Open source maintainer threatens to throw in the towel if companies won't ante up
- Reference: 1642058584
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/01/13/opensource_apacheplc4x_payment/
- Source link:
On Tuesday, Christofer Dutz, creator of Apache PLC4X, said he will stop providing community support for the software if corporate users fail to step up and open their wallets.
"The industry seems to like using PLC4X and open-source in general, but doesn’t seem to be willing to support the people working on it," he wrote in [1]a post to GitHub. "So, I will stop providing free community support for PLC4X."
[2]
Dutz is one of six listed maintainers of Apache PLC4X, a set of libraries for communicating with programmable logic controllers – industry-specific devices involved in the automation of various manufacturing tasks. His demand for support exists outside his involvement with the Apache Foundation; he maintains a separate IT consultancy called c-ware to help companies design and implement PLC4X software to suit their respective businesses.
[3]
[4]
C-ware has launched [5]several crowdfunding initiatives to adapt Apache PLC4X to Python, Rust, and TypeScript, among other enhancements, but these have barely attracted any funding commitments.
Finally, the lack of crowdfunding or corporate support has led him to look for an exit.
[6]
"This is my final attempt," he wrote. "If this also doesn’t help with getting at least some form of financial attribution for my hard work, I will close down my business and there will be no further form of support from my side."
This lack of financial support is particularly remarkable given his claims about the potential value that can be accrued by running Apache PLC4X. In a previous [7]blog post he describes prototyping a data collection system using the software that would have saved the unnamed customer €20m.
Dutz's distress call comes just days after another open source developer, Marak Squires, [8]sabotaged two of his own projects. That was nine months after Squires complained about the unwillingness of those using open source software to pay for it.
Pay the piper
Over the past few years, software developers who bought into the idea of laboring with little or no compensation for the benefit of the community have begun to question the inequitable distribution of the value they've created and the profiteering predicated on their donated time and expertise.
What's referred to as the open source sustainability problem has played out on a large scale where companies like Amazon have been accused of co-opting open source projects to stifle smaller competitors like [9]Elasticsearch and [10]MongoDB . It came up following the disclosure of the Log4j vulnerabilities when one of the maintainers [11]fired back at critics who demand better security without contributing anything themselves – as it did [12]when the heartbleed bug bit OpenSSL in 2014 . And it remains an unsolved problem for any number of less well-known projects.
[13]
Devon Zuegel, open source project manager at GitHub, published [14]a post on the subject in 2019, writing, "OSS is everywhere, yet it lacks financial and personnel resources. Developers and companies benefit from a vibrant OSS ecosystem, but they lack proportionate incentive to contribute time and money to creating and maintaining projects. This dramatically limits the value of OSS despite its enormous potential."
GitHub actually did something in an effort to address the problem: it launched [15]GitHub Sponsors in December, 2020 , after a beta debut the year before. There are similar schemes like OpenCollective's [16]Funds for Open Source and the funding alerts output when developers use npm to install packages, but these efforts obscure the fundamentally exploitative nature of discretionary payments.
They're little better than contests companies hold to obtain the rights to creative work while paying out a token monetary award to a few participants that's far less than the market value of the work. Instead of being the tide that lifts all boats, donations serve as life preservers thrown to the select few among all those treading water.
[17]JavaScript dev deliberately screws up own popular npm packages to make a point of some sort
[18]Log4j doesn't just blow a hole in your servers, it's reopening that can of worms: Is Big Biz exploiting open source?
[19]FOSS developer survey: Mostly male, employed... and many don't care about 'soul-withering chore' of security
[20]Open Source Jobs Report: Explosive cloud growth knocks Linux off top spot for desired skillsets
In other forms of labor, compensation is commonly declared in advance via contract, what's generally referred to as a salary. There are commission arrangements, where salespeople (hopefully) get a pre-declared percentage of sales. And some industries work gratuities into the equation, so they can shift labor costs to customers.
But software developers, many of whom now are now involved in the unpaid creation and maintenance of critical code infrastructure, don't even have the predictability of tips, which restaurant workers and food delivery contractors can reasonably expect due to social conditioning, actual generosity in the face of employer cost-avoidance, and app interface dark patterns.
Instead, open source developers have found themselves participating in the feast-or-famine paradigm that platforms like Spotify and the App Store have redefined how digital goods get sold. The fortunate can make [21]more than $100,000 annually through programs like GitHub Sponsors. But that's not the norm.
Shockingly low payback
In 2019, developer André Saltz looked at available donation data from OpenCollective and GitHub. "The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80 per cent) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold," he wrote in [22]a blog post that year.
In 2020, musical artists on Spotify outside the top 2 per cent of earners earned [23]an estimated $12 to $15 per month from their work. For aggregating all that copyrighted content and offering it to subscribers, Spotify founder Daniel Elk now has a net worth of several billion dollars.
What science fiction writer William Gibson famously [24]observed about the future – The future is already here, it's just not very evenly distributed – turns out to be true about financial compensation.
When The Register asked Feross Aboukhadijeh, a well-known open-source developer, about open source sustainability in the context of the Log4j debate, he speculated that the problems open source developers face seeking compensation would take the form of alternative software licenses.
Perhaps we'll see more licenses emerge that place conditions on usage, like the [25]one offered by game tool maker Unity : Its software is free if you've used it to make a game that generates a gross annual revenue of less than $100,000. If your project turns out to be more profitable than that, there's a licensing fee.
It's either that or relying on the kindness of strangers, because government intervention at a time of regulatory paralysis looks like a pipe dream and would probably only make things worse if it actually happened. ®
Get our [26]Tech Resources
[1] https://github.com/chrisdutz/blog/blob/main/plc4x/free-trial-expired.adoc
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YeAGbJ8gXwfAlrmN4nEsMQAAAAM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YeAGbJ8gXwfAlrmN4nEsMQAAAAM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YeAGbJ8gXwfAlrmN4nEsMQAAAAM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://c-ware.de/en/cf-listing-page/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YeAGbJ8gXwfAlrmN4nEsMQAAAAM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://github.com/chrisdutz/blog/blob/main/plc4x/success-stories.adoc
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/10/npm_fakerjs_colorsjs/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/10/aws_elasticsearch_opensearch/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2019/01/10/amazon_documentdb/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/14/log4j_vulnerability_open_source_funding/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/untangling_open_sources_sustainability_problem/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YeAGbJ8gXwfAlrmN4nEsMQAAAAM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://github.blog/2019-01-17-lets-talk-about-open-source-sustainability/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/08/github_money_dark/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/26/opencollective_funding_developers/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/10/npm_fakerjs_colorsjs/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/14/log4j_vulnerability_open_source_funding/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/08/foss_developer_survey_mostly_male/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/21/open_source_jobs_report/
[21] https://calebporzio.com/i-just-hit-dollar-100000yr-on-github-sponsors-heres-how-i-did-it
[22] https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
[23] https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-million-artists-royalties-1038408/
[24] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
[25] https://unity3d.com/unity/activation/personal
[26] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: There's something I don't get
Perhaps then it's time to change FOSS to FFNCUOSS*?
* Free For Non-Commercial Use
Re: There's something I don't get
Presumably the idea is not to lock people out who can't pay because they can still contribute in the form of bug reports or code themselves, and rely on good corporate practice/social responsibility to donate money to keep a project going that they themselves benefit from.
Obviously that wasn't a green light for the likes of Amazon to copy everything wholesale and not give a cent or line of code in return. But even Amazon manage to keep the software up-to-date, there are thousands or tens of thousands of corporations who never even manage to get that far.
Just imagine if one of the thousands of corporations had noticed the log4j bug and contributed the code to fix it.
Re: There's something I don't get
It's fun to tinker and make something that's useful to you and other people. To some degree it's even fun to polish it up
What isn't fun is realizing that your professional reputation has become yoked to it after it becomes a source of stress and impossible time sink, and if you walk away, your reputation suffers and people (who never paid or helped out) will castigate you on every corner of the internet that coders populate (all of them), as if you broke some kind of unwritten contract.
Anyone can fork a project, and many do, but that inevitably leads to mass proliferation of dead forks with one or two tweaks, nothing that ever evolves back into a centrally maintained project.
So, eventually, someone else out there feels like tinkering something useful together to wholesale replace the undead project, and starts the whole process over again....
Re: There's something I don't get
This is a bit harshly put, but accurate.
I do think companies need to do a bit more tho. A while ago at $JOB we wanted to implement a custom OAuth2 provider in python. We looked around, and there wasn't quite the open source libraries that fully encompassed the features we needed* (OIDC), so I took the best, most well maintained library and fully implemented OIDC for it, 100% test coverage, documentation, the whole 9 yards. The PR was accepted, and we had our custom project up and running in under 2 months.
That's wonderful - company needs something, develops it in OSS library, everyone's a winner... except we contributed nothing to the support of this feature. I was quickly on to the next project, no time for ID work, and we gave them nothing financially.
AC because this story leads to a github project, which leads to my commits, my company and my github username.
* 0auth actually had libraries that did, but we didn't trust them. It seemed their libraries kept boiling down to "wouldn't it be nicer to just pay us $2/user/month and let us do it". No it wouldn't.
Re: There's something I don't get
FOSS is a good thing, but I do think any one who uses it for commercial gain should contribute to the project in some way. Not necessarily Jo Bloggs who designed a system using a couple of open source libraries that they make a few pounds a month with, but certainly the likes of Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta and Apple who are likely to make millions from an open source project.
Re: There's something I don't get
Developer: Here's this software I wrote, you can have it for free.
Big Company: That's really useful, I insist on paying for it.
Never going to happen, arguably it could even be considered as financial mismanagement by the company. If the developer wants to be paid for commercial use then they should have chosen a release model which allowed for that.
"government intervention"
And what form should it take? Subsidies to FOSS developers? Paid by a tax on software? Nobody forced them to give their code away for free.
The problem with FOSS is it is based on a communist belief, and it has ended as any communist state: those at the top exploit those at the bottom. Keep on working for the ideal, Stakanov!
Re: "government intervention"
My understanding of FOSS has always been development of the software and availability of it is is free, but support has to either be provided by the community or a paid for service.
Some products survive quite well with this model, however some FOSS projects are relatively easy to learn and don't require a huge amount of support these days.
Technically speaking, I make money out of FOSS because I build platforms using FOSS and I charge to support it (nothing extortionate though, I'm far from being "rich") but I don't maintain any FOSS projects myself. Mostly because I have no interest (a lot of FOSS Devs are hard to work with) and providing support is a full time job in and of itself.
I do contribute backwards where I can (and where I see value, I won't contribute to a project that is slow moving for example, there's a ton of awesome projects that are mired in squabbling or have cultural issues).
Re: "government intervention"
Foss writers that work for big corporates do alright out of it. Google, red hat etc.
Maintainer of some obscure shell command out of your back bedroom? Apart from the honour of being able to say so there is basically no route to funding; and there never was. How can I put this - if you want paying for it “get a job”.
FOSS has a lot in common with piracy in the 1990s. Everyone wants stuff for nothing, including people that write stuff.
Re: "government intervention"
"The problem with FOSS is it is based on a communist belief, and it has ended as any communist state: those at the top exploit those at the bottom. Keep on working for the ideal, Stakanov!"
Hmm! Sounds a lot more like capitalism to me.
Naive
If you learn a little bit of history it's pretty fucking clear the only way FOSS developers are going to start getting paid appropriately is collective bargaining.
Shouldn't have to explain
FOSS is largely a gift economy. It only makes sense to play in it after your physical needs are met. Or just possibly to share the work on the tools of your trade, in the same way that Apache httpd came about or IBM contributes to the linux kernel.
I blame Eric Raymond, for claiming that FOSS could be a business model.
My sympathy to anyone who didn't realise that they were choosing poverty.
Re: Shouldn't have to explain
I think that a lot of FOSS gets created because the writers are just trying to show other people how things should be done - it's written by programmers who are trying to be educational and get a little praise or smiles from others.
Compare it to Free Open Source Artwork ... most people make no money but Banksy has been lucky, maybe we need to move FOSS to the Banksy world but it would be just another FOSS issue if anyone were to document how to do that.
'CFO's
Well, I was sysadmin/network administrator the Company required an IT help-desk system and a change request logging system which we really never had.
Among the plethora of 'solutions' out there, all costing 1000's of £ to buy, then the yearly maintenance licence, I found a FOSS system that combined both systems coded in PHP running on Apache. I installed it and messed around for a bit and as it was open source I easily fixed a few issues and adapted it to suit our exact requirements. All of which I submitted back as patches to the users/bug forums.
After a year or so of using this, in which all Dept.'s got on well with and as stated suited our exact requirements to a tee (for audits etc.) after my tweaks and fixes, I asked my boss, the CFO, if the Company would donate £200.00 or so to the developers, as they saved up 1000's of £ for us and also I could change/fix anything to suit what we required on the functionality.
He refused on the ground that as it was 'free' there was no Company value/assest or depreciate to record so therefore so there was naff all on the accounts sheet. No matter which way I approached it, he point blank refused.
Luckily the my Company shut down a few years after that.
Re: FEO's
And people bothered by this should licence their stuff as, say, Creative Commons - By - Noncommercial
Seems strikingly similar to art. The original artist just needs to (e.g. paint) and may give it away for a meal. Most such art sits around gathering dust, the few reach dizzy heights of financial transactions but the artist doesn’t get any (usually dead by then)
Licensing is not the silver bullet as enforcing it is beyond the means of many.
And saying it’s a socialist or communist thinking is too simplistic. I often wrote code just for the intellectual exercise of solving a problem. Sometimes I gave it away somethings I deployed it in my own licences code.
I’m not sure what I’m saying here other than ‘it’s complicated’
Not always true
Seems strikingly similar to art. The original artist just needs to (e.g. paint) and may give it away for a meal. Most such art sits around gathering dust, the few reach dizzy heights of financial transactions but the artist doesn’t get any (usually dead by then)
[1]Artist's Resale Right
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_suite
Tech crash?
> Dutz's distress call comes just days after another open source developer, Marak Squires, sabotaged two of his own projects.
The 2008 financial crisis arose because lots of american financial products were made of a mixture of high-risk debt that nobody quite understood their exposure to. It worked for a time, until confidence ebbed and some of those debts turned bad.
Are we now seeing the same thing in the world of FOSS? That every organisation fed at the trough of "free" (gratis) software with little or no understanding of the risks and exposure they were building in. And just like in 2008, it worked fine, until some "players" defaulted and then the whole mess turned sour.
We have all heard of technical (or software) debt. Where past shortcuts in design, implementation or documentation lead to far more work in the future. But that at the time, those failures did not seem important.
Are all those chickens coming home to roost?
It seems some people should reread their classics.
Workers get the labour, their masters get the dividends of it.
I work for a very large company. It's almost impossible to get money for donations to projects, conferences etc. as it just doesn't seem to fit in with the "receive invoice, wait for ages, pay invoice" model of payments. I've tried to get small amounts of money and it is very hard. Interestingly the only people to have any kind money for this are the diversity and inclusion group, so people usually try to force some "Diversity" angle on things!
There's something I don't get
You decide to contribute to a FOSS project. That is a Good Thing TM , and good on you.
Whatever brought you to think that you should get paid for it ?
Now, let me be clear that I am aware that there are many companies that are profiting from this, but you knew that there would be people using your code when you started. That is why you started. Why do you feel that you should be paid now ? Is it because there are companies making mint out of your work ?
There should only be two categories of developers working on FOSS projects : the ones paid by their company to contribute code, and the ones doing it as a hobby after their day job.
If you are contributing FOSS code as a full-time occupation, you are perverting the system and I don't see that you deserve being paid. Open your own company and go closed-source. If you're worth it, you'll make it. If you're not, you'll find another employ and go contribute on your spare time.