Load-Bearing Internet People

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8383

by ingve • 7 years ago

66 60 7 years ago

esr.ibiblio.org

gravypod• 7 years ago

I'm also pretty sure that if these incentives were in place we would see a lot of engineers switch to these really interesting tasks. No one wants to shovel http requests back and forth, they want to build things. I think a lot of internet, and software, infrastructure is more compelling work than what most high level engineers work on.

thrwayxyz3• 7 years ago

It is but the number of people who can understand it's value is inversely proportional to the interest of the work. I had to setup a TAI server for a trading company I worked in because no other time mechanism could record the trades happening reliably without duplicates. I would have been interested in making it a universal service. It would take me an hour long presentation to explain to other programmers with a physics background why this was absolutely essential. I can't imagine ever convincing a suit as to why they should pay for it.

nitrogen• 7 years ago

I can't imagine ever convincing a suit as to why they should pay for it.

...no other time mechanism could record the trades happening reliably without duplicates.

Start with the core value added, describe the world with and without in cost/benefit terms, and work from there.

NickBusey• 7 years ago

Personally I think the problem with a lot of these kind of Patreon setups is they are generally pitched as "I once wrote some very useful software, and sometimes I maintain it."

While that's great and all, for me at least it doesn't justify why I should send them money every month.

I think the Open Source model needs to evolve, and if these people want monthly income, they should be "showing their work" a lot more. Put out a regular (weekly or more often) YouTube or blog series. Maybe stream your work on Twitch (like I do :) ). Provide some active community involvement. Then I would be far more inclined to donate to someone, rather than having to wonder all the time if I'm paying for them to work on this stuff, or if I'm paying them so they can go on an extra vacation next year for work they completed years ago and have mostly ignored since then.

cs02rm02• 7 years ago

I had similar thoughts about how they could use YouTube or something equivalent to open access a little in return. Grow the cake and all that.

I then had quick Google and it seems a few years back some were seeing a conflict between ESR's Internet Civil Engineering Institute and something called the Core Infrastructure Initiative[1] which it seems is pulling in millions.

Perhaps it just lost out.

[1] https://www.coreinfrastructure.org

thrwayxyz3• 7 years ago

These people are not entertainers. Demand they post their work on YouTube makes as much sense as demanding architects use smoke signals to communicate their progress.

justin662• 7 years ago

This is morally equivalent to the pointy headed boss who demands people work from the office because work that is not done in his field of view does not exist.

erikpukinskis5• 7 years ago

Not really. The boss is being picky while getting paid, whereas OP is offering a donation while being picky. Pretty different from a moral standpoint.

I would say it’s morally equivalent to not buying a product because they haven’t updated their blog in a long time and you can’t tell if the company is still active.

jancsika• 7 years ago

I think the Open Source model needs to evolve, and if these people want monthly income, they should be "showing their work" a lot more.

I think there should be a "like" button on Facebook so that users can communicate more positive vibes on the internet. Maybe even make it easy to "like" things by embedding some code on web pages so that the positive vibes spread to the web as a whole.

In both cases it seems we're ignoring important and obvious consequences of the concept between the quote marks.

Edit: clarification

solarkraft• 7 years ago

There are some wonderful developers on Patreon. I tend to support those who explain their work, because it showcases the work and provides extra value. Granted, that extra value also means extra work. But I think it's more than worth it because more people will realize the value of one's work.

wbl2• 7 years ago

Some of the examples are people who are actively harmful. Harlan Stern is the reason NTP WG is so dysfunctional as he insists that his implementation and his private plans are more important then what everyone else wants, and the WG exists to ratify his plans.

toyg• 7 years ago

Well, it is ESR speaking...

dfrage3• 7 years ago

Who just happens to be the tech lead to a partial answer to this problem: http://ntpsec.org/ Which implicitly criticizes the reference implementation.

harryh• 7 years ago

The idea that ESR is a LBIP is laughable. Do not give this horrible person your hard earned money.

_vertigo• 7 years ago

I’m out of the loop, why do you say he’s a horrible person?

KirinDave2• 7 years ago

It's sort of out of scope so let's not dwell on his slow descent into predictably cantankerous obscurity. You can descend into his blogs, sword and torch in hand, ready to do ideological combat with the horrors from beyond the stars that lurk there on your own time.

The key idea: that he is an ILBP (or has been in 10 years) is absurd. He is not, and he claims he's not hurting for money.

neilk• 7 years ago

ESR has done, and apparently continues to do, many useful things for open source. But his various personality disorders have reset that karma back to zero, or possibly put him in negative territory.

It started early... https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html

And here is a generally well-sourced summary: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond

praptak• 7 years ago

What software for a critical internet service or a library does ESR maintain? I checked his Wikipedia entry and have not found anything.

cromulent• 7 years ago

I asked the same question and dfrage gave a great answer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20195743

plorkyeran• 7 years ago

ESR's whole life has been spent pointing at people who actually do important things and saying "I'm with them", and he's done it so much that people assume that it must be true.

QuadrupleA• 7 years ago

In spite of all its amazing aspects, one obvious drawback of the open source movement is that it devalues a lot of stuff that you could once build a business around and support a lot of people making a living. Category after category of software businesses have declined in the face of great free alternatives - OS's, languages and compilers, server software, databases.

Tears for Larry Ellison aside, I do feel social systems / economies work best when there's a mutual exchange of value, a win-win rather than a win-lose, and the classic simple payment in exchange for software has a certain fairness and sanity to it. E.g. the iOS app store was a lot nicer and high quality before ad-supported / in-app purchases became the norm. Anyway something like ESR proposes here seems promising.

I'm not an open source maintainer myself (except for my magnum opus https://github.com/QuadrupleA/private-secure-sharing-buttons) but seems like a lot of important-project maintainers find themselves in a demanding position with little reward besides ego-stroking or future promise of job opportunities to make money elsewhere.

trevyn• 7 years ago

The value of everything approaching zero is a signal of a post-scarcity world, which seems like a good thing, even if it requires some adjustment.

jackyinger• 7 years ago

If the useful open source software development work was not scarce these maintainers would certainly not be under immense pressure.

To boot, the entire idea of post scarcity is preposterous. Until the theorized heat death of the universe, there will always be uneven distribution of resources and some things that are better than others.

mattmanser• 7 years ago

I think it's more because there's a lot of software that's too cheap to charge for, but has too many edge cases for the average programmer to get right.

Logging is a perfect example, server-side logs are all handled by free frameworks (too cheap to charge for, but everyone needs it), but client-side is often handled by companies (just complex enough to make money on).

The former is often handled by LBIPs like Eric, where-as the latter is either written in house (usually badly) or you get something like Sentry.

erikpukinskis5• 7 years ago

I do feel social systems / economies work best when there's a mutual exchange of value

That’s too broad of a claim to possibly be true. Many things are required for smoothly running economies, and sometimes a ledger is the problem and sometimes it’s the solution.

0815test3• 7 years ago

sometimes a ledger is the problem and sometimes it’s the solution.

And sometimes it's the solution in search of a problem cough cough blockchain cough cough

jandrewrogers3• 7 years ago

A key nuance is that open source has largely only devalued software that any competent software engineer could write. In this sense, open source replaces software that was essentially selling labor rather than expertise. A developer always has the option to write this software themselves if they don't want to pay for it. The price of a product of undifferentiated labor will converge on the cost of that labor in a well-functioning market, which in the case of open source is effectively zero.

On the other hand, software that requires rare and difficult to acquire expertise -- software development where competence is insufficient -- faces little threat from open source in practice. This creates two-tier markets that differentiate on the replicability of capability. Products that are replicable by any software developer eventually will be in open source. But there are still large gaps in capabilities between closed and open source in some markets because the average software developer has no obvious way to replicate those capabilities on a purely technical level.

In essence, you can only make money if you are doing hardcore R&D. This strongly incentivizes the creation of new capabilities but also disincentivizes publication of CS research.

You see this in markets like databases, where open source has captured almost the entire market for undifferentiated capabilities, and there is a lucrative high-end market with unique product capabilities that don't exist in open source or CS literature. The trend toward treating CS research as trade secrets, originally started because algorithm patents were impractical to enforce, turned out to be effective at maintaining profitability in high-end software products if open source can't replicate capability.

Tomte• 7 years ago

A key nuance is that open source has largely only devalued software that any competent software engineer could write

I don't think so. Take GCC or Clang, for example. While I have taken a lot of compiler courses at university, I couldn't build a production compiler for a real language, without dedicating a decade of my life or so to it.

What Open Source projects really bring to the table is massive manpower over decades. Those projects that become popular, at least. And then no smaller dev shop (or single developer except Fabrice Bellard and a handful others) can possibly compete.

wolf550e• 7 years ago

1. libsodium is opensource and better than any closed source replacement

2. no single expert can ever recreate linux or clang or the hotspot jvm or many other things, just because of their size.

icebraining• 7 years ago

(Without getting into the discussion of who is an LBIP or not)

Where there’s no profit stream, markets are not going to directly solve this problem.

The market is a process of matching suppliers with consumers, and contrary to the previous statement, it has solved the problem, by finding a very cheap supplier: you.

LBIP are admirable selfless people, but I think this attitude is as misguided as a parent doing their kid's homework for them. The rest of us won't care to find a better solution until we start feeling the pressure, and we won't feel it while the load is being born by them. And the author is essentially asking regular individuals to throw a few tips to the LBIPs, so that the current broken model can be maintained. I'm not sure we wouldn't be better off letting it fail.

jauer• 7 years ago

No mention of a org that's funding things that are actually "internet load bearing": https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/grants/

Also, this might be better described as Load-Bearing Individual Participants. If only to avoid distraction around what counts as internet-critical.

Beyond funding, what happens when they get burned out or take a vacation? Walls have many bricks. What makes these people unique? I'd expect anyone in a senior position to be working on growing people to help share the load, open source or corporate. There's only so much you can do by your self.

tptacek8• 7 years ago

Or, you know, he could just get a job like everyone else does, including virtually everyone who actually does maintain critical internet infrastructure.

Meanwhile, for those keeping score at home, a quick recap of the ways in which Raymond, esteemed author of fetchmail and maintainer of gpsd, has referred to himself:

* A "load-bearing Internet person"

* "one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work"

* "one of the half-dozen or so most influential people" in open source, "in fact, a lot of people would put me among the top three".

* Hisham ibn-Sindbad (the Black Wazir) in Arabian Nights

* Someone you could reasonably infer is "the most famous programmer in the world" (but Knuth doesn't count because he's not famous outside of CS, nor is Bill Gates because he's not famous as a programmer, nor is Kevin Mitnick or Aaron Swartz).

* A member of a "small cadre of old hands" like Vint Cerf and Dave Taht with "the specialized technical knowledge required for Internet disruption on a massive scale".

* A person "creating the computer code that makes your digital world work"; "every time you use a Web browser, locate yourself on Google Maps, draw money from an ATM, or play on a game console, you rely on computer code I wrote and gave away."

pvg2• 7 years ago

There's a succinct summary of his position in the classical literature:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9aM_dT5VMI&t=182

Load-Bearing Internet People

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