Paying people to work on open source is good

I'll respond to the little part where it puts using a "non-OSI approved license" under the umbrella of open source. It's not OSI approved because it isn't open source, as the community defined it long ago, and as it still makes sense for it to be defined. If you want me to agree with you, don't do that.

Otherwise, I don't feel compelled to consider a bunch of disparate things as a Win. Here's one that could be more of a trap than a win, depending on the particulars of the job: "Employed by Microsoft to work on Python?" Look no further than https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

He anticipated your comment and already replied. You're free to disagree with him, but he clearly thought that part through already and already knows he disagrees with you and with the OSI. This entire post is his justification for his disagreement, while all you have is an appeal to the OSI definition that he's specifically rejecting.

“open source” / “free software”

Note the deliberate use of lower case. I’m not referring to Open Source™ as defined by OSI, nor to Free Software™ as defined by the FSF. I mean these terms in the broadest, most inclusive sense: “software with source code that I can read and modify and release variants of, perhaps under some conditions.” So I’m including OSI and FSF licenses, but also the Polyform licenses and the JSON license and, yes BSL in my version of “open source”.

This is perhaps a side point, but the “minimalist” definition of Open Source meaning “only OSI-approved licenses” – or, worse, “the GPL is the only ’true’ Free Software license” – is part of the problem here. I want to see more experimentation and variety in licensing options, and if that means introducing some additional restrictions beyond “anyone can use this for any purpose” I’m pretty okay with that. In my book, a broad spectrum of licenses from Blue Oak to BSL (and even more restrictive) “count” as open source.

... I’ll put it this way: if my sloppy use of these terms bothers you in the context of talking about how people make their living, it implies that you care more about terminology and definitions than about the people, and I’d like you to sit in that discomfort for a while.

I used lower case deliberately as well.

It's a term that excludes source available not just because of OSI but because of the original community. And members of the current community can argue for a new, weaker, openwashed meaning of it, but people can always look back to the early days and see the true meaning of it.

What "original community" are you referring to here? Are we talking about the free software movement that Richard Stallman founded, or the Open Source Initiative that forked off of the movement in an effort to be more friendly to businesses?

It's a bit ironic that people now wax lyrical about the "true meaning" of Open Source when the OSI described their origin like this (emphasis added):

The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

What "original community" are you referring to here?

It's a big community with a wide range of perspectives, but not so big that it can't be understood. To me the original community was mostly over a decade or two. This is similar to other communities such as a burgeoning genre of music. Whatever it was, it was established long before the words "Business Source License" were uttered. The first date range that comes to mind is 1993 to 2003 if it's one decade, or 1990 to 2010 if it's two decades. With the smaller range, you have the development of Linux, and the way Linux took over servers. With the larger range, there is Firefox taking on IE, as well as WordPress, Django, and Ruby on Rails becoming popular.

Even people who tried to fight it understand it. That is why before the deliberately misleading strategy being used now, some who wanted to promote code that could be read but couldn't freely be used settled for calling source available.

Again, though—you're fighting for the moral integrity of a term that was explicitly coined to try to buck the moralizing that was associated with the Free Software movement and make the new concept of Open Source more appealing to corporations.

The BSL isn't the first sign of the bastardization of the ideal behind Linux. The bastardization started as soon as the OSI decided that they needed to appeal to corporations, and in condemning the BSL the OSI is just following the same business-friendly playbook they've held to all along.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that the OSI provided a watered-down version of free software that got us to where we are today. I just disapprove of the moralizing that surrounds them when they were explicitly founded on pragmatism.

condemning the BSL

Are they "condemning" the BSL by saying "it is bad, don't use it", or are they just saying "BSL is not open source"?

Because my understanding is that BSL is not open source. Rather it is a commitment of becoming open source (GPLv2) at a point later (maximum 4 years). So BSL is effectively source available until GPLv2 is added. Which does not make BSL open source: GPLv2 is.

Are they "condemning" the BSL by saying "it is bad, don't use it", or are they just saying "BSL is not open source"?

Fair enough, others condemn it on the grounds that the OSI says its not open source.

Because my understanding is that BSL is not open source. Rather it is a commitment of becoming open source (GPLv2) at a point later (maximum 4 years). So BSL is effectively source available until GPLv2 is added. Which does not make BSL open source: GPLv2 is.

See TFA and my comments above. A substantial number of people believe that we need to reevaluate what counts as "open source" in the post-cloud era, which I see as a completely reasonable discussion to have given that the term "open source" was specifically coined to be a pragmatic and business-focused alternative to "free software".

IMO it's all a moot point. If people condemn the BSL because it's not truly open source as per the current definition of open source, changing the definition will not change their opinion. So yeah, changing the definition can trick a few people into believing that BSL is open source, and then maybe we will invent a new word to define what we currently call "open source". But that sounds ridiculous. Just invent a word for "open source + BSL" if it really matters to you...

It's not a philosophical question at this point, it's really just a definition.

I think this is a pretty good microcosm of the whole debate in this one sentence where you say:

It's not OSI approved because it isn't open source, ...

... as the community defined it long ago, ...

Yep, definitely! Nobody disagrees that the OSI defined this long ago.

... and as it still makes sense for it to be defined.

Maybe! But that's where the debate is. Is that the most sensible definition? Perhaps, even probably, yes. But it's also a totally valid question to interrogate. And that's what people are doing.

The debate would be for a new meaning of the term open source, which has already been established. People can create a new meaning but it doesn't change the original meaning of it, which I like to call the true meaning.

The license is far from being the only thing about open source. What makes open source what it is are its triumphs, such as the popularity of Linux and how many developers prefer open source tools and platforms. However, using a license like the Business Source License indicates a lack of belief in the vision of open source, and a need to exert control.

What makes open source what it is are its triumphs

If you define triumphs to include only 'popularity' and developer preferences, then sure, its triumphant.

using a license like the Business Source License indicates a lack of belief in the vision of open source

The issue is that the vision of open source itself is lacking, because it doesn't recognize that it fails to provide a pathway to being compensated and rewarded, tangibly, for building, contributing, and maintaining open source software and the infrastructure that supports it.

Popularity is absolutely part of the triumphs I had in mind. It is often a very good thing in open source. It meant Internet Explorer 6 being less popular, as well as Windows on servers.

As far as the pathway to being compensated and rewarded - I want the community to be compensated and rewarded, not just those that started the project. We've seen this play out with ElasticSearch and OpenSearch, as well as Hashicorp. Even Sentry has an alternative https://glitchtip.com/

The debate would be for a new meaning of the term open source, which has already been established.

Yes, that's what I'm saying, that people are interrogating whether that (inarguably) already established (arguably) "true meaning" is a good one.

I'm certainly sympathetic to the frustration people feel at new debates popping up over definitions that they feel are already perfectly good. But it's not up to you or anyone else individually; the way people use language broadly evolves all the time. It's useful to advocate for why the existing definition you prefer is the right one, but less useful to primarily focus on "we already have a definition of this, that's the only thing it could ever possibly mean!".

popularity of Linux

You surely meant to say it's a triumph of Free Software? /s

By picking his own definition of what open source means, is the author really arguing for paying people to work on open source? Or is his argument more one of being in favor allowing a bunch of things that happen to pay people to work on them be counted as "open source"?

For example, if RHEL still counts as open source, then Red Hat's programmers are paid open source developers, but if RHEL is now proprietary, then there are fewer people being paid to work on open source.

Even with the changes to RHEL licensing, Red Hat developers are still encouraged to upstream changes before landing them in Fedora (and in turn, before landing them in CentOS stream and ultimately RHEL). Nearly every developer at Red Hat working on RHEL will do work in the public, on OSI-licensed packages upstream, before landing changes in RHEL.

The change to RHEL licenses is not around source availability of the packages themselves, that has not and cannot change by Red Hat's hand. And it is a risk to Red Hat's business to heavily (internally) diverge packages from upstream as it makes future updates harder.

Is it a good move? Many think not. But that doesn't change the vast amount of upstream (OSI-licensed) work that Red Hat directly or indirectly sponsors, past RHEL into their JBoss and OpenShift orgs as well.

There were no changes to RHEL licensing whatsoever.

I agree.

I think what OP is talking about is change in the (for rebuilders) source distribution availability, e.g., https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s... -- but as a later blog post points out (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-sour...), the source is still available in a different location, though perhaps at a slightly different point in the release cycle: forward looking to RHEL next.

My response is in that context, that even if one were to consider the removal of those source locations somehow a "license change" (and I agree with you, it is not), nearly everyone working on RHEL would still be an OSI developer, for reasons pointed out by Mike.

Which is a very good thing, and as a former Red Hatter, thank you for helping to keep that possible Richard!

This is mostly irrelevant to my question. I wasn't speculating about RHEL specifically, but about source available under non-OSI, non-FSF licenses generally.

If what counts as "open source" can be anything the author says counts, there are potentially lots of projects not previously considered open source, and the developers paid to work on them as "paid open source" developers.

I don't see how it is irrelevant: you ask if they still count, and the answer is yes, because they contribute rather heavily to OSI-approved code, so they'd count regardless.

The real question is, would we consider MongoDB or my former employer, HashiCorp's products, presently open source projects?

In the latter's case, the answer from the community at large has been to fork (edit: not always successfully), giving a fairly good indication as to the answer...

(Whether this is as a result of the act of relicensing the code base or as a result of the license choice probably cannot be fully understood without parallel universes... I'm sure someone would complain and potentially fork if they had relicensed, e.g., from MPLv2 to AGPLv3--another OSI license, but a more restrictive one--though probably nobody would care enough to fork if they had suggested e.g., MIT instead, because the MIT is more permissive.)

However, developer categorization into OSI/non-OSI buckets is rather meaningless.

What we've by and large found is that Linux businesses (regardless of license model, even fully proprietary) can usually find funding, due to the large number of companies willing to pay for support & contract development on it. Many more businesses have been successful here: vendors like RH, Canonical, SUSE, Oracle, and even Microsoft and AWS, but also many smaller vendors & independent developers who make smaller livings and profits.

What's been harder has been the non-Linux Open Source/Free Software business model.

And that's what needs to be solved, one way or another. Perhaps that's committing up front to a license (if you want to use the BUSL, so be it, but don't expect the community to be happy if you do so after your project becomes successful).

But more likely, its by raising awareness and making sure people at the top of the organization (board members, shareholders) understand the value of OSI licenses and how their companies can benefit from it. And on the flip side, how changing the terms of contracts afterwards can cause problems. :-)

I'll respond to the little part where it puts using a "non-OSI approved license" under the umbrella of open source. It's not OSI approved because it isn't open source, as the community defined it long ago, and as it still makes sense for it to be defined

So what would you call a license that meets OSI's open source definition [1] but has not been OSI-approved?

OSI no longer approves new licenses unless they think the new license fills a gap that is not filled by existing OSI-approved licenses, which means there are millions of possible new licenses that meet every criteria of their open source definition but will become OSI-approved.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd/

So what would you call a license that meets OSI's open source definition [1] but has not been OSI-approved?

arrogant, as in: do you really believe that your project is so different that one of the existing approved licenses will not do? (addressed to the hypothetical project with such a license)

i mean, i am with bruce perens who believes that we need to rethink licenses completely to address many problems that have come up recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783500 and i guess this article does hints at some of the problems that need to be addressed. but coming up with a license that is in the spirit of FOSS and yet solves some of these problems is a non-trivial task that i do not believe an average developer or company is capable of by themselves, therefore it is very unlikely that your non-approved license is really worth it.

by all means please participate in the process of developing a new license, but do not actually use such a non-approved license until there is a broader consensus that this new license actually is worth it. otherwise it's just making things complicated for no good reason.

do you really believe that your project is so different that one of the existing approved licenses will not do? (addressed to the hypothetical project with such a license)

Actually, I think it would be pretty easy to have a project for which none of the existing OSI approved licenses will do without even being all that different, ever since OSI approved AGPLv3.

AGPLv3 contains a distribution requirement that triggers for your program if you have users who are "interacting with it remotely through a computer network".

Now all it takes is wanting a license similar to that, but with the trigger being different. Maybe a project agrees with AGPLv3 that if you run their program on your server you should have to give the users source, but wants that to also apply to users who are interacting with it locally on a computer network, or are interacting via some method other than a "computer network" such as serial terminals.

I love the AGPL, but even that has some holes. One classic case is a "backend service", which the user doesn't ever directly interact with, but is used by the application backend to provide the user service. Like if I modify an AGPL geocoding microservice, which is used by my backend to plan a trip to show the user, do I need to release the source? What if it's not displayed to the user at all and is just a small part of another calculation that is (like predicting bus arrival times)? What about an AGPL database or cache server? And if backend services don't count, are the users not interacting only with the reverse proxy and everything else is a backend service?

yes, it is easy to come up with a change that seems to make sense. but it is not at all easy to vet that change legally. and no: "we have talked to our lawyers about this" is not enough. your lawyers operate in your interest. they are not operating in the interest of the Free Software or Open Source definitions. the bar for a license that would be acceptable to OSI is much much higher. and my claim that it is not easy to come up with a new license is based on that.

A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea.

I will never compromise on the definition of open source. I'm not particularly hard-nosed about proprietary software, or source available software either, they're fine, with some caveats I'll leave out.

But it's important to have a term for software which is unencumbered by use restrictions, and we do: open source. Lumping other licenses in with it should be resisted. It's like (I've never seen this, to be clear) pescatarians rebranding as "seafood vegans". What is supposed to be gained there, or by trying to bolt on various source-available licenses to the definition of open source?

So this guy picks an important topic, and right up front, he's telling me he knows that it's going to piss me off, but he's going to call not-open-source software open source anyway, and if I object, I don't care about developers getting paid.

Y'know what? You succeeded. Fuck you, tab closed.

You’re talking about someone who’s been working in open source for decades, on pretty successful projects. He knew with absolute certainty that mentioning licensing will lead to pedantic rancor, and that’s unavoidable: there is literally no way to raise this topic in a way someone will not passionately disagree with, and that’s going to distract from the more important topic he wanted to discuss.

For example:

But it's important to have a term for software which is unencumbered by use restrictions, and we do: open source.

This phrasing means the GPL and MIT licenses are not open source. I doubt that’s what you meant, but simply raising the topic means that we’ll be debating exactly which use restrictions can dance on the head of a pin rather than the real substance of this essay: we all use open source software, we should be talking about how to make it pay a decent living!

I think you misunderstood “use restrictions.” I interpret it as “anyone can use the software built with this source code themselves.” The GPL and MIT license don’t have any use restrictions. (In the case of the GPL, there are restrictions on distribution, but that’s different.)

My freedom to use a GPL-licensed library does not include the ability to link it into a proprietary application:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic

Now, I suspect that what you had in mind was the kind of restrictions like “you can’t use this if you work for the military”, but that’s exactly the point he was trying to make: there are a lot of opinions and interpretations swirling around, and his intention was to talk about something else rather than diving into the license debate which has been running since the Reagan era.

You can do that, actually, for your own use. You can’t distribute the result. (Freedom 0 in the FSF four freedoms.)

Yes, there are always new people who get this wrong and the only thing for it is education.

Telling people that they don’t have to learn anything about how the software licenses they use work, that it’s just a matter of opinion, is not helping.

I don’t think anyone is saying that you shouldn’t learn about the licenses you use, only that he’s taking a big-tent view of open source focused on getting more people paid to contribute to the commons so we don’t have so many projects depending on a handful of people choosing to contribute unpaid labor.

I think we should have a big-tent view of software and software licenses. There are good reasons to use a non-open source license. If you want to block Amazon from running your code on their servers, an open source license is not for you, and you should choose something else. There are other licenses that make source code available under more restrictive terms.

The fact that there's a clear definition for what an open source license is, and some licenses meet it and others don't, means I can make a statement like that, talking about a bunch of licenses as a group.

If it just means "licenses that make source available with whatever terms" then it's a less useful way of classifying and discussing licenses.

Most terms in the English language are fuzzy that way, but this one has a clear definition and I would like to stick with it.

A note to writers: when you find yourself writing a paragraph defensively justifying alienating your intended audience, take a walk around the block and think really hard about whether doing so is a good idea.

I really dislike this kind of "geez, read the room!" thinking. Not everybody needs to have the same opinion about everything. Not everybody should. The opinion of "the room" or in your terminology, the "intended audience", is ever-evolving and the way that happens is via people talking and writing about their own opinions that aren't identical to the prevailing views of the time.

But it's fine that you disagree with the author about this and are unswayed by the author's arguments. Others will agree with the author and be unswayed by your counter-arguments, and that's fine too. Still others will change their views after reading the article or responses to it, and that's also fine. Maybe the prevailing view will shift as a result of all this discussion, maybe it won't. This is how discourse works!

I think you missed a fine point in my comment. Seeking to avoid offending absolutely everyone who reads your article is fruitless. Sometimes the point is to offend, and that, too, has its time and place.

It's when you start adding a paragraph defending your decision to offend your audience that you should give some thought to whether that is, in fact, why you're writing. If it isn't, don't. The author wasn't writing to piss off the FOSS community, that wasn't the topic, just the outcome. Why would I give credence to someone's opinions about open source if they flagrantly refer to things which aren't open source using that term? If you can't get the basics right, you have nothing to say which I want to hear.

Ah! I do see your more subtle point now, and I think it's a reasonable one.

It reminds me of the common writing advice to not hedge statements with a lot of "I think" and "I believe", because that's redundant, if it wasn't what you think, then you wouldn't be writing it, and it weakens statements, making it sound like the writer lacks conviction in the statement, and if you lack conviction in what you're writing then you definitely shouldn't write it.

That has always sounded right to me, but in the final accounting, I'm skeptical of it. Certainty just isn't all that natural, ambivalence is common, and I think hedging captures that reality more accurately in the tone of the writing.

And I think this case is the same. That paragraph is acknowledging a reality that many or most people reading the article will know, to the point that omitting any mention of it at all will seem notable. I think it is relatable and tactful to say "I know this isn't a popular view, but I care about it so here goes anyway". It doesn't imply that they are writing in order to offend. It only implies that they are aware of the situation.

I don't really get the thing about whether or not it impacts the credence with which you should take the opinions of the author... And frankly, I don't think it is the important thing; the important thing is the argument they are making. But FWIW, if it were the important thing, this particular author has an enormous amount of credibility in the space of working on a successful open source project...

Agree and I don’t understand the downvotes.

The goal isn’t for every dev or project to make money or be sustainable in open source, just as it isn’t for every business idea to succeed.

I donate to numerous open source projects and make a point of donating more than I believe they’d charge me to buy/subscribe if the software wasn’t open source. I encourage others to do so too, I sincerely hope and believe we can see that happen. I’d love to see more truly open source software become sustainable, of course.

But I don’t kid myself that it all will be. And I don’t care to relax the definition to include open core, VC exploitative, bait and switch, or whatever (have we learnt nothing in the last two decades?!). If the project dies it dies, if it stays a hobby project that’s ok too.

I don't understand when it became this was FOSS was always about "Free as in speech." But for some reason it became "Free as in beer." and many of the arguments I see around dev pay seem to be conflating the 2.

Open source merely means the source is open and free for you to view look at modify, etc. At no point does it mean it costs nothing. Now with code it's not exactly a super reasonable business model to sell a software product but make it's code freely available, but that would still meet the definition of open source.

[Never mind, I didn't express this clearly]

Tell that to Red Hat, WordPress, Canonical, MySQL and many more products built on pure Open Source. The issue is complex.

That's not true. The company I work for manages to sell free software [1]. All the stuff we sell is under LGPL, and it's not open core, it is fully free software.

It works under specific conditions and you need to come up with a business plan that makes it work, but it is possible. And it is one of the most ethical ways to fund free software so it would be too bad to discard this option too early.

For us, what works is enterprise oriented extensions for a platform we develop. Turns out companies will fork off hundreds of dollars and enjoy the support that comes with it instead of compiling all this thing by themselves. It's more convenient and employees understand that it funds the open source software they are using, and it's an easily justified expense. But should they want to enjoy any of the freedoms that come with free software, they can.

[1] https://store.xwiki.com

I’ve worked for multiple companies that pay for dual licensed GPL software

Perhaps unpopular opinion, but it's because the 0$ cost is what 99% of OSS users care about.

Since it requires no investment on part of the user, it increases the potential target market to a much larger size than it would if it were paid. There's just something about things being free that break people's minds.

There's even a study on this where they offered chocolates for free vs 0.01$, and the free option was much more popular even though the 0.01$ chocolate was much higher quality and much better value for a very negligible difference.

Lots of users just want to download something, use it for a few minutes and be done with it. Or at least try it out and know that they can fall back to a free version at worst and not feel like they made a bad investment.

I think this is more that pay barrier significantly raises obstacle no matter how much money you actually have to give. Even as little as 10^-10 cent. Just by nature of transaction verification have a hard cost no matter how much money actually transferred.

What would finally vanquish ads off the internet is micro transaction that is actually able to bypass this barrier entirely. This is what bitcoin promised to do but of course, they don't solve real problems.

I think the thing is that it's always been both. The freedom to hack and modify has always been inextricably linked with the $0 license fee. If the early free/open licenses had allowed source access and modification but come with a license fee, or if early FOSS had cost nothing to use but disallowed modification, I don't think we'd have seen the success that we have. The two senses of "free" in "free software" are and always have been linked.

The reality noone wants to admit is that most people use and patronize FOSS because it's free-as-in-beer and nothing else. Nobody cares about freedoms, but everyone cares about their bottom line.

This extends to even most of the FOSS devs themselves, refusing pay and ostracizing those who accept pay because money to them is kryptonite.

In my opinion, this philosophy that runs counter to a very fundamental law of the world (everything, including manhours, requires compensation) plays one of the largest roles in keeping FOSS behind both commercial and proprietary/closed software.

Did the author actually want to rant about the "paying people to work on <something>" part, or was it just an excuse to be controversial about the very definition of open source? Not clear to me.

But if it was the former, what a way to shoot oneself in the foot!

The author was fed up of people saying "well actually your achievement in getting paid to work on open source shouldn't be celebrated because of <list of pedantic reasons>" - one of which was license definition arguments. That's why he chose to be controversial about that.

I read the article again. Twice. To me the point is really that he is fed up of people criticizing the people instead of the system. And there are interesting discussions to be had around that, e.g.: is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad?

Instead, for some reason he just spends a whole section redefining concepts instead of just admitting that he may have used them wrongly in his toot. Which is not only completely uninteresting but also confusing.

If he had spent as much time redacting his toot than he did writing the "definitions" section, chances are that he would not have been pissed off by the reactions to his toot and would not have had to go on a crusade explaining why whoever disagrees with his poor formulation is a jerk.

is it fine to work on open source projects at Meta, or is it bad because Meta is bad?

I think OP would say its better to work on open source at Meta than closed source at Meta, and we should celebrate someone being paid to write open source. We can also condemn their specific employer while not denigrating their open source compensation.

re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.

re your second point, looking at this thread, "what is open source" is taking up a lot of the brainspace.

A lot of those discussions are not about the definition of open source (but something closely related, like "does it suck that it is difficult to get a new open source license OSI-approved?" or "should the JSON license be OSI-approved?", etc).

But "open source" is defined, has been for a while, and those who disagree with the meaning and would like to merge "source available" and "open source" are just fighting a useless fight IMO.

And really, in the featured article, the author clearly says "I will redefine 'open source' so that I don't have to say that I was wrong in my toot and in my book". To me it's like if I tooted "my favourite color in the visible spectrum is microwave", got pissed at people telling me that "microwave" is not in the "visible spectrum", and wrote a whole definition section explaining why I can't accept that I was wrong.

"in my book" in that post didn't mean an actual book, it meant "in my opinion".

Oh, so it would make it even easier to just accept that the toot had some "unfortunate wording" in that respect.

Again, I do understand the other points. I have a lot of frustrations as a maintainer of (much smaller) open source projects (e.g. all those people that believe I work for them for free and who can come complain and pressure me because of a missing feature they don't even consider contributing). But I think that redefining "open source" is not the solution. On the contrary, IMO we need people to understand the meaning of those licenses better.

A few weeks ago a wrote in to my Senator on the complete lack of government funding for independent engineers/small projects building FOSS (USA).

NLNet in the EU is awesome. We really should have something like the NLNet in the USA.

IDK maybe we just should let the EU pay for it

We need more funding, not less.

I'm undecided if it would be a net good or bad. If you think government should subsidize infrastructure that creates value that's hard to bill to users (like roads), then software is a pretty logical extension. However, given my personal knowledge of transportation project delivery and the astronomical amount of waste it includes, I suspect this might just make things worse.

I like NLNet model. NLNet isn't a government agency. NLNet is a nonprofit foundation that is responsible for distributing certain government grants, such as NGI Core Zero, which are themed for particular goals.

I definitely wouldn't want FOSS projects to apply directly to a government agency.

https://nlnet.nl/foundation/

OSTIF is vaguely similar and iirc from the USA

OSTIF scope is really narrow. It's mainly for patching security related bugs/vulnerabilities in existing large projects. And AFAIK it has a significantly smaller source of funding, relying on corporate donations.

It's not comparable to the projects that NLNet funds.

I want to agree, and I understand the position, but there's no room for nuance when you throw around the work 'always'.

I think I disagree that it is always good.

For instance, if a company is paying someone to work on open source, and they use that to leverage the project in a direction that is against its other users' best interest, can that be good? I don't think so.

There are numerous examples of situations and behaviors you could come up with that are not 'good'.

I'm all for people making a living, but I don't like bad behavior, no matter if it generates 'freeish' source code or not.

This is why grants are really important. That usually means deliverables in a specific timeframe. To me, that elevates open source from a full-time hobby to a job.

Grants are great but are often not nearly enough and they can vanish from a year to another. You'd better secure other sources of income. Grants will also usually fund specific features of your product but not the whole thing.

Other kinds of income are also good ways to fund open source like service, consultancy, support and even paid open source apps (which works particularly well for apps that have enterprise oriented features, turns out it doesn't matter that the source code is available under a free software license if it's convenient enough to click and buy).

Coincidentally, this is how I get paid :-)

Still, grants should not be ignored indeed.

I think the article addresses this.

It's a matter of not letting "perfect" get in the way of "good". You're totally right, we should work towards getting everyone who wants to work on open source code bases the public funds they deserve at every opportunity, but in the mean time, we'll have to put up with corpos funding some of the FLOSS code.

We have to accept the world as it is – even if it’s not the world we want. This means we have to be okay with the idea that maintainers need to be paid. Far too often I see arguments like: “maintainers shouldn’t be paid by private companies because the government should be supporting them.” Sure, this sounds great – but governments aren’t doing this! So this argument reduces to “open source maintainers shouldn’t be paid”. I can’t get on board with that.

But some of these aren't good. Some of them are the opposite of good.

We are allowing lousy business models to survive by insisting they are better than nothing.

That's why the open source communities themselves should be funding their own projects. Because if the communities and users dont fund their own projects, private corporations will fund them and they will have the say. Open Source must not become outsourced 'free labor' which major corporations can leech on. The best way to do it has been the 'freemium' format that is used in the Wordpress ecosystem and a few others - the open source shop creates and maintains a free version of their software under GPL2+, and sells downloads, update licenses & support for more advanced addons. The WP ecosystem was able to float itself with this method without taking in investor money or corporate money, and the software shops that exist in that ecosystem are able to pay their developers living wages. The entire ecosystem was created and is still floated by the open source software producers and the community members.

Basically, open source is like politics: Who funds it gets the say. And just like politics, we need to make sure that the communities are self-sustaining economically so that external money wont call the shots.

I know that a lot of us in open source software are very proud with our voluntary work and its contributions to open source. That is accurate and praise worthy.

But what do we do when we get up in the morning and go to work?

We each work in a private company that seeks to maximize its market share and gain more control of the economy, bar a minority of us who work in actual open source jobs. In one hand, we are giving something tangible to open source with our contributions, but the work that we have to do in our day job in a private corporation takes a lot of that away because the organized, concentrated impact of a large private organization with a lot of money goes much further than the heroic efforts of collectives of volunteers.

That is why open source must fund itself and become its own economic and political power. Otherwise we will always be giving with one hand with our contributions but involuntarily taking back with the other hand because of the work we have to do in private corporations. And this is without mentioning that if we dont fund & float our own ecosystems and become a collective economic and political power as a community in our own right, we will always be rule-takers and will always have to fight the attempts of the private lobbies at destroying open source.

Basically we must create our own world. And in that world, we must be able to work in, make money with, and live with open source.

can that be good? I don't think so

Well that's just an implied always. Is it likely good? No, probably not. Is it always bad? No, probably not. It's conceivable that there are a lot more potential users in the direction the company wants to drag the project, and the few current users can fork it.

A pro capitalist message from Jacobin? [Looks closer.] No.

I'd pay for an open source project that could filter & sort news by surprisingness-for-that-news-source. This opinion would rank high for jacobin.com. The story about Zuckerberg's preference for the Quest 3 over the AVP would disappear.

https://jacobian.org is Jacob Kaplan-Moss's website

https://jacobin.com is a socialist magazine

This blog post is from the former!

*jacobian.org for JKM's site

thanks, edited!

Jacobian, not Jacobin.

But even so, paying people for their labor is entirely uncontroversial amongst socialists. Some might even argue it's the fundamental underpinning of their critique of capitalism.

Yes, please start by practicing what you preach. I actually donated 1% of my income to various open source projects I use.

This is a good thing to do, but not really the point of the article.

I’m really happy that github in particular has made it so easy to give some cash to the people responsible for tools that I enjoy.

https://jacobian.org/2024/jan/10/philanthropy-update/ took 15 seconds to find on the website.

My (very small) tech nonprofit has started doing something similar [1], where everyone contributes to a list of OSS tools we use heavily, and then everyone gives a weight/score to each tool.

We then split the pot ($1,000 in 2022, probably ~$2,000 when I get around to doing 2023) among all the OSS projects, according to the relative scores.

[1] https://siliconally.org/policies/open-source/#yearly-donatio...

If we're going to ignore the "official" meaning of open source, then let's take a step back to consider why open source is worth supporting in the first place.

Open source guarantees to me, the user, that competition among vendors will be possible and fair in the future. This is exactly the point that many "fake OSS" licenses try to take away. Okay, maybe it's possible to fork for personal on-prem use, but god forbid someone creates a competing hosted solution that gives any customer more choice. Furthermore, these pieces of software are fucked the day that the company folds, or gets acquired by a malevolent buyer.

Open source guarantees a baseline level of respect towards me, the end user. By letting anyone fork a project that's gone too far in the wrong direction, I know that my software will continue working in the short run and of it's important enough, a competing alternative will emerge that continues without one-sided money or data grabs.

There's nothing inherently wrong with having someone from Microsoft or Google work on open source software, or any VC-funded company that will without fail turn against their users sooner or later. However, if a controlling majority of developers is employed this way, it provides an opportunity for what elsewhere is known as regulatory capture. If Microsoft's goal is to make people dependent on proprietary GitLab and VS Code Marketplace offerings, and Google's goal is to provide the greatest possible amount of ads and tracking to the largest possible user base, it does not matter if the software is open source or not. The end result is the same, I'm left without viable alternatives and big business gets to do with us whatever the hell they please.

Especially when this software becomes ubiquitous and entrenched, paying developers to work on company-controlled OSS instead of community-driven, user-respecting OSS is a net negative for everyone in the long run.

I'm only interested in OSS in so far as it protects my interests as an end user, and/or our common interests as a society, now and in the future. The collaborative aspect is nice, but that's not the reason that we should ask for better compensation for maintainers.

The "Open Source" label as such is indeed meaningless per se, and it doesn't always protect me either, as seen with BSD+MIT software allowing cryptographically-enabled control of devices that I nominally own, or GPL being useless when there is no actual distribution of software involved. That said, I have yet to see a case of non-OSI "open source" that doesn't try to tilt the playing field in biased, controlling and long-term unsustainable or user-hostile ways.

If you can't build a business on a level playing field, perhaps it's in everyone's interest that your business and software dies, or retreats into lower-intensity hobbyist maintainership, instead of leading everyone into a hard dependency on your oh so well-intended monetization of originally useful software. Then at least someone else can take a shot at doing it better.

Those are some pretty twisted reasons to support open source. First of all, you are not a "user" if you use open source. You are an owner. Open source gives you the freedom to control the development process of the software. It sounds like what you want is the freedom to have other people serving you. Also, an inventor who chooses to reserve some rights to control their invention is not acting anti-competitively. You're disagreeing with both law and morality by thinking that. You are not entitled to anything. Open source usually happens because the inventor has nothing to gain from exerting personal control through legal means over their invention. So what it in effect does, is it gives you the power to take control and participate in its development, as an equal, rather than a mere consumer. You can't walk into open source with the consumer mindset because that's just not how things work. Companies like Microsoft that retain full control over their software will break their backs to serve you, because they're the only ones who can. But you can't expect that kind of service from people who are simply trying to give you the DIY tools to do it yourself.

I am an owner if I can exercise control over the software at hand. That's entirely my point - there is open source that a rando like me can hop in and improve, sometimes requiring difficult discussions about how to go about it exactly, but always with the experience of the user as a priority. (User can be an end user, but also a developer who's using an open source library/framework.)

And then there's "open source" where the code is accessible but the user experience takes a backseat to corporate interests, CLA requirements provide a one-sided transfer of copyrights, hobbyist contributions are systematically steamrolled by optimizing build pipelines and development processes for internal company use, and large-scale directions are decided in a private meeting room without involving community contributors.

If an inventor reserves some rights to control their invention for their own benefit, I have no problem with that. There's plenty of commercial software out there, people are working hard to provide value to customers, and I've been part of this system too.

Where I take issue is when we ask for special treatment of "open source" whose main purpose is to benefit commercial entities in doing business. Companies should figure out on their own how to keep their mission-critical software alive, that's their business. If Django suffers because lots of profitable outfits can't figure out a way to finance what they build upon, let them eat dust. They'll figure it out eventually when their services start falling behind on all fronts.

As a charitable coder, I'm going to invest my time into providing value for end users, not companies. That's the kind of open source we as a community/society should focus on supporting and financing. Imho.

You should be supporting and financing open source that elevates knowledge.

Knowledge is the resource that open source distributes which folks fight to control. It's like the fruit you'd grow on a farm. You could argue about whether or not the fruit should be distributed more to the city folk or the country folk, or ask questions about how much money the farm is making, but I'd say you should be focusing on getting the farm to grow more fruit, since that's the only way to be sure everyone becomes richer as a result.

Scientists do a great job discovering knowledge, but open source is what makes it useful and able to be used. Any open source project that's helping to elevate know-how is a project worth supporting.

I've put some serious thought into solving this problem. There are two main structural issues I know of:

1. Open source libraries tend to be complement goods. You're more willing to pay for a good physics engine if you already have a good rendering engine and vice versa. But a sad truth of complement goods is that they are a centralizing force - it's actually better for everyone if the physics engine maker and rendering engine maker join forces and offer a bundle discount. But the most common strategy seems to be for them to just merge into one company, and this is why you see giant conglomerate products like Unreal and Unity instead of buying each component from a different vendor.

2. Since open source software is a public good (non-rivalrous, non-excludable), the "free market" cannot really incentivize its production nearly as much as would be optimal. Let's say there are 1000 people who would each pay $10 for a feature to be added, and the maintainer would happily add it for $5000. If 90% of those people each paid $6 they would get what they want and the maintainer would be happy too, but each individual has an incentive to be part of that 10% that gets to keep their $6 and still gets the feature, so what happens is that almost no one ends up paying.

These problems can't be solved without slightly modifying open source, but they can be solved by maintaining the spirit of open source I think. What you need is to have some kind of foundation that takes money and gives it to "quasi-open-source" projects, and then only allows businesses to use those projects if they contribute a certain percentage of their revenue to the foundation. Of course, now the foundation needs to decide which open source projects to give the money too. It's an extremely tricky problem, but there's been a lot of interesting research by Glen Weyl on that exact subject and I'm confident it could be solved in a satisfactory way.

I think this proposal would create a virtuous cycle once it got off the ground. The more projects licensed "quasi-open-source", the larger the incentive to pay the foundation to use them. The more the foundation is paid, the more money these "quasi-open-source" projects get, and so more people will license their projects "quasi-open-source", increasing the incentive again, etc.

Of course, it would only be "quasi-open-source", and not truly open-source. But there's no reason the license couldn't be extremely in line with the spirit of open source. For example, it could say "if you're an individual or small company, you can use our code for any purpose for free. If you're a big company, you can use it in a way that complies with the AGPL or you can pay us, your choice".

I think employees would also encourage their employers to become paying members of such a foundation, if it lead to those employees being able to determine where some of the money goes. Everyone at my current company is a Rust developer and so we naturally like Rust, but Rust jobs aren't always easy to find. As employees, it could be in our best interest to subsidize the development of Rust open source projects, if that increased Rust's attractiveness to other companies.

If you're interested in this idea, my email is in my bio :D

You don't need "quasi-open-source" to solve the coordination problem you describe. It can be solved with a threshold pledge system[0]. People agree to donate money, and the developer agrees to release the code once sufficient money is donated. There can be a time limit after which the donations are returned if the threshold isn't met.

This has actually worked in practice: Blender was originally proprietary software, but the copyright holder agreed to release it under the GPL after collecting 100K EUR in donations. After 7 weeks they collected enough donations and Blender was released as FOSS as promised.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system

The kickstarter model is awesome and should be used more but it clearly doesn't fully solve the problem. It works great for kickstarter because kickstarter projects aren't public goods (if you pay the money you get the thing you paid money for). In general it doesn't make as much sense for open source because you get the same thing whether you pay or not (unless you're the tiebreaker), so your incentive to pay is limited.

Or just use BSL...

The premise of paid open source devs is fine and well, but every single one of these blogs devolves into delusional utopian nonsense from people who do not understand the staggering infrastructure and maintenance cost of the modern society they think should be some sort of guaranteed right. People, please learn and understand where your food comes from before writing this kind of garbage.

TFA’s author is one of the co-creators of Django and a preeminent member of the Python community. I think it would be charitable to assume that he does, in fact, understand these things.

FWIW, the author was at least thoughtful enough to include this disclaimer at the top:

Warning: rant ahead. I’m writing from a place of frustration and not particularly interested in trying to moderate my tone. If you don’t want to hear me yell about open source for a while, please skip this one.

Did anyone following this in Mastodon-land specifically see any reaction to "luxury automated gay space communism?" I would be surprised if he wasn't blasted for that.

This article came across as much less ranty than I expected based on his disclaimer. I think he pretty much perfectly articulated the noise around funded open source.

It’s been quieter there than here other than done licensing derails. I think most people are desensitized to it after a decade of memes:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxu...

Ah, my self-imposed limits on internetting have saved me here. This is the first I've heard it. Thanks for the link.

This is as good a context as any to remind people of the origins of the Open Source Initiative and its definitions. Here's how the OSI described its history on its website in 2007 (emphasis added):

The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. ... A month later ... the participants voted to promote the use of the term 'open source', and agreed to adopt with it the new rhetoric of pragmatism and market-friendliness that Raymond had been developing.

I find it a bit amusing that here we are, decades later, and people who use non-OSI licenses to try to thwart exploitation by enormous corporations are condemned on highly moralistic grounds for not being "truly open source".

http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

Even businesses care about the distinction between OSI-approved and SSPL/BUSL licensed code bases. In the latter, they often cannot host services that use BUSL licensed code which puts risks on the business. Some examples:

Do they need to consult with a lawyer to understand if their particular use case is acceptable?

If not now, then how do they know when that threshold is met?

When the service is offered for revenue?

Or only when offered directly to customers?

What about if theirs is a consulting-structured business e.g., IBM or Collins, where any internally service provided to another team is billed and paid for internal to the company (even though its not paid for by an external customer)?

Can they hire developers to contribute to the code when the upstream is unresponsive to their bugs/features? Or, if they have to integrate with other custom internal infrastructure/tooling? Are they free to remix these tools into larger projects of theirs?

It is possible to separate the moralizing aspects of these licenses and articulate concerns strictly in business cases that make them unsuitable for OSI and thus not "open source" in spirit.

I'll just say this: I don't think the government should pay for open source development.

“Far too often I see arguments like: “maintainers shouldn’t be paid by private companies because the government should be supporting them.” Sure, this sounds great – but governments aren’t doing this!”

Governments are doing this. The German government funds https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/

This blog post interprets saying “it’s not open source, though” as if it were a criticism of releasing software under various other source-available licenses.

Maybe some people mean it that way, but for me it’s purely about not watering down terms that have a clear meaning. Sometimes source-available licenses are better for the business and it’s understandable why some businesses do that. It’s less generous, but still a good thing.

(Just like it’s understandable that people don’t make source code available for all their software.)

While I have made a few OSS donations, I want to avoid doing so out of principle. I, a lone developer, should not be funding the work my peers do.

How much does openssl benefit me personally? How much does eslint? However much, it’s negligible to how much it benefits my employer. Which in turn is negligible to Google.

This is a responsibility that big tech ought to pick up, not random people.

So many strawmen being set-up in this article the crow population is gonna take a major nose dive.

If I hate any specific business model that is used by a company that does some some open source suddenly I don't think people deserve to be paid for their work?

Yeah no, that's garbage. There's plenty of garbage business models and they aren't suddenly okay because one company uses it and 1% of their money funds some small bit of OSS work that underpins their business model.

I know it's not about the definition of open source, but that's actually what I found interesting from the article :-). It would have been so simple for the author to acknowledge the actual definition of "open source" and to just mention that their opinion extends to other models... Anyway:

- I did not know the BSL! That actually sounds like a pretty great idea: my understanding is that the company makes the code source-available but with a deadline (of maximum 4 years): after that deadline, the code becomes GPLv2. If more companies used that instead of proprietary, it would be a win for open source in the long run (because more code would become GPLv2)!

- I am also discovering Polyform. That's fun, but less exciting to me than the BSL.

- The JSON license seems to be purposely annoying. Reads like some kind of "Fuck you" to the very concept of licenses.

There is another potential source of funding for open source that is quite congruent to its ethos and that is the public sector. For many types of software used by public sector entities it would be quite efficient to support open source development as a public good.

There will always be points of view that would consider this (too) as a problematic source of funding (e.g., being suspicious of government actors and their motives) and it can be a major hassle to handle public sector bureaucracy, but given the distribution of demand for software in the economy it seems something natural to some extend and it could alleviate some of the sustainability issues with open source development.

The community I've been most involved in over the past few years has been R/tidyverse. Some developers are paid (by RStudio [now Posit] and other orgs, like R Consortium) to work on software, docs, community initiatives etc.

The experience as a programmer in this domain is amazing. Having these funded full time OSS contributors lets thousands of R enthusiasts (like me) benefit because someone incredibly high-leverage was paid to give a lot of their time to a project. So when you go to use that library, its docs are immaculate (I'm thinking all the tidyverse packages, Shiny, RMarkdown etc), and the examples are simple and brilliant. Getting up and running is often as little as taking an educated guess at how it would work, and often that's exactly how the function/package was designed! Having at least one dedicated person seems to dramatically improve the quality of OSS, possibly because it helps organise the dozens of people each making smaller contributions.

I suspect this works so well because open source projects sometimes don't attract attention to key areas like documentation, and UX (some of my most-loved OSS projects still have horrendous UX because, I suspect, contributors love to add things but nobody wants to be the person who organises it into a coherent package for users, much less remove people's contributions because they're unnecessary and confuse users).

When I contrast the experience with communities that have much fewer (or no) full time funded OSS contributors, there's much more niggle and inconsistency with libraries, interoperability, and especially in documentation.

Sorry, I'm rambling, but the R community has been an amazing example of how paying a few dozen full time OSS people can have a dramatically outsized benefit to the community for years to come. I'm very appreciative I get to stand on the shoulders of these humble giants.

Getting them to work for you for free is better! -tech companies

Sidenote. Some companies offer a "volunteer time PTO". You can use it to contribute to OSS

No it’s actually terrible. Because then they will eventually abandon the project and you’re stuck with it in your stack. Now you become the maintainer.

Companies should be giving employees oss budget they can use for donations.

Good piece, but it buries the lede. I suspect the reaction would be different if it started with the conclusion. Otherwise, the title and introduction sounds like another article about direct contributions to maintainers instead of being agnostic about how the maintainers get paid. I think “Purity only serves to limit open source’s value to society” is a great debate topic.

Shameless plug, but I already came up with two terms describing the author's vision of open source.

https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t...

I also think that forcing companies to accept liability would fund FOSS.

https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro...

Do it right, and the most important projects would be the ones flush with cash.

I've always thought a neat model would be something like: pay for convenience, for example, something like: to run git pull/clone, you have to purchase "premium" access to their repo, but the code's available and you can just download a tar.gz of it if you want. No way would a company balk at paying a little to have a more reasonable system for updates, etc, but the code is still fully open source, free software, etc.

See also Nadia Eghbal's (IMHO definitive) work on the economics and sociology of open source software, "Working In Public": https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public

It certainly is good, but money also turns many people bad and impacts organizational dynamics.

I donate to a decent number of open source projects. Others I think are more than fine without me (Linux kernel, etc.) but I wouldn’t hesitate to donate if I believed they weren’t.

For the rest, I would indeed as happily see them fail than compromise on the definition of open source. The two are equivalent to me.

Given free hosting and compute by the NSA? Win

I think cooperatively owned tech orgs are the future. Contribution to open source software will always lag behind private entities as people aren't prone to work for free.

Are there any open source projects that are monetized/pay their contributors?

If I ever get a successful startup going, I am going to explore this model.

Recently there was a discussion[0] around the value of open source software and how much companies would have had to pay to have it developed from the ground up.

The number that was thrown around was $177M.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39340146

It’s one of the few places where essentially all of humanity works together on something that benefits everyone. A world without open source would be substantially worse than the world we live in.

Well said and very true.

Almost nobody makes a living writing free software. As a percentage of all software engineers, it’s so few we can basically round down to zero.

As a member of the zero, I approve the title of TFA.

I'm a developer with 15+ YOE, working mostly on legacy code in a govt job but I have extensive experience with modern code bases (C, Rust), and I have contributed to lots of FOSS of projects over the years in my free time as a way to learn new tech. I would work full time on Open Source if I was paid enough to leave my 9-5 job, which is not a lot in a third world country like mine. Say, $1500 / month.

Every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, it’s a win.

Amen. It's becoming more common, and there's lots to celebrate [0]

[0] https://fossfox.com/