If corporation x uses my thing to cut labor costs and doesn't pay me anything while actual employees get to sit around and make six figures adding fields to jsons, that's a shitty arrangement for me
If corporation x didn't exist, I probably wouldn't worry about it. But the second money becomes involved it changes the calculus
And I do think some projects like ad blockers are worth it because corporations don't benefit much from them, but regular people do
> If corporation x uses my thing to cut labor costs and doesn't pay me anything while actual employees get to sit around and make six figures adding fields to jsons, that's a shitty arrangement for me
Then perhaps FOSS isn't for you.
There seems to be a large segment of the community these days that doesn't fall into the MIT/BSD or GPL camps and I'm not sure why they care about FOSS if they don't agree with one or both of those philosophies.
Not to say that those are the only true FOSS philosophies- I just don't understand why this third contingent isn't making their software closed source.
> Not to say that those are the only true FOSS philosophies- I just don't understand why this third contingent isn't making their software closed source.
This perspective pre-supposes the _the_ binary to analyze the world is open vs close source software (binary 1). But there are other binaries.
There are at least two reasons why people are attracted to FOSS. One is the "freedom" angle. But the other is that people like working within a gift economy - a system of value creation in which everyone gifts value to others to the best of their ability. FOSS licenses explicitly only care about the freedom value, but clearly there is some overlap with the gift ethos as well.
But for-profit companies using OSS to make crazy amounts of money and then gifting nothing back destroys the gift economy. This is another binary: systems that create gift economies vs those that don't (binary 2).
Many people have decided that they don't want to make a fool of by these companies, and they stop using FOSS licenses. Using binary 1 analysis, it seems these people prefer or should use closed source licenses. But from the binary 2 analysis, FOSS licenses create a non-gift economy. So there is a need to create other licenses or systems that create and enforce a gift economy.
I feel like in your last part you are also pre-supposing another third binary (binary 3): the copyright license is the only relevant part to enforcement of a system vs OSS is a community and is bound by ethics as well as laws.
The distinction between ethics and laws is a fascinating dichotomy. "What is the culturally right thing to do?" versus "What is the allowed thing to do?"
The gift economy is already an ethical system like "Take a Penny, Leave a Penny". There are no laws that tell you what to do, you are encouraged to do what is right for you and hopefully what you think is right for the larger culture (the next person into the shop; the next user of the open source software).
Sure, it is hard if not impossible to "enforce" a general ethical system. To some extent that is what laws are for in the abstract ideal, but in regular practice there's a gulf there and we find that some of the beauty of the ethical system is broken when attempted to be constrained by legally enforceable laws.
If you watch someone take all the pennies, stuff them into a Gucci bag, cackle like a villain, and never leave a penny and think "Someone should do something about this", you start to find how slippery it is to add rules to who must leave a penny and who can take a penny and how often and how many variables and edge cases there can be just to try to figure out who is "right" to leave a penny and who is "right" to take one. The open "you know best for yourself in that moment" invite of "Take a Penny, Leave a Penny" disappears exactly in that moment you try to constrain it with rules.
As software developers we love rules and coming up with them. Software is about plumbing for all those variables and building the big charts of the edge cases and solving them. Binary 3 is an easy trap here: people aren't playing the game right, lets add more rules to the laws (software licenses). But it's a break to Binary 1 (forced sharing licenses aren't "fully open") and just as with TAPLAP, it starts to sour the "everyone gifts value to the others to the best of their ability". By adding rules you have to define "value" and "best of their ability" and in doing so you lose that fragile idea of "try your best to do what is right, only you really know what that is".
In the real world TAPLAP is enforced via social contract: reputation and gossip, trust and distrust, dislike and shunning. For enforcing a "gift economy" culture in open source, there are options more like the social contract (industry ethics boards, unethical software company boycotts/reputation smearing). Some of those pieces exist (OSI is an ethics board; ACM has an ethics board; IEEE has an ethics board; FSF likes to think it is an ethics board, but also clearly trusts rules/laws more than open, unconstrained ethical systems) they just may not have enough teeth, especially with respect to enforcing anything like the "gift economy".
So I agree there's a need to better enforce a gift economy, but I don't think it drives a need for other licenses or systems as much as it shows a usefulness in giving more enforcement to the existing "social contract" of open source. Take a library, leave a library. I don't think adding more rules solves enforcement. (And it certainly endangers our principles for "freedom" such as binary 1.) We can and should be able to enforce it even in its "not very explicitly stated" current form as an "ethical obligation" (versus a "legal requirement", very different things). It just is a harder (improv) game to play with less "rules" to play by. (As much as we love rules in software, sometimes it is nice and freeing to take a break and go play an imaginative game with fewer rules.)
You cannot have soft enforcement of ethical norms without hard entry requirements. That soft enforcement can only be achieved in the context of high trust social groups, which exist in the context of relatively insular cultures.
I agree in broad strokes with almost everything you say. I don't think adding rules is the correct way to build societies with some desired ethics.
That said, open source software licenses are extremely simple as far as contracts or licenses go. At least an order of magnitude shorter than closed source software EULAs, for example. What I see people advocating for is not tackling on additional complexity onto the existing licenses, but replacing the fundamental principles of existing licenses with new simple principles that slice the world into acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a better fashion.
Of course, licenses alone are not sufficient for change as you say. A lot of other social structures will indeed need to be built to change large scale behavior. That's a hard long slog.
> but replacing the fundamental principles of existing licenses with new simple principles that slice the world into acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a better fashion.
Feel free to come up with a different set of principles, but don't call it FOSS.
What frustrates me about this current FOSS discourse is that the are a bunch of people who want to change FOSS principles without (seemingly) understanding what those original principles are or why they were chosen. These critics live in a world in which FOSS has been uproariously successful but don't appear to appreciate what was necessary for it to be successful in the first place.
this is why AGPL is perfect for the job. Solidly FOSS license, used without problems and usage increasing, temporarily embarrassed billionaires go into a screaming fit about it.
Even mentioning the AGPL on HN gets a flurry of not-even-wrong FUD in the style of early 2000s Microsoft about the GPL, c.f. the recent story about Elasticsearch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41394797
They are not paid 6 figures to add fields to JSONs. They are paid 6 figures to brainrot into obsolescence instead of going out there and creating a competing product.
The last part is working very well. Most of the innovation these days is coming from China.
I would guess they are referring to the idea that large established companies (usually monopolies) have little motivation to compete of features/technology, especially when that would cannibalize their main offering. Generally, an engineer working on something at Microsoft or Apple is going to be much less motivated to create new tech than one at a (Chinese) small business. But it gets worse than this: they sometimes hire engineers just to keep them from the competition.
That said, China has its own unique category of underutilized staff: those who are hired to work for state-owned enterprises.
Here is the one core aspect about open source. There are people who really want to open source code without expectations of money at all. Immaterial if users are corporate or not. Perhaps for love of the art, career building or even just prestige and so many myriad motivations. I respect their choice. And it's not a shitty arrangement from their p perspective at all.
Yes, of course there are people who really want to do those. But op was presenting their main point of view related to "the slow evaporation" part.
Like op, more and more people can't get past the idea of starting or contributing to FOSS is no longer worth their time, due to various reasons, such as: their free labor of love was turned into another corporate money making tool.
I use ads on my OSS projects' websites so to the degree ad blockers block low key, non intrusive ad networks favored by OSS projects like Ethical Ads and Carbon Ads, they are hurting regular people
Ads are unwanted. If you serve ads, you are doing something unwanted to your visitors. So they block the ads, and you get the unwanted effect of not making money. The pain point is not that your ads are being blocked — it’s that you don’t have a way to make money that doesn’t start with doing something unwanted.
It's the way ads are delivered that is unwanted. I would not care about a static inline banner ad at the top of a page. Slightly possible that I'm interested in it if it's relevant in the context of the page, easy to ignore if not.
The ads that pop up when I scroll, or ads between every paragraph (or more) or ads that are animated or use fancy CSS to overlay the main content or slide in from the side and float around -- those are what make me run an adblocker.
If corporation x didn't exist, I probably wouldn't worry about it. But the second money becomes involved it changes the calculus
And I do think some projects like ad blockers are worth it because corporations don't benefit much from them, but regular people do