Hacker News Reader

Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, open source software should come with a price. I think the "starving artist" approach is detrimental long-term.

Sure, there is great value in having a free (in both senses) operating system, but at the same time the year of Linux desktop is a running joke.

To be blunt, money motivates people to do the work they otherwise would not do. It's soul crushing to run the 400th manual test. It's not sexy to work on a lot of the bugs that affect real users, so, when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.

Maybe if we all sent $1 to open source projects we use, there'd be enough funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?

View on HN

While I love the idea of a better deal for free and open source software developers, I don't think a sales/transactional model will actually solve the problem at scale.

For one thing, it will eat away at the reasons you like open solutions in the first place. If it became normal/expected to pay for open source software, businesses would control a lot more open source software.

> when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.

But when there is money in it, the work tends to focus on quarterly revenue.

> funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?

Surely the money you gave to Lenovo would cover that? Like there must be $1 in each laptop they sell that could have gone towards even documenting the hardware so some nice developer can implement a working driver/whatever. Really, it's not the Ubuntu or Linux people that need to be paid to solve that problem, Lenovo is free to submit a patch whenever the hell they want to, they just don't want to.

> businesses would control a lot more open source software

Only because individuals would presumably open LLCs

> But when there is money in it, the work tends to focus on quarterly revenue.

I don't think the choice is between "John works on this project 11pm - 1am on the days he feels like it" and "John wants to IPO his company". I'm advocating for "John works on this project 3 days of the week because people pay him a small fee for using his project".

> Surely the money you gave to Lenovo would cover that?

The money I gave to Lenovo went to Microsoft for an OEM license to the pre-installed Windows OS. When I download Ubuntu and install that on my laptop, Lenovo couldn't be bothered to see if closing the lid suspends the laptop or not.

Should Lenovo write drivers for my custom kernel as well? As a business, why should Lenovo bother to implement resume capabilities for an OS that is a rounding error for their consumer line of laptops?

Canonical and Lenovo both make lots of money already. Sucks that Lenovo doesn't think supporting Linux on your laptop is important.

> Sucks that Lenovo doesn't think supporting Linux on your laptop is important.

This is the downside of not owning both software and hardware. The integration is lacking. I already gave money to Lenovo when I bought my laptop, and clearly they're not going to support Ubuntu. Maybe if I gave money to Ubuntu, they would support this hardware. It's worth a try, because leaving it at "sucks" is not acceptable.

Yeah life isn't great over here in Ubuntu on Asus Land. It's ok, but my laptop is dead when i pick it up way more than it should be.

Linux and laptops have always been a develops combo ime. Honestly at many issues as i have with my Asus, it's the best Linux laptop experience I've had yet

I was under impression that Lenovo laptops actually work pretty good with Linux.

Personally, I give to projects I use (and ones that need most help), and I'm happy that say my younger self or people with no conditions can still use it without paying. I think there should probably be better coordinated efforts in this direction, from say companies to governments. But meanwhile individual donations are already pretty powerful if even a small % of people that can donate do.

In particular, governments traditionally already allocate resources for the common benefit (their main function really), in public research and public science, public infrastructure, etc.. I think this is just another very significant extension of that.

Also companies benefit greatly from OS/(and OSHW in the future?), and frequently maintain private tools at significant costs. Open source can be seen as a coordination mechanism where everybody can (or rather, should) cooperate to lower costs and benefit everyone (basically, their whole industry or rather society gets more efficient) :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com