The Inevitability of Mixing Open Source and Money

> The reality is that we humans are messy and unpredictable. We don't quite know how we will behave until we have been throw into a particular situation. Open Source walks a very fine line, and anyone claiming to have all the answers probably doesn't. I certainly don't.

> Is it a wise to mix Open Source and money? Maybe not. Yet I also believe it's something that is just a reality we need to navigate.

Part of the answer, IMO, is that F/OSS surfs the delta between the individual and the group. Projects are an individual or small team effort that, per some hand-wavy statistical distribution, have some potential for traction.

The group needs stability and predictability. Hence all the pesky laws and economics that individuals generally disdain.

> https://opensourcepledge.com/ > Can individuals join? > While we've had companies-of-one join, we don't yet have a route to individual membership. We're discussing whether to add this in issue #21. Feel free to join the conversation.

I have been an FSF member for years now, because if one wants output, it helps to provide input.

> the solution we are focusing on is providing direct payments to maintainers

Cutting out the middle-man is excellent. One could pine for more stability and predictability, but that implies some governance.

THOUGHT: Maybe, as the greyhair population increases, trusted Devs who are inclined can move toward a governance council, and offer oversight of a resource pool (implying a non-Dev staff for the beancounting chores). This is one of those Herb Sutter ideas where the "difference between theory and practice may be greater in practice than in theory". But the basic idea is to leverage the wisdom of those who've Been There but don't intend to mash keys until the destructor call.

My personal opinion is that money and open source should mix more. In the sense that more open source development should be done by salaried engineers, and especially engineers whose salary is paid by the users of the software. Instead of donating money, companies should donate engineer hours. Shift the ownership from cathedralic upstreams to the user bazaars. The whole idea that projects would have semi-independent funding for development feels to me somewhat wrong.

I'll admit this is idealistic view and not very actionable.

Open Source licenses are probably too easy to adopt thoughtlessly, without the creator deeply thinking about what goals they want long-term, what achieving those goals is worth to them in actual dollars. The creator should at minimum know that they’re donating x hours a week of work valued at y dollars, and be able to look in the mirror and say “I’m fine with that”, rather than put in years of work only to find out they feel taken advantage of.

Earlier in the 1990s, it was kind of an open secret that Open Source was largely a movement by and for academics. Most the headline open source projects were launched and maintained by people who could rely on an academic or research institution's patronage to put food on their table. RMS's own ideas arguably grew out of his frustration at restrictions on academic freedom - in the form of restrictions on access to computing resources - on DARPA-funded projects that he saw while working at MIT, and concerns about the lab becoming dependent on - and therefore partially controlled by - commercial software vendors.

Somewhat later we'd have large corporations like IBM contributing to FOSS projects, almost as a form of patronage. Linux wasn't their core product; Linux was just a way to help them sell their core products. Products like Amazon Coretto arguably fall under a similar model. It's not actually all that far from how academic projects get funded.

Where it gets tricky is when you've got companies whose core or only product is an open source application, and when you've got individuals who are sinking a lot of free time into being maintainers instead of being able to do it on the clock.

I take this as an indication that Open Source has always been shaped by money. The movement's core ideals and structure are inextricably linked to a certain way that people make money. And therefore not necessarily so well-adapted to the needs of people whose relationship to capitalism works differently.

Isn't this the whole purpose of "open source"?

That's what makes it different from free software...

This seems like those bums who run out and smear up your windshield at stop lights who then want to be paid.

If you want to get paid for software development, start a business and sell to customers, or get a job. The number of "developer in residence" positions is approximately zero. If you want to get paid for scratching whatever itch you have, good luck.