> Honest question: isn't this a fundamental contradiction?
I'm glad someone brought this up. When a developer (or artist, or musician, or other creative person) gives away their work for free, that is fine by me. But when they later hold out their hat and say, "by the way, I worked really hard on that and I'm a nice person, would you mind paying for it now?" that's when I feel like I'm being manipulated. If you wanted money for it, you should have just said up front instead of tossing the guilt trip in at the end.
I do appreciate Jeff's enthusiasm for technology and he's done some cool stuff. I would totally hire him for a consulting gig if I were in a position to do so. But he's part of this "give stuff away for free and beg for money later" culture that rubs me the wrong way.
> The question is: can you make money as the developer of OSS?
Contributors to OSS are giving away their time and energy. That seems to be at the core of open source. I'm not going to demand you pay for what I produce - I'm going to give it to you for free with minimal restrictions in the belief that I will also benefit from others doing the same.
It seems to me that asking how to make money by giving away one's work doesn't really make sense. If you value it highly enough to think you should be paid, then why give the work away for free in the first place. No one picks up trash from the side of the road motivated by cleaning up their community then asks how they can get paid for it after the fact. Either you are motivated to give away your time and energy; or you really want a paid job, but one where you feel like you are giving back to society more meaningfully than just helping a company make more money.
> 1) Once someone starts paying you, they get to exert their influence on your work, and it becomes a lot less "hobbyish."
Definitely. I've been working on a free open-source project for 6 months. Last week, a user came with a feature request, and stated that they were willing to pay me. That could sound nice, but I immediately thought "nope". I told them that donations were appreciated, but I wasn't going to do commissioned work.
I don't want that kind of responsibility for my hobby projects.
>if you thought that other people would be interested enough in this software that they might pay for it, why did you put in all the effort up front to develop it yourself? Why didn't you instead make the project open source much earlier, so that you wouldn't have to pay all the costs of developing it yourself?
"If you knew people might pay you money for it, why didn't you make it so they didn't have to, instead of making them pay money for it?" What?
>Why do people want everything for free when other have put a lot of effort on making it?
This is a flawed question. People pay money based on the value delivered to them, not the effort the developer put into a project. This is tough to hear, but nobody cares if you put a lot of effort into something if it doesn't solve their problems better than their current solution. Check your ego at the door of your business if you want to be successful.
> I guess I’m not convinced that if software is offered for free in the first place that it always makes sense to expect money to be offered without asking for it.
I'm explicitly not talking about the "software ... offered for free in the first place". I'm talking about changes to that software at someone else's request.
> I just don’t necessarily agree with the hyperbole that unpaid labor is “wrong”, because that undermines the initial OSS transaction.
I don't think this is true because of the genesis of the open source software itself. I created it for my needs. I would do it even if I didn't plan to give you a copy, but the transaction between us is near zero cost so I go ahead and let you use it too because I'm a cool guy.
> The software was offered for free-as-in-beer in the first place, and that is unpaid labor.
I'm making a claim that doing something to scratch your own itch doesn't qualify as 'unpaid labor' in any useful sense. It would be like saying doing a hobby is unpaid labor.
> It’s perfectly fine to request pay for changes, so isn’t that better and more straightfoward than not asking for money but complaining when none comes?
The current norm is to not request pay or to expect to pay. My argument is that norm should be inverted and maintainers should expect payment to be offered, and requestor should expect to offer to pay. If a specific dev doesn't want to be paid, then fine. It's really about the norm changing, not mandating individual behavior.
> personally I don't see any validity in the "it's free so I am beyond reproach" mentality that open source people seem to have. What makes you think that I would thank someone for something that was free even if I didn't want it? Or that anyone would for that matter. Thanking people regardless of what they did, just because they did it for free, is one way to erase market signals which govern the direction of open source projects.
Damn. Most of the time people follow their reasoning with, "I am paying for this, so do the stuff I want exactly how I want." But, This is the first time I've seen someone using the free-market to excuse being a dick to someone who's giving their work out to the world for free. The amount of entitlement mentality in this person is so unreal, I'm literally almost exploding in rage here, because I can't believe anyone would treat anyone else like that.
To the maintainers: 99.999% of people out there are not like this person, and we appreciate your work very much. Thanks for putting that work out there. Your effort is also unreal, but a kind version of unreal!
> all of my friends made fun of me for paying for a free software
That's a pretty unethical attitude. A developer, who by definition makes her living by creating software, more than anyone else should be able to appreciate that developers have to make a living.
I'm not exactly sure what this widespread attitude is caused by. Perhaps a mixture of a lack of empathy, a feeling of powerlessness and not having significant say in an organisation's direction.
> Is there a rationale for leaving money on the table?
Sometimes I just want to do a project for fun and plop it on Github and see people's reaction. Not everything has to be monetized, and that can sometimes become an ulterior motive: 'If I keep releasing stuff with monetization I will profit' mentality creeps in.
> On the other hand, with open source, we have a different set of social conventions
Agreed. I'd like to see this particular convention change.
> Do you view it as ethical for someone to use open source software without payment?
Sure, assuming the license says it's ok. So I guess technically were talking about FOSS.
> Isn't that also getting something for nothing?
I didn't put this well before, but the problem isn't in getting something for nothing per se. The difference comes from the cost imposed on the other party involved. If I download your code, the cost we both pay rounds off to 0. But if you implement something for me, you pay a hefty cost in time while my cost remains 0. So all the value produced goes to me, and you get very close to nothing.
I see a problem with any situation where you end up worse off and I end up better off. This is the source of much open source project mortality. The core developer(s) give until they give out.
> Is it ethical for someone to ask a question on one of my blog posts without offering to pay me for my answer?
Depends. If they are profiting off of the response and all you get is the work of answering, then no. You will eventually get bitter and stop blogging unless you are some angelic person.
> Have I been spoiled by FOSS? And am I being selfish for wishing these high-quality apps were free?
Yes. Even as a FOSS user, you should try to support the software you use (donations, contributing code, linking to the project on your websites, etc.)
Even though project maintainers may love the coding part of the work, there are always not-fun parts that they have to do as well (responding to hostile users, responding to bug reports, etc.) If you get value from those things, you should contribute back to the person building it.
When it comes to Mac, I think the user base is small enough that you can't rely on 0.01% of your users giving you donations.
> Also, an opinion question: would it be unethical for someone to clone (non-unique) features from paid apps and then release the software for free?
No. In fact, this is how a lot of FOSS begins life.
> Why would anyone want to contribute solutions that others can profit off of for free?
For me:
* I profited off free software that could have been sold as well but was not (25 years BSDs and Linux).
* I rather see my code in use because it means it solves a real problem and it does so in a good way. If I wanted to invest time into turning this software into money, I could. If I don't, why shouldn't somebody else be able to invest his/her time to turn that into money for him/her?
> Honestly, I don't get why super talented people work for free.
In some cases it's a better way of accomplishing what you want than doing it for money. If you want to give people more security, for example, you'll probably get a wider audience and more impact with FOSS software.
Should Tim Berners-Lee have charged for his new idea? You might not be reading this in a web browser if he did.
> It is weird and unfair for a support partner [GitHub] to earn significantly more money than the core persons involved in open source
>> How are the Electron project creators and core contributors not 'the core persons involved in open source'?
>>> I didn't say that and would not have agreed to saying that.
?
> requiring their participation in the culture of gifting
If it's required, it's not really gifting, is it?
> why companies typically don't participate in open source commons
Open source has never been better supported by corporations. Billions (probably tens of billions) of dollars are being poured in to open source. redis was a hobbyist project and now it's backed by over $100M in corporate money.
I just very much dislike this view that open source is in a bad place because it doesn't fit some moral judgement of how money should work in open source. It's like Stallman's campaign for 'freedom' as long as your view of 'freedom' is exactly the same as his.
> It blows my mind though how the moment that someone offers free stuff, the first comments are people asking for more free stuff.
If you create something from the perspective of "I had to make this on my unpaid spare time..", then requests for additional work do seem annoying.
But is that the case here?
If I made a utility I thought other people could also benefit from I'd personally be open to suggestions. I'd ignore a lot of them, but every now and then someone requests something interesting that sparks motivation to expand the utility.
>It would be impractical and completely insane to expect everyone to work for free.
Do you have any examples of him saying that code should be free of cost. As far as I know he has no problem with people charging for programs, only that the source code should be made available to recipients, along with rights to modify and redistribute (the latter obviously poses problems for business-schemes based upon artificial scarcity).
I also seem to recall him arguing for micropayment schemes to be used to finance developers (and artists), this is something which could perhaps become a reality in the (hopefully not too distant) future, as shown by successful kickstarter type projects like for example openshot:
> What happened to building something and selling it?
Since they are already providing it for free to those who need it, and producing at as free software, selling it as a finished product is unlikely.
> If you were truly concerned about online privacy, you'd build it anyway.
Many people do altruistic work during their free time. crowdfunding means you can do the same work, but not be limited by what scraps of time that exist after work.
The extremely few people in the world that would quit their job to do altruistic work is few. They are so few that almost every time it happens, it get posted here as news.
If I made a poll, asking how many people here cared strongly about something in the world, I would get close to 99% hands that said yes. If I then asked how many of those people would agree to quit work to work altruistic on that subject, how many hands would I see?
> The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end.
Why do people choose to work for free on open source projects that are mostly used by businesses? I can completely understand making things that are hard to monetize, user facing applications, or trying to learn something. But when I see free contributions to things like infrastructure management I just don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you just get a job doing this if there’s obviously a business demand for it? If I made something for free that was primarily used by people who made money off of my work it would completely kill my motivation and I would feel taken advantage of.
>You can pay for software even if it is not proprietary
You can, hardly anyone does though. Donate buttons make a pittance. Nearly all the times I've given one I get back an almost embarrassingly grateful response because A. the amount I give is always a small fraction of the value I've gained and B. it's obviously a rare event for the receiver.
I'm glad someone brought this up. When a developer (or artist, or musician, or other creative person) gives away their work for free, that is fine by me. But when they later hold out their hat and say, "by the way, I worked really hard on that and I'm a nice person, would you mind paying for it now?" that's when I feel like I'm being manipulated. If you wanted money for it, you should have just said up front instead of tossing the guilt trip in at the end.
I do appreciate Jeff's enthusiasm for technology and he's done some cool stuff. I would totally hire him for a consulting gig if I were in a position to do so. But he's part of this "give stuff away for free and beg for money later" culture that rubs me the wrong way.
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