Comment by jaredklewis 2 months ago
Fair enough, but having worked inside a lot of tech companies I think I also have a pretty good sense of why tech companies don’t monetarily contribute more: no incentive to do so and because OSS is often chosen specifically to avoid costs.
Hard to see why those things will stop being true.
If you think companies care about embarrassment I have a nice house in Bhopal to sell you.
I think most of the executives and managers do - yes.
That’s why I said to shame individuals, not faceless entities. And I think it’s fascinating that you didn’t reply to what I actually said.
Even as you tried to shame me (ie “if you actually believe that, you’re so dumb you’d buy something ridiculous!”) because you recognize that shaming is an effective tactic.
>I think most of the executives and managers do - yes.
To quote someone else who's worked with Big Corp:
>>Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing management. Think of management the way you think of a lawn mower.You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about management.
>Even as you tried to shame me (ie “if you actually believe that, you’re so dumb you’d buy something ridiculous!”) because you recognize that shaming is an effective tactic.
I don't give a fuck what you think. I want to convince other people that you're wrong and we need better solutions for writing open source software because I enjoy doing it and I'd love to get paid for it. As far as I'm concerned you're a badly put together memetic lawnmower whose a danger to everyone around you - the end.
Yeah, I think it would take something like bankruptcy of a Fortune 500 company because a critical open source piece shut down.
And I'm not holding my breath that even that would sink in. People are amazingly talented at hearing only what they want to hear to justify doing it like they've always done it.
> because a critical open source piece shut down.
unless they're using some sort of hosted service for free, this cannot be critical. After all, software doens't rot, and they could continue to use the existing release until a (new) solution is found.
Look at how crowdstrike triggered outage didn't cause bankruptcy - that is more critical than most OSS would be.
That's only if they agree with your description. I really don't see that happening. I just see the simple, factual retort: "we're not deadbeats, and if you wanted us to pay, you should have sold it to us instead of giving it to us for free."
Which is absolutely correct!
As an open-source author and maintainer, I have no desire or motivation to call any of my users "deadbeats", especially when I license my software under terms that specifically do not require any kind of payment. That would be pretty hypocritical, as I've used lots of open source software (both personally and professionally) without paying for it.
Is there a website where one can see some open source contribution metrics? I found https://opensourceindex.io/ , but the absolute numbers do not tell much by themselves; of course the biggest companies contribute more[1].
[1] apart from Meta and Apple, they seem ridiculously low.
I think it’s pretty easy:
Refer to any manager or executive at a tech company who uses open source to generate profits but doesn’t contribute as a “deadbeat” — so their choice becomes a source of social embarrassment.