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.
Comments
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.