!
> Anyway, you all smarter than me people can figure it out. I just cannot accept that what we have is “GOOD”. xx
It's entirely possible you can make things worse by avoiding doing nothing. Sometimes in life you have to pick the lesser of evils.
Many open source projects are created by engineers being paid to solve a problem their employer has, and they just happen to release it freely.
I don't think Google needs a dollar every time I write a script in golang or run a container in kubernetes, and I would put a lot less trust in Envoy if I thought Lyft was building it profit and not because they needed to.
Instead of a dollar from github users, I think it should just be a hefty tax on big tech companies that have valuations of over a billion. The nature of software and tech means that there are massive monopolies where winner takes all. We should just accept that and leverage it.
No idea why this has got the traction it has. Absurd and poorly thought through. It sounds like you don’t like building open source software, so stop doing it. Don’t write a blog post whining about the cage you have shut yourself in. Absolute martyr complex.
> Alright, I don’t know how you fund Linux (does Linux appear in a requirements file). Hmm.
By paying companies like Red Hat, Canonical, Google and Amazon, who in turn spend massive amounts of money employing software developers to work on Linux.
Every day, millions go to work because they have to eat. Every day, thousands (?) go to their computers in their free time and make OSS software. Not because they have to eat but because [?]. Then they or others complain that people take their work that they do for free under no duress for free.
Maybe economists could do what is ostensibly their job and try to prevent the “tetris game of software depending on the OSS maintained by one guy in Nebraska...” situation. In the meanwhile people who do things under no duress for free could stop doing it.
(Not that OSS is all hobby activities. There are many who are paid to do it. But these appeals only talk about the former.)
One thing I thought that got me interested about Brave was this part of their business modell. It had the potential to support this type of economy almost without any attrition. It was not that different from flattr, with the difference that people would be able to contribute just by accepting the notification ads and passing along their earnings.
Unfortunately, the crypto angle made sure that mostly degens and speculators got into it. Perhaps if stabletokens were more established by the time they started, it would be easier to market it.
(I am not going to get into yet-another discussion about Brave as a company. I will flag any attempt at derailing the conversation.)
>It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer).
Why? It's not crazy at all. It's the status quo with no sign of things changing. It is both possible right now and likely continue. Its not crazy.
If it's not worth maintaining people will stop. If people need it they will develop it. The current incentive structure has produced lots of open source code that is being maintained.
>It is not okay - it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
It is if there is no cost. You can always charge for it. But you can't make it free then pretend its not.
I think we sometimes treat "open" as automatically good without examining the tradeoffs.
You can easily sponsor Iran or Russia killing real people by doing such things.
Powerful tools, once released, can be used by anyone, including those with harmful intentions. And let's be honest: much of open source functions as a way for large companies to cut costs on essential but non-differentiating infrastructure. That's fine, but it complicates the idealistic narrative.
With generative AI, these questions matter more. Maybe it's time to revisit what open source should mean in this context.
This transformation of open-source into rent-seeking behaviour is quite distasteful to me. If you don't want to share your stuff without taxing everyone, then don't share it. Other licenses exist. You don't have to use MIT or the GPL.
Meta has even demonstrated an alternative with the Llama 4 License which has exclusion criteria:
> 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 4 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.
Go put such terms in your licenses.
This is particularly rampant in the Rust community and if I'm being honest this forced tithing church nonsense from people who want to be priests makes participating in that community less desirable. I don't even want to donate to the RSF as a result.
All the other projects I've donated to in the past have been much more reasonable. This kind of pushy nonsense is unacceptable.
> If you don't want to share your stuff without taxing everyone, then don't share it. Other licenses exist. You don't have to use MIT or the GPL.
I agree. Yet some of my comments here have been met with downvoting and explanations that GPL licensing is a moral imperative, so there is certainly a contingent who would disagree.
> This is particularly rampant in the Rust community
This is interesting. Do you have examples? I am not cognizant enough of interactions there.
Yeah, there's a HN comment where someone is complaining about a related concept but in the linked threads there you have a lot of these donation inquisitors. I shy away from any such community.
I've seen plenty of cases of making something a target where quality won't be measurable and immediately cut off the reward or apply penalties. I don't really want Microsoft to run a large fund that encourages people to try to take over roles and request cash, etc.
Literally anyone could create a support and maintenance organization that takes MIT license projects into an AWS like split and only get paid if the support they provide remains valuable to people who pay for the value of the support and maintenance.
I've spent a bit of time thinking about this[0] - as a maintainer (oapi-codegen, Renovate, previously Jenkins Job DSL Plugin and Wiremock), as someone who used to work on "how can we better fund our company's dependencies", and building projects and products to better understand dependency usage
As others have noted, there are a few areas to watch out for, and:
- some ecosystems have more dependencies over fewer, and so we need to consider how to apply a careful weighting in line with that
- how do we handle forks? Does a % of the money go to the original maintainers who did 80% of the work?
- how can companies be clever to not need to pay this?
- some maintainers don't want financial support, and that's OK
- some project creators / maintainers don't get into the work for the money (... because there is often very little)
- there's a risk of funding requirements leading to "I'm not merging your PR without you paying me" which is /not problematic/ but may not be how some people (in particular companies) would like to operate
I have a better idea-- why doesn't GitHub (that closed source platform) donate 20% of all revenue to opensource projects that enable the company to exist?
It's as dumb as the german Pauschalabgabe, where everyone is forced to pay a specific amount of money for technical devices, because there is the possibility of private copies for licenced media.
> every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt
OK, what about those of us who aren't writing libraries?
As a personal anecdote, the amount of opportunities that have been opened up to me as a result of my open source project are worth way more than any $1 per mention or user.
I think that if GitHub had charged everyone from the beginning, it wouldn’t have become so popular and wouldn’t have attracted so many users. Maybe if they introduce charges now, it could work, but I’m still sure that a lot of users would drop off, and only those who are basically forced to use it would stay. And this would simply open the door for competitors to create similar products.
OSS works partially because a lot of stuff is free as in beer. I rely on probably many thousands of OSS projects directly or indirectly on a daily basis. So does everyone else.
The problem for some people is that they want to get paid for their work and just aren't; or not enough. I won't judge that. Writing software is hard work. Whether you donate your time and how much of your time is a personal choice to make. But of course a lot of OSS gets paid for indirectly via companies paying people to work on them (most long lived projects have paid contributors like that) or in a few cases because the companies behind these projects have some business model that actually works. Some people donate money to things they like. And some projects are parked under foundations that accept donations. That's all fine. But there are also an enormous amount of projects out there and most of them will never receive a dollar for any of it. OSS wouldn't work without this long tail of unpaid contributors.
I have a few OSS projects of my own. I don't accept donations for them. I don't get paid for them. I have my own reasons for creating these projects; but money isn't one of those. And people are welcome to use them. That's why these projects are open source.
MS and Github make loads of money. There's a reason they give the freemium version away for free: it funnels enough people into the non free version that it is worth it to them. Charging money to everyone might actually break that for them. I happily use their freemium stuff. I did pay for it a long time ago when private projects weren't part of the freemium layer. Anyway their reasons/motivations are theirs. I'm sure it all makes sense for them and their share holders.
If people feel guilty about not donating to each of the thousands of projects they rely on (or any, because why cherry pick?), you can pay back in a different way and try to contribute once in a while. Just pay it forward. Yes you somebody put a lot of work in the stuff that you use. And you put some work in stuff that others get to use. If enough people keep on doing that (and the success of OSS hints that they do), OSS will be here to stay.
People in tech thinks that micropayments work. Even if you leave out the drop off in entering card details, it just doesn't work, as if get some payment you are much more liable by law. e.g. Whatsapp is the closes example, which had cost of revenue of $52M for revenue of $10M[1] in the last filing.
I think there could be a GH feature request that could do something like this in my opinion (opt-in though, not opt-out).
In my personal GH account there is a "sponsor" button that shows me what dependencies I have that I could sponsor. Unfortunately the list is empty.
My _organisations_ have hundreds of repo's, but there's no "sponsor" option at the org level in GH that says what dependencies the orgs use and then set up batch transactions at that level.
The dependency data already exists in dependabot for a lot of stuff, so it wouldn't be starting from scratch.
$5 a month per dependency, OK let's go! Hold up I've just reorganized my packages into sqlalchemy-base, sqlalchemy-core-sql, sqlalchemy-orm, sqlalchemy-oh-you-want-deletes-also, sqlalchemy-fewer-bugs, and about eight more
If you want to make a product and sell your software, make a product and sell it.
It is always people who make a thing for free then people find it useful and start using it then they start using that free and open source thing at work instead of writing a copy and that’s when the original person starts asking for donations and money.
The reason your project is popular is because it is free. If it wasn’t free we would have probably written our own or used something else.
No. I would get rid of "should" to "could" but it actually would warp the open source world once money is involved. People would start optimizing what they do to try and get a slice of the pie.
I wouldn't want some committee to decide who gets the money. It would make more sense to promote Github sponsorship. Suppose they occasionally gave all subscribers a $10 credit that they could use to sponsor whatever projects they want?
Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software, but they don't want to, which is why they'll happily spend money promoting the use of corporate-friendly and maximally exploitable open source licensing among the passionate individuals who maintain the lions share of their dependency tree.
If you don't want to give your software away for free, don't give your software away for free. When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes. If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.
> When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes.
Maybe, but also maybe they just fork internally and fix the bug internally and don't publish the bugfix. And maybe it's never in their best interest to pay for it, maybe it's in their best interest to just freeload forever.
> If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.
I think it's good when we expect corporations to write checks to the people that write the open-source stuff they rely on. "A rising tide lifts all boats" is not automatically true in software, we have to choose to make it true. I think a world in which we make that choice is a better world. I'm not convinced we currently live in that world.
That is not how people and society function. The status quo and culture is that open source is good for society and all. You are not told about why big corporations can use all this code for free. You’re actually told you’re doing a good deed by making code open source.
Then you jump on to a place like Reddit or HN and you have people mostly supporting the status quo. Of course people are going to do open source more than they should. And then if they complain later on, you will say they chose to make it open source. Reinforcing the status quo by blaming the individual.
It certainly no other persons fault than the person that wrote the software and gave it away. Making them out to be the victim in all this is ridiculous.
We can make similar arguments for the corporations: if you want to sell your software in the US market, you need to pay for a VAT for digital services that fund national endowments giving grants to individual US developers that apply to the program.
Corporations should start paying their fair share, they've scammed society enough.
The are purposely ruining the commons as any corporation does to society. Companies take advantage of open source all the time without ever truly giving back, which is why we should lobby the government to compel big tech into this.
If it helps, voter sentiment against big tech is quite high and the profit margins that big tech has means there's a lot to plunder for the public.
The only question is who do you want to do the plundering?
Such an aggressive response to a perfectly rational response to "Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software."
A problem is that some Python library with a sole developer who is on the verge of halting maintenance needs your $1 way more than the Linux Foundation.
This is a terrible idea in my opinion and it's been tried/is being tried by services like thanks.dev. Yes, we need something here but this is not it. The reality is more complex.
It doesn't work well in practice. Because then people like https://github.com/sindresorhus?tab=repositories&type=source would get a shit ton of money because of the pure number of dependencies. And yes our stack also contains his code somewhere in a debug UI but our main product is entirely written in a different programming language with way fewer dependencies but if one of them goes away we'd be in trouble. In other words: Dependency count is not a good metric for this.
My "idea":
Lots of companies will have to create SBOMs anyway. Take all of those but also scan your machines and take all the open source software running on there (your package.lock does not contain VLC etc.) and throw it in a big company wide BOM, then somehow prioritise those using algorithms, data and just manual voting and then upload that to some distributor who then distributes this to all the relevant organisations and people and then (crucially) sends me (as a company) an invoice.
We've tried doing the right thing but sponsoring is hard - it works differently for every project/foundation and the administrative overhead is huge.
The reality is that "we" as an open-source community suck at taking money and I believe this is partially on us.
Being on both sides of the open source value relationship, I feel somewhat skeptical of mechanisms that use dependency cardinality/"popularity" to allocate funding: at its best it's a proxy for core functionality (which is sometimes, but not always, the actually hard/maintenance-intensive stuff) and at its worst it incentivizes dependency proliferation (since two small core packages would be equally as popular as one medium-sized one).
That's a mischaracterization of TFA's point. Your re-phrase makes it sound like the proposal is for filthy-rich Microsoft to pocket additional bucks from other people's open source work. Ostensibly, yes, Microsoft will be doing such action but the spirit of TFA is more like for Microsoft to act as a tax collector and, crucially, redistribute the collected tax back to the community---the money will not add to Microsoft's $3.4T-worth coffers!
Naturally this comment isn't a "fuck yes!" to the idea of Microsoft-as-tax-collector but if we're discussing TFA, let's not be needlessly cynical to the idea presented.
The comment you responded to may have incorrectly assumed that all the problems were self-evident, but apparently they are not.
> redistribute the collected tax back to the community---the money will not add to Microsoft's $3.4T-worth coffers!
Ummm, yeah, no.
Microsoft is a contributor to many open source projects, so it could, in fact, directly add to its own coffers.
And, the onus to pay for what was nominally free software could make paid software look more attractive, so it could indirectly push people to, e.g., office subscriptions.
I am working on open source projects. I believe we need a better licensing approach for open source. The current license system only works if users actually care about licenses, but most do not. They simply copy the code and do whatever they want. Finding a solution to this problem is more important than charging money.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
Could have worked before LLMs.
Also, funding by popularity would mean alternatives would have a harder time to emerge and get the funding they need to compete against the established popular projects.
Being an Open Source project doesn't mean that it provides the best solution to the problem it's supposed to solve.
Diversity is important.
Or the copyright holders can start dual licensing their software for commercial use
license A is GPL or MIT for academic and free applications
License B is for commercial use, with a fee
The license is literally whatever you want to put into it.
IMO the issue is with the open source community gatekeeping these policies. Shaming developers for proposing commercial licensing, then shaming corporations for properly using the IP according to the free license (e.g. MIT)
I do not agree. It should not be opt-out. If you want funding, make it opt-in. I do not want to be paid for it, and I also do not want to pay for it (and I also do not want to have too many dependencies, even if I do not have to pay for it).
Also, not all programs use package.json and requirements.txt, so that won't work anyways.
I donate to specific projects through OpenCollective. I do not want Github to take extra money from me and then redistribute it to projects I don't care about according to some formula that will inevitably be exploited to get free $$$.
If you want to support a project, submit a PR or send them a check. Don't force me do it for you.
No, they shouldn't. Microsoft has so much money, they couldn't spend it in a thousand years. Much of that money earned, because they had not have to spend it on developers because they just use open source software. They should just invest more into open source, but out of their pocket.
GitHub already charges organisations to fund open source features. Otherwise it wouldn't lack so many enterprise level features, it wouldn't have half baked solution that do not take into consideration enterprise requirements. GH Actions for example is still not there yet after years
I do like this idea, as it seems easy to implement. Github can just increase its prices by $1/month/orguser and that fund could end up with like, i think, 6 million per month. Thats a sizeable amount of money and could help in making open source more sustainable & attractive.
No. Take some of that enterprise cash and lay it aside on a daily lottery which devs automatically enter based on usage metrics. And a bit more enterprise aside to give directly to the customers' deep dependency maintainers (which gh already knows).
It's a good idea! Extra bonus: the inevitable exodus of companies moving to a different platform might reduce github's scale to a point where they can handle their own traffic (zing!)
Why not just offer dual license open source + commercial license.
If anyone is making money off the code they should pay annual fee which goes to contributors. Github can setup an escrow, manage licenses and distribute the money to contributors.
I'm not a fan of Github, I prefer to promote the competition, and I'm definitely not a fan of Microsoft, but Github is already sponsoring open source with unlimited repos.
So this is a weird statement to me, like you always want more.
Open source work is not a product, it is a gift to the community with no strings attached, and that goes both ways. You don't ask people who give you a gift to then unbox it, set it up, and maintain it for you.
However it is opt-in aka "Launch a page in minutes and showcase Sponsors buttons on your GitHub profile and repositories". That's effort & friction and only simplifies the "begging" aspect that I am (strongly) reacting to.
>it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments
Or Microsoft could simply fund open source software since they provide a Linux subsystem to allow people to do proper work despite of them having to use windows
Although the article's author might have intentionally chosen a highly misleading title (ragebait?), as it would have been far less misleading (and shorter) to write "GitHub should charge orgs $1 more per month" instead of "everyone" ...
How about GitHub stops using GPL'd code to train models? The authors weren't asking for payment, they were just asking not to reuse their code without GPL.
While delegating fund collection and disbursement to one organization reduces overhead for each project, the centralized nature of the setup can be asking for trouble.
Instead, why not accept the reality that 1) projects may charge for their offerings and 2) users may have to pay for such offerings? As a user, if a project's offering is useful to me, then I should be willing to pay for it. As a creator, if I want to get paid for my offering, then I should be willing to ask for it. An upside of such a change could be that we start being more focused and prudent about what we use and create.
Without such delegation, projects will have to do the heavy lifting in terms of collection of funds; features such as sponsorship in GH or setting up e-payments via Stripe or Paypay may help reduce this brunt.
the payment isn't the problem so much as the payment processing. They wouldn't support crypto, even if they did, getting crypto without KYC hassle is a PITA, not worth it for paying one company $1. Not associating your real identity with a github repo is very important to most github users.
Payment could solve lots of problems, but there is no real and meaningful cash-equivalent payment system or method. This isn't a tech problem either, governments allow cash payments, but if it is digital, they won't allow any means that preserves privacy. Money laundering is their concern. You can't solve this without laws changing. Even if I don't mind buying crypto with a credit card, I still have to go through proving my identity with my id card, as if my credit-card company didn't do that already.
payment is a huge barrier to commerce these days, people think LLMs will change the world, but payment tech/laws will have a bigger effect in my opinion.
Let's say HN mods go a little crazy one day and want to let us tip each other for good posts and comments, imagine if all they had to do is add an html tag in the right place and that's it. All we had to do is click a button and it just works, and there is no exposure of private information by any involved party, and you could fund that payment by buying something (a card?) at a convenience store in person, just as easily as you could with a crypto payment, moneygram or wire transfer.
I __want__ to pay so many news sites, blogs,etc... I don't mind tipping a few bucks to some guy who wrote a good blog, or who put together a decent project on github that saved me lots of time and work.
It isn't merely the change in economics or people getting a buck here and there, but the explosion in economic activity you have to look at. The generation of wealth, not the mere zero-sum transferring of currency. This is the type of stuff that changes society drastically, like freeways being invented, women being able to ride bicycles, airplanes allowing fast transport, telegrams allowing instant messaging,etc..
Everyone being able to easily pay anyone at all, including funding private as well as commercial projects would be more disruptive than democracy itself, if I could dare make that claim. There is freedom of movement, there is freedom of communication and last there is freedom of trade. these are the ultimate barriers to human progress. Imagine if everyone from texas to beijing could fund research and projects, trade stocks in companies (all companies in the world). You won't need governments to fund climate change work, I think eventually taxation itself will have to suffer, because people would be able to direct exactly where their funds went. Not just what department in the government gets a budget, but exactly what projects they spend it on. being able to not just talk or meet each other instantly (and even those have a long way to go) but to also collectively or as individuals found each other, governments and companies, that'd be the biggest thing that could happen this century.
This could be done, but again, we don't need better tech as much as we need a change in attitude. For people to actually believe this would result in a better world for them.
> payment is a huge barrier to commerce these days, people think LLMs will change the world, but payment tech/laws will have a bigger effect in my opinion.
Having a native way to send micropayments on the web without having to pay a huge % of that transaction to Visa/Mastercard and Stripe and Co would be such massive game changer when it comes to this stuff.
As a silly example, every time I collect 1$ for my 1$/month club I actually get ~70c which is wild.
I agree with you, if there was a better way to directly send small amounts to people running interesting sites or projects the whole landscape could change.
And I also agree that a change in attitude is needed. I appreciated your comment.
should be the transitive dependencies, not just top-level (so the lock file or equiv) or you just reward the "barely wrap it and give it a new name" js crowd even more.
let everything be gratis and if you need something fixed, and engineer you hired to work for you in your org can fork or send in a patch. there, I solved it
Have Microsoft charge people $ for their repos, and then take their code to train their LLM for more $.
And they can use the surplus $ to fund open source projects to produce more code to train their LLM for even more $, and reduce their taxes thanks to the charitable donations.
Government grants can be used to cover infrastructural open source. Not every open source wants money, so this scheme has ro be opt-in. Further, entitled "paying" users[1] will make things much worse for small projects. "I paid for this package, so you need to fix this show-stopper bug before we ship on Friday"
Having a passion project is great, having it gain traction is even better, but that is not sufficient to make it a job / company. The utility of open source projects range from "I could implement the bits I use in under an hour" to "It would take 100-person team years".
> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
Is that not what most of open source is? Things people make for themselves because they either found it fun or solved their own problem, then published it for others to use for free. Most projects are not worth the bureaucratic tax related headaches the income from them would bring (maybe that's just my EU showing).
What's not okay is demanding new features or to fix something urgently. That's paid territory.
Honestly this post is such a shit take it's borderline intentional ragebait.
People would milk the system as much as they could, only to become the most popular library, only to get most of the "pie".
I guess Python/JS devs would get the most of it. Because their ecosystem is most fragmented. C++ or assembly devs? Nothing.
I don't think this idea is thought out. Money corrupts things.
There already is a "market" for stars. But if stars would indicate how much someone earns, it would be morbid. Well, in some way, I guess they already do, but it's linked at least indirectly.
Deeply hate this. Just add a small fee. It's just a couple bucks. What are you, cheap?
Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games little notes apps and digital art run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.
Yes I read it, but still, charging me $1 so M/S can spy on what I do and make money off of it by selling my work to large corporations is wrong.
But if they really wanted to do what the article says, create a project and people can donate what the want. For example, if M/S sends me $5 per month, I can redirect it to various open source projects instead.
When I was on GH, I did donate a little per month to 2 projects, it was a nice way to do that. But I moved off because I do not want to give M/S more personal information (like my Cell #), so I send a few $ to them using other means.
Sounds like force with a Hobson's choice. And who decides who gets how much?
This is a common anti-pattern of utopian, this will work this time(tm), improperly-educated dreamers who are much too comfortable with totalitarianism like taking money, property, and rights from others without asking for their consent.
Robbing peasants to build palaces and pet projects. Maybe start with "demanding" every big company fund them than taxing average people.
This line of thinking is utterly bizarre to me. People need to stop thinking of GitHub as anything other than a typical corporation. If they could charge an additional dollar they would keep it for themselves.
I've been thinking about this very hard problem while walking the dog.
Individuals and companies love open source software, but the current donation models don’t really work.
I thought this problem was bad for programming libraries (e.g. the recent Tailwind stuff), but after using Linux desktop open source—which has much less incentive for companies to donate or sponsor—oh boy, it’s bad.
Open source evokes a lot of emotions, but at its core, to me, it’s two things:
A collection of “features” (depending on license / governance):
* You can use it for free, no matter what
* You can see how it works
* You can modify the software
etc.
These are genuinely valuable features, which is why open source has won.
But these features are unavoidably coupled to business models and incentive structures for the developers who create this value.
Right now, open source developers and companies can only extract a relatively small percentage of the (considerable) value they create. As a result, only very large or strategically important projects become financially sustainable.
I agree with the article that the solution likely involves a different business model or incentive alignment—but this is a very hard problem.
We’ve seen major business model shifts outside open source during my career:
- SaaS software (used to be one-time payments)
- Microtransactions in games (personally dislike them, but they radically changed incentives and revenue)
These shifts are often counterintuitive and closely tied to human behavior.
I don’t agree with the specific solution proposed in the article, but I don’t have a clean answer either.
My best (very rough) idea:
Create a non-profit that builds tooling and infrastructure to measure open source usage (tricky!).
Loosely, you run something like:
oss-usage
And it generates a report for a machine (or an entire company):
'tailwind': 5 # units TBD
'npm': 8
'haskell': 1
Then a centralized registry where individuals and companies can disclose usage and donations:
Donated funds are held centrally and can be claimed by project maintainers.
Companies can claim (or not) their usage. Developers can claim (or not) their projects and funds.
Donations are aggregated into one transaction per month, solving the microtransaction problem.
This creates a public, open record of who is funding open source. I think that could be a strong incentive for larger companies—engineers will notice when choosing where to work.
Bad actors who under-donate or refuse to disclose won’t be invisible; we’ll know where they stand.
Anyway - if you’ve read this far and are interested in working on or funding this idea, come find me:
https://richardgill.org
Oh, I know! Let’s redistribute royalty payments from AI subscriptions in Spotify-fashion from OpenAI and friends to developers, kind of like how Spotify pays artists for streams we get a cut of the token. Oh wait… no one’s profitable yet. Right.
In principle it sounds like a grand idea, although there are a bunch of corner cases like how it works cross country borders, and de-anonymising maintainers.
If it was opt in for opensource projects, and there are strong guards against people forking/hard takover-ing then yes, it seems like a good idea in principle.
I will leave the AI enthusiasts to chime in about the future, and how we don't need OS anymore.
love this idea on so many levels. Of course, then the fight moves to how allocation happens, and how to avoid people further gaming things like repo stars, forks, PRs, voting, dependencies, etc.
in particular, there's repos with extremely high activity where funding doesn't help anyone and repos with low activity where funding ensures continuity for key components we all depend on but which are under-funded for various reasons.
The sense of entitlement is strong in these comments. If you haven’t built or maintained OSS I’m wondering why your opinion matters [edit: that's harshly worded I could have been more nuanced, hopefully the point is taken and it is a question]. There’s also the take that “this is fine” vs considering that the state of OSS things could be a LOT better with higher quality and more choices if we fed the beast properly.
I don't see any entitlement at all, in fact it's the opposite.
The article: "I expect open source maintainers to maintain their codebases and add new features. I have unilaterally decided that $1/package is a suitable amount, universally applicable to all packages and maintainers." <--- this is entitlement
The comments here: "Open source maintainers don't owe you shit."
Interesting. I do not agree with your summary of his post, in fact he goes so far as to say "an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe."
So yes, we can laugh at the proposed mechanism but I feel the world would be a better place if we could funnel more resources to OSS creators rather than just take because that's an easier path.
> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default.
I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. Equally, if you expect someone creating open source owes you anything, you're also part of the problem, (and part of why people feel they deserve compensation for something that used to be considered a gift).
All that said, you should take care of your people, if you can help others; especially when you depend on them. I think you should try. Or rather, I hope you would.
I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…
I've made my living working fulltime on a single open source project for more than 15 years now.
I think it is important to differentiate between different kinds of projects that people might undertake, and 3 particular categories always come to my mind (you may have more):
* "plumbing" - all that infrastructure that isn't something you'd ever use directly, but the tools you do use wouldn't function without it. This work is generally intense during a "startup" phase, but then eases back to light-to-occasional as a stable phase is reached. It will likely happen whether there is funding or not, but may take longer and reach a different result without it.
* "well defined goal" - something that a person or a team can actually finish. It might or might not benefit from funding during its creation, but at some point, it is just done, and there's almost no reason to think about continuing work other than availability and minimal upgrades to follow other tools or platforms.
* "ever-evolving" - something that has no fixed end-goal, and will continue to evolve essentially forever. Depending on the scale of the task, this may or may not benefit from being funded so that there are people working on it full time, for a long time.
These descriptions originate in my work on software, but I think something similar can be said for lots of other human activities as well, without much modification.
If a "well-defined goal" project gets popular and sticky enough, it can metamorphize into an "ever-evolving" project by injection of VC capital.
Or just good old scope creep =)
https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
> There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it
Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books.
But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
If you think that literally no one is motivated by making more money than the minimal amount they need to survive, how do you explain rich people who still work? UBI isn't a proposal to make salaries illegal, so the problem of "how do we financially motivate people to work" isn't going to change if people happen to get a subsistence wage without employment. The assumption that there's a binary of "people will either be motivated to work or they won't" is nonsensical; there's a entire spectrum of what motivates different people (and how much they're motivated by them). Some people who work now might stop under a system of UBI, but plenty still would continue to. There's a fair question about what the correct amount of money for this is to balance things properly, but without the flawed assumption that motivation is a binary, I don't think the answer is nearly as obvious as you imply.
Seems like you are making same binary assumption that people either work or they don't. The important question is probably how well/hard do people work. Lower productivity means people that work produce less so prices rise. Many make mistake thinking only about having money, but forget the supply part of the equation. If productivity is lower, there are literally less things available to everyone. And these equations are not linear. Look at the current RAM situation for example.
But the major issue is that the progress slows down. Effects of slower progress accumulate with time. At first you are only a few years behind, then you are a few decades behind etc. Imagine inventions, cures being available decades or hundreds of years later (depending on what timescale we look at).
I think UBI sounds nice, but is far from an optimal solution. Wouldn't be better, if we could solve same issues UBI promises to solve in a more efficient way (with less negative side effects)? UBI is just throwing money at the problem, hoping it will solve itself.
Most work is worthless for progress though.
No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketry or some other pursuit they have interest in. Providing UBI means that geologists don't need to hoard data because they won't starve if they don't get a cut from it's usage. The people involved in technological break through are often doing it for self-interest or fame and don't stop once they've hit some financial breakpoint.
We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody and at this point it's all gravy. For obvious reasons we couldn't feed/house everybody if they wanted to solely live in NYC but IIUC no UBI proposal is about that; UBI lets you live in below median-desired places without additional income.
> So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, where a civilization decides that phone sanitizers are useless, until removing them quietly collapses everything else. Declaring work “non-essential to progress” usually just means we don’t understand its role.
But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc. While they might not make progress directly, they enable other people to make progress.
> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody
Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of anything is completely relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
> But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.
Of course money is not the only thing that motivates people. But there's a lot of empirical evidence that it matters. A lot, unfortunately. And I say unfortunately as I would rather have it matter less. But me whishing it doesn't change the data.
UBI is a high concept pitch, that is memorable and catchy, but AFAIK it's not well supported either by psychological models or by empirical economics data. It gives some social safety net. Problem is that it gives a rather weak safety net. We can actually do better.
Can I ask you why exactly does it need to be UBI? If another system (more complex, with less sexy pitch) could provide a bigger safety net and have a more positive economic impact, wouldn't you rather choose that?
> Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own.
Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.
> The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
We don't live in an ideal free market.
Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
SROs not in say NYC are cheap as well. Everybody trying to live in the same major cities will never be cheap.
> Why would we need UBI then?
Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.
You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring.
> Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
Food prices sometimes fall below costs because agriculture is volatile. It's not proof that food is inherently "extremely cheap" to produce. Also, absolute prices cannot be easily compared between countries and low quality food has negative health effects.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-gd...
> Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
If basic needs are so cheap that UBI can cover it, then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
> Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Opportunity cost is the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how? And even with UBI they would still benefit, if they get that additional money.
> Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
UBI fixes that issue how exactly?
> You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant.
We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect.
> If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before?
I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going to go up with UBI as the opportunity cost has increased.
> then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
No, I just don't think you understand the world around you. Have you never heard of remote nomads? Plenty of people work full-time for parts of the year or part-time all of the year.
> Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how?
Giving the information away for free costs you the money that you could've gotten for charging for it. When you need that money to survive then you have to restrict access. When you don't then you're able to volunteer it.
If we want to have any meaningful debate on what effect something has, we need to try to separate what are the reactions/side effects caused by it and to try to avoid additional confounding changes that were not caused by it. Trying to undo the negative side effect you don't like by, for example, introducing new technological innovations, or in your case a new optimization even though there is no increase in anything that would help do develop this new optimization, is making a confounding change.
While speculating what might happen in some particular cases can be fun, the real questions that need to be answered are regarding the macroeconomic effects of UBI. Starting with what % of GDP will be needed for UBI that will cover all the basic needs (food, housing, healthcare, etc.)? And then focus, not just on what few good Samaritans might do, but on how households, firms, and governments would respond at scale: labor supply, wages and prices, inflationary pressure, taxes, effects on productivity, growth, etc.
But I think our discussion has run its course. While we clearly have different opinions, it was still fun and I hope we both learned something. Be well!
I don't disagree that people work with different amounts of efforts, but if anything, to me it seems far more likely that people who have to work only because they won't be able to survive otherwise are going to be more stressed and less likely to be able to work productively. If the only people who work are the ones who choose to rather than an additional set who are forced to in order to survive, the average motivation level is going to be higher, and it's not obvious to me that this wouldn't be better even if the total number of workers is lower. This just seems like another balancing problem, and there's still no obvious reason to me why the default assumption is that maximizing the number of people who work will end up being the best option.
> But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
You're making the mistake of conflating UBI with "no one works anymore". This is a silly mistake to make. It's like believing that providing a universal healthcare service that provides basic care to everyone somehow meant supply and demand for private health services would be eliminated. In the meantime, look at pretty much any European country which already provides free universal healthcare.
Listen, UBI stands for Universal Basic Income. Universal means everyone gets it, Income means an inflow of cash, and Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs. Think of a kind of unemployment benefit for all that doesn't go away once you find a job. Once you get a job, you get paid an income that supplements your basic income. That's it. The biggest impact is that if you find yourself out of a job, you still get an inflow of cache that allows you to meet basic needs.
UBIs does change the economy. For example, most if not all poverty-mitigation policies can be effectively replaced by UBI. Instead of food stamps, use your income to buy food. There's no longer a pressing need for unemployment benefits if you already are guaranteed a basic income.
My main objection to UBI: won't landlords, grocery stores, power companies and the like simply raise their prices to suck up that money that everyone is guaranteed to have now until it ultimately doesn't cover basic needs like it was designed to do? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic.
> Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs
But what are these basic needs that are not much? Housing costs, medical expenses...?
I actually volunteer to take care of parts of the trash in our neighborhood. Like with a proper garbage truck. And the amount of volunteers so big that I only have to do it a few times a year. All the money they make with recycling goes to the local school. It is fun to do, even in cold rain. The garbage truck driver gets paid, but I am sure in an IBU world even drivers would chip in if they could afford it. People want to contribute and feel useful.
>development of accounting tooling,
There has been several really nice personal accounting CLI projects lately.
I’ve met a lot of people who are passionate about public cleanliness to the point of organizing rubbish pickups, beach cleanups, and river dredging using their own power. With UBI, you may have to take your own trash to the landfill but rest assured the larger ecology will still be taken care of by passionate people.
I think a bigger issue will be that the people who are passionate for a project may not be the most effective at accomplishing it, and without income you can’t motivate those more effective people into working on the project.
UBI is not in contradiction to paid work to make more than the minimum that is guaranteed. Think of it as being like food stamps that you get in addition to whatever you do or do not make.
Interestingly, UBI would be compatible with ending the minimum wage. If survival is guaranteed, then there is no reason to insist that a low end job pay a living wage. As long as someone wants to pay for the work and someone else wants to do it, let them!
This sounds like it'd be one of the many ideas that sounds great on paper but in reality just creates an even greater stratification in society. I think you're completely correct that in many places, particularly higher end - people would come together to keep the place looking great, possibly even better since you get to 'own' it on some ways.
But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. But I also think we're looking at things superficially. There's a lot of technical work that can't be casually done like plumbing or electrical that is currently moderately compensated. In an UBI world costs for this would likely skyrocket which would lead to an even higher UBI which would lead to even higher costs which would lead to Zimbabwe.
Pessimism aside I would probably actually support it, simply because I think it would be the ultimate expression of liberty - but you have to realize that you're not going to create anything like the same society we have, but with everybody being able to independently support themselves. You're going to completely destroy the contemporary economy and create a new entity that would probably be much closer to something of times long since past when the overwhelming majority of America was self employed. 'The Expanse' offers a realistic take on what UBI would probably entail.
> But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly.
You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other place, be it rural, suburban or urban. You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
Of course OP is silly in making the mistake of believing UBI will get all people working on urban waste management fired and out of a job. It's like believing that if a service provides a free tier, all other services will suddenly vanish. But presuming people don't care about their surroundings because they live in an 'urban' neighborhood reflects a problem that's about prejudice and not UBI.
This is rather a tangent but I spent years living in these areas. Have you ever wondered why it seems so many people who grew in these sort of places tend to have seemingly so much less 'empathy' for them than those who grew up e.g. upper middle class? You are probably seeing things through a foreign perspective where you assume everybody is, more or less, like you and so these awful differences must be caused by reparable externalities. You probably imagine that if you were granted infinite power, you could create a utopia.
But what you learn living in these areas for years is that no - not everybody is like you, or even remotely like it. There are a significant number of people who are simply broken and beyond repair. It reminds me of this video [1] which is from a minister of the UAE speaking on a perfect analog. The one thing I'd certainly agree with you about is that prejudice is bad, but the direction of one's prejudice, good or bad, matters not. We should always form our opinions based on reality, and not ideals.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0jIKBhUDeA
> You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
I think that is what observation actually is, you get to see what others have done in the recent and not so distant past, or am i missing your point.
The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.
Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study.
I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisible because their extreme pathological avoidance of attention. You don't know them and their contributions because they don't want you to know that they still live at home, out of their car door dashing because no company ever hires them, are shut-in because of serious unhealed trauma, are still deeply in poverty in such a wealthy industry etc.
A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
Many prominent pseudonymous devs have had hikikomori traits. _why practically inspired a generation of Ruby devs. visualidiot (RIP) was a crucial driver behind a lot of web dev culture in the 2010s. Heck, I made significant contributions to Joomla and WP themes back in the day -- you have probably used sites with themes or plugins I made. Also I ran a blog a decade ago that used to rank prominently in google and receive dozens of emails a month from people struggling with mental illness -- many people crediting me with saving their lives. Surely that is something of value to society.
Don't go around spreading bullshit like it is facts about a group of people we know little about.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/creative-exploration...
Love a headline that conforms to Betteridge’s law
Strangely though, all the studies cited on the wiki page seem to suggest that there is a higher number of "yes" questions than "no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#...
You assume much about what I know about the hikikomori demographic. My power level is well over nine thousand.
>> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
> Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about.
Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
> A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
"likely", "might" - this is all speculation on your part too. There is no reason to believe that a lot of humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would, in fact, contribute more to society, nor that the contributions from those that do would, in fact, offset those that don't.
It's speculation on both sides of this particular argument I see no compelling evidence at all.
> Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
If we can't tell, the "they aren't" bit is of course made up. Are you not arguing in good faith, or are you just not paying attention to what you're quoting?
"they aren't, plain and simple" is the made up bit I was calling out. There is literally not much more to the original comment to be calling made up.
"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.
Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.
The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.
People who are specifically not employed because they aren't motivated to do anything at all don't seem to be the best sample for what average people could do if they had more free time during their waking hours.
It seems unlikely that the most motivated people will take up UBI; the most likely UBI recipients are those who are marginally employed, and likely marginally motivated.
Guess what the U stands for
did you mean to write the opposite of what you wrote?
Accidentally posted in the middle of an edit; corrected now, thanks.
You posted the edit over 7 hours ago and it still doesn't make sense. You should check what the U in UBI stands for.
What do you think UBI is and how do you think it works? Honestly.
a) I'm not sure it logically follows that the hikikomori would be a particularly artistic group, thus don't understand the assertion; b) how do we know they aren't? By definition, they wouldn't be out promoting their works or gaining recognition.
Also, there is at least one example of UBI contributing to an increase in activity:
"According to the research, 31% of BIA recipients reported an increased ability to sustain themselves through arts work alone, and the number of people who reported low pay as a career barrier went down from one third to 17%. These changes were identified after the first six months of the scheme and remained stable as the scheme continued." [1]
[1] https://musiciansunion.org.uk/news/ireland-s-basic-income-fo...
> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true.
This seems a non-sequitur. People whose motivation is isolation are unlikely to try to generate anything for other people.
But your general idea is correct - is there group where motivated people don't need to worry about money?
Well yes - we see this in artist colonies and indeed in entrepreneurial retreats like https://www.recurse.com/
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: the flourishing of the arts in Bohemian districts[1] in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Maybe there’s a feedback loop with societal expectations regarding the hikikomori / NEETs? The more they are demonized as unproductive, the less productive they become.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism
Hikikomori seems to be largely a symptom of mental illness. NEETs almost by definition are not productive.
The fact that these groups are not producing mass amounts of creative works in no way implies that currently-productive people would not produce significantly more creative works if they had the time and resources to do so.
No that wouldn’t. If the zeitgeist, culture, society at large are antagonizing toward you, if you are meant to feel like a useless negative part of society, why would we expect amazing output from them?
This reinforces others talking about the flaws of hustle and grind culture. The status quo create the conditions for the negatives and then point to that and say “see”.
NEETs are, by definition, people who are either unwilling or unable to do anything productive, so I don't think they are a good example. I expect you'd get better results if you include the people who are employed today.
> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
It's funny how you chose to frame groups as "NEET", but you somehow failed to refer to "aspiring artist" or "aspiring musician" or "aspiring novelist". I mean "aspiring artist" already implies engaging in an activity albeit not professionally or reaching success.
You also somehow failed to refer to "amateur artist". As if not enjoying enough success to live comfortably with your art to the point of requiring to hold a job to pay rent is something that would validate your argument.
I'm not sure you are even aware of the fact that most of the mainstream artists you see around are not even professional, in the sense that in spite of their success and touring they still need to hold a job to make ends meet. Check out any summer festival, pick any random non-headliner band, and see how many members hold jobs, and had to take time off to go touring. Even some music legends have a history of holding humble jobs at least up to the time they made it. See Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory.
It's not just music, either. Luminaries like Fernando Pessoa could very well be classified as the ultimate NEET as he spent years of his early life not in education, employment, or training.
The UK music culture of the 1960s was in large part due to the "dole" or cash payments to poor people.
I don't think that's the only reason since the dole exists today too and there's not as much good music coming out.
Jazz and other music genres in the US came without government welfare, they came from struggle and oppression. Motivated artists will still work part time to fund their dream, they don't necessarily wait for welfare to start making art.
IF you were to give a lot of people free money today, will you get more and higher quality art in return, or will most people just drink and smoke that money while playing videogames at home?
Society, people and the world today are vastly different than back in the 1960s, so we need new polices targeting the society of today, not 1960s policies.
What do you mean there isn't much good music coming out? Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preference, or you aren't looking for it and are just relying on major media companies to show it to you, but ive never had more high quality music of more variety than ever before.
Much of it is farther in the electronica genres that many people somehow still ignore the existence of but I haven't had to listen to the same song twice unless I wanted to in a number of years. Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
>Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
How is that proof of "good music"? That's just background noise.
From the post you replied to:
What do you think those policies might look like? It's true that we have more screen based entertainment options today. We also have a very different music distribution system that is likely influencing things substantially. In the 1960s, I imagine getting on the radio was what it took to launch a career, now it's matching the algorithm on spotify.
I don't know what the right policies would be, but I noticed that smart, driven and disciplined driven people will always find a way to work around algorithms to get to the top, it's not something the government can legislate in order to get a desired outcome.
It's not like becoming famous back then was easy either. Plenty of good bands never got anywhere. The Mona Lisa wasn't a famous painting until someone stole it in 1911, before that nobody gave damn and now it's the most famous of them all. Survivorship bias and randomness in art is real.
Um, hikikomori are a hotbed of creative works, though. Your entire premise is false. I don't know that you could get reliable statistics proving this claim, but Japan likely has the highest number of creatives per capita of any country in the world, and a ton of them are NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels. The vast majority of this creative work isn't commercially successful, of course, which is part of why they're NEETs.
> "NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels"
And you expect the voting public to be persuaded to support UBI because of the immense societal value of an tsunami of gooner fanart (yes, I do have some passing familiarity with the sort of output Japanese NEETs generate) and "trashy webnovels"? I'm pretty sure that when the person I'm replying to talked about "the incredible artworks [and] literature ... that would spring into existence", that's probably not what they were hoping for.
I'm not commenting in any way on UBI, as I try to avoid having strong opinions about topics I don't have expertise on. My only stake in this matter is addressing the patently false claim that NEETs are not creative, when the exact opposite is true which perhaps is incidentally harmful to the argument you were building against UBI given that you staked it on an inversion of the truth.
That you boil it down to "gooner fanart" reflects entirely on yourself and what you view. I believe this is known as "telling on yourself". The overwhelming majority of the artistic output is actually not lewd; somewhere in the region of 85-90% of what gets published is SFW. Not only that, a pretty considerable amount of output is in fact professional-quality; if anything keeps them from being professionals, it's merely the fact that they spend their time creating what they want to see in the world. Being an actually professional artist generally entails creating what other people want to see in the world; specifically what a critical mass of people willing to pay want, which renders commercially viable art to a limited subset of possibilities, mostly only possibilities that appeal to the lowest common denominator if you want to ensure the safety of your income.
You could indeed say that literature is a weak point relative to the very high quality art, music, games, etc, in the NEET cultural sphere, but it's because people aren't trying to be literary. There is simply a subcultural preference, among both creators and consumers, for easier-to-digest writing. The forms of creativity people take an interest in don't have to match the exact ones you value in order for them to have merit. People read and write trashy webnovels because they like trashy webnovels, and that's fine too. It is still an expression of creativity all the same. And some small percentage of those trashy webnovels do go on to be extremely commercially successful, so even if that's your cynical metric for creative value to society it would still be incorrect to say they don't have value.
Can it really be a 'hotbed' if there is no demand (or even maybe awareness) of the works? That just seems like a hobby done for selfish reasons.
Quoting GGGP:
>There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
As it happens, the Japanese internet is absolutely rich with content created by individuals, most of it done for the sake of love for creative work rather than financial motivation. I spend much of my free time either consuming it or contributing to the pool of such work myself. The entire point of this discussion thread was about the potential for creativity if you were to unshackle it from the demands of financial self-sustenance.
As an aside, I believe this phenomenon manifested as strongly as it has in Japan because of the extremely low cost of living relative to the level of economic development; a studio apartment can be had for less than the equivalent of $200 USD per month, and many parents can afford to and are willing to pay this price to get the NEETs out of their house. In essence enabling them, not that they want to enable their adult children to depend on them but the burden is small enough that they can tolerate it.
I have no problem with people doing whatever they want, but if nobody else values it, there’s no ‘contribution’ to society, art, or anything else.
People valuing something is not at all the same as people spending money for it. For one, there is always competition with an abundance of freely available material. At the very least, you’d have to compare with a situation where nothing of the sort whatsoever would be freely available, and that’s very hard to do.
That being said, I’m skeptical of UBI being workable as well.
I think that's an unbelievably cynical worldview, one I don't agree with at all, but within that view: what of the things people value, but which they do not pay for? Much of the tech of the world is built on the free labour of FOSS developers. Are they not contributing to society because they are not compensated for their contributions?
I contribute to FOSS, and everything from issue reports to branches and pull requests are indications of a project’s value! True value is difficult to measure, but there are many projects which contribute no value.
It's quite possible to be creative while not contributing to society or whatnot.
A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.
I never disputed the fact that shut-ins can be ‘creative’, but instead focused on ‘hotbed’. I would characterize artistic failures as being more ‘original’ and perhaps ‘creative’ than successes, but they still lack value (to anyone but the creator). Regardless, this seems pointlessly semantic.
Counterexample:Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered in the 1840s that hand-washing dramatically reduced deaths in childbirth. The medical establishment rejected his findings, and he was institutionalized and died tragically, vindicated only after his death.
Surely this was a contribution even if not valued at the point of making it.
Even given the other objections to your argument, there are an extraordinary number of examples of now-very-appreciated artists, writers, etc whose work was not valued at the time they were creating it.
All hobbies are selfish, that's kinda the point?
Hikkis will barely have their (speaking from Maslow) physiological needs met, and seldom their safety and security needs. This leaves them with very few mental-emotional resources to put into even having any creative thoughts. UBI would absolutely uplift these people into a position where they can start producing output.
and yet their hypothesis is true, there are already many people, with or without UBI, that volunteer, create things and in general help people surrounding them without any reward and they are the backbone of every society, not the career-chasers
I think phenomena like hikkikomori have more to do with (at least perceived) social rejection than lack of motivation. If the only acceptable message you receive from society is that you must chase the brass ring constantly and any setback means you are an abject failure, then withdrawing from the pain of that rejection makes sense for anyone who has experienced enough setbacks or strongly feels alien to that culture. A broader societal shift would occur if it was truly universally understood that everyone has value as a human being separate from their labor market leverage or capital accumulation.
There will always be strivers who measure their self worth against superficial standards (Russ Hanneman “doors go up” hand gesture here), I just don’t see why everyone should be forced to play that game or starve I suppose. Giving everyone the option to settle for a life of basic dignity while caring for those around them, or going all in on some academic / creative pursuit seems equally valid investments for society.
Yes. The only real conclusion from people like NEETs is that society failed them. Outside of a fraction of total people (or when addictions are at play), it is very rare that someone never wants to be productive.
I support UBI, funded by high capital gains taxes, to offset the growing value of capital relative to labor due to ever-improving automation, but I think it's silly to think a significant number of people will ever be happy with UBI alone.
First of all, "baseline needs" are fluid. These days, electricity and internet are broadly considered baseline needs, but would have been unimaginable luxuries for previous generations. The future will inevitably bring new "baseline needs" we can hardly yet comprehend.
Secondly, the vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum, no matter what that minimum is. If you have a friend who can afford fancy things, and you can't, then more likely than not, you will not be satisfied. It's also much easier to attract a partner if you're financially successful, for similar reasons. That's just human nature. Just because you don't have to worry about starving or succumbing to the elements does not mean people will stop competing with one another.
> The vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum
Isn't that a benefit for UBI? If everyone's basic needs are met and they want more, nothing would stop them from taking a job and making more money right?
Ya. I'm saying I support UBI, and that the concern most people raise about UBI (usually along the lines of "I don't think anybody should just coast by without working") is completely unfounded.
The parent post was talking about how everybody would have more time for unpaid pursuits if only we had UBI. I'm saying that I don't think UBI would change that much. People will continue to pursue unpaid hobbies much like they do today, but making money will still be just as important.
> Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
If people find these things useful, they can actually pay for them. If you can't find people who value it enough to pay for it, then may be it's not as valuable as you think it is.
By that measure, doing something for a poor person who cannot pay would be entirely worthless, while delivering food to a particularly generous billionaire would be more valuable than an entire month of an average person's work.
The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.
Somehow no one talks about the incredible plumbing.
Not really against welfare programs...but...
UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.
You need to impose a tax called the Land Value Tax to prevent landowners eating up the public money. Even then we got a long list of much needed public spending before we can even think about a Citizen's Dividend.
> UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.
This is only true if there’s a static supply of rental units, which isn’t true in most places (despite new construction being constrained by regulation in many places). I support an LVT, but it is not a necessary precondition for redistribution.
I'm generally an advocate for a robust safety-net such that people shouldn't be on their knees every month just to scrape by with food/housing/healthcare, and would love it if we reached Star Trek/The Culture levels of post-scarcity, but I'm simultaneously not convinced by this idea, but possibly from another angle.
1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists).
2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded.
TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.
“Strong” social safety can be achieved only by enslaving producers who have to provide the ground for “many many” caring people. This is always the case. Consider Russian support of young families: the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have. Personally, I cannot imagine a worse moral depravity than supporting this atrocity as a matter of justice.
Capitalism is not “slavery with extra steps,” it’s freedom in a fragile world repleted with conflicting goals. Just because people don’t agree with your goals doesn’t make you a slave.
>the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have
IDK, this seems perfectly reasonable if the state also provides an old age insurance / pension system for retirees. Without a younger generation of people paying into the system (i.e. the children of parents) these systems collapse. It seems appropriate to support the people that keep the government functioning.
Of course, I’m guessing you oppose systems like social security too, given your comment. I just find it odd that you can’t imagine anything worse than giving money to parents, given most governments give money to a lot of people, most of whom aren’t opting into anything as noble as parenthood.
Giving uncharacteristically large direct stimuli for procreation disproportionately incentivizes the people in dire need of money, meddling with the rationality of the decision and increasing social tension later.
The only other way to be promised a big pile of cash from the govt there is a military contract.
UBI is an idea from another money-centric ideology, namely “libertarianism”. It’s not an idea for fostering creativity. It’s an idea for dealing with less employable dependents of society, while the true dependents (parasitic capitalists) take the real spoils of industrialized productivity.
Doesn't UBI come from taxes? I can't reconcile the idea of welfare for everyone resonating very well with any of the libertarians I know. Personal charity, sure, absolutely, but not government controlled payouts to people, even if that includes everyone. They would probably consider it better than the current welfare system with all it's bureaucracy, but that's as positive a response as I can expect.
Most libertarians I know (and I consider myself an on and off libertarian as I learn more about it) want the government to stick to making sure people's rights aren't being trodden upon and otherwise leave us alone.
1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.
3. Now I'm really angry! I should have gotten some money from them!
4. The government must force my neighbours to pay a salary to me!
5. Continue to work for free making open source code for giant corporations, so they can profit.
How about instead?:
1. Don't work for free or give away your code. Instead charge a fair price for people to use your code or software.
2. If your code is good, people and corporations pay you for it.
3. Now you're really happy! You got money for your labour.
4. The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary.
5. You can continue to work for money and make more money.
I'm not agreeing with the OP proposal, but with LLMs today, no matter how you license your code and no matter what ToS or other prohibition you put on it, there does not seem to be any way to prevent LLMs from absorbing and using it to implement a replacement based on your code unless you choose to only do closed source code - there's no "opt out" for someone's source code, let alone an opt-in (again, unless we give up open source). (A very different situation from the AI companies themselves, where companies such as Anthropic make Claude Code closed source, and their ToS provide strict prohibitions on using it to work on something that could compete with them - can you imagine if Windows or MacOS's ToS prohibited people from using their OS to work on a competing OS, of if the VSCode ToS prohibited people from using VSCode to work on another editor?)
> The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary
Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly that's it includes levying taxes, so that's pretty much a meaningless characterization.
Let's put it in more concrete terms: if the US government passes a law to raise taxes to fund UBI, that probably wouldn't even make the last of the top 100 most oppressive things it's done to innocent people in the past year. If the strongest objection to this policy would be "I don't want to pay taxes to fund things for other people", it's in pretty good company.
> Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly
Yes, and that's why great care and respect should be applied to how the government uses the tax money which they have raised from oppression.
Paying somebody to work for free for a giant corporation is not a justified use of that money. Those corporations should pay for their labour themselves.
I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour. When it's done to pay for an army to defend ourselves against enemies, for the justice system to protect all citizens, or for healthcare to save lives, then that's palatable. As well as for a myriad of other things. But to pay a programmer so that he can make server infrastructure so that Amazon doesn't have to pay him? That's not palatable.
>I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour.
Really?
Not among the standard things which every government always does. Are you thinking about crimes against humanity and such?
For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost every government engaged in during the covid pandemic, and which I am against.
> I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech
I guess we're just not going to agree on any of this then, because that's pretty much the opposite opinion of mine
I think you've missed the point again, it's more like this:
1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.
3. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
If you can't go to step 3, then you are doing it wrong and need to change step 1 from "giving it away for free" to something like "giving it away for free to the common people and at a price for corporate."
Which you could say "but that's not open source!" and you'd be right, which is exactly my point here: I don't think you want to do fully open source software, you want to do software and get paid for it somehow. If you do open source and get paid eventually and non binding, that's a nice little bonus, but it's not the main goal, never was with open source.
Although I agree with your overall point, there is a middle ground here: (commercially) non-free but open source software.
I believe that's where the biggest disagreement ITT lies. There are currently good ways to do FOSS, proprietary closed-source and free closed-source software development. But if the OSS is worth charging for (commercial) use, devs are left with asking for donations, SaaS or "pay me to work on this issue/feature".
There arguably should be better mechanisms to reward OSS development, even if the largest part of an OSSndev's motivation is intrinsic.
Agree completely, that's why I don't understand these people who demand payment for open source code after having given it away to the world.
And everyone can get stuck with big corporation proprietary software that they have no idea how it runs or what it does under the hood
You can then make your own software. Nobody owes you free software.
You're not wrong, but I think it is increasingly harder (and perhaps socially taboo) to stay far away from proprietary software while still being part of a functioning society.
FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.
My apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time.
I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.
If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work they hadn’t necessarily signed up for (who signs up for burnout?) - it’s ok/necessary/mandatory to see how everyone (and or Nvidia/Google/OpenAI etc) can, like, help.
My insistence is on the opt-out nature of this so that people who would be ok being compensated don't have to beg.
Consider how the xz malware situation happened [0]. Or the header & question 8 from the FAQ for PocketBase [1].
[0] https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500
[1] https://pocketbase.io/faq/
Instead of forcing Github to force users to pay a fee to support OSS, why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work? Then that requires 0 coercion and those who feel undervalued for their work/projects can be compensated as the market dictates the value of their projects.
There are a lot of dumb and even disagreeable open source projects. Why should someone be de facto forced to fund those projects?
It's like this ass-backwards way of selling something because you're allergic to markets or something. Honestly, it's quite rude to go on and on about free software and liberation and all these things and then turn sour grapes years later because everybody took you up on it. Nobody is forcing anyone to maintain any of these projects.
And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
> And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
Yeah, maybe. Maybe if it wasn't released as MIT but released as GPLv3 you'd actually get compensated in the form of patches, bugfixes, features, etc in "your" software.
The whole RIIR movement is doing this - replacing as many GPL components as possible with rewritten MIT components. I find this completely disrespectful: trying to displace pro-user software with pro-business software.
You just read the title don't you?
> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month
It's about org, not about every single person using Github.
The idea is basic and should have been written in the article. When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.
A contributor wouldn't like a free for personal use either. The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue) »
> you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
It happens so many times and no just about software (but then it's not a million dollar company). It's not that you are dump, you done the right thing and some companies with money/power/opportunity to capitalize on it, did it and didn't compensate you fairly.
> When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.
Nope.
Put it in the license, sell the software, or work for free, but stop complaining about it.
It's nice if businesses who benefit from specific software packages want to pay or show support, but it's not nice to release something "for free" but then jump on a moral grandstand and demand everyone pay so you can feel good about your ideology at the expense of everyone else.
> The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue)
Then make that your license?
You're not wrong, but I feel like a lot of people are hung up on the purism of the OSI definition, and a license that's not so blessed may prevent a project from gaining significant traction, if that is part of their goal.
I think it would be nice if there were a license that was more widely accepted that introduced a monetary component that could compensate the developer(s).
> why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work?
What if we turn this from a rhetorical question to an actual question?
My totally unverified take:
1. Missing transaction / Payment infrastructure. The same reason why paid music streaming services were successful depite piracy being a thing.
2. Bureaucracy associated with earning money. In many countries, going from "unpaid" to "€1 per month" is a nightmare.
... and a suggestion to make both less dire: A transaction infrastructure that allows small projects (that wouldn't be a cash cow anyway) to forward all payments to another project of the project Author's choice.
Edit: See https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...
I don't disagree with any of what you wrote here, but I don't think the solution is "well we haven't figured this out, OSS who talk all the time about free as in beer free software now all of a sudden want to get paid for their work" is to just go around uncharging other people/organizations to support their projects, especially if not all OSS projects are worth supporting.
I agree with echelon; don't apologize. I'm not objecting to the message, only to the framing.
How to create more code I can enjoy using has been something that I've been thinking about for a long time. I've even advocated for a stance[0], similar to yours. While I don't agree it's correct to conflate the malign intent surrounding the xz takeover, with the banal ignorance as to why so many people don't want to support people creating cool things, (and here I don't just mean financial support.) I do acknowledge there are plenty of things about the current state we could fix with a bit more money.
But I don't want open source software to fall down the rabbit hole of expectations. Just as much as I agree with you, people opting-in to supporting the people they depend on is problematic. Equally I think the idea that OSS should move towards a transactional kind of relationship is just as bad. If too many people start expecting, I gave you money, now you do the thing. I worry that will toxify what is currently, (at least from my opinionated and stubborn POV), a healthier system, where expectations aren't mandatory.
The pocket base FAQ, and your hint towards burnout are two good examples, describing something feel is bad, and would like to avoid. But they are ones I feel are much easier to avoid with the framing of "this work was a gift". I have before, and will again walk away from a project because I was bored of it. I wouldn't be able to do so if I was accepting money for the same. And that's what leads to burn out.
I do want the world your describing (assuming you can account for the risks inherent into creating a system with a financial incentive to try to game/cheat), but I don't want that world to be the default expectation.
[0] https://gr.ht/2023/07/15/donations-accepted.html
> Equally I think the idea that OSS should move towards a transactional kind of relationship is just as bad.
GPL is transactional; that's the whole point. What you are calling OSS includes GPL, true, but it also includes BSD/MIT, which are not transactional.
To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.
I also don't think all software needs to be free. I also don't think all software needs to be a gift. (But then I just said the same thing twice.) The part that I care about is which direction the default [default definition?] shifts.
In my perfect world, more code would be MIT not GPL. But in my perfect world, the GPL wouldn't be useful in practice. The world is far from perfect.
> To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.
Well, yeah. I think we agree. That's why I said it is transactional - you get software in exchange for any future potential improvement you make to it.
It's a transaction.
MIT is not transactional, it's charity - you get software without having to trade anything for it.
If people make their software MIT or GPL, they should not complain when it is used in a way that they are unhappy with. With MIT, it can be used in almost any way the user wants, including closing it off, and depriving the community of improvements.
>The simplistic answer is the same for why seemingly everyone chooses proprietary software; it’s just easier.
This is honestly the exact opposite of my experience. Though I may just have very different desires and frustrations
Don't apologize.
"Open Source" is hugely conflated in terms of the reasons people write open source software.
There are people who truly don't care to be compensated for their work. Some are even fine with corporations using it without receiving any benefit.
Some people prefer viral and infectious licenses the way that Stallman originally intended and that the FSF later lost sight of (the AGPL isn't strong enough, and the advocacy fell flat). They don't want to give corporations any wiggle room in using their craft and want anyone benefiting from it in any way to agree to the same terms for their own extensions.
Many corporations, some insidiously, use open source as a means of getting free labor. It's not just free code, but entire ecosystems of software and talent pools of engineers that appear, ready to take advantage of. These same companies often do not publish their code as open source. AWS and GCP are huge beneficiaries that come to mind, yet you don't have hyperscaler code to spin up. They get free karma for pushing the "ethos" of open source while not giving the important parts back. Linux having more users means more AWS and GCP customers, yet those customers will never get the AWS and GCP systems for themselves.
There are "impure" and "non-OSI" licenses such as Fair Source and Fair Code that enable companies to build in the open and give customers the keys to the kingdom. They just reserve the sole right to compete on offering the software. OSI purists attack this, yet these types of licenses enable consumers do to whatever they want with the code except for reselling it. If we care about sustainability, we wouldn't attack the gesture.
There are really multiple things going on in "open source" and we're calling it all by the same imprecise nomenclature.
The purists would argue not and that the OSI definition is all that matters. But look at how much of the conversation disappears when you adhere to that, and what behavior slips by.
> If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work...
You're only responsible to the people who pay you to deliver something. It's not complicated.
> that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.
Exactly what burden?
I agree with you, but I do think we have a bit of a problem in which an open source creator makes something and then suddenly finds themselves accidentally having created a load-bearing component that is not only used by a lot of people and companies, but where people are demanding that bugs be fixed, etc., and we lack great models for helping transition it from "I do this for fun, might fix the bug if I ever feel like it" to " I respect that this has become a critical dependency and we will find a way to make it someone's job to make it more like a product".
I gather that the open source maintainers who have found themselves in this situation sometimes get very unhappy about it, and I can see why -- it's not like they woke up one day and suddenly had a critical component on their hands, it kind of evolved over time and after a while they're like "uhoh, I don't think this is what I signed up for"
In that case the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything. If somebody depends on the maintainer's package for a critical component then they should consider paying them and possibly drawing up an explicit contract. That's what we did at my work for a critical open source component, where we paid the maintainer to add several features we needed.
It's commendable that your organization did this.
But...
> the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything.
Assumes (especially in cases where "maintainer == original author" psychological capabilities that simply might not exist in the maintainer.
I don't know of a good way to deal with this, other than to be kind and try to notice potential signs of impeding burn-out before an implosion.
Public funding from governments would make sense. Open source software are effectively public good.
Europe is doing this: https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/
I don’t think the added idea of “I pay good money for my GitHub subscription and some of that pays you, you are obligated to support me!” would help here.
I agree - but maybe if there were easy ways to opt-in to "hey I want to actually get paid for this thing and in return I'm going to spend more time on it" it might be a good thing. I'm not sure the model in this post is the right way -- I like what Filippo Valsorda has done in creating a small company of developers who do contracted OSS crypto software maintenance. But complicated.
I think expecting to get paid to fix bugs, add features, etc. to one’s open source code is much more reasonable and there should be marketplace infrastructure that makes this much easier to do (compared to the current system where developers have to apply for corporate grants for long running projects).
Yes and yes. I make open source software because I fundamentally enjoy the act of learning something new and then applying that knowledge by making something. I publish it for the ego boost only. I am equally likely to be irritated by contributions than to be excited by them. My day job contributions are up for scrutiny but the personal projects I publish on github are my island, my sovereign ground. As exciting as PR interest is, sometimes I don’t really want someone to paint over my painting. It’s mine after all. I obviously don’t speak for all open source contributors but I don’t want compensation. If someone wants to fork my work and turn it into a community then they are free to do so as a result of my licensing choice. If the first few contributions I receive are pleasant and someone takes over then that is great too. My point is that not all creators are aggregators. Leave us alone and stop complaining. We gave it away for free after all.
I'm pretty sure you didn't wake up at 5am to an urgent issue. Because I did last night, and for sure __MY WIFE__ expects me to get paid for it!!
In general, people's time is not free if only because they have rent/mortgage, food, transportation, medical bills, education, etc.
>Urgent issue
Urgent issue for whom? If there is some org relying on something you maintain voluntarily, in your free time, that seems like a "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"-type situation to me.
At the risk of sounding like a poor man's John Galt: If you wouldn't like to get out of bed at 5am to work without getting compensated, then you should just not do that.
I was going to comment exactly the same thing, thanks for expressing it so well and here's my upvote. I think part of why I wanted to comment the same, is that for me this IS exactly the reason I make open source! It is my gift for everyone, please use it well.
I do think it would be nice to get paid anything at all, but that wouldn't change at all how I do things/release code. In fact, unless it'd be really no-strings-attached, I'd prefer to keep the current arrangement than being paid a pittance per month and then have extra obligations.
People really want to have a business with none of the work of running a business. They want to make something useful, then have people just pay them for it without any of the things that go into operating a business. In a perfect world value would directly correlate to income, but it isn't even close to being the case, there's a lot of coercion and control of supply that goes into owning a business.
> I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong.
I think this is a little unfair, given that many (especially younger maintainers) get into it for portfolio reasons where they otherwise might struggle to get a job but stick around because of the enjoyment and interest. It still sucks that so many big orgs rely on these packages and we're potentially experiencing a future when models trained on this code are going to replace jobs in the future.
I think a lack of unionisation is what puts the industry in such a tough spot. We have no big power brokers to enforce the rights of open source developers, unlike the other creative industries that can organise with combined legal action.
Redistributing unwanted funds would be a good chore to have to do!
thanks grayhatter. well said. been programming for 20+ years never earned a dime from it dont want it. its a silly assumption that everyone's motivation is money. this is very far from the truth.
Agreed. I do this too.
>it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments
Yes it absolutely is. That is the exact social contract people 100% willingly enter by releasing something as Free and Open Source. They do give it as a gift, in exchange for maybe the tiny bit of niche recognition that comes with it, and often times out of simple generosity. Is that really so incredible?
The problem is more so maintenance.
The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues.
However many companies will dump these issues to the maintainer and take it for granted when they are resolved.
It's not a sustainable model, and will lead to burnout/unmaintained libraries.
If the companies don't have the engineering resources/specialization to complete bug fixes/features, they should sponsor the maintainers.
It’s OK to say “No” or “Pay me and I’ll do it right now” to companies doing this.
I 100% agree with this. It also is 100% OK to fork aggressively and patch yourself.
(And on the flipside, nothing is owed for a bugfix the maintainer made out of their own free will. Again, a gift.)
The problem is lots of open source is unmaintained/insecure, and there aren't any security engineers on those open source libraries.
For the library to be secure, there needs to be funding, not by magic and expecting maintainers will do stuff on there free will.
The person needing a feature can do implement it themselves or pay for it. They may even share it, in the spirit of open source, but they probably don't have to (depending on license conditions).
Is your perspective here "these things need to be useful/stable/secure, how do we make them/create incentive for them to be what we need them to be"? Because my view is more like "open source is a sprawling wild garden and occasionally a tree bears fruit, and anyone gets to have some for as long as it does."
The assumed base state we're looking to augment via open source software being: "Fully working software"(Augmented: free) vs "No software" (Augmented: yes software)?
Like, what you seem to want is business, plain and simple. Pay a guy, have your specs filled, get guarantees. That would be expecting open source to fill a role it just isn't made for.
Correct, maintainers can say that and get shamed.
And it leads to unmaintained libraries, since companies don't want to pay.
At some point, is open sourcing your work a liability?
Help normalize saying no? As an OSS maintainer, the sense of entitlement many have is quite frustrating. After years in OSS, I have built up a thick skin and am fine saying no, but many aren't.
I’m sure many companies like to pay. It’s probably the cheapest way to solve a business problem. It should be the norm. If a company wants to have a bug fixed or a feature added, they should pay. And GitHub should make it easy to do so.
If you look at the issue list for any significant open source project, it's probably of nonzero size. That's a way of saying "no": just don't do it.
Maybe you're overloaded, maybe you just don't feel like it. It's totally normal, and different projects have different levels of resources, some with none anymore.
I have seen small utility libraries like tj-actions get compromised because there aren't any security specialists looking at the library.
My main concern is supply chain compromise.
Unless you're talking about a different event, tj-actions wasn't "compromised because there aren't any security specialists looking at the library". Instead, an API key was used, maybe by the author, maybe by someone else, to replace good code with bad code, including modifying historical release tags to point to the bad code.
That said, everything in my previous post still applies: a nonzero buglist is totally normal and widely accepted.
I'm not too sure about the root cause about tj-actions. IIRC there are some libraries that compromised by actions injections vulnerabilities, where a security specialist could have helped.
> At some point, is open sourcing your work a liability?
I argue that open sourcing your work is no more liable than making a comment on social media. The biggest risk to an open source maintainer is publicly losing their patience and/or being heterodox in their beliefs. Code isn't a requirement for that to happen.
> Correct, maintainers can say that and get shamed.
And then they can shrug and move on with their respective days. If I open source something it's a gift to the commons, not a promise to work on it for free in perpetuity. I don't really care if someone tries to shame me for that, as there's nothing to be ashamed of.
I always chuckle at indignant GH comments on OSS projects. There should be a subreddit dedicated to them. Like a specific kind of r/choosingbeggars
Are there honestly examples of maintainers being shamed for that?
A company finding a bug and opening an issue on an open source project _is_ contributing.
What happens next is completely irrelevant. The maintainer can 100% decide to just ignore the issue or close it.
Opening issues doesn't create unmaintained software. In fact it helps.
No the expectation of FOSS is that code is provided AS-IS with NO WARRANTY because that’s what it says in the license.
People's expectations are not constrained by the license. They are free to exercise a sense of entitlement beyond the terms of the contract and empirically they often do. The license does not prohibit them from engaging with the authors or maintainers for any reason whatsoever, including requesting free labor.
You could perhaps add a clause in the license that restricts this behavior but then it would no longer be FOSS.
They are free to have a sense of entitlement or to try and engage with the project maintainers/owners but there is nothing that obligates them to reciprocate anything at all.
Perhaps they simply meant the legal expectations are constrained by the license.
> The expectation of FOSS is that the users and maintainer work together to resolve bug fixes/features/security issues.
This depends a lot on the users, and then somewhat on the maintainers.
I have seen a lot of end-user facing software where people do not understand that features and fixes do not magically materialize - that there is a person on the other end likely working on this in their free time, with their own prioritization on how they will use that limited time.
You, as a maintainer, are free to ignore any such expectations and do what you want. There are no obligations. You only risk disappointing people (or corporations), and losing Github stars. If that leads to unmaintained libraries, that probably means the open-source model doesn't work for this project. And that's fine.
The software can't have a price, but the service of maintaining it and adding someone's desired features can.
What are these many companies? And how are these mysterious companies forcing you to work on their issues?
If you have companies name and shame them, but often these are just hypotheticals or few entities.
Agreed. Supporting open source maintainers is a great idea in general, but shaming people for using something according to the exact license terms it was released with is getting old.
It's crazy to expect someone to pay for something that you're giving them for free.
Correct, but if there's a bug/enhancement/support they want, it's perfectly reasonable to ask for compensation for it.
A natural solution for this kind of problem would be either a private or public grants program. Critical infrastructure built by random uncompensated people... ideally there would be some process for evaluating what is critical and compensating that person for continued maintenance.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think the solution to the open source funding problem is to force people to pay for it. I think that goes against the spirit of open source. If there is forced payment, or even the expectation of payment, then we're not really doing the whole original open source thing, we're just doing bad source available commercial-ish software.
I think the solution is for people to understand that open source goes both ways. Unlike what this post says, users don't owe maintainers anything, but maintainers also don't owe the users anything. If I build something cool and share it freely, why should users expect anything from me? Why should you expect me to maintain it or add the features you want? I think we need a mentality change where less is expected from maintainers, unless funding is arranged.
After all, it's free and open source. No one is forcing you to use it. Don't like that I'm not actively developing it? Submit a PR or fork it. Isn't that what the original spirit of open source was? I think that open source has been so succesful and good that we've come to expect it to be almost like commercial software. That's not what it is.
There's also the problem of who decides who gets paid?
If they pay by popularity most of my $1 would go to javascript. I'd rather it went to libraries I actually use.
Even though I like JS/TS, I agree... not to mention that at even 10x the suggested amount for paid accounts, or even $1 per private repo per month, it still wouldn't be significant to any individual developer... More along the lines of thanks for the cup of coffee money as opposed to income money.
As suggested, I do think there should be room for grant funding, especially in the case of govts switching to open-source (LibreOffice, Linux, whatever) and open-source individuals and orgs can apply and granted each year dependent on actual use. Though, even then, govts should probably do more for funding, but I don't want a situation where the org just spends more money than they actually distribute for dev (looking at you Mozilla).
Not sure if github publishes their subscriber numbers but there may be quite a few, at least corporate?
Personally I used to pay 7/month for personal use, then when MS bought it it went down to 4, and one day when my card expired I noticed I'm not using any of the paid features and private repos are now free... so now I'm paying 0.
Congratulations everyone! We just reinvented taxes!
> I think that goes against the spirit of open source
Strictly speaking open source originally was not to do with whether you paid for something or not, it was that if you did pay for it, you got the code and had the rights to make your own changes.
Think Free speech, not free beer, or the software equivalent of right to repair.
If this actually happens, get ready for an avalanche of AI-generated garbage code that exists for the sole purpose of boosting a scammer's metrics, so they can maximize their slice of the pie with the minimum amount of effort. Spotify is dealing with this same issue around AI-generated music [1].
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lesliekatz/2024/09/08/man-charg...
Tea.xyz already slopped this: https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=teaxyz-spam
Spotify is creating their own AI slop music aren’t they?
Been living off grants and donations for a few years now. My 2c is you probably don't need to invent a new platform to fund open source development. There are tons of platforms and systems in place already. That's not's what's missing. You need to get open source developers that want to get paid for their work to spell that fact out to their users and supporters.
Yes this is uncomfortable, but the simple fact is that if you don't tell anyone you want to get paid, you probably won't be given any money. Standard seem to be maybe there's a donation link somewhere on the site, buried 4 clicks deep in the FAQ, more often than not something like a paypal.
The reality is that if you do ask for money, surprisingly often people will straight up just give you money if they like what you're doing. Like people get paid real money for screaming at video games on Twitch, meanwhile you're building something people find useful. Of course you can make money off it. But you gotta ask for it, the game screamers on twitch sure do. That's the secret. Sure there's a scale from asking for donations and doing a Jimmy Wales and putting a your face on a banner begging for donations; and while going full jimbo is arguably taking it too far, it's also probably closer to the optimum than you'd imagine.
If you have corporate users, word on the street is you can also just reach out to them and ask for sponsorship. They're not guaranteed to say yes, but they're extremely unlike to sponsor you spontaneously.
Krita put a fee on Steam and Windows store, their team doubled from 2 to 4.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
Usage is not a good proxy for value or ongoing effort. I have a npm package with tens of millions of weekly downloads. It's only a few lines long and it's basically done - no maintenance required.
I'm skeptical that there exists an algorithmic way to distribute funds that's both efficient and resistant to gaming.
The first order effect of this would be great, but the following onslaught of schlinkert spam would be devastating- its bad enough now with people making garbage dependencies and sneaking them in everywhere just for clout
Sadly I think this is true. There is already a problem with people making useless dependencies and pushing them into projects with PRs to increase their download numbers.
Showing high download numbers on your resume is more valuable than anything a fund like this could provide. There will always be a company who views high NPM download numbers as a signal of top 1% talent, even if it has become a game in itself.
It might make the maintainers of if the rest of the pie vigilant for dependency spam that would cut into their end.
Well now you've got me wondering.
Proposals like these seem to assume that FOSS is mostly produced by unpaid volunteers. But a lot of the open-source stuff that I personally use is produced by massively profitable companies.
For example, I am currently working with React, which was produced by Meta. I write the code using TypeScript, which was produced by Microsoft (and other corporate behemoths such as Google). I am writing this comment in Chrome (produced by Google). Etc.
> I am writing this comment in Chrome (produced by Google).
Which depends on a lot of code not produced by Google, like libxml2 which was on the news recently because the maintainer step down.
Chrome is not FOSS btw. Google Chrome is proprietary software based on the open-source Chromium (also created by Google), which in turn is a fork of Webkit (by Apple, and with many corporate and non-corporate contributors), which itself is a fork of KHTML/KJS from the KDE project.
You are still right that corporations found and contribute to countless open source projects though.
If you willingly choose to make source code publicly available under an open source license you can’t then act all shocked that people don’t have to pay you for using that code. If you wanted to be guaranteed an income whenever your code gets used, you should have chosen a different license.
And if you're ok with not getting paid but you are shocked that corporations take it and use it in a non-FOSS-compatible way (e.g. selling their version for money) you should have used GPL instead of MIT.
perfectly articulated. Moreover, the license is whatever the copyright holder wants to put into it. They can easily dual license , copy-left variants -- there are tons of licenses that provide compensation for commercial use.
I paid 1 buck for WhatsApp back in the day. Better business model than what meta did with it. But we're moving closer and closer to 8 companies controlling the world. Both WhatsApp and github are owned by them.
> we're moving closer and closer to 8 companies controlling the world.
Which 8? In the control the world domain I see Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. In terms of Market Cap you would add Tesla, Nvidia and TSMC, but these three aren't any where close to "controlling" the world category.
I would put Disney in there. I picked 8 arbitrarily but those companies have substantial pull in governmental regulations and the state of the web. Probably missing some Chinese companies.
imo corporations have more pull on governments than governments have on businesses at this point as far as long term culture goes.
Had you said these 8 companies controlling the world 5 to 6 years ago I would have partly agreed.
But right now I see so many cracks in their game I am optimistic they wont control world and there will be new competition to challenge them.
The trick will be getting around the regulations that are being set up to protect interests of government and big business at the expense of everybody else. This will only become more difficult as time goes on.
This would not fund the people you want it to fund.
Bad or borderline actors would be so much better at creating whatever metrics you're basing things off of that the actual value creators wouldn't stand a chance.
Static rules will be gamed.
It's easy to predict what sort of incentives this would produce, and how bad they would be. Fewer users and way more spammy projects to say the least.
GH could easily end up having to spend more than it collected in fighting abuse.
So you sprinkle a few tens of thousands of dollars across a few hundreds of thousands of developers every month? Thanks for the $0.48 Github.
s/thousands/millions/ the point stands that there are way more devs than commercial accounts, and even then, even if it's 1:1, you get $1?
Have a glass of water on us, friend!
The transitive nature of dependencies makes fund allocation extremely wonky. Say you have Next.js as a dependency in your package.json file? How many dependencies does Next.js itself have? What portion of your funds go to Next.js versus all the transitive dependencies of Next.js?
$1 USD is ~90 Indian Rupees, 1450 Argentinian Peso or over 1 million Iranian Rial [1]. In some places, $1 USD could be a week's work. On the collection side, you could be seriously over-charging people. On the distribution side, you could be seriously overpaying people for their work - and encourage scams, etc.
> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month and direct it into an Open Source fund, held in escrow.
Sure. It'll be some charity, then somebody gets paid $200k+ per year to distribute what remains after they've taken the majority, all whilst avoiding most taxes. To receive the money the person has to ID themselves, financial background checks need to be done, a minimum amount needs to be reached before a payment is made, and then after passing through multiple wanting hands, they end up with a fraction.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
What even is "usage"? How many times it appears in a number of repos? How many users there are of the project? Is the usefulness and value of a project limited to the number of people that directly use it?
> Or don’t! Let’s not do anything! People’s code and efforts - fueling incredibly critical bits of infrastructure all around the world - should just be up for grabs. Haha! Suckers!
> Anyway, you all smarter than me people can figure it out. I just cannot accept that what we have is “GOOD”. xx
It's entirely possible you can make things worse by avoiding doing nothing. Sometimes in life you have to pick the lesser of evils.
[1] https://www.x-rates.com/table/?from=USD&amount=1
Many open source projects are created by engineers being paid to solve a problem their employer has, and they just happen to release it freely.
I don't think Google needs a dollar every time I write a script in golang or run a container in kubernetes, and I would put a lot less trust in Envoy if I thought Lyft was building it profit and not because they needed to.
How bold to start with "Listen to me" then jump into something that doesn't make much economic sense and has not been properly considered
In fairness TFA:
> Hence, a solution. Or an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe.
Instead of a dollar from github users, I think it should just be a hefty tax on big tech companies that have valuations of over a billion. The nature of software and tech means that there are massive monopolies where winner takes all. We should just accept that and leverage it.
No idea why this has got the traction it has. Absurd and poorly thought through. It sounds like you don’t like building open source software, so stop doing it. Don’t write a blog post whining about the cage you have shut yourself in. Absolute martyr complex.
> Alright, I don’t know how you fund Linux (does Linux appear in a requirements file). Hmm.
By paying companies like Red Hat, Canonical, Google and Amazon, who in turn spend massive amounts of money employing software developers to work on Linux.
Every day, millions go to work because they have to eat. Every day, thousands (?) go to their computers in their free time and make OSS software. Not because they have to eat but because [?]. Then they or others complain that people take their work that they do for free under no duress for free.
Maybe economists could do what is ostensibly their job and try to prevent the “tetris game of software depending on the OSS maintained by one guy in Nebraska...” situation. In the meanwhile people who do things under no duress for free could stop doing it.
(Not that OSS is all hobby activities. There are many who are paid to do it. But these appeals only talk about the former.)
One thing I thought that got me interested about Brave was this part of their business modell. It had the potential to support this type of economy almost without any attrition. It was not that different from flattr, with the difference that people would be able to contribute just by accepting the notification ads and passing along their earnings.
Unfortunately, the crypto angle made sure that mostly degens and speculators got into it. Perhaps if stabletokens were more established by the time they started, it would be easier to market it.
(I am not going to get into yet-another discussion about Brave as a company. I will flag any attempt at derailing the conversation.)
>It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer).
Why? It's not crazy at all. It's the status quo with no sign of things changing. It is both possible right now and likely continue. Its not crazy.
If it's not worth maintaining people will stop. If people need it they will develop it. The current incentive structure has produced lots of open source code that is being maintained.
>It is not okay - it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
It is if there is no cost. You can always charge for it. But you can't make it free then pretend its not.
I think we sometimes treat "open" as automatically good without examining the tradeoffs.
You can easily sponsor Iran or Russia killing real people by doing such things.
Powerful tools, once released, can be used by anyone, including those with harmful intentions. And let's be honest: much of open source functions as a way for large companies to cut costs on essential but non-differentiating infrastructure. That's fine, but it complicates the idealistic narrative.
With generative AI, these questions matter more. Maybe it's time to revisit what open source should mean in this context.
This transformation of open-source into rent-seeking behaviour is quite distasteful to me. If you don't want to share your stuff without taxing everyone, then don't share it. Other licenses exist. You don't have to use MIT or the GPL.
Meta has even demonstrated an alternative with the Llama 4 License which has exclusion criteria:
> 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 4 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee’s affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta, which Meta may grant to you in its sole discretion, and you are not authorized to exercise any of the rights under this Agreement unless or until Meta otherwise expressly grants you such rights.
Go put such terms in your licenses.
This is particularly rampant in the Rust community and if I'm being honest this forced tithing church nonsense from people who want to be priests makes participating in that community less desirable. I don't even want to donate to the RSF as a result.
All the other projects I've donated to in the past have been much more reasonable. This kind of pushy nonsense is unacceptable.
> If you don't want to share your stuff without taxing everyone, then don't share it. Other licenses exist. You don't have to use MIT or the GPL.
I agree. Yet some of my comments here have been met with downvoting and explanations that GPL licensing is a moral imperative, so there is certainly a contingent who would disagree.
> This is particularly rampant in the Rust community
This is interesting. Do you have examples? I am not cognizant enough of interactions there.
Yeah, there's a HN comment where someone is complaining about a related concept but in the linked threads there you have a lot of these donation inquisitors. I shy away from any such community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048954
Thanks!
I've seen plenty of cases of making something a target where quality won't be measurable and immediately cut off the reward or apply penalties. I don't really want Microsoft to run a large fund that encourages people to try to take over roles and request cash, etc.
Literally anyone could create a support and maintenance organization that takes MIT license projects into an AWS like split and only get paid if the support they provide remains valuable to people who pay for the value of the support and maintenance.
I've spent a bit of time thinking about this[0] - as a maintainer (oapi-codegen, Renovate, previously Jenkins Job DSL Plugin and Wiremock), as someone who used to work on "how can we better fund our company's dependencies", and building projects and products to better understand dependency usage
As others have noted, there are a few areas to watch out for, and:
- some ecosystems have more dependencies over fewer, and so we need to consider how to apply a careful weighting in line with that - how do we handle forks? Does a % of the money go to the original maintainers who did 80% of the work? - how can companies be clever to not need to pay this? - some maintainers don't want financial support, and that's OK - some project creators / maintainers don't get into the work for the money (... because there is often very little) - there's a risk of funding requirements leading to "I'm not merging your PR without you paying me" which is /not problematic/ but may not be how some people (in particular companies) would like to operate
[0]: https://www.jvt.me/posts/2025/02/20/funding-oss-product/
I have a better idea-- why doesn't GitHub (that closed source platform) donate 20% of all revenue to opensource projects that enable the company to exist?
It's as dumb as the german Pauschalabgabe, where everyone is forced to pay a specific amount of money for technical devices, because there is the possibility of private copies for licenced media.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe
> every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt
OK, what about those of us who aren't writing libraries?
As a personal anecdote, the amount of opportunities that have been opened up to me as a result of my open source project are worth way more than any $1 per mention or user.
I think that if GitHub had charged everyone from the beginning, it wouldn’t have become so popular and wouldn’t have attracted so many users. Maybe if they introduce charges now, it could work, but I’m still sure that a lot of users would drop off, and only those who are basically forced to use it would stay. And this would simply open the door for competitors to create similar products.
OSS works partially because a lot of stuff is free as in beer. I rely on probably many thousands of OSS projects directly or indirectly on a daily basis. So does everyone else.
The problem for some people is that they want to get paid for their work and just aren't; or not enough. I won't judge that. Writing software is hard work. Whether you donate your time and how much of your time is a personal choice to make. But of course a lot of OSS gets paid for indirectly via companies paying people to work on them (most long lived projects have paid contributors like that) or in a few cases because the companies behind these projects have some business model that actually works. Some people donate money to things they like. And some projects are parked under foundations that accept donations. That's all fine. But there are also an enormous amount of projects out there and most of them will never receive a dollar for any of it. OSS wouldn't work without this long tail of unpaid contributors.
I have a few OSS projects of my own. I don't accept donations for them. I don't get paid for them. I have my own reasons for creating these projects; but money isn't one of those. And people are welcome to use them. That's why these projects are open source.
MS and Github make loads of money. There's a reason they give the freemium version away for free: it funnels enough people into the non free version that it is worth it to them. Charging money to everyone might actually break that for them. I happily use their freemium stuff. I did pay for it a long time ago when private projects weren't part of the freemium layer. Anyway their reasons/motivations are theirs. I'm sure it all makes sense for them and their share holders.
If people feel guilty about not donating to each of the thousands of projects they rely on (or any, because why cherry pick?), you can pay back in a different way and try to contribute once in a while. Just pay it forward. Yes you somebody put a lot of work in the stuff that you use. And you put some work in stuff that others get to use. If enough people keep on doing that (and the success of OSS hints that they do), OSS will be here to stay.
> OSS will be here to stay
OSS literally runs the modern infrastructure... https://www.fordfoundation.org/learning/library/research-rep...
People in tech thinks that micropayments work. Even if you leave out the drop off in entering card details, it just doesn't work, as if get some payment you are much more liable by law. e.g. Whatsapp is the closes example, which had cost of revenue of $52M for revenue of $10M[1] in the last filing.
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
I think there could be a GH feature request that could do something like this in my opinion (opt-in though, not opt-out).
In my personal GH account there is a "sponsor" button that shows me what dependencies I have that I could sponsor. Unfortunately the list is empty.
My _organisations_ have hundreds of repo's, but there's no "sponsor" option at the org level in GH that says what dependencies the orgs use and then set up batch transactions at that level.
The dependency data already exists in dependabot for a lot of stuff, so it wouldn't be starting from scratch.
$5 a month per dependency, OK let's go! Hold up I've just reorganized my packages into sqlalchemy-base, sqlalchemy-core-sql, sqlalchemy-orm, sqlalchemy-oh-you-want-deletes-also, sqlalchemy-fewer-bugs, and about eight more
If you want to make a product and sell your software, make a product and sell it.
It is always people who make a thing for free then people find it useful and start using it then they start using that free and open source thing at work instead of writing a copy and that’s when the original person starts asking for donations and money.
The reason your project is popular is because it is free. If it wasn’t free we would have probably written our own or used something else.
npm funds is that to a certain extent -> https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund
No. I would get rid of "should" to "could" but it actually would warp the open source world once money is involved. People would start optimizing what they do to try and get a slice of the pie.
I wouldn't want some committee to decide who gets the money. It would make more sense to promote Github sponsorship. Suppose they occasionally gave all subscribers a $10 credit that they could use to sponsor whatever projects they want?
https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-c...
yes and I think animejs and others used this modal effectively.
Not a great take.
Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software, but they don't want to, which is why they'll happily spend money promoting the use of corporate-friendly and maximally exploitable open source licensing among the passionate individuals who maintain the lions share of their dependency tree.
https://lgug2z.com/articles/on-evils-in-software-licensing/
If you don't want to give your software away for free, don't give your software away for free. When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes. If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.
> When they decide it is in their best interest to pay for it they will, i.e. support, bug fixes, changes.
Maybe, but also maybe they just fork internally and fix the bug internally and don't publish the bugfix. And maybe it's never in their best interest to pay for it, maybe it's in their best interest to just freeload forever.
> If you make open source software that just works they are unlikely to start writing checks nor should there be any expectation that they do that.
I think it's good when we expect corporations to write checks to the people that write the open-source stuff they rely on. "A rising tide lifts all boats" is not automatically true in software, we have to choose to make it true. I think a world in which we make that choice is a better world. I'm not convinced we currently live in that world.
Make the license non-commercial.
That is not how people and society function. The status quo and culture is that open source is good for society and all. You are not told about why big corporations can use all this code for free. You’re actually told you’re doing a good deed by making code open source.
Then you jump on to a place like Reddit or HN and you have people mostly supporting the status quo. Of course people are going to do open source more than they should. And then if they complain later on, you will say they chose to make it open source. Reinforcing the status quo by blaming the individual.
It certainly no other persons fault than the person that wrote the software and gave it away. Making them out to be the victim in all this is ridiculous.
We can make similar arguments for the corporations: if you want to sell your software in the US market, you need to pay for a VAT for digital services that fund national endowments giving grants to individual US developers that apply to the program.
Corporations should start paying their fair share, they've scammed society enough.
They aren't scamming anyone by using open source software made available to them for free.
The are purposely ruining the commons as any corporation does to society. Companies take advantage of open source all the time without ever truly giving back, which is why we should lobby the government to compel big tech into this.
If it helps, voter sentiment against big tech is quite high and the profit margins that big tech has means there's a lot to plunder for the public.
The only question is who do you want to do the plundering?
this argument that companies are plundering something given away for free without taking it away from someone else is tiring.
> If you don't want to give your software away for free, don't give your software away for free.
I don't, and I spend a lot of my time and efforts encouraging others not to, and doing the work to prove out alternative models :)
https://lgug2z.com/articles/normalize-identifying-corporate-...
https://lgug2z.com/articles/komorebi-financial-breakdown-for...
Giving something away for free and then whining that people use it for free confuses me. I mean, what did you think would happen?
> Giving something away for free and then whining that people use it for free confuses me. I mean, what did you think would happen?
Such a weird thing to reply to someone who very publicly disavows the use of open source licensing for individuals
Such an aggressive response to a perfectly rational response to "Corporations who use and benefit from software should be made to pay for their use of that software."
> created: 46 days ago
Checks out
A problem is that some Python library with a sole developer who is on the verge of halting maintenance needs your $1 way more than the Linux Foundation.
Github should charge everyone $1 more to disable Copilot on accounts.
This is a terrible idea in my opinion and it's been tried/is being tried by services like thanks.dev. Yes, we need something here but this is not it. The reality is more complex.
It doesn't work well in practice. Because then people like https://github.com/sindresorhus?tab=repositories&type=source would get a shit ton of money because of the pure number of dependencies. And yes our stack also contains his code somewhere in a debug UI but our main product is entirely written in a different programming language with way fewer dependencies but if one of them goes away we'd be in trouble. In other words: Dependency count is not a good metric for this.
GitHub actually offers something in that direction: https://github.com/sponsors/explore
My "idea": Lots of companies will have to create SBOMs anyway. Take all of those but also scan your machines and take all the open source software running on there (your package.lock does not contain VLC etc.) and throw it in a big company wide BOM, then somehow prioritise those using algorithms, data and just manual voting and then upload that to some distributor who then distributes this to all the relevant organisations and people and then (crucially) sends me (as a company) an invoice.
We've tried doing the right thing but sponsoring is hard - it works differently for every project/foundation and the administrative overhead is huge.
The reality is that "we" as an open-source community suck at taking money and I believe this is partially on us.
> The reality is that "we" as an open-source community suck at taking money and I believe this is partially on us.
More broadly people suck at giving money for things they can get for free. That’s just the reality of how most people out there behave.
The only “solution” is to educate people but that is completely unfeasible.
Being on both sides of the open source value relationship, I feel somewhat skeptical of mechanisms that use dependency cardinality/"popularity" to allocate funding: at its best it's a proxy for core functionality (which is sometimes, but not always, the actually hard/maintenance-intensive stuff) and at its worst it incentivizes dependency proliferation (since two small core packages would be equally as popular as one medium-sized one).
Let's rephrase this a bit so I'm sure I understand.
Microsoft, a $3.4T company, should charge people for open source they didn't even write?
Hell no. Hell no.
That's a mischaracterization of TFA's point. Your re-phrase makes it sound like the proposal is for filthy-rich Microsoft to pocket additional bucks from other people's open source work. Ostensibly, yes, Microsoft will be doing such action but the spirit of TFA is more like for Microsoft to act as a tax collector and, crucially, redistribute the collected tax back to the community---the money will not add to Microsoft's $3.4T-worth coffers!
Naturally this comment isn't a "fuck yes!" to the idea of Microsoft-as-tax-collector but if we're discussing TFA, let's not be needlessly cynical to the idea presented.
The comment you responded to may have incorrectly assumed that all the problems were self-evident, but apparently they are not.
> redistribute the collected tax back to the community---the money will not add to Microsoft's $3.4T-worth coffers!
Ummm, yeah, no.
Microsoft is a contributor to many open source projects, so it could, in fact, directly add to its own coffers.
And, the onus to pay for what was nominally free software could make paid software look more attractive, so it could indirectly push people to, e.g., office subscriptions.
I am working on open source projects. I believe we need a better licensing approach for open source. The current license system only works if users actually care about licenses, but most do not. They simply copy the code and do whatever they want. Finding a solution to this problem is more important than charging money.
> Those funds would then be distributed by usage - every mention in a package.json or requirements.txt gets you a piece of the pie.
Could have worked before LLMs.
Also, funding by popularity would mean alternatives would have a harder time to emerge and get the funding they need to compete against the established popular projects.
Being an Open Source project doesn't mean that it provides the best solution to the problem it's supposed to solve. Diversity is important.
Or the copyright holders can start dual licensing their software for commercial use
license A is GPL or MIT for academic and free applications
License B is for commercial use, with a fee
The license is literally whatever you want to put into it.
IMO the issue is with the open source community gatekeeping these policies. Shaming developers for proposing commercial licensing, then shaming corporations for properly using the IP according to the free license (e.g. MIT)
> It is crazy, absolutely crazy to depend on open source to be free (as beer).
It is also kind of crazy to want Microsoft to manage FOSS taxation and funding.
I do not agree. It should not be opt-out. If you want funding, make it opt-in. I do not want to be paid for it, and I also do not want to pay for it (and I also do not want to have too many dependencies, even if I do not have to pay for it).
Also, not all programs use package.json and requirements.txt, so that won't work anyways.
I donate to specific projects through OpenCollective. I do not want Github to take extra money from me and then redistribute it to projects I don't care about according to some formula that will inevitably be exploited to get free $$$.
If you want to support a project, submit a PR or send them a check. Don't force me do it for you.
Amen, GitHub is already a faustian bargain for FOSS projects, this kind of thing will just entrench it further.
No, they shouldn't. Microsoft has so much money, they couldn't spend it in a thousand years. Much of that money earned, because they had not have to spend it on developers because they just use open source software. They should just invest more into open source, but out of their pocket.
No, Github should pay open source per inference token.
It'll never happen; open source doesn't have the legal team of Disney [1].
[1] https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
Not much money * quite a lot of people = not very much money
(this holds true for all of the other times this idea has been suggested, too).
And this does not take into account the various fees, taxes etc, that will be removed before any money gets into an OSS developer's bank account.
GitHub already charges organisations to fund open source features. Otherwise it wouldn't lack so many enterprise level features, it wouldn't have half baked solution that do not take into consideration enterprise requirements. GH Actions for example is still not there yet after years
An Open Letter to Hobbyists has a similar ring to it: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/su...
How much was left-pad worth? Lots of people used it because it's free, not because it's valuable.
I do like this idea, as it seems easy to implement. Github can just increase its prices by $1/month/orguser and that fund could end up with like, i think, 6 million per month. Thats a sizeable amount of money and could help in making open source more sustainable & attractive.
If this ever happened I imagine private equity would begin taking control of open source projects.
No. Take some of that enterprise cash and lay it aside on a daily lottery which devs automatically enter based on usage metrics. And a bit more enterprise aside to give directly to the customers' deep dependency maintainers (which gh already knows).
Tax large companies properly then you don't have to tax the public for things like this.
It's a good idea! Extra bonus: the inevitable exodus of companies moving to a different platform might reduce github's scale to a point where they can handle their own traffic (zing!)
Why not just offer dual license open source + commercial license.
If anyone is making money off the code they should pay annual fee which goes to contributors. Github can setup an escrow, manage licenses and distribute the money to contributors.
IMHO Open Source Software is a public good, and should be mostly funded like other public goods: through government grants.
GitHub charging its users, who themselves are mostly OSS developers (and not end users) doesn't seem like a sensible solution.
I'm not a fan of Github, I prefer to promote the competition, and I'm definitely not a fan of Microsoft, but Github is already sponsoring open source with unlimited repos.
So this is a weird statement to me, like you always want more.
Git is already distributed. We don’t need a hub for it. Just stop using GitHub it is a Microsoft product.
Not sure how open source got bamboozled into paying rent to Microsoft of all companies.
Open source work is not a product, it is a gift to the community with no strings attached, and that goes both ways. You don't ask people who give you a gift to then unbox it, set it up, and maintain it for you.
GitHub should be gradually substituted by some other providers, decentralized.
This... exists? Did they even search for it? https://github.com/open-source/sponsors
Yes, it's a step in the right direction.
However it is opt-in aka "Launch a page in minutes and showcase Sponsors buttons on your GitHub profile and repositories". That's effort & friction and only simplifies the "begging" aspect that I am (strongly) reacting to.
https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-fund will also "list all dependencies that are looking for funding in a tree structure"
I want the step (or 5 steps) after that. Charge first, then distribute.
GitHub cannot see enterprise repos. Those are purposely kept on-prem.
>it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments
Goodbye 90% of open source software I guess then
Or Microsoft could simply fund open source software since they provide a Linux subsystem to allow people to do proper work despite of them having to use windows
Great. That would mean that 98% of the github users would leave it.
He said only for org users. Orgs are already paying github, 4-20$ per month per user.
Although the article's author might have intentionally chosen a highly misleading title (ragebait?), as it would have been far less misleading (and shorter) to write "GitHub should charge orgs $1 more per month" instead of "everyone" ...
The post is about users who have paid plans
How about GitHub stops using GPL'd code to train models? The authors weren't asking for payment, they were just asking not to reuse their code without GPL.
This is the classic "if everyone gave 5 cents" thing. But If GitHub charged $1 more per month, how would they raise prices later then?
If you pay for it to gain the access, then it is not open source. In open source, everyone can access it and contribute (in theory).
That would be fun. Could over time round roughly to charging everyone to fund the use of GitHub Copilot to work on open source.
Schemes like this have a way of getting captured.
So much for freedom, I find those views a bit extremist and forcing one's opinion on everyone else.
If you make every single person go through Github's miserable auth process just to do git pull, they are going to leave
While delegating fund collection and disbursement to one organization reduces overhead for each project, the centralized nature of the setup can be asking for trouble.
Instead, why not accept the reality that 1) projects may charge for their offerings and 2) users may have to pay for such offerings? As a user, if a project's offering is useful to me, then I should be willing to pay for it. As a creator, if I want to get paid for my offering, then I should be willing to ask for it. An upside of such a change could be that we start being more focused and prudent about what we use and create.
Without such delegation, projects will have to do the heavy lifting in terms of collection of funds; features such as sponsorship in GH or setting up e-payments via Stripe or Paypay may help reduce this brunt.
This is suggesting Microsoft should take more power to itself, and disguise it as "community support"
Considering that Github already has indirectly done a biggest theft in the tech history, I'd say: no way.
> Github already has indirectly done a biggest theft in the tech history
What is "the biggest theft in tech history" that GitHub did?
I'd rather have GitHub completely shut down than to donate ¢1 to any npm project.
not all people can access usukeu based payment systems, so no.
greg just proposed sanctions, more sanction. without disriminating that for some kids 1 is too much or impossible.
greg why do you want more suffering to people?
Make it opt-in and I'm all for it.
The REAL problem becomes, who gets funding? ouch
I'd support this if only to end the nightmare that is the JS ecosystem
the payment isn't the problem so much as the payment processing. They wouldn't support crypto, even if they did, getting crypto without KYC hassle is a PITA, not worth it for paying one company $1. Not associating your real identity with a github repo is very important to most github users.
Payment could solve lots of problems, but there is no real and meaningful cash-equivalent payment system or method. This isn't a tech problem either, governments allow cash payments, but if it is digital, they won't allow any means that preserves privacy. Money laundering is their concern. You can't solve this without laws changing. Even if I don't mind buying crypto with a credit card, I still have to go through proving my identity with my id card, as if my credit-card company didn't do that already.
payment is a huge barrier to commerce these days, people think LLMs will change the world, but payment tech/laws will have a bigger effect in my opinion.
Let's say HN mods go a little crazy one day and want to let us tip each other for good posts and comments, imagine if all they had to do is add an html tag in the right place and that's it. All we had to do is click a button and it just works, and there is no exposure of private information by any involved party, and you could fund that payment by buying something (a card?) at a convenience store in person, just as easily as you could with a crypto payment, moneygram or wire transfer.
I __want__ to pay so many news sites, blogs,etc... I don't mind tipping a few bucks to some guy who wrote a good blog, or who put together a decent project on github that saved me lots of time and work.
It isn't merely the change in economics or people getting a buck here and there, but the explosion in economic activity you have to look at. The generation of wealth, not the mere zero-sum transferring of currency. This is the type of stuff that changes society drastically, like freeways being invented, women being able to ride bicycles, airplanes allowing fast transport, telegrams allowing instant messaging,etc..
Everyone being able to easily pay anyone at all, including funding private as well as commercial projects would be more disruptive than democracy itself, if I could dare make that claim. There is freedom of movement, there is freedom of communication and last there is freedom of trade. these are the ultimate barriers to human progress. Imagine if everyone from texas to beijing could fund research and projects, trade stocks in companies (all companies in the world). You won't need governments to fund climate change work, I think eventually taxation itself will have to suffer, because people would be able to direct exactly where their funds went. Not just what department in the government gets a budget, but exactly what projects they spend it on. being able to not just talk or meet each other instantly (and even those have a long way to go) but to also collectively or as individuals found each other, governments and companies, that'd be the biggest thing that could happen this century.
This could be done, but again, we don't need better tech as much as we need a change in attitude. For people to actually believe this would result in a better world for them.
> payment is a huge barrier to commerce these days, people think LLMs will change the world, but payment tech/laws will have a bigger effect in my opinion.
Having a native way to send micropayments on the web without having to pay a huge % of that transaction to Visa/Mastercard and Stripe and Co would be such massive game changer when it comes to this stuff.
As a silly example, every time I collect 1$ for my 1$/month club I actually get ~70c which is wild.
I agree with you, if there was a better way to directly send small amounts to people running interesting sites or projects the whole landscape could change.
And I also agree that a change in attitude is needed. I appreciated your comment.
should be the transitive dependencies, not just top-level (so the lock file or equiv) or you just reward the "barely wrap it and give it a new name" js crowd even more.
BRB donating to Forgejo.
This is the same rationale for governments raising taxes.
Congratulations, HN reinvented the concept of taxes!
let everything be gratis and if you need something fixed, and engineer you hired to work for you in your org can fork or send in a patch. there, I solved it
There's Drips that kinda works like this I think
Yeah ask Microsoft to charge everyone $1/m more, what could go wrong. They didn't coin the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish" or anything
Even better.
Have Microsoft charge people $ for their repos, and then take their code to train their LLM for more $.
And they can use the surplus $ to fund open source projects to produce more code to train their LLM for even more $, and reduce their taxes thanks to the charitable donations.
Everyone wins, right?
Thankfully we still have Codeberg.
Tech guy reinvents half-assed taxes. More at 11.
Government grants can be used to cover infrastructural open source. Not every open source wants money, so this scheme has ro be opt-in. Further, entitled "paying" users[1] will make things much worse for small projects. "I paid for this package, so you need to fix this show-stopper bug before we ship on Friday"
Having a passion project is great, having it gain traction is even better, but that is not sufficient to make it a job / company. The utility of open source projects range from "I could implement the bits I use in under an hour" to "It would take 100-person team years".
> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
Is that not what most of open source is? Things people make for themselves because they either found it fun or solved their own problem, then published it for others to use for free. Most projects are not worth the bureaucratic tax related headaches the income from them would bring (maybe that's just my EU showing).
What's not okay is demanding new features or to fix something urgently. That's paid territory.
Honestly this post is such a shit take it's borderline intentional ragebait.
This would be terrible.
People would milk the system as much as they could, only to become the most popular library, only to get most of the "pie".
I guess Python/JS devs would get the most of it. Because their ecosystem is most fragmented. C++ or assembly devs? Nothing.
I don't think this idea is thought out. Money corrupts things.
There already is a "market" for stars. But if stars would indicate how much someone earns, it would be morbid. Well, in some way, I guess they already do, but it's linked at least indirectly.
the problem with any approach like this based on usage metrics is that it will be abused to death
Deeply hate this. Just add a small fee. It's just a couple bucks. What are you, cheap?
Open Source Software underwrites everything. It makes the largest human endeavors work. It makes silly ephemeral games little notes apps and digital art run. Turning maintainers into a kind of digital landlord that charges a fee is both insultingly low bore and enough to squeeze the life out of computing as a hobby.
I disagree, due to github copilot and other AI crap Microsoft is adding to GitHub, they should pay us 5 USD per month.
Did you read the article? Though I can agree the title is bait.
Yes I read it, but still, charging me $1 so M/S can spy on what I do and make money off of it by selling my work to large corporations is wrong.
But if they really wanted to do what the article says, create a project and people can donate what the want. For example, if M/S sends me $5 per month, I can redirect it to various open source projects instead.
When I was on GH, I did donate a little per month to 2 projects, it was a nice way to do that. But I moved off because I do not want to give M/S more personal information (like my Cell #), so I send a few $ to them using other means.
UBI solves a lot of this, no?
Sounds like force with a Hobson's choice. And who decides who gets how much?
This is a common anti-pattern of utopian, this will work this time(tm), improperly-educated dreamers who are much too comfortable with totalitarianism like taking money, property, and rights from others without asking for their consent.
Robbing peasants to build palaces and pet projects. Maybe start with "demanding" every big company fund them than taxing average people.
This is so dumb.
This line of thinking is utterly bizarre to me. People need to stop thinking of GitHub as anything other than a typical corporation. If they could charge an additional dollar they would keep it for themselves.
ok greg i made my repository public where is my stinky money?
I honestly believe this is a great idea and of course you can make it opt-in and opt-out but it should be a default or enforcable by repo-owners.
YES. SOMETHING.
You mean Microsoft?
I've been thinking about this very hard problem while walking the dog.
Individuals and companies love open source software, but the current donation models don’t really work.
I thought this problem was bad for programming libraries (e.g. the recent Tailwind stuff), but after using Linux desktop open source—which has much less incentive for companies to donate or sponsor—oh boy, it’s bad.
Open source evokes a lot of emotions, but at its core, to me, it’s two things:
A collection of “features” (depending on license / governance):
* You can use it for free, no matter what
* You can see how it works
* You can modify the software
etc.
These are genuinely valuable features, which is why open source has won.
But these features are unavoidably coupled to business models and incentive structures for the developers who create this value.
Right now, open source developers and companies can only extract a relatively small percentage of the (considerable) value they create. As a result, only very large or strategically important projects become financially sustainable.
I agree with the article that the solution likely involves a different business model or incentive alignment—but this is a very hard problem.
We’ve seen major business model shifts outside open source during my career:
- SaaS software (used to be one-time payments)
- Microtransactions in games (personally dislike them, but they radically changed incentives and revenue)
These shifts are often counterintuitive and closely tied to human behavior.
I don’t agree with the specific solution proposed in the article, but I don’t have a clean answer either.
My best (very rough) idea:
Create a non-profit that builds tooling and infrastructure to measure open source usage (tricky!).
Loosely, you run something like:
And it generates a report for a machine (or an entire company): Then a centralized registry where individuals and companies can disclose usage and donations: Donated funds are held centrally and can be claimed by project maintainers.Companies can claim (or not) their usage. Developers can claim (or not) their projects and funds.
Donations are aggregated into one transaction per month, solving the microtransaction problem.
This creates a public, open record of who is funding open source. I think that could be a strong incentive for larger companies—engineers will notice when choosing where to work.
Bad actors who under-donate or refuse to disclose won’t be invisible; we’ll know where they stand.
Anyway - if you’ve read this far and are interested in working on or funding this idea, come find me: https://richardgill.org
Oh, I know! Let’s redistribute royalty payments from AI subscriptions in Spotify-fashion from OpenAI and friends to developers, kind of like how Spotify pays artists for streams we get a cut of the token. Oh wait… no one’s profitable yet. Right.
free market. go and charge.
no.
<humour> sounds like socialism amirite?</humour>
In principle it sounds like a grand idea, although there are a bunch of corner cases like how it works cross country borders, and de-anonymising maintainers.
If it was opt in for opensource projects, and there are strong guards against people forking/hard takover-ing then yes, it seems like a good idea in principle.
I will leave the AI enthusiasts to chime in about the future, and how we don't need OS anymore.
Taxes, that's called taxes.
...With absolutely nothing expected in return. This is for work completed, not for leverage on future work
Fucking lol. They should pay people for services people give them for free.
love this idea on so many levels. Of course, then the fight moves to how allocation happens, and how to avoid people further gaming things like repo stars, forks, PRs, voting, dependencies, etc.
in particular, there's repos with extremely high activity where funding doesn't help anyone and repos with low activity where funding ensures continuity for key components we all depend on but which are under-funded for various reasons.
obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
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You do not want to add profit incentives like this to FOSS.
Profit incentives like the one suggested is what brought us enshitification.
And the code is a free gift, unless the licence says otherwise. What's wrong with letting developers choose what to bill for?
You are absolutely right
The sense of entitlement is strong in these comments. If you haven’t built or maintained OSS I’m wondering why your opinion matters [edit: that's harshly worded I could have been more nuanced, hopefully the point is taken and it is a question]. There’s also the take that “this is fine” vs considering that the state of OSS things could be a LOT better with higher quality and more choices if we fed the beast properly.
I don't see any entitlement at all, in fact it's the opposite.
The article: "I expect open source maintainers to maintain their codebases and add new features. I have unilaterally decided that $1/package is a suitable amount, universally applicable to all packages and maintainers." <--- this is entitlement
The comments here: "Open source maintainers don't owe you shit."
Interesting. I do not agree with your summary of his post, in fact he goes so far as to say "an idea, really. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very unwrought and muy unripe."
So yes, we can laugh at the proposed mechanism but I feel the world would be a better place if we could funnel more resources to OSS creators rather than just take because that's an easier path.