<story><title>The Internet Relies on People Working for Free</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wvenable</author><text>I feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor.  I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren&amp;#x27;t grasping.&lt;p&gt;Nobody is doing anything they don&amp;#x27;t want to do.  Nobody is forced to build open source software.  And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren&amp;#x27;t worth enough individually to charge for.  It&amp;#x27;s only collectively that these contributions have value and we all collectively benefit from it.  And for-profit companies are part of that collective benefit but that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean money needs to be involved.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m working on an open source project right now -- I&amp;#x27;ve put a lot of hours into it -- and it&amp;#x27;s cool but there is no way to build a profitable business from it.  It&amp;#x27;s an end-user product, the small number of users will like it, and I just enjoyed building it.  But I also don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to make it business.  I already have a job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhizome</author><text>Nobody&amp;#x27;s saying it has to be, uh...what&amp;#x27;s the name of a profitable internet company that isn&amp;#x27;t Facebook? But making demands on people who are working for free is &lt;i&gt;bad manners&lt;/i&gt;. I don&amp;#x27;t care if you think the internet changes everything, it&amp;#x27;s still possible to be an asshole.&lt;p&gt;My off the cuff solution is for project owners to add a status flag to their issue trackers: PAID. Anybody can submit a bug as PAID, but it costs $50,000-100,000 to do so, per bug. And no private fixes: there is one version and everybody gets the benefit. No badgering on ETAs either.&lt;p&gt;If Ford thinks it has value, then the developer should get some of that value, and $100K for a suitable patchlevel of cURL might even be a low estimate.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Internet Relies on People Working for Free</title><url>https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wvenable</author><text>I feel like there is an article a week about how open source developers are being used by corporations for free labor.  I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding that these journalists aren&amp;#x27;t grasping.&lt;p&gt;Nobody is doing anything they don&amp;#x27;t want to do.  Nobody is forced to build open source software.  And, most importantly, most of these contributions aren&amp;#x27;t worth enough individually to charge for.  It&amp;#x27;s only collectively that these contributions have value and we all collectively benefit from it.  And for-profit companies are part of that collective benefit but that doesn&amp;#x27;t mean money needs to be involved.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m working on an open source project right now -- I&amp;#x27;ve put a lot of hours into it -- and it&amp;#x27;s cool but there is no way to build a profitable business from it.  It&amp;#x27;s an end-user product, the small number of users will like it, and I just enjoyed building it.  But I also don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to make it business.  I already have a job.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>svavs</author><text>&amp;gt; Nobody is doing anything they don&amp;#x27;t want to do. Nobody is forced to build open source software.&lt;p&gt;Many job postings list OSS contributions as a requirement &amp;#x2F; desirable for employment. So, I&amp;#x27;m not sure if your statement holds up.&lt;p&gt;I personally know developers that contribute to OSS because of this. And many that have burnt out because of the constant need to contribute.&lt;p&gt;Most OSS contributors do it for fun - but there is a section that do it because it&amp;#x27;s becoming part of the interview &amp;#x2F; job hunting process.</text></comment>