Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

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I am reminded of the saying in the military: Freedom isn't free. (I think Heinlein said it was paid for with the blood of patriots.) The article says his time is worth something, and that is a big part of his point: To get all this "free" stuff, you have to have some intelligent, capable person giving away skills and knowledge they could be making money for.

I spent a lot of time giving away information. The information was valued but I wasn't making a cent. (In fact, I was paying for the privilege because of web hosting costs and domain names.) I've seen a number of websites that started with giving stuff away and when they became popular enough they turned into commercial ventures and you could no longer get free stuff from them. The websites basically became advertisements for the skills and products they were offering. I also know some very idealistic webmasters who basically are resentful of the time and energy they have spent on their projects and the fact that they aren't making much money, aren't getting the kind of recognition they crave, etc. At some point I decided I did not want that to be me -- and could no longer afford to follow in the footsteps of people like that.

I still want to give information away for free but these days I also want to figure out how to make money at it. Since I am mainly looking to give information away, I think some of the traditional ways of monetizing that should work, such as advertising. I haven't (yet) spent any time pondering how one would make money from open source software. But it seems to me this is an issue that needs a good solution. As I see it, code is basically information and that's always been a tricky thing to effectively commodify.

But you are manufacturing a problem. If you don't think free software works for you, don't write it. Not everyone's a capitalist fanatic and feel like they must be "paid" for (in money) for everything they do. Like you say, plenty of people do volunteer work without any expectation of return apart from feeling like they've helped someone. How can you argue that this "needs a good solution"?

A coherent capitalist fanatic wouln't like intellectual property at all!

I did volunteer work for about 25 years. I've spent a lot of time in that realm and thought a lot about it. I don't mean to imply that what is currently being done must stop. But I agree with the author that his time has value, so if other people expect him to keep giving it away for free, it's basically a parasitic expectation. If he wants to give it away for free, that's his choice. But if he isn't independently wealthy, time put into a FOSS project competes for time he could spend making money or with family and friends, etc. Good projects generally require substantial time and effort. It is common for volunteer situations to result in shoddy work, people you can't count on because they feel no real obligation since they aren't being paid, and similar problems.

I was diagnosed late in life with a serious medical condition. Prior to my diagnosis, I was too ill to pursue a paid career. Many of the idealistic, talented and intelligent people I have known who routinely give away their work for free are also handicapped in some way. (Actually, I can't think of anyone who gives away substantial amounts of their time and skill on a regular basis who isn't seriously handicapped in some manner.) If you are handicapped, doing volunteer work has the easy terms that work for you. Moderating a forum, running a website part-time, and so on are things you can do when you feel up to it and no one can force you to be more consistent. And the quality of the work is generally consistent with the fact that you are unreliable, impaired, etc.

So while I still value some of the free resources made available by other people like me, now that I am well enough to work a full time job, I am somewhat less of a bleeding heart. I still think some things need to be "free" -- in terms of rights and also in terms of financial access -- but I think many of these resources would be of better quality than is currently available if the people running them were compensated in some manner. Non-profits don't operate without budgets. They still need money. That money is typically raised from the community based on the idea that the organization is offering something of value. They aren't "beggars". They are just doing work that has human value more than commercial value and therefore needs to be monetized without directly selling services.

Compared to your situation I feel less sympathy for Mr. Tarver since much of his work took place in a university environment and while he claims to have spent 20 years developing the ideas behind Qi, he obviously didn't profit from those efforts in the way that he may have wanted.

But I doubt he would have been as critical of government support for projects had his own efforts been more successful since presumably the university partially supported his research (or at least didn't take the kind of hostile attitude he would have encountered at many corporations).

I think this particular situation shows that there is a difference between having expertise and having an ability to capitalize that expertise. Perhaps had he spent a little more time networking to find people who would be willing to support his ideas, things would have worked out better for him.

I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta (a college level math honor society) in 11th grade, the earliest you can be inducted. We did volunteer work tutoring math once or twice a week. I've spent a lot of time in online communities for folks with really smart kids -- the parents are typically also smart and it is an environment where many people come to terms with their own social and emotional problems through trying to do right by their kids. So I've thought a lot about this as well: Smart people are given a lot of messages to the effect that they have a moral obligation to give away what they know for the benefit of all humankind and if, instead, they use it to make big bucks, then they are evil incarnate. This mindset can be extremely hard to escape (at least for some people).

Universities are rife with such "idealism", a form of idealism that I increasingly think is misplaced. To try to put it in a nutshell: One requirement for sainthood is that you be persecuted. We seem to think that good people must suffer horribly as a means to prove their goodness. I'm increasingly disenchanted with the idea that one has to martyr oneself to be a good person, whether that means dying for the cause or just not getting paid adequately for your work. I think all that teaches people is that there are only two kinds of people: victims and victimizers and in order to be good you must be a victim because the other choice is intolerable. I have concluded that trying to be "good" by being a willing victim forces others into the role of victimizer even if they don't want to be there. So I believe that if one wants to genuinely do good in the world, one must pursue a paradigm of symbiotic exchange rather than letting people parasitically use you up and playing the role of martyr/victim.

Symbiotic exchange sounds rather like Capitalism. I don't think that means every thing one does has to be in pursuit of the almighty dollar. I haven't been here long, but I'm impressed with the quality of HN so far. I am struck by the fact that it was initially created as a means for people at Y-Combinator to get to know potential applicants -- ie although it's offered as a "free" service, it ultimately is part of their business strategy. It looks to me like this is why HN is a better run forum than many I have participated in which were all-volunteer. HN can't afford to cater to personal peccadilloes and personality quirks of a volunteer staff. It has to meet a certain professional standard. And to the degree that at least some of the members want to apply to Y-Combinator, the participants have motivation as well to remain professional and polite. It is not a good place to indulge in habits that promote flame-wars and the like because the purpose is not merely social. Not everyone here will have such a goal, but it still impacts group culture. An influential minority can go a long way towards shaping community behavior. For some members, there is potentially millions of dollars at stake (if they can get VC from Y-Combinator and launch a highly successful business). It's strong motivation to behave better than what you see in many online forums where everything is idealistically given away "free" and flame-wars and other problems are the rule, not the exception.

> could no longer afford to follow in the footsteps of people like that

The late Erik Naggum had something to say about this:

"I no longer share code with other people by default. My experience and problem-solving abilities have become the bread and butter of my life, not just "fun" until something rewarding comes along. Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless. When people refuse to help pay for the roof over your head and your meals when you help them do their well-paying jobs, sooner or later you get seriously pissed."

(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e239591cbc...)

Thanks. I will read it some time when I am not so tired. :-)

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