donuts

This is fearmongering bullshit that incorrectly equates machine learning with human intelligence and is totally ignorant of the law.

I get it, you want to use AI. Don't worry, it'll stick around.

But the free ride of big companies owned by millionaires and billionaires helping themselves to every piece of data and knowledge that happens to be on the internet somewhere is going to end. Every bubble bursts eventually, and hopefully AI comes out better in the end.

Absolutely batshit to attack a piece of free and open source software that everybody loves. I guess they must have struggled with the donut tutorial.

You know, normie stuff!

So they always say... and then keep reading and posting tweets all day every day.

Sigh, here we go again.

The thing I've found with AI tech bros is that they're rarely interested or informed about any creative process, and instead are much more interested in typing shit into a web form that spits out some garbage that they can pretend that they created.

It's like arguing with people over NFTs or whatever, we could get down to the technical details and the merits/flaws with the concept and current implementation, but at a certain point it's like trying to tell a flat-earther that the world is round or an anti-vaxxer that vaccines have saved millions of lives over the last century. I really don't want to be an ass to any of them, but after months of trying to get through to them I'm kind of over trying to talk them through it.

Hey guys I think this Elon Musk guy might be not so great...

I'm a Linux guy and I don't really care about Windows, but I'm glad to see this happening and every day I thank Europe for being the main entity fighting for regulation of big tech monopolies, because America is really failing.

If you develop software for a living that means you spend the bulk of your work week writing code for money, probably for a for-profit business writing closed-source, proprietary software.

And please don't get me wrong... That's not to invalidate the volunteer work that you've done in your free time for whatever FOSS projects that you've contributed to. That's a commendable and generous use of your free time and as a FOSS enthusiast I appreciate whatever you've done.

But now just imagine if you could spend your work week writing code for FOSS projects, while still making a decent living for yourself or your family. Imagine how much more FOSS code you could write with entire weeks of time instead of just the odd weekend here and there. Imagine how much effort you could dedicate towards maintaining larger projects and reviewing code from other contributors to accelerate the pace of development. Imagine how much more, high quality FOSS software would be available to everybody to use, for free, all over the world if more people like you could spend their days writing FOSS code instead of writing proprietary code.

That's the point of what I'm saying.

Obviously not every project can afford to pay every developer for their one-off patch that they submit on a random weekend. Most projects don't have the funding to do that, and even if they did the logistics of it are unreasonable. But that's not really the point. More sustainable funding for FOSS means that more developers would be able to spend the bulk of their time writing FOSS code and maintaining FOSS projects. Large FOSS projects like Blender absolutely rely on this concept.

In my opinion people who are genuine allies of FOSS should want more stable and sustainable funding for FOSS development, so that more talented people can spend more of their time doing work for FOSS projects instead of for-profit companies.

I'm not saying I think it's wrong, I am just curious how and why people believe that FOSS development should be funded.

Why FOSS development should be funded is the easy part... At scale, FOSS maintainership and development often becomes a full-time job, just like any full-time software development job.

Users file bug reports of varying degrees of urgency. Community contributors submit merge requests (patches) that need to be tested, reviewed, iterated upon, and merged. Changes need to be documented and releases need to be made and delivered to users all over the world. Finally, for projects to improve, a future direction for the program needs to be planned and features need to be designed so that the project isn't just aimlessly stagnating. That's why people are paid full-time salaries to work on projects like Linux or Blender, because otherwise it is almost impossible for FOSS projects to handle a large number of users and contributors. (There are exceptions to this, but keep in mind that they are exceptions)

Lots of volunteer contributors obviously do good work for FOSS projects for free out of pure generosity and wanting to make things better. I appreciate that and I think we should all appreciate that. But unless they are independently wealthy, they are very unlikely to have the time to commit to spending 32 hours or more per week on contributing to FOSS. In our current world, most people have to make a living and they spend most of their time doing just that. They might have enough free time and energy to write a one-off feature/bug patch to some FOSS project, and that's a great and noble thing, but they likely do not have infinite time to continually maintain or develop a large project.

How FOSS projects get funded is the tricky part, because FOSS funding mainly relies on corporate support (as in Red Hat paying developers to maintain and work on the Fedora Project, for example) and individual user donations (like the ones that you might find on the Blender Development Fund, for example). Sadly many users don't value FOSS, as can be seen in this thread, and so they may never see the need to contribute to FOSS development funding.

I don't understand the idea that people should be paid for FOSS work.

In an ideal world, nobody would need money for anything (food, water, shelter, education, healthcare, infrastructure). We would all do exactly what we want, when we want, and society would just take care of itself.

In the slightly less than ideal world that we live in, everybody should be compensated for work that they do, and people who volunteer their extra time for free to some project or ideal should at the very least be appreciated.

title is saying FOSS is unsustainable but we are here decades later with Linux the dominant server platform (I was there when this was very much in doubt) and tons of our infrastructure continues to run on free and open software.

Much of which, including Linux, is funded by companies and individuals so that talented and knowledgeable developers can afford to spend the bulk of their weeks maintaining these projects. What would happen to if you dropped Linux's funding to $0/month? Obviously development and maintenance would no longer be sustainable.

Sadly not every project is as well-funded as Linux obviously, and there are important pieces of software at every level that are falling victim to the tragedy of the commons because, in some cases, FOSS development at scale is not sustainably funded.

I am willing to be convinced, but I can't help but think that software you get paid to write is a capitalist business, subject to all the enshittification problems that brings. Why do we want that in FOSS?

Paying people well to do good work is not the problem with capitalism. The root of the problems concerning capitalism is when the work of others is exploited in service to profit.

People who work full-time for non-profit organizations do get paid, as they should, and fairly.

Frankly we have our priorities totally fucking backwards if we are pointing the finger at workers or non-profits for the problems of society and the enshittification of technology. But that's something to think about as many of us collect our paychecks from our for-profit employers.

That wasn't an answer to my question.

What do you do for a living and why don't you do it for free?

Edit:

Nobody is forcing others to make free and open source software

But clearly a lot of people here are expecting people who develop and maintain open source software to do it for free, regardless of how many hours it takes and how obviously unsustainable that notion is at scale.

Nobody is claiming that FOSS is slavery (i.e. people being forced to work for free), but expecting other people to work for free is entitlement, plain and simple.

And yet the very entitled people in these comments have the nerve to tell other people that they should donate their time for the greater good, when you can be sure they gladly pick up a check every couple of weeks for whatever they do.

It's shameless. Remember that FOSS developers don't owe you shit.

Holy fuck. Nobody fucking wants this shit.

Edit: The minute AI generated trash music or videos start showing up in my feed I'm buying new drives for my jellyfin server and never looking back.