The open source developers should unionize against the large corporations not paying them. A virtual picket line, and collective bargaining
Lots of open source developers are working for those same companies and getting paid to work on open source code.
I don’t have numbers in front of me, but I think only a slim minority of contributors make money off their work. And those that do make money often can only do so because of the earlier, unpaid, work by others which caused the projects to be valued and widely used
Related blog post I saw posted yesterday goes into a lot of depth on exactly what you’re talking about.
It does not. It pledges source-available software as a better alternative to FOSS. So it by definition is not about FOSS devs. (I’ve only read part of the article because I oppose the opinions they share, so maybe it talks about FOSS devs in the part I have not read.)
I noticed them talking about one of their softwares being licensed under FSL, not having heard of it, I looked it up and…
They kinda lost me at
What about AGPLv3 though? AGPLv3 is not permissive enough.
However, in the original article, this section definitely had me thinking. I thoroughly agree with the author’s stance on this, and I wonder if their alternatives will actually solve the problem.
As the former VP of Community at Discourse (GPLv2) I spent half a decade participating in the making of certifiably Free, Open Source Software that got put to use by literal nazis to amplify their organized hate, and all we had to say for ourselves was “well, the license says free for everyone”.
It makes me think of “”“Truth”" Social" using Mastodon code, and illegally at that. I guess… at a certain point if a bad actor is gonna be bad… Will a license stop them? I’m unconvinced that AGPL isn’t enough, but I could still be won over.
So long as my freedoms as a regular individual are maintained with the software that I use and love (my primary concern is some megacorp enshittifier being able to just take the stuff I use on the daily) then I’m open to new licensing schemes. I could be won over.
I’m not very educated on the Fair Source stuff but the idea is that you create source available software which will after some time become Open Source. So I guess their idea is that if you use AGPL, people cannot do that. AGPL means nobody else can make Fair Source software from your work. AGPL is a good license, it just does not work with their
[new software] -> [source available] -> [FOSS after a while] -> [new software made from the now FOSS software]loop.
FLOSS is dumb because it’s too good for us. I haven’t paid for software in ten years. And I could use this great stuff to build bad stuff.
That’s why I refuse to use Linux. It enables a front end of tech stacks for morons to profit from, and sell ideas like state surveillance, AI worker displacement, and other boogey monster tech to audiences gooning for tech to profit from, instead of honoring the purity of open source and what it enables creative young folk to do with it.
FLOSS didn’t radicalize me to create, it radicalized me about worker rights.
Time for OnlyFloss
The FOSS vtuber community is not far from that
The main problem is, that BigTech abuses the inner fire of Open Source developers. They monetize it, but don’t send money to the makers… They send the money to their shareholders.
Are you sure? Because based on the internet armchair developers I see around, open source developers are an inexhaustible source of unending miracles that work for free and are fueled by incoherent, conflicting, entitled demands from 14 year olds.
open source developers are an inexhaustible source of unending miracles that work for free and are fueled by incoherent, conflicting, entitled demands from 14 year olds.
Ah, I see you’re a Bazzite user
e: (No offense to the Bazzite user, I’m sure you’re a special little guy and not at all a problem.)
Dark humor becomes a coping mechanism. “Fix it, fork it, f*ck off” becomes the phrase of choice.
oooo, I like that.
The motivational component hits first. Developers lose the ability to push through tasks.
Eh… they lose the motivation to fix issues for free that don’t affect them. Crazy, I know.
That’s because FOSS is not paid. Imagine all distros minimum price of 1$
Lots of FOSS developers are paid by companies.
If that were the case I’d have spent thousands on Linux by now T.T
I understand that you want money, but if I created FOSS applications, I would do it for fun.
So do they. But then the tiny tool they built for fun keeps expanding as they add features until it’s useful, then really useful. And some eventually become a small, ignored, absolutely critical components in software used by millions. Too small or unsexy to get any money, but user errors or scammers or AI slop or bugs or feature requests lead to enormous volumes of email, comments, forum posts, vitriol, pressure, stress, angst, burnout, depression.
FOSS works on the premise of an angry engineer, that someone finally got pissed off about a problem enough to write a solution.
This so tracks.
All we need is for the communist government to say we like what you’re trying to do. Here’s an allowance for expenses!
This is purely subjective and depends on whom you’re talking to. While I’ve had series of burn out stages with free software development and maintenance, I only distanced myself from writing code but not the community altogether. I also only work for orgs that are run by volunteers not by companies so theres that. If you work on projects that are led by a company, you’ll always feel like you’re being used because there’s no sense of belonging.
Understandable. I’m not a FOSS dev but if I’d be one then I wouldn’t be.
I feel like there is scope for a Patreon type thing that allows you to donate a fixed amount but choose the projects it goes to so it gets split between them. So I can donate €20/month and choose projects A, B, C and G so they all get €5 each
Liberapay is similar to this, and very well established. Highly recommend checking it out!
i’ve used liberapay to support lemmy and now that i know it can do this, i’m going to see if it can do the other project work i also use heavily; thanks for making me aware.
Great! Thought it’d be wild that no one else thought of this
I can think of nothing worse than having your pet project adopted by BigTech and being expected to fix bugs free of charge. I’m not even sure what the solution to that would be other than walking away from it. Thankfully, my biggest project (DF-SHOW) is niche enough to be just a personal project, but a common enough concept (a TUI file manager) that there are plenty of other, more well established, solutions available.
I wrote it for myself, but figured others can benefit from it.
Really good points there.
After seeing one of my team burnout (and I’m feeling it too), the indicators mentioned are real.
Treat them well (and pay them, regularly).
