FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

Never work for free. It's a complete market distortion and leads to bad actors taking advantage of you and your work.

Yep.

I love the spirit of working for free on a project of passion. But yes it only takes a few bad actors to totally exploit it.

That's fine. Are they required to work for Google? I mean, they are independent and can decide on their own.

Sometimes it's hard: for many kinds of projects, I don't think anyone would use them if they were not open source (or at least source-available). Just like I wouldn't use a proprietary password manager, and I wouldn't use WhatsApp if I had a choice. Rather I use Signal because it's open source.

How to get people to use your app if it's not open source, and therefore not free?

For some projects, it feels better to have some people use it even if you did it for free than to just not do it at all (or do it and keep it in a drawer), right?

I am wondering, I haven't found a solution. Until now I've been open sourcing stuff, and overall I think it has maybe brought more frustration, but on the other hand maybe it has some value as my "portfolio" (though that's not clear).

You can just use the GPL, then it's free, but your labour cannot be so easily profited from by big corps

But it can be profited for not-so-big corps, so I'm still working for free.

Also I have never received requests from TooBigTech, but I've received a lot of requests from small companies/startups. Sometimes it went as far as asking for a permissive licence, because they did not want my copyleft licence. Never offered to pay for anything though.

Corporations extract a ton of value from projects like ffmpeg. They can either pay an employee to fix the issues or setup some sort of contract with members of the community to fix bugs or make feature enhancements.

There is precedent for this: https://sqlite.org/consortium.html

I've grown a bit disillusioned with contributing to Github.

I've said this on here before, but a few months ago I wrote a simple patch for LMAX Disruptor, which was merged in. I like Disruptor, it's a very neat library, and at first I thought it was super cool to have my code merged.

But after a few minutes, I started thinking: I just donated my time to help a for-profit company make more money. LMAX isn't a charity, they're trading company, and I donated my time to improve their software. They wouldn't have merged my code in if they didn't think it had some amount of value, and if they think it has value then they should pay me.

I'm not very upset over this particular example since my change was extremely simple and didn't take much time at all to implement (just adding annotations to interfaces), so I didn't donate a lot of labor in the end, but it still made me think that maybe I shouldn't be contributing to every open source project I use.

Nearly everyone here probably knows someone who has done free labor and "worked for exposure", and most people acknowledge that this is a scam, and we don't have a huge issue condemning the people running the scam. I've known people who have done free art commissions because of this stuff, and this "exposure" never translated to money.

Are the people who got scammed into "working for exposure" required to work for those people?

No, of course not, no one held a gun to their head, but it's still kind of crappy. The influencers that are "paying in exposure" are taking advantage of power dynamics and giving vague false promises of success in order to avoid paying for shit that they really should be paying for.

I understand the feeling. There is a huge asymmetry between individual contributors and huge profitable companies.

But I think a frame shift that might help is that you're not actually donating your time to LMAX (or whoever). You're instead contributing to make software that you've already benefited from become better. Any open source library represents many multiple developer-years that you've benefited from and are using for free. When you contribute back, you're participating in an exchange that started when you first used their library, not making a one-way donation.

> They wouldn't have merged my code in if they didn't think it had some amount of value, and if they think it has value then they should pay me.

This can easily be flipped: you wouldn't have contributed if their software didn't add value to your life first and so you should pay them to use Disruptor.

Neither framing quite captures what's happening. You're not in an exchange with LMAX but maintaining a commons you're already part of. You wouldn't feel taken advantage of when you reshelve a book properly at a public library so why feel bad about this?

use GPL

Now count how many libraries you use in your day to day paid work that are opensource and you didn't have to pay anything for them. If you want to think selfishly about how awful it is to contribute to that body of work, maybe also purge them all from your codebase and contact companies that sell them?

AGPL at a minimum. Some kind of copyfarleft license if a corporation exploiting your code is a serious concern.

Maybe those people shouldn’t be doing free labor to give me free libraries either.

Maybe such sociopath ideas should be shunned in any healthy society.