Solving the Maker-Taker Problem

https://dri.es/solving-the-maker-taker-problem

by geerlingguy • 2 years ago

81 81 2 years ago

bruce511• 2 years ago

This is a problem unique to Open Source because the root problem itself is baked into OSS and Free Software.

The very foundation of Free Software is the idea that a user can do whatever they like, are given the source code, and pass those freedoms on to their users. There are no protections offered to the developer, and that is not a bug it's the explicit point of the model.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this model. But the model is what it is.

Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows.

Drupal has created a parallel organisation which monitors and rewards participation. This doesn't "solve" the problem, it just adds a commercial and administrative layer.

Proprietary software solved the problem by not being Open Source. Others have adopted a "source available" license, which may come with restrictions.

In other words, lots of people have solved the problem simply by not being "open source" (not necessarily by closing the source, but rather by restricting usage.)

Word Press are picking a fight with a user, who is using it exactly as they licensed it.

If Word Press don't like the rules of the game then they can change the rules. That is 100% under their control. But don't use the "common rule book" then complain when the other team plays to the rules.

roenxi2• 2 years ago

Although I agree with what you say, that seems to be mischaricterising the blog post - he is talking about the community rather than the software.

It is a bit like free speech and ideologies like communism. Do I support the right of people to spread communist messages? Yes. Do I support them in doing so? No. Indeed, I would pick a fight with them on the subject - it just happens that suppressing them by censorship is a bad strategy. Similarly, the Drupal Association seems to be supporting the general freedom of all software users but the people it actually supports is a much smaller group.

The specifics might not work, but building a community isn't related to the license of a piece of software.

mcmcmc• 2 years ago

So you would physically fight someone over political speech? That doesn’t seem to respect their right to it. Curious why you’d choose to harp on communist ideology when there are real live Nazis again.

senko• 2 years ago

They can't change the rules of the game because WordPress itself is a fork. [0]

This is GPL working exactly as it's designed to do, ensuring whoever forks the software must allow others to do the same.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress

okanat• 2 years ago

If the majority of the code and functionality is written by WordPress, Having a little GPL component in there will not affect them to change the license. GPL's idea of infecting copyright with small libraries is a convention. I don't think it will hold in an actual court that will test who wrote what at what degree of substance.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

More people should try splitting the difference with source available licenses that turn into GPL after a year. The point of open source was to change the balance of power from developer to user, it was not an economic system. Theres plenty of room in the middle to balance interests without resorting to predatory proprietary licenses.

The only workable way to fund software development is for users to pay. The idea is that if the user, after some time, can take the source to a new development team then both parties are invested in continuing the relationship in a stable way unlike proprietary licenses where the incentive is to squeeze to the users limit. It also solves the abandonware issue.

Terretta2• 2 years ago

Word Press is unhappy that WP Engine is using the software exactly as the license allows.

Maybe, but they seem to be basing their legal argument on trademarks, that WPE is using the same WordPress and WooCommerce labels as the labels on the primary maintainer's services based on the upstream code base, when, according to them, the downstream forks of pieces of this are not the same service and WPE doesn't have rights to that trade dress.

In addition to the methods you talk about, trademarks are another method of "solving the problem".

o11c• 2 years ago

Two immediate thoughts on this:

* There's nothing wrong per se with being a Taker - (assuming a broad definition of "profit") the vast majority of individual users certainly fall into this category. The problem is only when the Taker's actions harm the Maker ecosystem.

* Regarding a credit system, one problem that jumps out at me is - how do you quantify work on a plugin? Do you attempt to scale by what fraction of users uses that plugin? What about a plugin that's widely used, but many of its users are customers of your hosting company?

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

how do you quantify work on a plugin

There's also the fact that the majority of big wordpress plugins are "freemium", with most features locked behind a paywall, that includes Automattic's own plugins like jetpack.

kuratkull• 2 years ago

I don't really understand the premise of these types of write-ups — the software has a license, and people and companies use it accordingly. I understand most core software was started long ago as a one-person project and given a FOSS license. Due to the license, it grew from the work of hundreds or thousands who contributed, but the license no longer serves the authors' worldview. It seems to me all the contributors implicitly approve of this situation, as they contribute labor while knowing what the license is.

tgsovlerkhgsel3• 2 years ago

I think the article clearly states the problem: It encourages contributors to stop contributing and become "takers", and once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies. A classic tragedy of the commons.

blitzar2• 2 years ago

once there are not enough makers, the product and entire ecosystem dies

Once there are not enough makers, willing to license products to corporations for free, the corporations either have to write their own software or die.

A classic tragedy of the billionaires.

feoren• 2 years ago

A classic tragedy of the commons.

Except software is infinitely reproducible once written. There's no tragedy of the commons if the commons' resources are infinte.

"But code needs to constantly change and update all the time! Who's going to do that!?" -- well, maybe that's the problem. Maybe if we want to make a real, lasting contribution to OSS, without being stuck maintaining it forever, we should focus on making software that doesn't have to change. Code is basically math, and we get lots of use out of polynomials and complex numbers and Galois theory without anyone actively "maintaining" them. Galois died in 1832!

Maybe the software we're writing is trying to do too much; maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?

keybored2• 2 years ago

The “tragedy” as commonly interpreted is so wrong-headed and ill-framed. The problem at the heart of it was always the intermingling of private interests and common goods. The biggest problem with OSS is exactly that: private corporations can take those commons and get rich based on them.

So what is the tragedy? Really? It’s the tragedy of private interests. But it’s of course not named that because Economists championed The Problem. In turn we have to pretend that The Commons have a problem. Because Private Interests are axiomatic and are not to be questioned.

jmull• 2 years ago

It's definitely not a tragedy of the commons problem. Open source doesn't get used up by more people using it.

Takers actually have an inherent interest in supporting the open source software they use, in direct proportion to the long-term value they derive from it.

You actually need some countervailing force to have significant takers. E.g, with Wordpress I think there's an acrimonious and competitive relationship between the for-profit company controlling the open source project and one of the big for-profit users of the project.

The tragedy for OSS here is that an OSS project is being used as a lever in a struggle between business competitors over who gets the dollars. (I suspect WordPress was always designed and intended to support a commercial enterprise, though, so this kind thing was probably always going to be part of it.)

echoangle• 2 years ago

Does this really solve the problem? The article doesn’t really provide statistics, but why would WP Engine suddenly increase contributions to get listed on the WordPress homepage? Is that an important marketing tool for them?

tgsovlerkhgsel3• 2 years ago

Some Drupal users only contracting with contributors likely does solve a lot of the problem. How they made that happen, I don't know.

The marketing surely also helps, not sure how relevant it is for WP Engine though and how willing WordPress would be to do that given the very direct competition with Automattic.

blitzar2• 2 years ago

It's the software developer equivalent of - I will make a post on my Instagram (50,000 followers) if you give me a free holiday - "influencer" request.

patcon• 2 years ago

Yeah, it really requires a whole specific culture of the community, which Wordpress did not build over the decades, and Drupal did. It's not a system, but a long culture-bending process to implement this to full effect

Drupal best this drum every conference and summit for decades

tgsovlerkhgsel3• 2 years ago

This is the most amazing part for me:

Drupal users like Pfizer and the State of Georgia only allow Makers to apply in their vendor selection process.

I wonder how they managed to convince companies to add such a requirement, but it's amazing!

dmurray• 2 years ago

I could imagine a checkbox with something like "participates in the development of the Software" as a criterion for selecting vendors. I'm amazed they got it to be an absolute for a government body, I think it likely would not be legal in Europe.

kazinator2• 2 years ago

It's pretty dirty. Yikes.

pdimitar3• 2 years ago

This all stems from people of certain backgrounds expecting everyone to be a good citizen, more or less.

If your intentions are not clearly spelled out somewhere, then somebody is absolutely going to use your thing in a way that you did not intend.

What complicates matters even further is that the original license reflected some youthful idealism and optimism. In the meantime the maintainer(s) worldview evolved but they forgot to encode that in a new license. Pretty classic mistake, it seems.

Less idealism and more formalities solve that problem. Mostly. Though good luck suing the big companies if they violate the license.

Liftyee• 2 years ago

"Certain backgrounds"? Any particular examples?

pdimitar3• 2 years ago

Well I am not a sociologist or a professional psychologist, I am sharing what I've seen many times is all. But let's just say: somewhat privileged white Western men. They seem to think everyone operates on goodwill.

I am a white guy, though from Eastern Europe. Happily most of us suffer no illusions about the benevolence of the world at large.

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

The title made me think this was about market makers and takers.

kragen4• 2 years ago

this is not a new problem; peter deutsch was very annoyed in the 90s about linux distributions distributing outdated, and often modified, copies of ghostscript, whose users would then complain to him about their bugs. compounding the problem in his case: virtually nobody else was capable of contributing third-party code that was up to his quality standards; for context, he'd written i think the second or third implementation of lisp, in assembly language, when he was 15, some 30 years earlier, and hadn't stopped honing his craft since then, for example inventing jit compilers

ultimately i think the answer is to limit your interactions with the takers; some of them may become makers later, often of different free software than yours†, but most of them won't. they may provide useful feedback (bug reports, feature requests, etc.) but most of them will not. what's important is preventing them from overrunning spaces where the makers are collaborating (and especially harassing makers into quitting), and maybe to give them a path toward growing into makers, if they are so inclined. dries's system seems like a gentle, probably sufficient way to do that

______

† the contributors to vim mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to gcc, and the gcc maintainers mostly don't contribute code or bug reports to vim, but they each benefit from the others' work. similarly, many linux distributors eventually became important indirect contributors to ghostscript development, even though at first peter wasn't using linux, and i think even today very little of the code is contributed by outsiders

languagehacker2• 2 years ago

There's some cognitive dissonance to me about using Ayn Rand's words about open-source efforts. What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good". That is, if you're doing what you're doing to make the world a better place, you wouldn't be so incentivized to keep score about who's benefiting more.

I don't disagree with the author's ideas about how to create an incentive structure that finds alternate means of benefiting those who have gone out of their way to contribute. I just think framing it the way he did comes across as a little pecuniary.

Chyzwar• 2 years ago

Only rich people can think in terms of public good. Rest of us pheasants needs to put food on the table.

There is difference between childless google employee maintaining open source library as side hustle and someone running company building Drupal sites for a living in India.

sdenton4• 2 years ago

And worse, we pheasants are in constant danger of being eaten by starving peasants.

languagehacker2• 2 years ago

childless Google employee

yikes

kragen4• 2 years ago

as a poor person, i greatly appreciate public goods such as the public park down the street, the sidewalks that take me there, the public order that kept me from getting stabbed the last time i was successfully robbed, wikipedia, linux, firefox, and library genesis

i contribute to them by, among other things, not littering in the park, editing wikipedia, and publishing my software as free software

Terretta2• 2 years ago

What seems to be missing from both forms of discourse is this nagging term "public good".

The term is in the article:

Our approach stems from a key insight, also explained in my Makers and Takers blog post: customers are a "common good" for an open source project, not a "public good".

zahlman2• 2 years ago

This seems far wordier than necessary for the point it's making, and reads to me as AI-generated or at least assisted.

kazinator2• 2 years ago

I don't see this issue at all. I put a BSD license on it so you can do whatever you want. Get rich with it; steer missiles at civilian targets with it; whatever.

Building a business with the help of someone else's open source isn't some zero effort, turn-key event. Those people still hustle and take risks.

beefman• 2 years ago

This problem has an established name and is widely studied in economics and mechanism design: the free-rider problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

Solving the Maker-Taker Problem

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