Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

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IMO no, it isn't. FOSS project need participation, so not money but resources. FOSS idea is that software is knowledge, something that must be public and grow through interaction (sharing). So if I have a need or a desire and I start implementing it others may or may not join because they share the same or similar need or desire. That's the FOSS way.

I start a new project, for instance to autoclassify documents. Ok users of my code will contributed in code, hosting, documentation simply because they share my similar need/desire. If there is interest there is no need for money, software is not a product nor a thing we can live on. It's shared knowledge. There are no "producer" nor "consumers", only participants.

If we have a single-man-show that say "hey, found me so I can keep the project up" it means that:

- we completely lost FOSS model, transformed to a sort of neopatronage, the erotic dream of proprietary vendors that dream a world of products to be sold and bought;

- the project is already dead not because of lack of founds but because of lack of participants, knowledge, interest.

I support the FOSS idea that software is knowledge and should be public, but I think that a substantial amount of FOSS development has always been done professionally, on a paid basis. Ad-hoc bazaar-style contributions where someone happened to notice a way to improve something is probably the exception rather than the rule.

One reason for that is that many codebases are large and complex, and so even expert programmers won't automatically understand how to improve them substantially without a considerable amount of study. It's likely that many people will need to be paid for that investment, not because they ideologically believe that software should be property, but because it takes up a huge amount of their time and effort that they won't be able to apply elsewhere.

And indeed, when people have empirically looked into some of the larger FOSS projects they've found that a majority of the contributions were made by people who were being paid to make them—again, not because of any ideological aspect, but because being paid for it allowed them to invest a huge amount of time and focus and helped them to be more sophisticated and productive contributors.

(Edit: Just to be clear, I don't think that trying to convince people to use, develop, or procure FOSS instead of proprietary software is bad, or that, if successful, it won't also lead to more resources being applied to FOSS development. However, a lot of those resources will probably be mediated by money.)

Of course there are FOSS paid developers, for instance Intel pay few devs to work on Linux in order to have the hw they sell work properly. That's good. That's not someone that live on FOSS, that's a company that participate to a FOSS project because it need or desire it.

On contrary there are other companies that pretend to sell "open" product that are open like a bunker (to name a few try looking for business software from ERP to CRM to DMS etc) and those are not contributed to FOSS. Even if they both pay someone to develop FOSS code and publish it.

I hope to have being able to clarify that point in my limited English...

On complex codebase: FreeBSD codebase is not exactly simple and little, but it live on it own foot since decades, for instance? Emacs, Debian, ... the same. I do not intent that a project must run on casual contribution but simply that contributors must be subjects that need/desire such code so they contribute to it for their own sake like the Intel example above.

And there are other projects (such as Django Rest Framework or even Django itself) where many people and companies derive significant value but either don’t have the time, knowledge, or resources to contribute directly. These projects advance by having people dedicated to maintainence. Often the only way to provide dedicated resources is through donations.

If these donations dried up then the projects would suffer. That’s not an outcome anybody really wants.

You seem to acknowledge that companies paying staff to contribute to OSS is ok. Why then is it not ok for companies to provide funding for a specialist to do the same thing?

Because it's not "founding" but alms. With some intermediary subjects that gain and reign as they want. Not much different than Ottoman's empire "islamic alms" that was in fact a form of imposition on citizen for the sake of few in the upper pyramid.

If project like Django need maintenance the answer is: universities. Universities train students and can easily maintain projects providing not only people but also resources.

FOSS is knowledge, so a thing that need to be entirely public and entirely relay on public. It is ok if a company need a certain software and so develop it, it is not ok to be "founded" like Patreon, LibrePay, PayPal donation etc. We need freedom and participation not charity.

But charity does not preclude freedom. Unless you're suggesting that if charity was absent we'd be seeing more participation?

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