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Open Source Developers Are Exhausted, Unpaid, and Ready to Walk Away (itsfoss.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/49194514

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[–] 25 points 10 months ago (24 children)

Big question is: how many of us are funding foss projects?

It isn't difficult, and with how popular some are, it wouldn't be long before the projects could hire one or more full time devs at good rates.

I support a few big projects I use every month through liberapay.

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  • [–] 39 points 10 months ago (15 children)

    I think the bigger question is how many corporations are supporting foss projects? I'm sure a lot of us contribute a bit here and there if we can and I'm sure it makes a difference - but if some of these corporations, making billions of dollars profit, contribute just a tiny fraction of their wealth it could make a huge difference.

    It's the same argument as recycling, turning off lights, walking instead of driving etc. etc. - yes there are 8 billion of us and if we all do it, it will make a difference, but the difference we make is still not significant compared to corporate greed.

    We are being gaslit to accept yet another scenario where we socialize the cost and privatize the profit.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Big question or not, we can only control ourselves.

    Everyone always stares at other people's resources and imagine how great it would be if those resources were used how we like, but at the end of the day, we control our resources.

    So is it a big question if it doesn't really matter because we can't do anything about it?

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  • [+] -13 points 10 months ago (12 children)

    A corporation has no obligations towards foss projects, no different to any individual being made to fund them.

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  • [–] 23 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    This isn't true, a lot of corporations use and benefit from the foss and they should be supporting those projects.

    They should also be supporting projects that could replace the applications that they spend millions on each year. When your CIO says that they are using 'whatever corpo system' because a viable open source project doesn't exist, they should start funding the non-viable projects so they can become viable.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    The problem is, I feel like more recent MBA lessons tell people that the "rising tide that lifts all ships" is a business death sentence, for reasons unexplained. Many of them now would rather sink the whole ocean if they believe that their business will sink a little bit less.

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  • [–] 0 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    they should be supporting those projects

    As long as the end user is abiding by the licensing terms it shouldn't be an expectation that any additional support is coming from anywhere. This is the nature of foss. The contributors should know this.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    Licensing terms only govern the legal aspects, not social and moral aspects.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Of course, but as we know there is no universal agreements for either. The expectations are ill placed.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    We don't need the madman who thinks suffering is good to change their mind for sensible people to act, as medicine doesn't need the madman who thinks always throwing up is healthy. We place expectations on others everyday: like when we walk past a stranger. Perfect agreement is not needed to have expectations, or demand better from those who benefit from others.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    You are correct - they have no legal obligation. They do however have a moral obligation. It seems to me that if corporations want to be people when it comes to things like political donations then they should be people when it comes to their moral obligations as well.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago*

    We all do as well. Many individuals who use Linux, LibreOffice and other legendary open source works would be much better off if we as individuals performed our moral obligations towards developers and volunteers. I think we would be in a different world if we paid them even a fraction of what we pay to big corps.

    I agree with you.

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  • [–] 29 points 10 months ago* (4 children)

    Love the enthusiasm, but let's stop casting this as an end-user-only problem. The real issue is, once again, large corporations using and taking advantage of oss while putting ZERO money or work back into oss. It's victim blaming with extra steps, and us blaming each other is exactly what the real culprits want.

    If it makes us feel better that we can pay on a regulsr basis for these things, great. But massive oss projects can't thrive on a few of us donating.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (3 children)

    Large corporations and exploitative, over demanding individuals are always going to be this way. We can only prepare for these kinds. I agree on paying them subscriptions on a regular basis, just as we pay large corp projects, and more people need to be involved.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I hope you didn't infer from my comment that we should stop individually supporting FOSS, that's not what I'm saying.

    However, I will counter that I don't think you are current with the overwhelmingly massive imbalance of corporate vs personal use is currently in play on big Foss projects.

    Ffmpeg is used by almost everyone with a video project, but not companies want to kick in any bucks:

    https://m.slashdot.org/story/448966

    We saw this back in 2015 as well with NTP, which almost everyone on the internet uses, yet the one guy who worked on it had to stop doing so temporarily in 2017 and get a job to support himself:

    https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/ntp-needs-money-is-a-foundation-the-answer-

    Not only do corps use FOSS at a higher rate by an order of magnitude than individual users, but they also profit from it.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Not at all. I support individual paying for foss projects and then corporations should be made to as well. Corporation will not have morals until there is social pressure, even so they just pretend to or regulated by government standards.

    We are on the same page, if you read my other comments.

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