Comment by subjectsigma

> but it seems like those who get the most benefit from free labor are large corporations.

One factor is the lack of adoption of copyleft licenses. The proliferation of permissive licenses turned into a backdoor for corporations to privatize volunteer work. We should adopt copyleft whenever possible. Stallman is right on this.

> but it seems like those who get the most benefit from free labor are large corporations.

I feel one thing to remember on this front is that large corporations will ALWAYS get the most benefit out of open source / “free labor”, simply because they have the ability to bring massive amounts of resources to bear on using that open source product towards their own ends. Consider the world of hardware emulation. Sure the community has benefited massively from the efforts poured into reverse engineering and understanding old systems and games and preserving what was there. And the big corporations reap huge benefits in the form of continuing nostalgia, awareness of their back catalog of IP, test markets and information about the viability of re-releases and in some cases the licensing (or outright theft) of emulators and emulator code for selling their own retro consoles.

Burn out is absolutely a concern, and the approach of some open source devs (like IIRC the curl dev) of essentially “f you, pay me” to support requests is probably an important thing to have. But for me as an individual, the fact that Atari’s current owners have reaped massive rewards from the fact that the emulation scene keeps their brand alive means nothing to me. I’d rather have the world we have were things are open and the community is there, than one were emulation is closed and insular and getting into it is even harder than it already is just to keep Atari from “winning” the most. And selfishly part of that is because Atari winning also benefits me. Their re-releases and re-masters and dumping of money into manufacturing by hardware retro clones puts money into the market, gives new hardware to tinker with or build on. And their dependence on the open efforts of the community also means bending that hardware to my own needs is much easier than if they had for example just rolled out a bunch of new proprietary SoCs to replace the old hardware with a single blob chip

> I’ve submitted a handful of pull requests and I’ve already run into the classic “Your patch works and provides a feature some people might like, but I don’t like it, go away.”

This might be because they’re not interested in maintaining it for future iterations.

> Open source first felt to me like a way to give power back to ordinary people, and it still is, but it seems like those who get the most benefit from free labor are large corporations.

As I often do on this topic, I feel compelled to point out that this isn't actually a problem. Software is not a scarce resource, and Microsoft (or whomever) getting huge benefits from a project doesn't prevent the project from doing good for the common man as well. Since nobody is being hurt by corporate usage of open source, there's no problem.

> I’ve submitted a handful of pull requests and I’ve already run into the classic “Your patch works and provides a feature some people might like, but I don’t like it, go away

Same. I think it is potentially easier to get a well defined change into Linux itself rather than a randomly chosen but largish open source project these days. I don’t really try to contribute to other projects anymore, not because I don’t want to, but because if you’re coding for fun anyway it’s usually better to work on a project you control rather than dealing with the frustration.

I think a huge percentage of open source would be more accurately advertised as “open source but closed contributions”, and being upfront and realistic about this is important. People who are already working for free deserve to have a realistic understanding of whether they will get to merge that simple bug fix they need to unfork the library, or if it’s more realistic that they need to start talking on a mailing list for 5 years and work out how to join a steering committee first.

As someone born in the 70s, I don't have high hopes for the Linux kernel after our generation is gone.

It is hard to keep something rolling after the founders, that managed to steer a project under their ideals are no longer around to steer the boat into the right direction.

Something else will eventually take Linux's place, in some form, it might even be a Linux based like Android, WebOS, ChromeOS.

Reading LWN I don't get the impression that the kernel is immune to "Your patch works and provides a feature some people might like, but I don’t like it, go away" -- even big corporate contributors sometimes wind up in year long efforts to try to get something they and others find useful upstream if the upstream maintainer is unconvinced about the worth of the feature or that it won't have net downsides for the codebase as a whole. The "extensible scheduler" is one prominent recent example.

I understand the frustration.

> Open source first felt to me like a way to give power back to ordinary people

I think it's the difference of philosophy between Free Software and Open Source Software: Free Software cares about the people, Open Source Software not so much.

> most people won’t care and the few that do might still treat you like crap

That's completely right, people are mean. I do open source for myself, I choose copyleft licenses (I like MPLv2/EUPL), and if people want to fork my project I am fine as long as they honor the license. If they do a good job, I can bring some of their changes back, to my benefit. If they ask me for features, I invite them to fork.

> I’ve submitted a handful of pull requests and I’ve already run into the classic “Your patch works and provides a feature some people might like, but I don’t like it, go away.”

That's where I think you misunderstand open source. It is their right to not take your change, you should not bully them for that. Your right is to fork the project and add your changes. Do it!

> I’ve submitted a handful of pull requests and I’ve already run into the classic “Your patch works and provides a feature some people might like, but I don’t like it, go away.”

Never ever build anything non-trivial for an open source project unless you've cleared it with the maintainer first. No one is obligated to take your contributions. Unless you're building an addition that you plan to maintain yourself (either privately or through a fork), always always always discuss what you want to do with the maintainer before you write your first line of code.

> I’ve donated plenty to organizations like Mozilla, Wikipedia, and GNOME. I then email them with my opinions on what they’re doing. In nearly every case not only am I ignored completely, I see those projects (Mozilla especially) continue to drift in a direction that I disagree with. So, I stopped donating.

In general I look at donations as influence-free. You aren't buying anything with your donation. Sure, an org is more likely to listen to the wants of someone who is a large, noticeable, recurring donator. But in general most people will not be that. Donate to support what they are doing, not to try to influence them. Your decision to stop donating when their values stopped aligning with yours was a good one.

> Open source first felt to me like a way to give power back to ordinary people, and it still is, but it seems like those who get the most benefit from free labor are large corporations.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. Unless you're going to dual-license your project, you just need to accept that people will use your software in ways that you might not agree with, or to make more money with it than you can make off it yourself. That's always been true, even before you started getting into it.

I do open source because I enjoy it. It's really that simple. I love building things with code, and building entirely for myself behind closed doors is much less fun than collaborating with others, building for a larger audience. If I ever stop enjoying it, I'll stop. If a company ever starts making money off what I've built, that's fine, good for them. If there's anything I've built that I do need or want to monetize, I'll license it in such a way that will make it harder for companies to make money without me getting a piece of it. But this is the trade off with open source: you give it away with no expectations for or reservations against how it's going to be used.

> I’m a young(-ish) dev who used to care a lot about open source but never managed to break into a community.

I think this is the wrong mindset. Open source works best with a "hacker" approach where you fix your own issues / fulfill your own wants and then share the results with others. Sure, this could result in becoming part of a community but that shouldn't be the goal.

> “Your patch works and provides a feature some people might like, but I don’t like it, go away.”

That's an entirely reasonable response. You are effectively asking the project regulars to maintain your code going forward, after expending whatever effort it would take to coach you into making it fit. It's perfectly fine for them to say thanks, but no thanks. Accepting pull requests indiscriminately only leads to project death by scope creep, unmaintanable bloat and eventually maintainer burnout.

> I’ve donated plenty to organizations like Mozilla, Wikipedia, and GNOME. I then email them with my opinions on what they’re doing. In nearly every case not only am I ignored completely, I see those projects (Mozilla especially) continue to drift in a direction that I disagree with. So, I stopped donating.

Understandable and I feel similarly about these (well except I never cared much about GNOME) but they are all run closer to startups than open source community projects.

Free Software is designed to solve this problem.

numpy and scipy are other examples of widely used (esp in scientific community) FOSS packages that are solid, updated, don’t appear to be v political (from the outside). There are others.

I hear you on "yeah, the patch works, but I don't want it" - or..., as I've had a few times "that works, but it's not the way I want it done - redo it my way". Had that happen a couple times, in tech stacks and projects I'm not comfortable in. I'm not an expert in tech X, and don't have time to become one, to learn 'your way' just to make a PR you find acceptable. I found a legit bug, gave you code to reproduce and a suggested fix; please reformat it if you don't like my way.

I also had an opposite experience - submitted a PR with a fix, and the maintainer rewrote it a 'better' way which addressed the problem higher up the stack, meaning it 'fixed' things in a couple other spots I didn't even know about. That was such a great thing to do, and reminded me that projects can be that collaborative, even when you don't really 'work' with the other people all the time.

I might suggest you find smaller and more focused projects to contribute or donate to. The spirit you're looking for is still out there. Your Mozilla donations individually don't mean much to them, and sending some money to GNOME doesn't mean they'll take your emails seriously. A more niche project addressing a more focused problem would more likely welcome your code and donations, and potentially let you have a 'voice' more effectively than at big projects.

Open source misses the point of Free Software. The distinction is important.

I have some tips that might help you develop a better relationship with Free Software.

Try to be egotistical about it. Contribute because you want a change in a software you use. If the maintainers are giving you a hard time, fork it with your changes and be happy.

Stop donating to software foundations, you will be disappointed on how they use your money.

Never sign away your rights with a contributor agreement. Fork it and move on.

Use copyleft whenever possible.

I will get downvoted for this answer. I have similar experiences with open source contributions, including big reports. My solution: Don't do it; it is a waste of your time. It is best, if possible, to run your own open source projects, then you fully control to whom you listen and accept input.