Imagine you have a bunch of fishermen surrounding a lake. After a while, they notice that each year they catch fewer and fewer fish. One realizes that what they're doing is unsustainable and they need to change their practices. He buys a billboard that says, "We must stop fishing at the lake." The others correctly point out that he still fishes there. "Fine", he says. "I'll stop." So he stops, and his income stops. Eventually he can't afford to keep that billboard up. Meanwhile, the others are doing better than ever now that the man isn't taking any fish out. They use the extra income to put up billboards saying, "Fishing here is fine."
In general, I'm a big fan of leading by example. But in situations like open source where there's a tragedy of the commons effect, leading by example can simply mean deliberately putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. Companies that pay open source developers are doing the right thing morally, but end up with less money available to compete against other companies that don't.
I don't know what the right solution is. Maybe it requires organized action and legislation. Maybe it requires the open source developers themselves to restrict who they let use their code. (Sort of like the fish choosing which fishermen get to catch them.) I don't know. I applaud what Cognitect is doing, but I don't know if it will have any ability to influence other companies that extract value from open source without giving anything back. It may just make them relatively more powerful.
Companies still compete to attract and retain top devs. What if those devs insisted that the companies they work for sponsor open source, and prefer sponsoring companies when making decisions about where they'll work? If companies spent just somewhere near 1% of what they spend on devs on open source sponsorship they could transform the ecosystem. As a result they'd have more and better open source to leverage. That's before you consider the risk mitigation of ensuring stable suppliers.
Yeah, I don't disagree. Just to be clear I want to re-emphasize that I applaud you or any other organization that unilaterally takes steps like this. It is a good thing.
I just always think about the indirect incentives our choices make in the broader ecosystem. Some systemic problems can be solved by individuals incrementally making different choices, but I think some require larger organization and coordination. And, to some degree (but not enough to cancel out the merit of an individual moral choice) a choice to do the right thing can actually make it easier for others to exploit more.
I don't understand your analogy. Using OSS is not like fishing because there isn't a finite number of times a project can be depended on downstream. When I use a lib I don't "take a fish out of the lake".
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Imagine you have a bunch of fishermen surrounding a lake. After a while, they notice that each year they catch fewer and fewer fish. One realizes that what they're doing is unsustainable and they need to change their practices. He buys a billboard that says, "We must stop fishing at the lake." The others correctly point out that he still fishes there. "Fine", he says. "I'll stop." So he stops, and his income stops. Eventually he can't afford to keep that billboard up. Meanwhile, the others are doing better than ever now that the man isn't taking any fish out. They use the extra income to put up billboards saying, "Fishing here is fine."
In general, I'm a big fan of leading by example. But in situations like open source where there's a tragedy of the commons effect, leading by example can simply mean deliberately putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. Companies that pay open source developers are doing the right thing morally, but end up with less money available to compete against other companies that don't.
I don't know what the right solution is. Maybe it requires organized action and legislation. Maybe it requires the open source developers themselves to restrict who they let use their code. (Sort of like the fish choosing which fishermen get to catch them.) I don't know. I applaud what Cognitect is doing, but I don't know if it will have any ability to influence other companies that extract value from open source without giving anything back. It may just make them relatively more powerful.
Companies still compete to attract and retain top devs. What if those devs insisted that the companies they work for sponsor open source, and prefer sponsoring companies when making decisions about where they'll work? If companies spent just somewhere near 1% of what they spend on devs on open source sponsorship they could transform the ecosystem. As a result they'd have more and better open source to leverage. That's before you consider the risk mitigation of ensuring stable suppliers.
Yeah, I don't disagree. Just to be clear I want to re-emphasize that I applaud you or any other organization that unilaterally takes steps like this. It is a good thing.
I just always think about the indirect incentives our choices make in the broader ecosystem. Some systemic problems can be solved by individuals incrementally making different choices, but I think some require larger organization and coordination. And, to some degree (but not enough to cancel out the merit of an individual moral choice) a choice to do the right thing can actually make it easier for others to exploit more.
I don't understand your analogy. Using OSS is not like fishing because there isn't a finite number of times a project can be depended on downstream. When I use a lib I don't "take a fish out of the lake".
The lake analogy is inverted. Investing in open source is like adding fish to the lake. There are more fish for everyone.
The metaphor is dubious because knowledge is not zero sum.