Those aren't the only answers. The notion that people only respond to direct incentives is incorrect and ahistorical. It's a convenient dogma for the selfish to promote, but I don't have to take it seriously at all.
Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right here in this discussion, so you could be part of that solution if you wanted.
Good luck with that. I for one am not holding my breath. Meanwhile, perhaps accept the world for what it is and act accordingly? Just make the companies pay for it by licensing the code correctly. It isn’t rocket science.
Oh? Shame nobody's ever tried that. But since you've had a brand new idea that you're sure will solve the problem, how about you take a swing at it? Show us how easy it is.
Where did I say it was a brand new idea? Where did I say it would be easy? Starting a business is hard. I founded and ran my own succesful business so I know how hard it is. I am not sure what your point is?
My point is that you're trivializing the problems and insulting all of the people who have been trying to make it work for decades. I too have started successful businesses. What I learned from that was to respect the people doing the actual work, rather than to run around arrogantly blustering, "It isn't rocket science."
You are attacking a point I am not making. My point is that some OSS maintainers don't understand that they have to think about their work as a business if they want to see any $ thrown their way. That's the part that isn't rocket science. I agree with you that actually doing it is hard. My message is to stop whining that companies/people don't give them $ out of the kindness of their hearts and instead accept it and either treat their work as a business or accept that they will get very little gratitude or $ in return. The idea that OSS maintainers are special snowflakes that can work on whatever they feel like and the world automatically owns them something in return is childish.
This notion that one has to think about it as a business is just false. That is one way to do it, but open source funding happens other ways too. Your attitude that anybody must be an idiot if they want to solve in a way incongruent with your hypercapitalist fantasies is both rude and ignorant. If anybody's being childish here, it's the person treating them as "whining".
How has the strategy of "companies should just be nicer" worked for things like minimum wage, health insurance, workers rights, ect... It's getting to the point of insanity (in my opinion) that people keep thinking this is going to magically appear if they ask for it. It arguably flies in the faces of thousands of years (or millions if you count pre-humans) of evolution.
At the least people suggesting this should acknowledge that this kind of society has possibly never existing in this entire universe on the scale they want it to exist (larger then dunbar(ish) number tribes). The onus is on them to build a path towards this new kind of society instead of just throwing the ideal out into the ether and expecting it to just magically appear.
I'm not suggesting it's magic. Indeed, what I specifically said was that we should work to build strong cultural expectations. Which are very much necessary in all the cases you name.
That's not because they just had some good feelings. It's because people expect them to be at least slightly non-awful. We can accomplish something similar here. If programmers start insisting that companies take open-source funding seriously, it will happen. Not quickly and not easily. But if people start taking action (e.g., turning down jobs when companies are parasites on the open-source ecosystem), things will change.
Yes and no. A lot of that spending is done with a monetary incentive in mind. Companies aren’t completely devoid of understanding that there is a certain breaking point where being shitty can have financial consequences. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, not predominantly anyways. They can use charitable contributions to project a public persona (earned or not) of being good, for the purposes of increasing/maintaining business. They can do it as a smokescreen/cover for other scandals for the same reason.
Is that a good thing? Yes.
Is it enough? Not even close.
The culture needs to change sure, but the change of culture that needs to happen seems effectively impossible unless companies are dragged into it kicking and screaming through organized labor efforts or government oversight/regulation. Those are both of course highly polarized political issues and that aspect of culture sure isn’t getting better either.
I think the quicker, sadder, and easier change is that a lot of Open Source projects just aren’t going to get started like they used to, and are going to have increasingly restricted licenses with stratified feature sets. We’re definitely seeing more of the “Taking my ball and going home” approach by small developers with tiny open source packages these days and it’s sad but also hard to blame them for. Even worse there are an increasing number of groups who attempt to buy projects for sometimes stupid money for the explicit purpose of using them as a Trojan horse to ship malware. They’re preying on the same people who have become incredibly cynical about the whole thing and that’s dangerous for everybody.
What do you think underlies most of the changes via "organized labor action or government oversight/regulation"? People understanding that things should be different, which is a cultural change.
The history of the minimum wage isn't that some bureaucrat mandated it and then everybody said, "Gosh, that's a good idea, let's keep it." There was a long period of advocacy for it, a period of persuading people that it was the right thing to do. That was the ground in which all the work for the change grew.
Today, software developers are the key labor force for this change, and we aren't organized. So in practice, the first work we have to do is to persuade the bulk of programmers that it's part of their professional duty to make sure their employers support the open-source projects that their businesses depend on.
Companies will do it if we insist. In the grand scheme of things, it isn't even much money, not compared to what they're paying programmers in salary, benefits, and cushy amenities.
> tech people [need] to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy
Agreed on this, but the "and companies" thing is a total red herring. Two things to note: even though you mention "people and companies", it's incredibly clear from popular sentiment that the conception held by most people of the problem/solution comes down to the latter (companies) and not the former (people). Focusing on companies at all—let alone allowing it to occupy a majority share of one's focus—is a huge mistake. Depersonalized abstract entities like companies are almost entirely immune to whatever methods of persuasion people have in mind here. Gay rights only just became kosher to "take a stand" on, and even then it's invariably limited to being trotted out as a vehicle for the most empty and self-serving marketing horseshit and other corporate speak that anyone should expect to come out of these institutions. Cultural pressure for open source doesn't stand a chance; it has to come down to people.
I've brought up the subject before: why do we rake companies over the coals for their inaction, but ignore the individuals? It's worth reflecting on the relationship between a company and its employees.
A company, no matter how many layers of management are involved, delegates some problem to an employee. That employee surveys the lay of the land and then elects to use some tech that is available from the commons towards solving the problem. In turn, they are rewarded by their employer in both tangibles and intangibles that are considered proportionate to the achievement and budgeted accordingly. Thus, that person is, in a very real way, converting the labor of others into personal gain—in the form of wealth, career prospects, and personal stature.
Why is it easy to frame a company as the perpetrator and hard to say anything about, say, a given developer who was involved in this? Because it's uncomfortable, since it's too personal? That might make sense if we were talking about, say, a custodian with limited career prospects just doing their best to keep their head above water and provide for their family already, but that tends not to be the case where software development is involved. The implication here is clear. (For now, go ahead and forget the prior argument I just made about effectiveness for a moment and just focus on fairness.) If there's any appropriate allocation of social pressure to be meted out—resulting in social expectations to be met—then it needs to come in the form of beliefs like, "hey, if as part of your employment you are singlehandedly making something like twice the US national average of an entire household, and you're not giving away at _least_ 10% of your salary to the people who made that possible, then you're kind of a piece of shit."
It's acceptable to disagree with this, but to understand why you feel it's justified to defend the individuals involved means that you have everything you need to understand why there is no movement on the problem. Perennially and impotently opining that companies need to quit screwing around and do something about this already is a ridiculous strategy.
Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right here in this discussion, so you could be part of that solution if you wanted.
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