Open Source is broken if you think you should be able to make money from it when you need to. I don't think it's broken for its stated aims.
I feel bad the chap, but I don't think Open Source is to blame. It is fundamentally hard to charge tiny amounts of money to millions of people, which is all he really has to do to survive, because receiving money, especially with all the different tax rules from countries, make micro/nanotransactions difficult.
It would be good to have some sort of marketplace for this sort of thing, that has the scale to wade through country regulations and still transmit enough money to makers to be useful.
I agree that Open Source (and Free Software, so let's go with FOSS) works as designed. However, charging is not an option FOSS supports. At best it's accepting and no one's paying. OpenSSL, for instance, had accepted money for a long time yet the whole internet had to be scared for the money to actually start trickling in and still laughable amounts.
Where I don't agree is that FOSS is not to blame. It absolutely is. FOSS is the entrenched default. And FOSS is incompatible with requiring a payment. To require a payment one has to run a tangential business (provide support, integration services, etc.) and all the options are in conflict with the quality of the main FOSS product one way or another. FOSS makes it hard to switch to any other model and it's harder the longer the project lives.
The issue of funding is not going to be solved by FOSS because it is not the foal. We need to look past FOSS to find a solution. A good start would be to chose a different license when one starts a project. Like one of PolyForm Licenses [1] or BTPL [2]. These are not FOSS compatible but they align much better with the funding goal. And if one figures it doesn't work for the project it's easy to switch to FOSS. Much easier than the other way around, anyway.
FOSS isn't entrenched in any meaningful way. No one forces or even guides people to make FOSS. People choose to opt into FOSS, and choose to work on it for nothing.
As an alternative, there are millions of commercial software vendors out there, and they predate FOSS. They weren't forced into some FOSS hegemony, because that doesn't happen.
If people don't want to work on FOSS, they can do what everyone else does and start a company, and charge for their work.
The thing to avoid is starting something that's totally free, watching people pick it up because it's free, keep using it because it's decent, and then assume that those people owe you money. They may well have done something else if they'd known they were making a purchasing decision from day 1.
I do think there's an opportunity somewhere for GitHub, that owns most of the infrastructure for Javascript OSS development, to do something for JS developers. For example, they could do what YouTube does with paid accounts and distribute some of the monthly fee to creators proportionally based on watch time.
(Note: that wouldn't be righting an injustice, although I'm sure their marketing would make the most of that instinct in people. It would just be adding a proprietary marketplace to monetise OSS creators. But it might also alleviate the problem.)
I'm contemptuous of the feckless trust that unenforceable legalese can
win over human nature. It already sounds ridiculous for Coca Cola and
Kentucky Fried Chicken to publish their secret recipes permitting the
public to recreate them at home but not repackage and resell. And
that's for a food product whose provenance is easy to trace, what with
the issues of scalability, storage, transportation, government
inspection, etc. Dissemination of software is frictionless and hard to
trace.
Those with the most ability to pay are simply benefiting from free labor. How many multi-billion dollar companies are shipping products where core-js is an essential component?
It is strange to count on payment for code distributed under a free license. You can use a license that would prohibit the use of code for free in commercial products, but then spread of project will also be reduced.
The problem is that often there isn’t even an easy way to give back sure there are donations but ironically for a non person entity making donation payments like this isn’t something that is possible because laws often don’t account for this model as the projects are often not registered charities or other statutory non for profit organizations.
When a company makes a payment to an individual or an incorporated entity that is not a donation. It’s very difficult to near impossible to even properly classify them which means you are at very serious risk of violating either employment laws or tax laws or both.
And a lot of projects that have a restrictive license don’t dual license or do it properly and don’t really support commercial channels.
So whilst it’s easy to blame freeloaders more often than not the project maintainers are at fault.
There will always be idiotic compliance departments that don’t understand it also doesn’t help when SAM teams don’t differentiate between open source software and commercial software either in practice or logistically e.g. you have to register a vendor in some ERP/CRM system for every software even if it’s open source.
It still doesn’t change the fact that companies big and small can’t donate money to projects easily unless those projects are well organized behind an incorporated entity.
Comments
Open Source is broken if you think you should be able to make money from it when you need to. I don't think it's broken for its stated aims.
I feel bad the chap, but I don't think Open Source is to blame. It is fundamentally hard to charge tiny amounts of money to millions of people, which is all he really has to do to survive, because receiving money, especially with all the different tax rules from countries, make micro/nanotransactions difficult.
It would be good to have some sort of marketplace for this sort of thing, that has the scale to wade through country regulations and still transmit enough money to makers to be useful.
I agree that Open Source (and Free Software, so let's go with FOSS) works as designed. However, charging is not an option FOSS supports. At best it's accepting and no one's paying. OpenSSL, for instance, had accepted money for a long time yet the whole internet had to be scared for the money to actually start trickling in and still laughable amounts.
Where I don't agree is that FOSS is not to blame. It absolutely is. FOSS is the entrenched default. And FOSS is incompatible with requiring a payment. To require a payment one has to run a tangential business (provide support, integration services, etc.) and all the options are in conflict with the quality of the main FOSS product one way or another. FOSS makes it hard to switch to any other model and it's harder the longer the project lives.
The issue of funding is not going to be solved by FOSS because it is not the foal. We need to look past FOSS to find a solution. A good start would be to chose a different license when one starts a project. Like one of PolyForm Licenses [1] or BTPL [2]. These are not FOSS compatible but they align much better with the funding goal. And if one figures it doesn't work for the project it's easy to switch to FOSS. Much easier than the other way around, anyway.
[1]: https://polyformproject.org/licenses/ [2]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/01/26/Big-Time-2.0.0
FOSS isn't entrenched in any meaningful way. No one forces or even guides people to make FOSS. People choose to opt into FOSS, and choose to work on it for nothing.
As an alternative, there are millions of commercial software vendors out there, and they predate FOSS. They weren't forced into some FOSS hegemony, because that doesn't happen.
If people don't want to work on FOSS, they can do what everyone else does and start a company, and charge for their work.
The thing to avoid is starting something that's totally free, watching people pick it up because it's free, keep using it because it's decent, and then assume that those people owe you money. They may well have done something else if they'd known they were making a purchasing decision from day 1.
I do think there's an opportunity somewhere for GitHub, that owns most of the infrastructure for Javascript OSS development, to do something for JS developers. For example, they could do what YouTube does with paid accounts and distribute some of the monthly fee to creators proportionally based on watch time.
(Note: that wouldn't be righting an injustice, although I'm sure their marketing would make the most of that instinct in people. It would just be adding a proprietary marketplace to monetise OSS creators. But it might also alleviate the problem.)
Like one of PolyForm Licenses [1] or BTPL [2]
I'm contemptuous of the feckless trust that unenforceable legalese can win over human nature. It already sounds ridiculous for Coca Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken to publish their secret recipes permitting the public to recreate them at home but not repackage and resell. And that's for a food product whose provenance is easy to trace, what with the issues of scalability, storage, transportation, government inspection, etc. Dissemination of software is frictionless and hard to trace.
As the developer stated. It doesn't matter if the system is in place. People will mostly not donate.
Those with the most ability to pay are simply benefiting from free labor. How many multi-billion dollar companies are shipping products where core-js is an essential component?
It is strange to count on payment for code distributed under a free license. You can use a license that would prohibit the use of code for free in commercial products, but then spread of project will also be reduced.
I've always only used GPL on my projects, and I'm now moving to use AGPL.
For me adoption is not important if that means freeloaders taking and giving nothing back.
The problem is that often there isn’t even an easy way to give back sure there are donations but ironically for a non person entity making donation payments like this isn’t something that is possible because laws often don’t account for this model as the projects are often not registered charities or other statutory non for profit organizations.
When a company makes a payment to an individual or an incorporated entity that is not a donation. It’s very difficult to near impossible to even properly classify them which means you are at very serious risk of violating either employment laws or tax laws or both.
And a lot of projects that have a restrictive license don’t dual license or do it properly and don’t really support commercial channels.
So whilst it’s easy to blame freeloaders more often than not the project maintainers are at fault.
it's easy to blame freeloaders [but] the project maintainers are at fault
No one except butt-hurt OP is blaming anyone. If someone agrees to finish your basement for free, you accede and ask him to keep the noise down.
Seems you haven't read the horror stories from Daniel Stenberg's (curl's main author) website.
There will always be idiotic compliance departments that don’t understand it also doesn’t help when SAM teams don’t differentiate between open source software and commercial software either in practice or logistically e.g. you have to register a vendor in some ERP/CRM system for every software even if it’s open source.
It still doesn’t change the fact that companies big and small can’t donate money to projects easily unless those projects are well organized behind an incorporated entity.
Not the latest NASA one. The others.
Then don’t spend countless hours on that project. Simple.