A few weeks back I encountered a FOSS guy here explaining that when he sees open source devs ask for money, he blocks them and then stops using their code because they're morally wrong and he only wants to work with tools made by people who are doing the work for the right reasons. (I'm paraphrasing to avoid indexing the post.)
I've resisted writing about it because I'm slammed, but the question I can't shake is: Who benefits from the ideology of "pure" volunteerism?
@kissane If I'm using open source and a dev asks for money, I give it. I could never finish listing the FOSS software I have used over my lifetime. I'm happy that companies like Canonical and Redhat can pay people, but if the small projects need help, then I'm always happy to donate.
And in my professional life I'm lucky enough to have a sympathetic boss. If my company is using some FOSS he always approves my requests to send larger donations.
"Who benefits from the ideology of "pure" volunteerism?"
IN CAPITALISM? PREDATORS; so that means capitalists and their adjacent rich (petit bourgoisie to go old school).
too many companies that started as FLOSS are doing everything in their power to not just back away from their initial licenses but to not give a cent back to the people who were gullible enough to gift them with their labor.
FLOSS without cooperative ownership is just digital sharecropping.
@kissane This is a class warfare tactic. People who can afford to work for free get paid in social capital instead. The rest of us are locked out of those opportunities.
@alter_kaker This is what I keep coming back to, both from a strict class analysis and from frameworks of identity-based marginalization, which are obviously all mashed together IRL.
I think there's a closely related interest in maximizing rights/liberties and minimizing duties/responsibilities and some tangles about the way funding aways shapes output, but the class piece seems central to me.
@alter_kaker I don't feel like my sense of the problem is fully baked, but my guess is that the surface benefits of volunteers-only culture are 1.) social gatekeeping around especially class, race, gender, and ability, 2.) the hoarding of resources, including social capital, and 3.) a resistance to the duty of care, like the responsibility to make widely used tools more accessible, or documentation more inclusive.
@alter_kaker I think it's also complicated by a (valid) resistance to the bizarre demands people make of maintainers, which leads some people into a very rigid posture of, like, "no one in open source owes anything to anyone, ever, and anyone who says otherwise must be ostracized."
All cards on the table: When I co-ran a very large-scale volunteer project a couple of years back, the only thing we took money for was server costs and financially stabilizing our core team so they could continue the work. So I do have feelings, obviously, about what's good—please do filter me accordingly.
Lastly! If I hadn't been encountering expressions of this opinion for 20+ years, I wouldn't be mentioning this—I try not to do "Hey come smell this, I think it's gone off" unless I'm literally cleaning the fridge lol
@kissane Answering "privileged people" is a bit too simple. Plenty of wealthy white tech bros would never get moralistic about the purity of open source because they're on the hustle to monetize everything. (Sometimes by building their reputation from open source contributions & then pivoting to something else.)
No, the people who want open source to be all volunteer are people who idealize their hobby as counter-culture resistance, an antidote to their dull, corporate, trade-secret day jobs.
@kissane Of course, the other group that benefits are the for-profit companies that incorporate all the free labour from open source contributors. But unless your example guy was being really disingenuous, it doesn't sound like that was his motivation.
So, I think it's more like the obsession with amateurism in the early 1900s Olympics & sports movements: people who have easy but boring ways to make money are enthralled by the idea of taking on noble adventurous challenges for the love of it.
@AmeliaBR@kissane Yeah, amateurism and professionalisation in sports was the first thing this reminded me of. (Though in that historical case there very much was a class fault line underlying the dispute.)
@kissane Does this guy think that there are no paid staff at the local food pantry? At the art museum? The Trevor Project? That none of those are worthy of donations? You can have a non-profit that provides free services, and maybe it's largely staffed by volunteers, but still need to pay for operating costs and the labor and expertise of core staff.
But in practice, "open source" is semi-synonymous with permissive licenses, so called because they pretty much allow anyone to do anything with the code. By contrast, "free/libre software" is more associated with copyleft licenses, which require that changes get published under the same license. This is for establishing a commons.
It comes as relatively little surprise IMHO that companies prefer permissive licenses, not necessarily because they...
@MarkRDavid@kissane ... are greedy. Yes, protecting their own IP from accidentally becoming part of the commons is a major factor.
But permissive licenses are also easier. As a company, you get no support but you're also not required to give anything in return.
The other easy option is paying a vendor for support (license fees as well). Copyleft licenses are a weird intermediate because there's no contract partner to negotiate with, but they're not free of obligations, either.
@MarkRDavid@kissane Neither means that you don't need to pay contributors, but OS also makes it simple to trick yourself into thinking a permissive license "costs nothing". It's a hidden cost, hidden in the general personnel expenditure.
@kissane In short, insistence on “pure altruism” as the basis of open-source software is essentially a shorthand for excluding those who are not already wealthy. It’s elitist.
@drahardja This is my own gut sense of it, 100%. I suspect there are some knock-on beneficiaries that I don't really understand and I'm certain there are culture things I don't have my head around, but I do think that's what it boils down to.
@kissane As someone who spent over a decade write OSS, one that millions of people use every day, I can wholeheartedly say: f*ck this guy. We had so many bright and productive people who had to leave projects because they needed to put food on the table and after a long workday had no energy left to keep on coding for other people.
OSS has an idealistic aspect, but at the end of the day, everyone has bills to pay. They can either do that working on OSS or on commercial software.
@trochee@kissane i do open source work because the government pays my wages. it's technically "volunteer" because my job is not explicitly dependent on the code produced and it does not generate profit in itself. i'm often very skeptical/critical of FOSS projects whose funding models i think conflict with the broader health of open code. i would never dream of slicing the divide at 'only volunteer code is pure.'
@kissane this is the second time I hear this being told in llas many days. What the actual?
For me, I've never expected to get paid for my contributions but I'm also in such a fortunate position that I don't need to ask anyone to contribute money.
But others are not so lucky, and I still want them to be able to contribute without worrying about how to put food on the table.
@kissane To be fair, OSS has given a lot of opportunities to students and other newcomers who would otherwise not be able to work on interesting software projects with a chance to collaborate with leaders in their fields. It’s not all bad!
@kissane A possibility that no one seems to have considered is that this person is a troll, aka a low-level sociopath, who doesn't actually do what they pretend to do.
It's very hard to find a significant open source project which doesn't involve some people accepting money for spending their time to improve software for the common good.
For example, what language does the troll program in? Not C, C++, Python, JS, Ruby, ....
@TomSwirly Yeah, I mean, any individual could be, although this guy seemed to have a consistent shtick, but I’ve seen similar statements since I started in tech, so the philosophy isn’t about one guy.
@kissane i wonder if it’s related to concerns of artists “selling out” — the idea that being motivated by money crowds our other drives and narrows the space of creative expression.
@kissane Whew I remember attending a feminist consciousness raising session 50 years ago that featured a blistering analysis of whose work was supposed to be “volunteered” and whose wasn’t
@kissane So basically what he’s saying is folks making “open source” should be working at Big Corp during the day or be independently wealthy. And screw those of us actually trying to contribute to the commons. I guess we can just die.
@aral@kissane Yeah, I had a similar run-in a few days ago. I wrote something about more reciprocity in FLOSS, and someone both claimed I was trying to abolish volunteering and making volunteer contributions easier for companies to exploit, and I have no idea how you can get to that point from what I wrote. It's genuinely staggering.
@jens@aral Yeah, if it were one guy being a jerk it wouldn’t be worth mentioning but there’s a lot of related ideology floating around and I think it’s worth teasing apart to see what’s in there and why.
@aral@kissane their other "fun" trick, if the project hasn't produced a first release yet, is spreading false allegations of impropriety. That spooks contributors & makes people fear for their jobs, so they end up closing all the donation portals!
One of the understated benefits of Open Collective is that it's handled by a trusted legal source & publishes everything publicly in real time. That eliminates trust as an issue.
Funnily enough, right-leaning white guys are just implicitly trusted.
@kissane It would be interesting (I really mean that, no sarcasm) whether That Guy also produces under that stringent ethic, or only consumes under it, and if the latter how he makes sense of the difference.
Stipulating that Stallman is a turbocreep, one of the few things I find interesting about him is that he seems to embrace all the consequences of his ideology, even the unpleasant ones.
@kb My passing sense was that the person in question produced under that ethic at home while getting paid/having previously been paid an excellent salary in a a tech dayjob.
Speculations about how household labor gets divided and whose unpaid labor in families furthers paying careers would be unfair in the case of one guy, but I sure think about it a lot in aggregate.
@kissane only slavers benefit from that. I really enjoy making small donations to OSS or free software that I find useful. It's an act of kindness, and activism at the same time. The ideology you're paraphrasing is truly toxic imho.
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