The Open Source movement, as championed by the OSI, prizes absolute openness above all other concerns. Openness, they claim, is an absolute good, f...
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"I think we can agree that if I extract value from your labor, you deserve compensation."
I don't think we can agree on this. If I choose to give away my labor, I don't deserve any compensation.
Do you deserve compensation from me if I gain value from reading this article?
Releasing your code as open source is a choice. If you don't agree with an OSS license, don't use it!
And the same would go for the possible use you code can get...
You can maybe find a way through licenses to prevent usage in certain fields that you don't want your code to be used... But really you could change something or get an idea.
Bad use will ALWAYS be there.
"Choice" is the key word here.
Reading the article I felt like if OSI was pointing a gun at OSS contributors' heads.
NO! People contribute openly because THEY choose so. And they choose so because they WANT SO.
Open source is among the top reasons why IT is eating the world and advancing so fast, creating solutions to humanity's problems, opportunity for people to earn a living for themselves, their family, to contribute to society.
It's sad that the author got the idea so wrong...
As an open source developer, I solve problems because they're a problem for me. Once I solve the problem, I open source my solution because I don't want anyone to have to re-solve the problem that I just solved. Thousands of people run my code. If this is what being exploited feels like, then count me in.
The friends and collaborations I've made with random strangers on GitHub have given me a better sense of humanity and community than some of my best physical community service projects.
Also, to the open source devs don't maintain their stuff, thank you for making it open source so I can fix/update it myself when I need new functionality.
Your analysis rests on your producer-consumer model. But this is the wrong starting point for successful open source projects, where my definition of successful is a diverse and broad pool of contributors.
Open source (not free software) is a pragmatic model to encourage co-operation between developers. Pure consumers are simply accidental beneficiaries. Economically, they may appear to be exploitative 'free loaders', but unlike real examples of free loading (such as polluting), pure consumers of code do not impose any costs on anyone. However, your analysis says they are, by saying that these consumers are exploiting the developers. This is only potentially true if the developers are foregoing revenue by not charging consumers when they could. Traditionally, this requires technical copy protection and legal copy protection. However, at the same time, these barriers have a cost too: they block or impede co-operation from other developers, due also trust barriers.
Ironically for your argument, a closed-source model where users are financially 'exploited' by developers makes potential code contributors wary that their contributions will be exploited by those selling the software. This is a strong, in fact probably fatal, barrier to gaining developer contributions. Open source licences remove impediments to co-operative code-development by parties who are strangers to each other. It is remarkable, actually.
The open source model indeed does not make sense where a developer gets little relative benefit from encouraging other developers to contribute. This might because they don't need other developers, or can't attract them (perhaps the user-base is too niche). I said 'relative benefit'; perhaps the developers have some IP that is so compelling that the potential for user payments is very high, and that it is better to take these revenues, stay closed source and pay developers.
In these cases, the developers' economically optimal decision is not to go open source.
But to repeat myself, in a genuinely successful open source project, apparently the opportunity cost of user payments is actually lower than the benefits of attracting external developer contributions to the mutual benefit of participating developers. This is not conjecture, this is really happening, and a good scientist bases their theories on observations. Your essay sounds like the famous academic who lamented 'it might work in practice, but it doesn't work in theory'.
I do not dispute that some projects which started as open source find themselves in a position where it's not the right choice. I think there are examples of VC-financed startups that went open source as a tool to gain market share, but were not able to get any compensating benefits (that is, they did not get a critical mass of external contributors)
Really interesting article. Do you think there is anyway we can keep our source code open to read and contribute to for security reasons, while still being able to publish work for money?
It really sucks that developers who pour thousands of hours of work into a project just to have someone quickly grab the source code, without even a thank you.
I do! I don’t know what the best way is, but the Prosperity Public License is one possibility. prosperitylicense.com/ (I really want to drag License Zero into this conversation!)
Suggest what you're attempting to do is "Open Development". Something in the 1970's/80's we discussed. (turned into a LinkedIn article by request, see linkedin.com/pulse/open-source-bro...).
At the start of Open / Free Source, the unspoken idea was that the code was attached to the people who wrote/developed/maintained it, and they were attached and pulled along by it, sort of like a parachute, lifted into the air by attention/use.
In the excitement of the moment, many saw opportunity and the desire to "cut the lines" because they didn't like where things were headed, so many hard landings happened. That is how people who did the code got separated from it. And to cover for this, retconning spliced the lines as needed. Your might call it a moral failing, or a lapse in judgement.
Often discussion of this was considered "religious" and beneath the "pure code" desire. Many of the comments I see here want to still present the notion that "the code speaks for itself", as if it is "bootstrapped" from developers minds, to become something unassailable, "above them all". Perhaps another religious abstraction?
It is this "unassailable" fantasy that is used to remove "impure" people from the code, sometimes entirely missing the point of the code in the process, possibly obfuscated. This loss of integrity sometimes even kills the code longer term, where then certain open source projects "wander in the wilderness" until the integrity is restored. Perhaps the price for such "purity"?
When someone claims detachment from generation of code, it's really rather disingenuous because they did make it happen. It's immaterial as to "why". It's even worse to jump to the conclusion that because one claims to do this for one's own contributions, that another's can so be detached. This is the process by which integrity is lost, and people are detached as unnecessary destruction.
Suggest that if you focus instead of "prosperity" on "integrity", you deal with the fundamental issue of separating people from code. Perhaps the rest of the unfairness you correctly cite falls out of this more concise remedy.
And this is still quite a battle, because it's hard for humanity to retain integrity in a fair statement, because many need to distort it for a given ends. What I've found is that sooner or later integrity matters, and is reasserted, even after decades or more. Perhaps integrity, like beauty ... endures.
It really doesn't "suck", if you choose to willingly give away your code, that's a perfectly valid choice. If someone then makes money with it, good for them.
You are right about one thing - people are more important than code. But all these big corporations also consider people are more important than code (maybe less important than money, but let's not go there right now). Their take on it is probably different than yours, though.
Companies that hire programmers look for the programmer stereotype. This is probably true, to some extent, to all professions, but let's focus on the programmer stereotype - the kid who somehow obtained a Commodore 64 or an Apple II and spent his (forgive me for not being neutral here - but this is the stereotype) days figuring how what makes it tick and how to make it tick more colorfully. These are the "ideal programmer material" employers seek - probably not that specific (I did went full cliche here...), and they will have to settle because there are not enough stereotypic programmers for everyone, but that's the general direction.
What does that have to do with open source? It turns out we stereotypical programmers (and I include myself in this group even though I'm too young to had a Commodore and I learned programming on a Pentium III) love open source. We consider ourselves creators, and the creators want the most is a stage to present their creations. Open source is a great stage for those who only care about spreading their creation and getting feedback, and the fact we can use our peers' code makes it even better!
Now, companies want us, and they notice that connection, and found that it serves them in two ways. By publicly supporting open source (with the emphasis on "publicly") they can appeal to the people they want to attract. But even more important - they can use open source to find those types. The assumption is that the kids that programmed through their childhood will keep that passion and use whatever little free time they have as adults to program - so the open source communities are a good place to start looking for candidates.
So, it's not the free code that they want - it's the people that write it. Many companies are actually afraid of this free code - they fear that if the free code will fail at a crucial moment they'll have no one to turn to. This is why many companies prefer to pay for expensive products that have good open source alternatives - so that they'll have someone to turn to if things go wrong. Some companies even made it their business model to support open source software - companies pay them for software they could use for absolutely free just so they'll have someone to turn to.
When a company does rely on open source software, many times they'll have someone familiarize themselves with the codebase. Maybe they'll also fork it, or - at some not common but not that rare cases - send pull requests and sometimes even join the maintainers. This allows them to have "someone on the inside" that can fix emergencies for them.
You probably think of this as exploitation, but it's actually a symbiotic relationship. The companies get the programmers they want, and we get industrial contribution to their open source projects. The paychecks also help.
The problem is, that using open source contribution to find candidate is an economic concept called Signalling. And signalling mechanisms tend to have inflation. More and more people want to emit the signal, because they see the high tech jobs, the salaries, the benefits, the working conditions, and they want all that. Can you blame them?
And wherever there is a gold rush, there will be pickaxe sellers.
So, in the last decade or so we witness the rise of the everyone-can-code movement, which by itself is a positive thing - we live in a world of computers, and being able to control your computer can be a valuable work skill even if you are not a professional programmers. But during the last few years this movement started to preach open source, convincing many people that they need to contribute to open source projects, if not to maintain ones of their own. And they don't usually say it, but they definitely imply - open source is the gate to your dream high tech job.
But as always with signaling - the core concept behind it, actually - the "high quality" (not my term. I'm not judging. "high" and "low" quality were the terms used in Spence's paper introducing this concept) signallers have much easier time emitting the signal than the "low quality" types. While the "true nerd" programmers actually enjoy contributing to open source, and would have done it even if it didn't help them get a job, the "everyone can code" programmers suffer. They feel like they have to slave for free just to be able to get that prestigious job...
Which they don't even get. Because, as I said, signalling begets inflation. The companies looked for programmers they considered special, and fought over them because they were special. But the masses will never be special - that would be a logical contradiction to the very definition of "special". So employers have to look for other signals, and people will continue to bleed for a now-meaningless signal.
Does this make open source evil? I don't think so. The same thing happened with higher education, and no one claims higher education is evil. That's just a sad artifact of human behavior, and it will always find new forms, new signals.
Actually, you did not go full cliche. You mentioned male ('his', and true, that is part of the stereotype) and learning tech by using a Commodore 64 (not so much - we're talking current programmers here, not the likes of Bill Gates). You completely missed white or Indian, going to just the right college, young, urban, well-connected, and upper-middle-class.
See, if it was just learning on the earliest computers and male, I'd only be down by one - male (FYI, TI computers predate the Commodore 64, so if the 'original tech geniuses' stereotype were actually true, I would have most certainly been in the early wave of hires). Truthfully speaking, I'm actually down by all but one - white. And the necessity of creating Open Source is not just implied; it's actually part of job listings. 'Be a major contributor or creator of at least 3 Open Source projects' is sometimes given as an alternate to 'At least 5 years of experience at a major tech company, i.e. Google, Microsoft, Apple, or as a programmer with Amazon'. All it is, is a passive-aggressive way to 'pull up the ladder'.
Sure, when the market gets flooded with more people looking for the same job, it is harder to find a job, and it is only logical that companies would up the requirements, assuming, of course, that those jobs were becoming ever more technical. Yet, at least in the US, this absolutely contradicts the common tech company lamentation that there just aren't enough qualified candidates in the US and that they have been forced to find employees from outside the country. The argument seems even stranger, taking into consideration the increasing job requirement and convoluted interviewing and internship requirements even for relatively simple, data-entry jobs. Too Many Jobs, Not Enough Talent If the companies' claims in the article were true, people like me would be getting flooded with job offers and promises to help relocate, if needed, but instead, we simply get rejected with explanations like 'the position has been filled' (assuming we get a call back or get the recruiter back on the line at all) and watch as the same job offer sits unfilled with nothing changed but the date.
You claim that companies value people over code, but then why is there a push to create AI that can create their own non-human-readable coding language and use it to create new programs? People work in programming currently, but if the current trend persists, eventually, even the most well-connected, rockstar programmers will find themselves permanently in the unemployment line. Google AI writes its own code In 2018, it was writing its own code by scraping GitHub repos. Facebook AI creates its own language Why would companies continue these projects that could potentially create new AI 'employees' that do not need a paycheck or benefits if they truly valued [human] people over code? Granted, Facebook said it shut down the AI, yet somehow, Facebook is still working on its own AI program. I don't claim to have insider information, but that does sound shady to me.
It's simple, really. By pulling up the ladder in their own wealthy country and hiring people who will program for less pay, they create a stopgap measure to bridge between the time when employed programmers could still earn well above the cost-of-living in their area and the time when human programmers were no longer required.
Welcome to the world where Open Source, through no fault of its own (Open Source is a concept, not a human making actual decisions), has created a new philosophy in which humans, working freelance, working in small companies, and working in major corporations, feel entitled to use whatever Open Source code they want, for whatever ends, good or bad, they wish to achieve, for absolutely no cost all at, and often no credit to the original creator at all.
Open Source itself is not evil, per se, at least insofar as the original intent, but it is being used for evil, and if we can change that, we should change that.
So, in the end,
'The same thing happened with higher education, and no one claims higher education is evil.' - except they have been making that claim. Whether you agree with the people polled or not, it is true that at least someone claims higher education is evil.
'That's just a sad artifact of human behavior' - absolutely.
'and it will always find new forms, new signals.' - but that's no excuse for making signalling and the systematic exploitation of anyone easier. Programmers should be among the first to understand that problems need solutions. A programmer that gives up on finding solutions before they even bother giving problems a moment's thought is a terrible programmer. It might be easy to defend broken code or broken morals, but that doesn't make the broken things right.
First I need to say that I'm not American, so my experience may be different from what's going on in the US.
That's the "management material" stereotype - I don't think it's really considered as part of the "nerd programmer" stereotype. Sure, it has great effect on your ability to acquire the connections and education that can help you land a job, and the culture you grew in can change your probability of living the nerd programmer childhood, but it's still not part of the actual stereotype employers are looking for - a black man from a poor family can still fit the stereotype. A woman - can't. (though that changes too, though slowly, in the last years)
Employers don't want to be the first one to hire you. Not only they prefer you make your beginner mistakes elsewhere, they also don't want to take the risk of hiring an incompetent employee. That's one reason the want previous job experience (not the 20 years experience in C++17 stuff - that's just recruiters bs. They just want to know someone else already tried you and found you are good enough)
So... I guess now they expand their searches to open source? I'm not really that familiar with these job listings (I don't recall ever seeing one - are they really that common? Then again, I haven't looked for a job in 5 years, and this world changes rapidly), but maybe they think they can ask around these open source communities to get a feeling about your competence? Not sure how this is going to work... But one thing I'm sure of - the level of contribution they require is much higher than what those that only do open source to make themselves hireable think they need.
What I said is "But all these big corporations also consider people are more important than code (maybe less important than money, but let's not go there right now). Their take on it is probably different than yours, though."
OK, so we do need to "go there". A company's goal is to make money. If we go one resolution lower, the goal is to create value for people ("customers"), and have some business model for converting that value to money. Code is just a resource the company needs to create value (and in some cases as part of the process of converting that value to money). So are programmers - there is a reason why it's called "human resources".
The programmers are more valuable a resource than the code they write, because even if you use free code from the internet you still need programmers to fit that code to your needs and to fix it when thing go wrong. This may change in the future, with advanced AI that will replace us, but for now - we are more valuable than code.
They don't say higher education is evil because of the signalling, they say it's evil because it is controlled by the other camp. Maybe I should have appended "for that" to that sentence...
This is an economical problem, and trying to engineer the economy and fix the human nature never ends well. And besides - the only ones feeling exploited by open source are the ones who tried to exploit it in order to get a job. "I slaved on this open source thing and didn't get a job! Do you think I'm doing it for fun?". But the thing is - we are doing it for fun! It's not our fault that the pickaxes seller sold you a pickaxe and told you to hit that rock and find gold. We are not even here for the gold, we are just rock enthusiastic that want new rocks for our collections. Just because you are all sweaty from all the work you did for free doesn't mean anyone owes you any gold.
Your experience does differ. In the US, (the number of women in programming has been in a severe decline)[observer.com/2017/06/women-in-tech...] and in Silicon Valley, any (programmer who is not white or Indian and is not cis-male is seen as 'not real')[takepart.com/article/2015/08/04/en...]. Read all the way through the articles; it's not just a fringe thing.
In the US, unlike many other coutries, college and university level education is not free; (it's astronomically expensive)[theatlantic.com/education/archive/...]. Likewise, unpaid internships are a thing here - until relatively recently, Google required all applicants for programming jobs to successfully complete a one-year, (unpaid internship)[forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2013/...] and even then, they changed only after it had become an illegal practice. Now they use how much they pay interns as a PR stunt, but don't be fooled - the pay isn't 'out of the goodness of their hearts'. Essentially, the only ways to land a tech job are through being wealthy enough to afford college, then find a place to live near Silicon Valley (or another, newer tech center) where monthly rent or mortgage payments are well over $1,000 or be a well-known rockstar programmer on GitHub with years of experience working in major tech companies. For those privileged enough to be wealthy or be able to get financial help from wealthy family or friends, the cost may not seem that high, but for the rest of us ...
Take me as an example. I make $10 per hour at my full-time job - which is about the only full-time job available in the area I live in. That's 30-40 hours a week (I average about 33 hours per week), no overtime allowed. So, for one month, before health insurance, taxes, and other deductions, I make roughly $330 dollars a week or $1,320 per month. After deductions, it's more like $1,100. That's not even enough for rent or a mortgage in a tech city, much less for other expenses like food, gas, car payments, water, power, internet connection, money phone bills, or out-of-pocket medical costs. Worse, the 24/7, live-in, legally mandated caregiving I do for my mother-in-law is unpaid. My paycheck has to cover my family's (my husband, his mother, and myself) expenses. There's nothing left for college tuition, transportation to classes, books, etc.
But the cost isn't just financial. Between a full-time job, maintaining the household, and caregiving duties, I have very little time left, which is to say, almost no time to work on Open Source projects, and I'm certainly not the only one. The majority of caregivers in the US are women, due to the cultural, which assumes that caregiving is women's work because it involves nurturing, a stereotypical feminine trait. Likewise, most STEM fields are generally considered men's work. (Open Source coding is even more skewed than most STEM in terms of the gender gap.)[peerj.com/articles/cs-111/]
'They don't say higher education is evil because of the signalling, they say it's evil because it is controlled by the other camp. Maybe I should have appended "for that" to that sentence...'
Perhaps I should explain how those camps are divided up. When they take issue with 'the other camp', they are referring to liberals and progressives directly, which in turn, indirectly refers to people who encourage diversity (in terms of gender, sexuality, and ethnic background) in education and in the workplace. I disagree with the crowd that hates gender/sexual/ethnic diversity, but there is a point to be made about how financial diversity isn't much discussed in terms of admissions, aside from 'fill out some forms' and 'take out a huge loan that you won't be able to finish paying off, ever'.
You said, 'Just because you are all sweaty from all the work you did for free doesn't mean anyone owes you any gold.', but put more accurately, all that means is 'Just because you earned or generated a boatload of money, doesn't mean that your wealthy trust-fund overlords are ever going to let you see a dime of it.'
If you don't see the injustice in that, then all I can say is you've clearly bought into the 'logic' of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and other areas of highly concentrated wealth. 'Everyone knows wealthy people are special geniuses, because all special geniuses are wealthy, and only special geniuses are wealthy'. Isn't it strange how few of those 'special geniuses' can see the (circular logic)[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_rea...] in that?
There's nothing fair when you try to buy a pickax, only to find you'll never be able to afford one, and all the precious metals, precious stones, pretty rocks, and even fertile soil has already been claimed by people who happened to have all the right things at all the right times, because they had the money already.
I agree with most of what you said. Here in Israel we have a saying that roughly translates to "You don't need nepotism when you've got connections". My point about narrowing the stereotype was that if a poor guy from a minority that fits the "true nerd" stereotype will arrive in Silicon Valley and show the necessary qualifications he'll have a decent chance to get an high-tech job - but being a poor minority means he has slim chances to get these qualifications and get to Silicon Valley.
These is not just, but I'm not sure what the solution should be. Location is important, and high-tech companies benefit from being in high-tech hubs - so if a single high-tech company builds it's HQ or a development center in a poor region, that company will be at a great disadvantage. Mainly because it'll have a hard time hiring experienced people. I'm not saying that all the people in that poor are stupid and unfit, but since they never had the a opportunity to work in the high-tech industry they'll be unexperienced - and high-tech companies need a core of experienced engineers. That company is unlikely to survive.
So, in order to get successful high-tech companies in that region, you need a lot of them - so that experienced developers will move there, seeing lots of employment opportunities. But that means gentrification - the poor region will strive and become rich, but the poor people will not.
But I digress. I wanted to talk about open source.
You said, that in order to get an high-tech job, one should either live in the hub or be scouted by the companies which requires to:
My argument is that the "on GitHub" part is not as nearly as important as the "years of experience working in major tech companies" part. Like you've seen - they don't really consider open source as experience (maybe unless you are a renowned open source programmer? But then you'll probably also have professional experience, or a position in MIT or some other academic/research institute...). They give that as an option in the resume because they want to attract people who care about open source. And because candidate with professional experience may add their open source projects to their resume, and as @moopet mentioned in another thread here - this gives them a chance to judge their code.
So, I'm objecting to the OP's claim that companies say "write open source and we may hire you" to get people to give them free code. They do use unpaid internships for that purpose, but in these cases they get to tell the coder what to do. With open source the company can't demand anything from the contributors, can't have the software built to their specifications, and can't have the maintainers (or someone trained by and paid by the maintainers) on their beck and call in case something goes wrong and they need urgent support. From a business point of view, this makes open source very risky.
And yet - you see many posts about how open source contribution can land you a job. I'm sure what the gain from it (business models in the internet are weird), and it's probably not direct, but I still call them "pickaxe sellers". Yes, you paid good money for the pickaxe and worked very hard, but it's still not the rock's fault that you didn't get any gold from it.
Look, I'm not saying everyone is going to, or should, get that first job with no effort, nor am I saying that all effort produces the same, perfect results. You seem to be misunderstanding me on both those points right there.
Perception is a huge problem when stereotypes (not actual merit) are what will determine whether or not you will be able to get a job.
Examples: I first learned to code a bit shy of 40 years ago, though I had a gap in coding for nearly 2 decades - first when school started and I was denied access to computers, and later during military service when internet access was nearly impossible to come by during much of that time. CS courses were not a thing in the colleges at the time, either. And yes, I'm showing both my age and the sad state of internet access in the US. Now, if I had never learned code on my own and I had taken 4 years of college (at the right school with the right students to make connections with), including some CS classes, I'd be looking like a pretty good candidate to any tech company. Instead, the decades of teaching myself to code are treated as 'proof' that I am unmotivated to learn and that I have no interest in coding, which is clearly the opposite of the truth. No one devotes decades to teaching themselves to code if they hate both code and learning.
Another example: Women are seen as only being interested in fashion, finding recipes and baking, finding a rich husband, making babies, and creating drama. We are seen as not understanding numbers, being terrible at logic, and being far too emotional and pregnant to handle having a professional level job. Men are seen as naturally good at logical things like code and at putting in more work. None of this is proven by actual data; it's merely seen as a thing 'everyone knows'. It's as if the 1800's never ended. Being born with a vagina is a serious detriment to being taken seriously when trying to land a job outside of retail, porn, and nursing. The fact that women, by and large, have far less time they can devote to Open Source due to unpaid home obligations reinforces the perception that 'women can't do math or code'.
So, possible solutions? There's a few that could certainly be put in place together in order to fix the issues.
The OP mentioned creating new Open Source licensing that gives creators and maintainers of Open Source code more control over who gets to use that code, what purposes they can use it for, and a legal framework for enforcing those licenses. You see, roughly an hours worth of driving from the rural area I live in, is a large city full of hotels, convention centers, and other tech meet-up necessities (and very little in the line of actual tech companies). Plenty of programmers live there, but many must work remotely as Silicon Valley isn't exactly next door. A new trend in the hotel industry in this city is using Open Source for everything but room key codes and storing guest's personal information, which allows them to keep a cutting-edge system and code base for everything from food ordering for the 5-star restaurants, water and air recycling to protect guests, aka walking ATMs, from the water and air dirty poors may have 'contaminated', to maintaining their own security and banking systems and still keep only the bare minimum of programmers hired, sometimes as third-party contractors so they can skimp on paychecks and avoid paying for benefits. Imagine if all the free Open Source resources were cut off to them until they started paying fairer wages, hiring more programmers, providing benefits, etc. You could still code as a hobby; that wouldn't go away. What would change is how the people that create and maintain the code are treated and that they'd have more say in whether or not their code could be used for evil.
We could also work towards changing cultural norms in an effort to rid society of the unjust master/slave relationship between men and women, between whites and non-whites, and between rich and poor. Currently, at least in the US, non-whites, esp. blacks, are set up to be funneled into the prison system from a very early age. A white kid gets disruptive in class and the campus cop writes them up. A black kid disrupts the class, and he ends up face down on the floor in cuffs and gets hauled off for processing into juvie. Men are expected to be employed. Women are expected to be employed, maintain the entire household, get the shopping and dry cleaning dropped off, raise the kids, care for the elderly parents, and have dinner ready for when the man of the house gets home, all for less pay from their place of employment and no pay at all for the rest of it. Poorer people have spotty access to the internet, can't afford healthcare, go homeless when the can't pay the rent/mortgage, and go hungry when food banks run out of food, all to be arrested if they fall asleep in a car or on a sidewalk or if they loiter, use public bathrooms too frequently, or worse, use the bathroom in public when the nearest public bathroom is miles away. Wealthy people can commit DUIs and barely get a slap on the wrist, or in some cases, repeatedly commit rape, murder, or other felonies, but use money and status to weasel out of having any real consequences.
We could also, again in the US, do like much of the rest of the world, and make things like higher education affordable, or better yet, 'free' (as in shared cost by way of taxes, like public education does now), but without the strangled budget the wealthy have been setting up using their financial power as political campaign donors.
It's not impossible, and it won't take your hobby away, but if we implement the right solutions, we just might bring the world some justice, help those with actual merit succeed, create better code by bringing in new ideas, and set up tech that works for everyone (as opposed to self-driving cars that don't stop for people with darker skin, automated phone services that do not recognized women's voices, and all sorts of other screwed up issues).
Video that explains what privilege is and isn't and why awareness of one's own privilege and taking responsibility for righting wrongs is a good thing
The moral injustice is intellectual property (at least, strong forms of), and the notion of restricting access to resources that can be freely copied and shared.
While it's socially good to compensate talented people for their work, and nobody wants to make tools for Nazis, MLK and Ghandi were never compensated for freedom fighting, and everybody uses tools.
You raise a few interesting points however - there's an injustice in large corporations using open source software to power cloud services that might as well be proprietary as far as end users can tell, especially if they don't contribute upstream.
But overall FOSS is a benefit to humankind, and most people do the right thing.
I will add - Devs are hugely underrated and maybe these corporations should be encouraged to contribute money upstream ;) like tithes - give 10% to the stack
That's a characteristic of artists, not open source developers. Most open source maintainers and contributors either do it as a hobby, do it as part of a payed job, or have a business model to earn money from it. Cases like Neece are rare - and even there, these guys are highly employable and could easily find a job if they see it doesn't work out.
It's nice you have such faith in those who have worked on Open Source projects, but getting hired isn't always so easy as all that. There is nothing about Open Source that guarantees future employment, any more than there is a guarantee that a Resume will automatically land you a job instantly. What you call 'highly employable' is nowhere near the same thing as actually becoming employed.
I've been writing code for over a decade, and wrote a bit of Open Source code, myself. Even so, the only place I could get hired was in a grocery store stocking groceries for minimum wage. I've tried getting into a job coding for years, but I still have never been hired at a traditional job involving code (other than produce codes, and that hardly counts) and the only freelance work I managed to get paid a grand total of $100 over a 4-year time period. And I'm not talking the dollar-equivalent I earned in some impoverished third-world country; I'm talking actual dollars in the US.
Never assume companies are falling over themselves looking to pay writers of Open Source code when currently, they can still get it all for free.
Buster Neece is not highly employable because he worked on an open source project - he is highly employable because he worked as a programmer in Bravely Blue Media before "retiring" to work full time on open source.
The thing about this profession, is that it's hard to get your first job, but once you're in - everyone will want to hire you. Neece was in, and even if currently he is technically "out" - potential employers will still want to hire him if he ever decides he wants to code for a salary again.
That's just it, isn't it? If all you have is Open Source as something you can show an employer, but you still have a decade or more of rejections from employers and still no initial job.
Again, the current incentive for companies is 'take what you want for free, because actually paying for free code cuts into profits and shareholders don't like that sort of thing'.
Employable =/= employed
I have a bit of a long reply for that, so I wrote it as another direct comment to the main post - dev.to/idanarye/comment/gck9
Wait, I have a bit of a sticky with "If all you have is Open Source as something you can show an employer".
Open source is all you can show an employer. Everything else is hearsay. You can say, "I worked on the doohickey that tamped down vibrations in the flux capacitor" if you want, but unless you have permission to show your work, it's just words. Sure, you can back it up in an interview, but you can do the same if it was open source.
Having open source software you can show people is always of benefit to the company looking to recruit you. Of course, if it's crap then you're not going to get far, but...
Only read about half the article when I realized this rant is misplaced. It is not about Open Source. It is about what people do with Open Source.
Commercial entities were initially reluctant to jump on the bandwagon of Open Source, even before it was called Open Source, and they fought tooth and nail against it. If they could not make money they weren't interested. The community was always reasonably good to one another. Until, that is, commercial entities realized they could exploit Open Source to reduce costs which is like making money. So the problem of Open Source is and has always been people. By focusing on the thing that Open Source is this article has placed the blame on the thing it set out to attack rather than the actual people who are being immoral in their use of said thing. People are getting a pass!
Open Source is not any more broken than any other thing because it is a thing. People are broken. The community fooled themselves into thinking commercial entities would use their code both morally and ethically. But such expectations were always naive. This is the reason such a strong emphasis was placed on stopping monetary transfers and requiring the viral Copyleft! Perhaps those measures also failed to realize cost savings equals making money.
But we're still talking about people here. People are immoral and will continue to be immoral no matter what actions we take nor what restrictions we attempt to impose. The only thing we can control is whether we continue to support obviously immoral and unethical enterprises. Don't try to force enterprises to be moral, instead stop working for them. And if you continue to work on Open Source, then require a Copyleft.
Don's follow up post gets into this more, looking at what people can do both via licencing and through ethical organisations to take positive moral actions rather than abdicate responsibility entirely (and losing their agency over their creations). As he mentions here, there is a lot more to this than code and licenses, and it's in need of more thought :)
Well, it wasn't when Open and Free Software were designed.
While your argument is very well built, I think that you should take time perspective in account: maybe OS and FS (someone else has already told you how different they are) need an overhaul because the market and the whole society have changed a lot, in the last 30 years. And, as you point out, they are many attempts at that being carried out, by many actors.
Saying that "Open Source is immoral" still needs many pages of careful wording and specification, before becoming a valid sentence. You bring many valuable discussion point to the table, but I don't subscribe to this view.
It boggles my mind that a GitHub employee is writing in opposition to open source. You want us to restrict who can use our software? If I sell a hammer, should it come with an EULA specifying that it's not for use in military applications or by communists? You're entitled to your free thought, I'm here to tell you that it's thoroughly wrong-headed. Go pitch to Debian and see how far you get. Open source distributions could not exist if each developer attached their own set of crazy-ass conditions to their license. "Not for use by Jews" "Not for use by Republicans" It's such a bad idea that I didn't continue reading after that (yet)
Acknowledgement and tooling for the human layer of the stack is sorely lacking and the profileration of open source has turned this into a central problem of our times. I'm very impressed by the depth of the perspective here, thank you for sharing it Don.
Thinking of imposing your moral standards on others? ...like in a religion?
This pretty much sums it up.
Heaven forbid (is there some non-religious idiom as easily recognized and understood for this same concept in the English language?) there be any expectation to treat people like people. Morality and religion are not one and the same; everyone follows their own moral code, but not everyone is religious.
Surely you've heard of the 'Golden Rule'?
If this was a serious question, you could try one of my favourites:
perish the thought
Fair enough. That certainly would have been preferable, then.
Still, though, religious words and phrases are so ingrained in the English language, Atheists like myself still end up using them, not so much to be ironic, but because in many cases, there is either no alternate way to get an idea across, or it's just such a common way to say a thing that it slips out with no thought on just how religious the phrase is.
If someone sneezes, the words 'Bless you' are spoken without any thought as to the religious ideals that gave rise to the phrase; it's just the polite thing to do. (At least I hope we can all agree that sneezing doesn't actually mean your soul has escaped your body, leaving you open to demonic possession or that saying 'bless you' will cast away the demons and safely send your soul back into your body to protect you from further evil.)
But, absolutely, 'perish the thought' would have worked just as well.
Take Tor Project for example, how are we going to weed out the criminals? Isn't everyone or no one? If a bad actor wants to use an open-source for bad, regardless of the license or ethical rules, they're going to use it anyway.
People pirate paid closed-source software.
What's going to happen? The bad actors are going to get into extra trouble for using open-source software for non-ethical intentions?
This is a lot like arguments against strict gun control, and they are pretty empty because they start with the hidden premise that there is nothing we can do to create the outcomes we want. Of course we can, but it's a patient, iterative process, not something that happens all at once. We have to start somewhere, and for me that begins with normalizing the kinds of conduct we want people to engage in (and whatever the opposite of normalizing is for the kinds of conduct we want to halt). If we wait for the perfect confluence of norms, culture, laws, and actual behavior, we get nowhere fast.
Excellent article, and a topic I myself have a draft in progress about. I think we are clearly seeing the business world getting wise to the massive wealth of free labour they get by leveraging open source. And we have little dialog about their moral obligation to contribute financially to those projects.
Compound this with increasing financial pressures on average workers and the ability of maintainers to work for free is going to keep shrinking.
We, the OSS community of users, contributers & maintainers, are in an unsustainable situation, but no one seems to be talking about it. Phase one is a golden age of profit for corporate use of OSS. Phase 2 is going to be a tidal wave of burnout by maintainers.
We need something better. Where licences require graduated compensation. Ex free for individuals, education, non-profits, and solo businesses. Not-free for government & corporations.
And absolutely a means of preventing immoral use of our code.
I have to admit, I got a quarter of the way into your article, and couldn't bring myself to keep reading. I get where you have misunderstood Open Source, but it's clear from your first few sections that your understanding of the Open Source philosophy and its roots is far narrower than you realize. (You've also clearly confused the altogether separate camps of Open Source and Free Software.) As a result, I can't take anything else in here seriously.
No insult intended to your person or intelligence. I simply recommend digging a lot deeper into the histories involved, as it would seem you've wholly missed or misunderstood the bulk of it.
Same here, he clearly has some misconceptions and biases not grounded in facts.
You’re right, like you sir (and the time lord above you), I believe that anything I disagree with is biased and I am under no intellectual obligation to provide evidence of this fact because I am very smart and they are misinformed at best.
It’s like Dunning and Kruger are having a messed up kind of party in this thread.
There's no point in my rehashing the entire history and all the writings on the topic from the last 40 years, nor would it be a prudent use of my time to attempt it. If one wants to understand this, the writings of Eric S. Raymond are a good place to start.
Oh yes, the illustrious work of yet another bigot in OSS. This is the exact problem, you and yours are more than willing to set yourself up as some authority on an issue while gatekeeping dissent, and yet you’re either obtuse enough to not bother checking toxic sources or you lack historical context for the issues and don’t even know why your opinions suck (if you’re arguing in good faith at all).
The problem is mate, I don’t believe that you have the ability to explain this issue competently, but I do wish I had the confidence of a man who will attempt to shut people down with abandon and absolutely refuse to refute their points beyond your own vague notions.
I like you. You’re hired.
"the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: 'theres actually zero difference between good & bad things.'"
Yess, thank you, I know we spoke briefly about this and I actually asked a question on this in a conference panel a few weeks back to which not many people had an answer, mostly shrugged shoulders, I can't wait to see we can take this!
Robert Lindh published an article (exactly 5 years ago) on opensource.com way back when on rebranding open source here: opensource.com/life/14/10/communit...
Might be a interesting read for the crowd. We were very early in thinking about this topic and considering a Community Software Alliance. That all sounds more relevant then ever. Thanks for the article! It kicked up a discussion here again on the topic. Having humans at the center is super relevant.
Some interesting points. The main problematic issue is: whose morality does one adopt? We live in an age of moral relativism which means that one person's gospel is another's heresy.
Wow, that's a big, in-depth post. Thanks for writing it.
I think my problem with it is that recently people have been discovering that their permissively-licensed software has been used for things they didn't want to use it for, and for some reason this has blown up.
Everybody knew that was going to happen.
That's literally the reason people chose permissive licenses above copyleft.
I think a lot of this is down to the rise of javascript, to be honest. I think that people who are relatively new to the idea of free licenses have rushed to copy existing software and chuck it into npm so they can lay claim to being a "project maintainer". It's low-hanging fruit.
Social media peer pressure affects our children in school nowadays, and the same seems to be true for developers - if your project doesn't have a thousand stars next to its repo badge, then you're just not good enough, and the only way you can get those stars is to let Big Brother use it willy-nilly.
The popularity of the term "open source" and the push from certain vocal parties to release software that is "compatible" with big corporations' proprietary products means that this was all inevitable.
The libertarian fantasy of the free market implies that people should be able to take your code and do what they want with it without giving anything back, so I don't think this applies here.
You lost me here, I'm afraid. I don't agree in the slightest with this point of view, so anything that follows from it is going to be a problem for me.
Thanks for writing this. It's really well thought out.
I've just watch your talk on #DevRel Conf (London), about this topic. I agree with you that our industry has to start to ask itself another questions.
Just one aside-topic thing : You mention about "Tolerance paradox" from Popper. Maybe I didn't get you , but IMHO your interpretation of Karl's Popper words in "Open Society and its enemies" lacks the full picture. I don't mean to correct you, just pointing out that this interpretation has been refuted many times. Here are 2 examples:
"Third, there is the paradox of drawing the limits, which concerns the rejection component. This paradox is inherent in the idea that toleration is a matter of reciprocity and that therefore those who are intolerant need not and cannot be tolerated, an idea we find in most of the classical texts on toleration. But even a brief look at those texts, and even more so at historical practice, shows that the slogan “no toleration of the intolerant” is not just vacuous but potentially dangerous, for the characterization of certain groups as intolerant is all too often itself a result of one-sidedness and intolerance. In a deconstructivist reading, this leads to a fatal conclusion for the concept of toleration (cf. Fish 1997): If toleration always implies a drawing of the limits against the intolerant and intolerable, and if every such drawing of a limit is itself a (more or less) intolerant, arbitrary act, toleration ends as soon it begins—as soon as it is defined by an arbitrary boundary between “us” and the “intolerant” and “intolerable.” This paradox can only be overcome if we distinguish between two notions of “intolerance” that the deconstructivist critique conflates: the intolerance of those who lie beyond the limits of toleration because they deny toleration as a norm in the first place, and the lack of tolerance of those who do not want to tolerate a denial of the norm. Tolerance can only be a virtue if this distinction can be made, and it presupposes that the limits of toleration can be drawn in a non-arbitrary, justifiable way."
Hope you can get this feedback as an invitation to dig in into more questions.
Have a nice day!
Late but thank you! This expresses a point that was brewing in my mind, and some other comments herein that ask 'what is morally right/wrong anyhow'? I feel we must address this larger philosophical question, maybe through organisations such as the UN (cf: the sustainable development goals), interpretation of the 'golden rule' or my preferred version (I am a Christian) - 'love one another'.. Don in his later post suggests Scanlon's Contractualism, which is appealing...
I've written something related here dev.to/pieohpah/should-open-source...
"commons based peer production" is the long form version of what we're participating in.
I just added an old post of mine here where I dove into some background and previous research, plus a recent talk I gave.
I too would like to get Kyle from LicenseZero involved in the discussions here :) Maybe we can convince him to cross post his very excellent blog.
I appreciate both the big effort to build this analysis and also the responses questioning its validity.
I was hoping to see how you perceive free/libre software movement with respect to your criticque to open source. I think FLOSS is more human centered, but indeed does not see maintainers as you suggest.
I think this conversation is very very interesting and even important and hope you continue with it by responding the people that has had something to say about it.
"The key is that Open Source is literally about exploiting unpaid labor."
I might not be a maintainer, but having worked with FOSS maintainers and corporate maintainers I can say this: Not all open source maintainers work on their own accord, some actually get paid through regional programs and others through companies that they work for either as contract open source dev or a maintainer for customized versions of an open source project (which they then merge relevant code back to frequently). It's the choice of the maintainer to work themselves to death, as you say the incentive is volunteerism- just because I donate my time to a homeless recovery program to setup linux laptops that they can build resumes on, doesn't mean I'm going to quit my job as a Systems Administrator to volunteer myself to death.
"Indeed, the very nature of Open Source means that of course Open Source code can and will be exploited to violate the rights of other."
Water is a human right, right? So let's say a town has one large well and a benevolent citizen decides to work the well every day and pass the water through a filtration system. Because water is free, maintained to a healthy standard, should evil people not be given water? Do you think someone who charges money for the water should decline the sale of fresh water to an evil person?
Should a closed source company decide that government's who disrespect human rights no longer have access to their code? What's there to stop those companies from pirating the code anyway?
The fact that open source code is more readily available doesn't mean an evil person/group/organization wouldn't eventually get their hands on the tools necessary to commit atrocities.
Aside from a couple of your points, I do agree that maintainers are not the forethought of the open source community, as they bloody well deserve to be and I appreciate the length of time you must have put into your article as it is incredibly well written and thought out. Thank you for your time Don Goodman-Wilson.
'If we want to move into a post-Open Source world, we first and foremost need a new term for what it is we do that captures what we stand for.'
How about 'Paid And Licensed Source' or PALS? Paid as in no more expecting free work, and Licensed in a way that creates procedures which allow writers and maintainers to decide how and by who the source code may be used and procedures that create a way to deny use to anyone who doesn't follow the creator's rules or uses the code in some unforeseen and unethical manner against the wishes of those who created and maintained the source code -
I don't really know where to start and finish with this blog. Interesting thoughts whatsoever, but I don't think I agree with anything written. By focusing on the code, free software is opening the field of cooperation to radically different people. If you wish to cooperate with same-minded individuals then create new licenses.
This modern type of "objective" morals and ethics is a bit tiring, and most prominently a spook. Also most of the problems described are more or less apparent in the closed software world, since I don't think companies would not sell their merchandise on moral grounds. And I wouldn't want them to do so.
The issue of big things built on the labor of free software maintainers is just a non-issue. They can quit whenever they want, they can not care, they just offered something to the world. As much as I care everything can and shall crash and burn sometimes. Stability is a spook.
On the philosophical level you insist that since you can do bad things with free software, free software is bad. So knives are bad? I thought these discussions where ended around 1800s. If you want to restrict the use of your software you are able to do so. Write a license and go on. But trying to shame on a superficial level all the work that many people have offered to all of us is pathetic. Every developer can release on whatever license he cares. He can even change opinions.
What is your position on ICE using Microsoft products?
Are we already at the extinguish phase?
"If we look at the complete set of all reasonable justifications for a particular choice, do any of those dehumanize others, regardless of intent?"
Can you do this with an "incomplete set?" Can you find at least one "reasonable" justification that can be interpreted as dehumanizing others? Absolutely. What if you do not have a complete set? Are we to forever wait to evaluate a particular choice? Or perhaps wait for a choice to emerge from the chaos of a panel of decision-makers?
Apply this logic to physical tools: hammers, knives, nails, shovels, chainsaws, nail guns, etc.
Scanlon's logic behind his theory is circular it presupposes ability to define wrong in a system created to define wrong. Software is a good I don't see the difference between it and any other labor intensive good or service as you may be more inclined to call it. However regardless applying the logic even if it was functional still does not fix anything because adherence to what is agreed upon as reprehensible by principle cannot be enforced due to the nature of the theory and the nature of humans as a whole. forgive me if I missed something but it seems that you want to have your cake and eat it too.
I am not obliged to keep open source project, I keep because I want or like.
I'm speaking for myself not by most, sorry