How are companies or developers supposed to make a full time living with OSI opensourced projects? (opensource.org)

submitted 6 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren't OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also been targets of vitriol.

So, let's say we wanted to make it possible for the majority of developers to work on software that strictly follows the definition of opensource, which models would be acceptable to make enough money to work on those projects full-time?

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[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago

I know all updates can be behind a paywall and still be FOSS but it really hurts the public good / community aspects that make FOSS great to me.

If companies abuse public good, how should the public protect itself and still stay great?

From a policy stand point I think stakeholders should sue when a major security breach tanks gets identities stolen, the stock or worse and CTO failed to buy down any risk with SLAs on key software.

🤔 Could you clarify the relation to opensource?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[-] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The later is true for all software, but a lot of the "open source is unsustained"talks comes from the trillions of dollars and critical infrastructure built on it, but with little to no funding going back to actually paying for development or any contract in place saying that bugs will be fixed at all.

I think the "abuse" part is less of an issue outside if this. Like I don't mind that business benifit more than they put into public infrastructure, in fact I hope they do, but its a problem in which people that benifit the most aren't paying their proportional amount of the bill or worse no one is and we poise ourselves to lose it.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago

its a problem in which people that benifit the most aren’t paying their proportional amount of the bill or worse no one is and we poise ourselves to lose it

Exactly. A lot of this public infra is written in OSI respecting opensource, yet it is being taken advantage of with little to no kickback. Most people writing opensource cannot live on it and are never compensated for their work. Yet, when the proposition is made to introduce the equivalent of a tax within/for opensource projects, there's an outcry about it not respecting the OSI definition of opensource.

So, my question is, what's the realistic alternative? Because right now OSIsts are defending the equivalent of roads being built by people in their offtime and are vehemently against it being written that they should get compensated if the road is used for commercial purposes.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[-] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 months ago

I mean we build projects that benifit ourselves and don't do the boring stuff we don't want to for free. If we are affected by organizations responsible to us (we are paying customers, investors part owners, voters, etc) that didn't do due dillegece to maintain their IT systems by getting meaningful SLAs or hiring proven capable devs to support upstream, they we sue them, demand refunds, vote out execs, etc, etc.

I don't think the free loading concept is very helpful way to frame though. If a bunch of people can make things or run services for next to no cost, that's great too. Not everything is critical, not every public project needs funding, just because we put in work to something does it mean we need to be paid for it. Somethings only became critical because a bunch of people, just for fun, ran stuff on it and choose it just because it was free.