Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

https://fosspost.org/opinions/people-be-thankful-for-free-software-developers

by ashitlerferad • 9 years ago

319 101 9 years ago

fosspost.org

sandov• 9 years ago

Apparently the source got hugged to death.

ldom22• 9 years ago

companies too.

neya• 9 years ago

Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:P1Yw34...

emerged2• 9 years ago

Interestingly, free software development often pays off in the best interest of the developers. In terms of networking with other developers and building a resume which leads to real jobs with real pay. Not to mention the value of real world developer experience.

Be thankful, yep - but as someone with a background in OSS, I'm quite happy with the intangible dividends it's already paid.

josteink3• 9 years ago

Interestingly, free software development often pays off in the best interest of the developers.

While I know that is true first hand, I think that's largely due to network effects.

You've most likely built your own open-source project on top of other existing open-source projects, an existing free platform. That means that there's a big bootstrapping cost you didn't have to pay for in terms of commercial software or developer-time (if you'd instead had chosen to make that platform yourself).

And since you got off so lightly, it's easy to think "I'll just give this away too". What if making that first release had cost you 10x more effort, or hundreds of dollars?

But now your project is FOSS and you get the benefits in the terms of people using your software and submitting patches back. Do you think you'd have something equally compelling to offer if you had to make it all from scratch? Or do you think you'd get contributors if using your product depended on a wide range of other commercial software?

Basically, your open-source project "works out" because of other open-source software. Even as a developer, you should be thankful for free software developers.

Just how much free software do you depend on? A text-editor? A programming-language runtime and toolchain? A operating system for that to run on? A platform SDK for the developers of that platform? A kernel surely?

And for each of those "high level" concepts there, you probably need to account for the very same thing recursively and more: server-software running their project's webpages and mailing-lists and other developer infrastructure. Plus whatever that recursively depends on.

The amount of free effort involved seems to defy enumeration. I guess it is turtles all the way down.

I think open-source today has come a long way compared to where it was a couple decades ago, and can't imagine how much perseverance and persistence this has required from how just many people. It's an enormous achievement.

My hats off and thanks to all of you, everywhere :)

emerged2• 9 years ago

Turtles all the way down, yea. The comment that I made IMO applies to each of those turtles. OSS is sometimes done out of a selfless sense of public service, but maybe more often just for the sheer cognitive/emotional drive to solve a problem and/or to create for its own sake.

But the way that plays out just so happens to yield positive benefits not just for the community who are free recipients of the software, but for the developers as well.

It's a great thing, though I don't think it's possible for us all to just hold hands in a spirit circle and develop all of the world's software for free without any care for profit. The modes are synergetic but OSS can't stand alone.

maccard2• 9 years ago

I agree, however: > Just how much free software do you depend on? A text-editor? A programming-language runtime and toolchain? A operating system for that to run on? A platform SDK for the developers of that platform? A kernel surely?

there are many people who use closed source editors (sublime/VS), on a nonfree tool chain (VC++) on a nonfree OS (windows) with a closed source SDK And kernel.

jordigh3• 9 years ago

This is a starry-eyed blog post. I like it, and I miss not having more of these. We need more starry-eyed dreamers because they get good things done.

I just spent some time with the Debian crew at the last Debconf here in Mtl. I've always liked their attitude and I love their operating system -- and so does everyone else who has ever created a Debian derivative. Others at Debconf felt the same. Bradley Kuhn even said something like what a breath of fresh air it was to not have to apologise for being a free software supporter. I love how organic Debian is and how the conference was perfectly run with livestreaming and IRC bots keeping us abreast of the next event. These polychromatically-haired dreamers know how to get things done.

So, it's good to see that the starry-eyed blog posts haven't stopped.

fny• 9 years ago

Why would someone have to apologize for being a free software supporter? I consider my FSF membership a point of pride.

jordigh3• 9 years ago

We get told many things. That we are fundamentalists, that all software cannot or should not be free, that the GPL is too restrictive, that we are anti-business, that we spend more time arguing politics than getting things done, that we are passé because Apple and Microsoft are releasing some free software. Someone like bkuhn gets to hear things like that all the time. It's nice for a change to not have to argue against each of those points.

b4ux1t36• 9 years ago

I'm all for free software. Really, I am. I just have a problem with the idea that free software is absolutely the only way to go. I have no problem with people who refuse to run non-free software. I have a problem when they insist that I'm doing it wrong by running Windows.

Sent from my Fedora-running laptop.

Clubber2• 9 years ago

Just to put it out there, Apple offers quite a bit of free software when you purchase their hardware. This includes OS upgrades and their office suite as well as Xcode and Garage Band, among other things. It's quite nice and they are well made.

There are a few asterisks though, most notably support life for the OS. My 2009 MacPro won't run the latest OS for no other reason than Apple decided it couldn't (end of life). The 2010 model is allowed to run it and there is no discernible difference in the hardware.

Having said that FOSS was truly paradigm changing. I lived in a world before Linux and everything was prohibitively expensive on the PC. There was a lot of freeware and public domain software available, but most of it wasn't very good or niche stuff. It's quite amazing that the FOSS movement it was able to happen, let alone gain so much traction with such great software. I mean today, you don't have to buy a damn thing except the hardware.

azrazalea• 9 years ago

Apple offers quite a bit of free software when you purchase their hardware. This includes OS upgrades and their office suite as well as Xcode and Garage Band, among other things. It's quite nice and they are well made.

Most of that is not "free software" in the way this blog post is talking about (FOSS). XCode has FOSS components, parts of the OS are FOSS, etc. However, much of it is not.

Clubber2• 9 years ago

Yes, I was mainly talking about the free as in beer. Not as much free as in freedom regarding Apple's stuff.

Apple used to charge for all their software. I give FOSS credit for changing that. I think Lion was the first free OS upgrade. I credit FOSS for Microsoft giving a real copy of Visual Studio away for free. They've done it in the past, IIRC, but it was so hobbled, it was useless.

vacri• 9 years ago

Bundled software isn't 'free-as-in-beer'.

pbreit• 9 years ago

I get the sentiment but the request is awkward. IF OSS developers don't want to code for free then there's an easy, fool-proof solution.

If you're going to try to argue Debian is worth $30 billion then I'll try to argue that it's generated $30 billion in free publicity.

AlisdairO• 9 years ago

I really liked this post. Obviously everyone has different motivations, but at its heart FOSS is an enormous collection of cooperative and/or charitable work, and the industry as a whole should be really, really proud of it.

One other option for giving back - just send an email saying thanks, and that you love the project. I get such an email once or twice each week for my open source project, and it really brightens up my day. I'm lucky enough to not really need any donations, but everybody needs their spirits lifted from time to time.

Knowing that your contribution has made a positive impact on someone else's life is a powerful thing, and from the user's perspective costs very little to do.

jancsika• 9 years ago

It means that someone has just donated hundreds of hours of work for you. Free of charge!

I think that misses something of the ethos of free software. It's not like somebody donating their valuable time to work in a soup kitchen. It's much more like somebody too lazy to spend thirty seconds doing a menial task like everyone else, so they instead spend three months creating a program that automates that thirty second task-- with the side effect that the rest of computer-using humanity gets out of doing that menial task, too.

So in a way it does require a thank you. But in another way releasing it as free software is the least they could do given all the time they wasted just to get out of doing work.

jacalata• 9 years ago

That is a bizarre attitude. Why would anyone owe you for having wasted their own time? I mean, if you were arguing that they owed it to their employer to give them anything developed on company time, at least you'd make sense...

makecheck• 9 years ago

I for one have spent over 20 years continually expanding my application, as free GPL software, and I stopped counting the hours long ago.

It is a gigantic amount of effort to design non-trivial software. Heck, just keeping everything stable and up-to-date is a project in itself (periodically having to adopt modern platform APIs, for instance).

And usually I receive very little feedback. I can see downloads in the thousands and I doubt I've had more than a few E-mails a year.

You might be misled by the tendency for people to hack random things together and dump them on GitHub, never to be touched again.

detaro• 9 years ago

I wonder what "30s menial task" the writers of Apache, the Linux kernel, Blender, … tried to avoid?

peterwwillis3• 9 years ago

Free non-commercial and non-free commercial software are both wildly different products in practice.

I installed some package recently that fucked with my X config, or my kernel modules, I don't know. But my hybrid graphics is now fucked and I have crazy artifacts all over my screen. The default install of this distro does not result in a working config, and I had to spend three days to figure out the insane set of software and configuration I needed to make it work last time. (Also, I added extra RAM, and now hibernating doesn't work)

There is no commercial support for this laptop running this distro. My free software has no "revert to a last known good working system state" button, like some non-free software. Doing all the work to fix the graphics again may literally be more expensive than buying a new Windows laptop.

Thanks, Free Software.

michaelmrose2• 9 years ago

Windows support is provided by the manufacturer of the laptop. Linux support is provided by a finite supply of free labor.

Instead of whining that not enough volunteers provided free labor to make whatever laptop you already invested in work better perhaps buy machines that are well supported or even better ones which come with Linux.

This approach has worked well for me for 14 years.

peterwwillis3• 9 years ago

Or I can buy a machine which is not only supported, but actually works, with basic features and quality testing baked in. But that's not the point.

The point is that free software devs asking for a thank-you is like a dog owner asking for a thank-you when you don't step in their dog poop on the sidewalk. They weren't walking the dog for my benefit, and I'm not going to thank them for getting to walk around their crap.

bumblebeard• 9 years ago

Hybrid graphics likely depends on a proprietary driver to work so that's probably where the problem lies. As for the RAM, you might just need to expand your swap partition so its the same size in order for hibernation to work.

And really, this has nothing to do with free software; there are even more horror stories like this about Windows and macOS and those are both proprietary systems.

peterwwillis3• 9 years ago

The problem lies in commercial companies not making free software. But since they don't, what you're left with is non-commercial free software, which in practice is worse than the alternative. Free software is broken, and you can fix it. Commercial software works, but you can't fix it.

roberthensing• 9 years ago

Doesn't solve your support problem, but...

Re "revert to a last known good working system state": some distributions provides this capability. For example, in NixOS, your system is similar to a git repository in the sense that every package is identified by a unique hash. You can choose to boot any version of your system configuration until you decide to have it garbage collected.

If you're not interested in the "declarative, reliable, DevOps-friendly"[1] approach of Nix, you may 'emulate' this behavior a bit with the bulkier approach of snapshotting.

If you're into LISPs and FOSS-only systems, you may prefer Guix instead of Nix.

[1] https://nixos.org

throw2016• 9 years ago

It's a huge generational gift, and people should now be concerned about how to sustain the free software movement. There is clearly an ongoing shift from a generation of 'starry eyed' ideologues to hired open source developers.

Some may argue that's moving forward but it's diminished in many ways by losing its core essence and 'motivation' to exist.

Companies can contribute by open source by supporting developers and projects without seeking influence by hiring or acquiring them. But then many don't even bother doing that.

We need to find a way to develop a ecosystem that has sustenance from businesses and especially individuals and yet leaves the developers and projects 'independent'. Leaving it to sort itself out has already led to a sort of centralization and will eventually lead to loss of control and accountability.

RachelF• 9 years ago

The should be thankful, but they do not know. FOSS doesn't spend money on PR.

Few know that free Linux lurks under Android, and OS/X an iOS have large parts of BSD in them.

jhasse3• 9 years ago

free Linux lurks under Android

Not only that, but the GUI is also FOSS: https://source.android.com/

OS/X an iOS have large parts of BSD in them.

I think this gives the wrong impression. The interesting parts of macOS and iOS are GUI and drivers, which are proprietary.

contingencies• 9 years ago

The interesting parts of macOS and iOS are GUI and drivers, which are proprietary.

The best parts of OSX are brew, iTerm2, and FileMerge.

(Edit in reply to below: Yes, that's my point. brew and iTerm2 are FOSS, FileMerge is part of XCode)

atomlib• 9 years ago

I wish it was that attractive to just switch from “expensive and evil proprietary software” as the author suggests.

1. The article claims that Microsoft Office 365 is $100 a year. In reality it's about $70, home license for up to 5 users is $80.

2. The article does not mention that every Office 365 user gets bunch of additional services. For example, a tebibyte of space in Microsoft OneDrive for each user, 60 Skype minutes per month, etc.

3. Each Office 365 user can install Office apps on 3 devices: his phone, tablet, and computer. Office apps are available on Android and iOS as part of the package. $70—$80 a year price tag includes not only Windows apps, they work perfectly fine on smartphones. Personally I make grocery lists in Excel, open them on my phone, fill my shopping cart with items, and track how much I'm going to pay or if I'm eligible for coupons.

4. I'm not aware of any decent OneNote alternatives. I researched it some time ago because I desired to self-host my notes. There are pretty much no comparable open source or free cross-platform apps which can work with notes in cloud or on a remote server from your mobile device. With OneNote all of my notes are available on my mobile devices. I strongly believe that OneNote is one of the best apps Microsoft came up with in recent years.

If you look around, you can see that 1 TiB of cloud storage alone costs $100 (Google Drive) or $120 (Dropbox). Office 365 offers not only that but also quite possibly the best office suite on the market for $70 for 1 or $80 for 5 people.

Note that so far I have not touched the question of quality of software at all — only the most basic functionality and packages. Microsoft Office is the most popular office software package for a reason. My exposure to open-source office packages is limited but here is at least one dealbreaking example. I tried recreating my spreadsheet for tracking caloric intake in LibreOffice Calc. It was extremely painful — among many other features Calc does not even support tables like Excel does.

I use another software package mentioned in the article — Kaspersky. I'm going to assume the author is talking about the package I'm using — Kaspersky Internet Security — since the price is stated to be $40.

Like with Office 365, KIS is not only an antivirus. It's also a firewall, parental control tool with a list of inappropriate websites, an adblocker, etc. It provides quite a lot of functionality, some of which, frankly speaking, should be in Windows itself. For example, KIS can autoupdate software.

Like with Office 365, article does not mention that $40 buys you a license for up to 3 devices. KIS is also available for Android and macOS.

But overall, an antivirus is not necessary in modern Windows system, so you may skip on these $40.

skgoa• 9 years ago

And when you start looking at professional level software (e.g. CAD), very often you will find that there is literally no FOSS alternative in existance. If it exists, it will most likely be a buggy mess that has far fewer features and a horrible interface. LibreOffice is a great example. I tried writing my masters thesis in it and it was a complete disaster. I don't regret going back to office.

jhasse3• 9 years ago

LibreOffice is a great example. I tried writing my masters thesis in it and it was a complete disaster.

I've made similar experiences, especially the crashes were very annoying.

I wrote my bachelor and master thesis with LyX, which is a lot more stable and better than Office if you have lots a formulas: https://www.lyx.org/

markvdb• 9 years ago

And when you start looking at professional level software (e.g. CAD), very often you will find that there is literally no FOSS alternative in existance. If it exists, it will most likely be a buggy mess that has far fewer features and a horrible interface.

We wanted to help FreeCAD[0] grow as a leading FOSS CAD application, to help it reach out to other developers. That is why we invited Yorik van Havre[1], one of its main developers, as a main track speaker to FOSDEM 2015 [2].

I'm not asking you to do something similarly constructive, but... Next time you state your opinion about "professional level FOSS software (eg. CAD)", please think first if it is necessary or even useful to gratuitously throw around negativity. Even if the tools are not useful at all (yet?) for your task, why discourage its users and developers? Chances are, the FOSS app _will_ be useful and even the only option for some.

[0] https://freecad.io [1] https://github.com/yorikvanhavre [2] https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/freecad/

b4ux1t36• 9 years ago

But overall, an antivirus is not necessary in modern Windows system, so you may skip on these $40.

Er. . .no, that's not true. AV and AM are very important to this day. You just don't have to pay any money to get them, between things like AVG, Avast, and MalwareBytes. These aren't Free as in freedom, but they are Free as in beer for very reliable AV.

And on an enterprise network, you're probably going to be pretty well served with an enterprise edition of Symantec Endpoint Protection (or its equivalent elsewhere), which lets enterprise solutions like BlueCoat ProxySG and CAS prevent problems for your users.

AV is good. Don't not install AV just because some of it costs money.

I largely agree with you, but I am a stickler for AV. If you'd like more of an explanation of why it's important, feel free to ask.

notlikethis2• 9 years ago

I used to be fairly neutral regarding AV's. Then I saw all the really stupid and really serious vulnerabilities Tavis Ormandy dug up in pretty much all the AV products, including the Symantec Endpoint Protection (https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-compro...).

The sheer amount of incompetence and neglect displayed by AV vendors has made me strongly question third-party AV's being a net positive.

shmerl• 9 years ago

As a user of Debian, Firefox, LibreOffice and etc. I agree :)

geff82• 9 years ago

I always like to think Free/Open source Software is the only known occurrnce where socialism works. You give 100% of what you have for free as a programmer, but in that very same moment you make everyone, including yourself, richer and more free. As software does not get consumed, everyone's assets rise.

tehlike• 9 years ago

+1. It is liberating to write software for free, and still feel the sense of accomplishment, community and wealth of knowledge.

hueving2• 9 years ago

Socialism isn't the right term because nobody is forced to contribute to any particular project with resources or even use it.

It's an economic activity with first order benefits and positive externalities.

candiodari2• 9 years ago

Exactly this is capitalism at it's finest. Working on open source projects by itself has rewards :

1) you probably use it, so you use it yourself and your own situation gets better.

2) you get the efforts of others in addition to your own because of the open source nature (e.g. your code gets maintained, fixed, reviewed, ...)

3) There are plenty of companies (Google, FB, Red Hat, ...) that will give you a great job because of open source contributions you have made (and more general, reputational benefits)

Enlightened self interest at it's finest.

scarygliders• 9 years ago

Tikhon Jelvis, Lead Data Scientist at Target (2016-present) has a very good answer to "Is free software socialism?" at https://www.quora.com/Is-the-open-source-movement-socialism - I will quote the answer in its entirety for the benefit of this thread...

No. The two are not related in any useful or meaningful ways.

The first thing to note is that there are actually two core ways of thinking about open source software: the "open source" movement and the "free software" movement. While the two work together perfectly well—and most people probably share some of the views from both camps—they are philosophically distinct.

The open source movement is pragmatic at heart: the main idea is that developing software in the open leads to better software. More eyes and more diverse opinions on your codebase is a strength that often overshadows the commercial benefits of keeping software proprietary. This is the camp more often associated with more "permissive" licenses like MIT and BSD, and mirrors the philosophy I've seen at most companies that release and maintain significant open source projects (often based on their own internal tools).

This movement has no parallels to socialism whatsoever. It believes in open source collaboration as a strong model for software development but doesn't opine at all about property rights.

The free software movement, spearheaded by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Richard Stallman, is more ideological at heart. It originally started from the idea that you, as a consumer, have the right to understand and modify the software that runs on your machines. This is codified in the four freedoms that Free Software aims to protect:

* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). * The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). * The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

These freedoms are often enacted with "copyleft" licenses like the GNU Public License (GPL). The idea is that you have the right to read, modify and distribute software under the GPL (including selling it commercially) as long as you distribute it under the same license. You can do more or less whatever you like as long as you provide all your users with the modified source to your software and give them the same rights.

The motivation behind the movement is to protect the rights that you have over your own devices and software, which is not significantly related to socialism at all. If anything, it's a way to strengthen what you can do with your own property!

There is one way you could see the Free Software movement in a way that parallels socialism: it's a collective effort and stands against "intellectual property".

However, this view misses some important details. Unlike socialism, Free Software is not concerned with property and how it is distributed in society; rather, it simply does not view "intellectual property" as property at all. In fact, many people in the movement don't regard "intellectual property" as property at all; instead, they view the term as a misleading way to group together several fundamentally unrelated laws into a single concept.

Richard Stallman wrote an interesting essay on this topic: Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage. His style is not for everyone—he comes off as very certain, almost fanatical, about his views—but it makes the idea eminently clear. The core idea is that copyrights, patents and trademarks are all fundamentally different from each other and fundamentally different from physical property; the term "intellectual property" is misleading because it groups these three disparate concerns together and implies they are variants on physical property.

There is nothing socialist about that view whatsoever. Trying to reform the laws and cultural norms around "intellectual property"—especially when you realize it's fundamentally distinct from other notions of property—is entirely orthogonal to socialism.

Both the Open Source and the Free Software movements are fundamentally unrelated to socialism.

phkahler• 9 years ago

I find your argument that OSS and FLOSS are "fundamentally unrelated to socialism" rather strange. So much so that I had to google definitions of socialism:

1)a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

2)(in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of communism.

Regarding OSS you wrote: "This movement has no parallels to socialism whatsoever. It believes in open source collaboration as a strong model for software development but doesn't opine at all about property rights." That seems to fit the part of definition 1 about means of production quite well. Actually I'm talking about design rather than the traditional means of production you might call replication.

As for Free Software, yes they are against the notion of intellectual property. But it is for pragmatic reasons actually. If you buy/obtain some software under traditional IP rules you are not allowed to modify it. That is in contrast to regular property laws - you can buy a car and modify it in all kinds of ways and resell it.

Where things get interesting is in the means of production in the traditional sense - producing copies. Software has the odd property that it can be replicated at nearly zero cost. In traditional industries from farming to manufacturing, production is a big deal and is where a lot of the costs are. You have resources and then you have utilization of those resources. People like to stake claims on either the resources, the means of production, or when that isn't enough, the design (IP) of the product. In contrast, communism want to take individual ownership of the resources and production away and claim it as community property. Free software also aims to strip that proprietary nature away from software and make it more of a community asset.

It may not be a perfect analogy, but to say it's fundamentally unrelated seems really strange to me.

Boothroid2• 9 years ago

Because what we have now has no socialist elements? Last time I checked the US military was a pretty large part of the economy, and I would hardly class that as a purely capitalist endeavour.

thinkfurther2• 9 years ago

The military shifts a whole lot of tax payer money to private corporations. And as Smedley Butler pointed out, without the impetus of private corporations there'd be a whole lot less war for the benefit of private corporations. From the taxpayer perspective, a bomb dropped into the middle of nowhere is just wasted money, a bomb dropped on people in a war of aggression is money wasted on murder. From the standpoint of the corporation the sold the bomb, both are highly profitable. And that's even before we get into the the spree of fucking countries to allow access to US corporations.

thinkfurther2• 9 years ago

The only known? I guess the problem is that "socialism" means a billion things to people, from "don't be so greedy all the time and help others out" to "specific governments Eastern Europe etc.". But I don't even buy that early Christians were the first example of that, I think exploitation is the invention, not socialism. Anyway, open source software is really just an example of this:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson (13 Aug. 1813)

And if you look at the date you'll notice these thoughts are real old hats :P Doesn't take away from them of course, to the contrary... it's about time we actually implement the wisdom we have. But let's not think any of it is or should be new.

wu-ikkyu4• 9 years ago

I always like to think Free/Open source Software is the only known occurrnce where socialism works. You give 100% of what you have for free as a programmer, but in that very same moment you make everyone, including yourself, richer and more free

Moreso anarcho-socialism, because there is no state violence involved

eeZah7Ux2• 9 years ago

the only known occurrnce You give 100% of what you have for free [...] everyone's assets rise

...same as mathematics and most of sciences, food recipes, spoken languages, traditional music, dance, sport and game tactics...

As well as everything else, for thousands of years, before copyright was invented.

jasonkester• 9 years ago

I like to think of Free Software Developers as rational actors. So while they certainly deserve my gratitude, I disagree that we owe them any other compensation that they didn't specifically ask for.

As the author notes, developers, doctors, lawyers, etc. know their value and charge accordingly. A developer who charges $0 for his work product must, therefore, be making up that value elsewhere. Most major Open Source projects certainly are.

Chrome, Linux, MySQL, and lots of other big names all have corporate backing. Large companies paying people to build software to advance their agenda. Commoditize the Operating System to sell more servers. Control the Browser to keep the rug un-pulled from your web empire. There's really not a lot of pure charity to be found.

True, you do find the occasional artiste working away for no money, living the officially sanctioned stereotype for what an open source developer is supposed to look like. But I tend to hope that he knows the score and is therefore looking out for his own interests.

There are lots of good reasons to develop open source. But I don't consider "charity to big companies" to be one of them.

foldr• 9 years ago

A developer who charges $0 for his work product must, therefore, be making up that value elsewhere._

No, even assuming that they're "rational", they must have expected to make up that value elsewhere. It's entirely possible to write something useful, in the expectation of some amount of praise and recognition, and get nothing but a lot of whining in return for it.

FatalBaboon• 9 years ago

Usually the difference between Free and Open Source also shows in who backs it.

Free Sofware comes from NGOs, whereas Open Source is either corporations looking to make a convoluted buck or developers looking for recognition.

In that regard, Free Software Developers definitely deserve my gratitude.

eeZah7Ux2• 9 years ago

you do find the occasional artiste working away for no money

You cherry-picked corporate-backed projects. Statistics show that unpaid work (without side benefits like resume building) is far from "occasional".

denisehilton• 9 years ago

People often underestimate the effort and motivation behind open source software. They download it and never come back again. We should be thankful to those developers who are working just to facilitate us without any monetary benefits. We should always donate even if it's $1.

twii• 9 years ago

I hope crypto currencies will eventually enable people and companies to more easily donate with micro payments to free software developers without the need for the greedy/stealing paypal or other banks.

I have dozens of free/open-source projects that make me 0 dollars while some of them are being used quite a bit. I currently cannot find spare time to improve on those projects because I need to work for a company to pay the bills..

I would love to have some income out of it, but I refuse to use paypal. First they take a proportional part of the sum as fee, second they take another proportional part by making up their own exchange rates for converting currencies. I refuse to support those companies and I truly hope crypto currencies will nullify them.

aerique• 9 years ago

Obligatory post asking for links to your projects.

(But I truly am curious.)

firmgently• 9 years ago

I love that open source exists and am very grateful that people have given their time to make stuff that I get so much pleasure out of using for free. I feel like the article suggests that programmers are the only people who ever produce work on a voluntary basis though.

"If you ask an engineer, a doctor, a professor, a teacher or a farmer to give you one of the products they do for free, probably they will just refuse. You won’t find a professor working full time in a university for free. You won’t find a civil engineer working on building houses for free. You won’t find a farmer giving you vegetables for free."

If you ask Adobe to give you Photoshop or someone who makes a piece of $10 software to give it to you for free they will probably refuse. There's a difference between offering something voluntarily and offering something for sale then being asked to provide it for free. Engineers do sometimes work for free eg. on charity projects as do many other types of business. Even ad agencies I've worked at did a certain number of free projects for charity. A farmer does regularly give me vegetables for free. I've made software for free but I've also spent a lot of time making props, art and other things for free. A friend runs a small charity, she works long full-time hours unpaid and often has trouble getting her own bills paid. I've also known more than a few selfish coders...

I'm certainly not arguing against the premise of being thankful for free software (thank you programmers - I really mean that, I've sent messages of gratitude to devs in the past and am reminding myself to do it more in future) but let's not start thinking that software developers are inherently better human beings than anyone else. Feels a bit myopic :)

Latty• 9 years ago

Maybe a more charitable reading would be that programmers are positioned to give away their work in a way that other professionals can't necessarily do.

tokai• 9 years ago

Doctors do provide their services for free. Doctors without Borders is a prime example of this. Professors give research, their primary product, away for free as well (Other actors do still profit from their work though. Movements such as Open Access tries to address this problem).

thingamarobert2• 9 years ago

As much as the introduction and the first two sections motivate the post, I think the last "Don't Just Feel Pleasure, Show It" section is the one that contains the main take-home message in my opinion. If one has benefited by using FOSS, one must acknowledge that it cannot get better and magically sustain itself without support from those who use it or appreciate the principles underlying the movement. The level of transparency and freedom of choice that FOSS offers to users, the DIY ethic and a sense of community it encourages is indeed something to be grateful for, and deserves a generous (subjective) contribution!

If one does not contribute directly by submitting bugs or developing FOSS itself, supporting organisations such as...

* The Free Software Foundation (http://fsf.org)

* Software in the Public Interest (http://www.spi-inc.org)

* Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org)

* Let's Encrypt (http://letsencrypt.org)

... I believe can go a long way. I'm sure there are more - when one feels grateful for the service the software has rendered them, one just needs to make the effort to find out who has written the software and whether there's a "Donate" button somewhere through which this can be expressed, however small the actual amount.

tajen• 9 years ago

- Is LE worth contributing for, given it's a joint Google initiative?

- FOSS really need to send out proper invoices, donations are a corporate risk and I have to spend time to my accountant to justify the necessity of donations, every year.

thingamarobert2• 9 years ago

I didn't realise that LE was a Google initiative. I know that it's supported by the Chrome project (and thus Google), but also by Mozilla, EFF and a lot of other supporters. Could you please point me to any article that discusses its Google affiliation? Thanks!

scandox2• 9 years ago

Inspired by this I went over to donate money to Arch Linux, since I've just been getting nothing but joy from using it for the last 2 years.

They use Click2Pledge which, frankly, is a UX which is a tad frightening, but I'm not a snob so I carry on.

And then I find that of all the countries in the world they seem to have left Ireland out (Eire, Republic of Ireland, no, nothing). I mean they have the Isle of Man - but not Ireland. So, I cannot complete their payment form.

So what all these guys need is a separate FOSS organisation exclusively dedicated to fund-raising.

Asooka2• 9 years ago

So what all these guys need is a separate FOSS organisation exclusively dedicated to fund-raising.

I'm afraid that such an organisation will gradually be taken over by people looking to make money more than to help open-source software, and in the end we'll end up worse off than not having anything, because most donations to that organisation will get used for "internal expenses".

marrs• 9 years ago

I think this attitude is holding FOSS back. The most successful projects are the ones that are funded: Linux, Blender, and Ubuntu to name 3. On the other hand we have projects like Gimp, which steadily makes excellent progress and gets better with every release, but the rate of change is glacial because the team are all working on it in their spare time.

That's not to say that the motivation of profit can't also be corrupting. Gnome 3.0 and the associated libs was a complete disaster IMO, and a lot of the stupidity came IMO from a fear that Windows Vista would leave the Linux desktop behind, but the net gain of monetary investment is clear to me.

The silly thing is, I'd much rather pay for software that is free than software that is proprietary. I won't use Adobe Suite on principle, especially now that it is subscription only, but I'd pay a subscription to Gimp in a heartbeat. I may not be in the majority, but I'm sure there are enough of us that we would generate enough income to make the difference.

s0l1dsnak3123• 9 years ago

I just donated to Arch after reading your comment as I've been using Arch for well over 7 years now, and it's by far my favourite Linux distribution.

lin_lin• 9 years ago

Haha! I didn't believe you about them leaving Ireland so tried it for myself and sure enough you're right! Pathetic. I see San Marino, Vatican City and Monaco et al are represented... guess, they're big players.

VLM• 9 years ago

Careful with re-invention. I was going to suggest SPI, but funny enough they're already on the list at:

https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/

I see the arch linux web page links to "click to pledge" service as reported, which apparently is extremely limited in legal coverage area, but the SPI Inc web page for arch links to a paypal link, and paypal seems to "work" in most countries on the planet.

Back when it took 5000 bitcoins to buy a pizza and my 486 software miner was generating about 100 coins per week, I donated 5 BTC to the FSF who promptly wanted no part of the accounting and legal problems so they got rid of my 5 BTC. At the time that 5 BTC was worth like 50 cents but now would fund somewhere around 2 or 3 gradstudent-years of development, Oh Well. Anyway BTC should be a viable transfer mechanism.

scandox2• 9 years ago

Oh that's great. I'll do it there now. They really should link straight to that page instead of the Click2Pledge...

fghtr• 9 years ago

So what all these guys need is a separate FOSS organisation exclusively dedicated to fund-raising.

Not sure if totally FOSS, but non-commercial and tranparent: https://opencollective.com/

amelius• 9 years ago

It would be nice if big repository services such as Github offered a simple way to donate.

Windson• 9 years ago

This is why I built www.thankyouopensource.com At least you can write a thank you note to the maintainer.

Sir_Cmpwn• 9 years ago

I love the list of ways you can help at the bottom - each of these is tremendously valuable but most people think "well, I can't help if I can't code". Another thing that's super helpful: volunteer to triage tickets on the bug tracker.

azuajef• 9 years ago

Also on being thankful for Free (Scientific) Software Developers: https://stactivist.com/2016/12/10/code-of-gratitude/

Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

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