I feel that there is an inherent conflict of interest in the OSS support sales model. Hypothetically, if your software were really simple and robust (think standard unix utilities), nobody would pay for support. On the other end, if you have to deploy openstack, kubernetes, or any other stack with a lot of moving parts, you need support and personnel. So in a perverse way, it's in your interest to make complicated shit. In reality, it is perhaps not quite as bad, but I definitely feel that with a lot of projects for which RH is the sole upstream, the quality or elegance isn't quite there when compared to more traditional linux or unixy things which have more diverse upstreams. This manifests in systemd, freeipa, glusterfs etc. too. These are generally hard problems though. So it's not quite black and white.
That is really, really not the case. You don't pay for someone holding your hand. You pay for support because you either simply have the resources to do so or your business requires you to pay for the things you use.
If you need help setting up Kubernetes, glusterfs or something else you get help from a third party contractor. That's what we do.
You pay for support because your want someone to keep sending out security patches even if upstream should roll over, and you pay for Red Hat specifically because you want to have an upgrade schedule your business can adhere to (as opposed to when upstream feels like it).
Put another way, you pay for the privilege of having someone to sue.
>> you pay for support because you either simply have the resources to do so or your business requires you to pay for the things you use.
A nuance: many big businesses require that you pay for software you use, and part of what you are paying for is an indemnification via the vendor, which makes sense to purchase for big businesses with deep pockets
https://www.scl.org/articles/3030-indemnity-and-limitation-o...
Companies also pay for support because after a few years the version of the open source product has moved on and nobody realizes the true cost of ownership does not end with the acquisition cost the company doesn't have the budget to upgrade. Thus they're 5 levels back and nobody in the Open Source community is interested in fixing old software. As an example, RedHat offers up to 9 years of support for Openshift. That's why companies pay for support.
You also pay for support so that when your senior engineers all pack up and start their own business together you can ring somebody to keep your infrastructure running while you find more people with the right level of knowledge.
I find this attitude really tiring. I'm a contractor and I work with people all the time who feel like they must avoid improving anything because if they do they'll be out of a job. It's nonsense. It's the same as the luddites that think robots will tale all the jobs. There will always be something new (and more fun to do) than maintaining broken systems and processes.
I have been in a couple slightly dicey situations but overall have found that there are always other things I’d like to have time to do if I didn’t spend so much energy babysitting a shitty tool or process.
You find out frequently that people who use the tool have ten things they never asked for because the tools don’t even handle basic common sense concerns. It feels like asking for a pony, possibly from a neglectful parent.
You fix a few things and get labeled as clever or useful. People come to you with more stuff and it expands your grasp of the organization. For me this strategy has opened up leadership opportunities.
You can still be laid off but everybody else will wonder who was the idiot who got rid of the person who was keeping the ship afloat.
there will always be something to do because once software A is so easy to use anyone can do it, you can jump to support software B that isn't there yet.
But if you poured resources in A with the hope of making supporting A your bread and butter, and A is so easy to use no one needs help, well, you kind of wasted your time and money, UNLESS you managed to make it so popular that the 5% of people who still need help anyway are enough to keep you afloat. That's hard though.
This isn't necessarily true in the enterprise. At our company we buy support for everything we use, whether we need the support or not. It's more like insurance, which also helps to break out of the O(N) scaling that people think goes along with the support business model.
Yeah I really think this is the most important point. In an enterprise environment it's almost more important to be able to point at who is responsible for supporting a product as it is for the product to actually work. The due diligence of any purchasing decision will always involve 'and what if it goes wrong'- especially since most enterprise companies will involve legal when getting approval for the use of OSS.
Large companies sometimes don't actually 'do' any of their own IT work. There are layers of SLA's across data centers and applications, spread across multiple vendors, contractors, etc.
Everything must have a legal contract that specifies support terms, penalties, etc. Large company's motives are risk avoidance to ensure profits for shareholders.
Basically companies will pay a premium to have someone they can call and yell at if something goes sideways. Usually corporate finance departments have no logistical way to accept a reimbursement from a vendor for missing a SLA but they like to put clauses like that in a contract.
The other part is the professional services arm tied to the sales process. RH can provide experts that only they can provide - they are the ones writing the code sometimes. Other companies like Oracle have professional services but I doubt they are committers on the products being sold.
One of the ways I poke fun at the Apache foundation is to point out that their online documentation is vague and uninspiring, and then poof the lead maintainers write an Oreilly book that explains all the whys and hows and whats.
Oreilly author and project lead for an open source eclipse foundation (apache style project though!) project that runs a company. Happy to answer questions here about the how/what/why this happens.
Kind of like professors writing difficult to reproduce papers, then explaining everything in the textbook (which they also assign to their students...)
wrong angle. Would you prefer to be an unknown/invisible/unappreciated manager of a small team writing simple robust software or to be a highly visible and valuable (S)VP of an organization developing a buggy complex equivalent of that simple robust software? I've observed the same answer to that modern Hamlet's question everywhere around me through all these years at the BigCo-s :)
When you assume inherent complexity exists, and competition exists, it works out fine. The consumers will always require some support for any complex OSS, but they want to minimize it (by finding OSS with reduced accidental complexity). OSS are incentivized to increase accidental complexity, but they’re capped by reputation and competition.
Of course, you can work around the core incentives (eg by marketing), and a lack of competition changes everything (consumers take whatever they can get, producers sell as high as they possibly can without bankrupting the consumer), but in a well-behaving market it should be fine.
Your RH-upstreams examples can probably be sufficiently explained by lack of competition, due to a captured market. Which isn’t behavior specific to OSS, but to every market. Notably, breaking RH’s stranglehold would be naturally easier than say apple’s
But that exact conflict of interest exists in closed source support models too. It exists for any company that wants to sell a support service. And it relies on the supporters being small-minded enough that they'd rather have a 1% market in 100 people than a 0.01% market of 1,000,000.
The incentive you identify only goes away if the software is a product with no support - and then businesses won't buy it, because there is no support.
> Hypothetically, if your software were really simple and robust (think standard unix utilities), nobody would pay for support.
Yeah but reality shows that standard unix utilities are not used by the majority of people. So many people use unix based systems, especially macOS which has much more simple/bare-bones tools than GNU/Linux and still few people do read man pages for instance
Disclaimer: Your concern is exactly what pays my salary. Take what I say with a grain of salt.
I typically see this attitude at the developer level, but the line of business never sees it like that. Devs don't have incentive to care about these things. They also just want to deal with the vendor.
What you sell is more "insurance" and a guaranteed timeline on bug fixes/releases.
As someone who supports OSS, why should you be able to demand I ship something on a certain schedule if you're not paying me? If it's a business transaction, then there's a contract and aligned incentives on both sides.
Taking this a step further, this is usually not enough which is why we then see open core business models like elastic search, gitlab, (and also my company skymind) selling a combination of support + licensing.
I think of it the other way. "I get paid X amount a month to guarantee support. How do I reduce my support costs? Oh I know, I'll make my product easier to use." Kind of like insurance companies who spend effort to figure out a way to make your activities safer.
Of course if they made it perfectly easy they would be out of a job since the software is free. But so long as it's within a certain margin it works out.
I work for a large insurance company that has a large RHEL deployment. We don't buy support really, it's just licenses to use with support attached. We'd use Centos in a heartbeat but Oracle and IBM won't support Centos. Our managers know the value for the support isn't really worth it, but it's about two factors: having someone on the other line to yell at when things go pear shaped, and also having teflon armor in case another manager uses an incident as ammunition in a fight for prestige.
As the article explains the real problem with that model is that selling software is scalable - but support is not. So a support business will never have the same margins as a software selling business - and will not be able to invest in the software the same money.
One thing we could do, if we wanted, is to build a society focused on automating away jobs. Such a society would not rely on people to work for its function, but on the labor of machines.
In such a place, people would be free to work as hard as they want for additional gain. They could also, however, take as much time off as they desired to go to school, learn on their own, spend more time with loved ones, or just relax and explore life in their own way.
In such a society, I think many people would be motivated to give their labor to open source projects. I think the machines that run such a society would necessarily be open source, and many people could give back to society by contributing to the design and improvement of the machines that provide for us all.
What do you all think of this? Would you want to live in a place like that?
“Automating away jobs” is like “harvesting away corn”.
Sure you can delete someone’s job. But you just leave a job-shaped hole in the person that then goes and finds a new purpose. It only seems like a disappearance for the season, and then you find something new growing there.
The idea that we are anywhere near “doing all the work” is batshit. We are presently doing maybe 1% of the work that needs doing. You could automate the entire economy 50 times and still have 50 more careers waiting for the globe’s population.
Bioremediation in he wake of climate change alone could occupy an entire generation of earth humans. Mental health another. Building permaculture cities will be the work of an entire generation. None of those things will be amenable to robot labor.
I don’t think we’re close to doing all the work, and I don’t want to automate all work. I want to automate away jobs. Those things society relies on from everyone to function.
The point is that a society that requires everyone to work all the time sucks for a lot of people - particularly those at the bottom. We can and I believe should build a world where working a job is optional. I fully expect people would still work a lot, but it would be optional in the sense that their basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, access to computers and internet) would be provided to them by society.
It is certainly possible to build this. And many people want it. The key, I think, is to build the system based on voluntary interaction. Find people who are willing to help support others and then have those people collectively drive the cost of that support down through engineering.
I’m not trying to eliminate work. You can never eliminate work. I want to eliminate jobs.
but who is going to want to pay for such things? The whole reason "jobs" exists is that it's a task somebody wanted done, and is willing to pay some resources for it.
> What do you all think of this? Would you want to live in a place like that?
Yes, but you're going to need to have the political capital to ratchet down the work week and split productivity gains with labor and capital. That does not exist yet, and without it, the advances you speak of will be used to funnel more wealth to the top.
Disclaimer: I am active on the political side, and will be running for office in the next federal Congressional election cycle. Drop me a line if you want to chat on how we can work together to obviate the need to work down the road; that's the future I want for everyone.
> Disclaimer: I am active on the political side, and will be running for office in the next election cycle.
You should make an announcement or something for us in HN (when the time comes)! I'm sure there would be quite a lot of people here to support your candidature.
Don't we already have a world where machines are the ones producing our needs? There's that Discovery Channel series called "How it's Made" where you see it's practically all robots. Do you agree?
> and without it, the advances you speak of will be used to funnel more wealth to the top.
All the technologies for mass production so far has indeed funneled to the top huh? And this I believe has also slowed down advancement in technology (unless it's something that is very profitable).
> split productivity gains with labor and capital
You'll be called Socialist. Giving what the laborers deserve is Socialism. "Share the means of production!"
However, the fact that Bernie had a following is a good indicator. There's also Corbin whom is pushing for a 'right to own' policy.
Absolutely! I’d like to go farther, and imagine how we could reinvent society if we had high quality open source automation hardware in addition to open source software. Open source software has paved the way and now I’m excited to see what open source robotics combined with the right attitudes can do.
We could have that today. All our money is getting dumped into arms races. If we:
1. Put a 1000% tax on advertising spending.
2. Taxed property at a much higher rate, but gave each person a basic income.
3. Set a ceiling for the ratio of funds that education institutes can spend on non-professor things. (At least here in Canada they waste most of the money on things that don't actually teach skills, they just look impressive or market the university in some other way.)
4. Set caps on how much individual patents or works of art could earn before they lost financial protected status.
5. Set corporate taxes as a function of in-country sales and total affiliated market cap.
6. Punished corporate region shopping for tax havens and other advantages with trade agreements.
7. Made public healthcare optimize on happy person-years saved and with emphasis on prevention.
8. Make more areas that are 7 storeys tall so people can walk or bike to get their daily things.
9. Set high taxes on cars and invested in high speed city-to-city trains.
Then we'd have houses that were safe, but affordable. Cities that had some quiet areas, but were dense enough to be viable for everyone. Great education via well-paid professors and TAs. Reasonable returns in investments in technology and art, without Walt Disney and other soulless corporations milking the same characters year after year. Products that competed mostly on quality instead of advertising.
Instead we have almost the opposite. Nobody can afford anything because property gets sucked up into mortgage fuelled bubbles and in classes of 100 people where each person is paying $40k per year after subsidies we have professors and TAs struggling to get grants to fund their research.
Why? A single course for a four month term is $350–$500k worth of product. Where did all the money go?
Same place all the money always goes: Competition for the best students to get the best reputation to get the best students to get the best...
Human beings, at least some of them, crave power. How would one such human behave in a system such as this? How would a group? Could a system be designed to be relient against this threat, at scale?
While it's nice to think of a FLOSS utopia, unfortunately human behaviour will never allow it to happen.
I used to be pessimistic about it too. I think it will happen in a proper way in some places, in others it will be used as a tool to amass more power, as the human nature implies it will.
But the silver lining is that we are creating a collective conciousness through tools like the internet. Humans can naturally create this collective sentient being when forming a tribe for instance. Our problem, in our particular point of history of civilization, was always the problem of scale.
Now with the internet we are again able to form this collective mind in a bigger scale. We are still in the infancy of this process, and thats why this collective is acting as a dumb giant. But I think that as we evolve in this process, this collective mind will get more sophisticated. And soon we will be able to collectivelly control whats best for the greater good, trying to repel all hostile movements that could try to control the resources to the benefit of a few.
The problem is: it will take a lot of fight to get there, some of us will fall, but i believe that some of us will get there first.
> Could a system be designed to be relient against this threat, at scale?
It's a problem that ethereum.org is working on. They have an mvp, but not yet ready to scale.
But one can argue that the internet has enabled some of that utopia. And the printing press from the point of view of those who weren't allowed to read. Yes the Church didn't want people to learn how to read, but humans have prevailed. Hopefully we can solve current problems before the Doomsday clock reaches midnight.
Whenever some human has amassed more power over others, and a group feels ill, the robots solve the problem.
All such a robot would have to do is apply current laws, facebook is too big, google is too powerful, banks are bankrypt, robot just swings the hammer the elected politicians failed to do.
I sometimes feel like if we could just make volunteer labor tax deductible, we could get part way to this place.
For some projects a couple hours of my time might be more valuable to everybody than the twenty bucks I’m willing to donate. And ten hours a week would increase your take home pay by about 6%, versus working 50-60 a week for your employer for a slightly bigger raise.
That society will not exist. People derive meaning from work. Ambition also drives personal development. You take those away and all a person has left is self-medication with drugs and booze and suicide. We need the struggle.
I mostly agree with this and I’d add: work does not have to be a “job”. Work can be your family, it can be art, and it can also be exploring the universe. I think Star Trek captures this idea very well.
People tell me this all the time - work is vital to human happiness so we’d better keep buying in to a system that holds the threat of disaster and starvation over our heads if we don’t work.
I have full faith that if work is this valuable, we’ll do it voluntarily. I cannot believe the fantasy that we have to be forced to work or we’ll be miserable. Humans are way too intelligent to just sit there getting more and more miserable because they don’t have to work. Yes, people coming from a capitalist society usually don’t know what to do when their work goes away. But people in a society where no one needs to work will find things to do. Maybe they’ll repair motorcycles as a way of finding Zen.
There is a lot of work we can do that is not focused on economic productivity. In a world where people don’t have to work to survive, they choose what they do. Some will waste away, just as some do now. Most will not.
Capitalists are not workers. You can create this utopian society by distributing capital in a way that all individuals have their basic needs provided. At that point everyone is a capitalist and is free to pursue whatever interests they desire.
Note that all economic systems are concerned with distribution of resources so the idea of distributing capital is not unique to a "welfare state".
A lot of jobs just act as distractions to create jobs
A better target than automoting away cashier jobs at pointless retailers would be to target universal access to healthcare and social services as the key economic drivers
Then folks aren’t tethered to dumb jobs and can make jewelry or chairs and such for personal needs when they’re on vacation from their job that supports the health economy
Creating is an important human outlet. Don’t think it’ll do to automate it away. But we can open it up to anyone learning to create whatever so long as they don’t need to be tethered to a dumb job
And in fact, we're seeing some great open source companies, including Elastic, which just had an IPO last month. Modern decentralization has yielded the promise of valuable assets that actually become more valuable through being open, which means that VCs in 2018 are singing a very different tune to VCs in 2014.
No, we won't see another company that's exactly like Red Hat. That's how the technology industry works. We're not going to see another successful Facebook, either. But we will see many more companies that push our expectations and moves the industry forward. Many of them will absolutely be based on open source software and communities.
That recently many historians have began to consider this line of thinking "wrong" because of the rise of illiberal democracies, i.e. Russia, Hungry and the success of China as a Pseudo-Capitalist Dictatorship.
If you don't think about how you will sustain an open source project, your project will not be sustainable. "Those who fail to plan, plan to fail."
Building a business model on top of my open source Sidekiq[0] project was the best decision I've ever made. That doesn't mean my approach will work for all (or even many) projects but anyone who is trying to build a popular project needs to consider: if I succeed, what will the project look like five years from now? Will you or a core team still be helping users every day?
Almost all of those features are available as OSS plugins. Do you want to gather 5-10 complex plugins, integrate them all, debug them and support them for years to come? Or pay for a turn-key solution that takes literally one minute to buy and get running?
If a business can afford a laptop, it can afford my Enterprise product.
The problem of open source is attribution, more specifically attribution back to individual contributors and the significance of contributions, and it is especially hard if you want to do attribution based on revenue performance if the licensee is small and do not have an audit department. A large proprietary software licensee can work with a licensor to track revenue performance because the licensee already have the right infrastructure to do so. So here is a startup idea:
An external auditing company with APIs to streamline the process of rev share and attribution back to the open source community and contributors, so that open source projects will make revenue and have the resource to reinvest and improve the projects.
I imagine most open source contributors have full time jobs. I have a full-time job that pays the bills so I don't need any kind of monetary reimbursement for my work on open-source projects. I just do it for the fun/challenge/scratch-an-itch/giving-back/etc.
I'd argue it's actually the economics. End users both want everything for free expecting it to work perfectly as well as assurances that the project isn't going away while also somehow still wanting guarantees around release schedules. Those same people also endlessly complain to OSS maintainers about something they are getting for free and somehow expect the red carpet when it comes to feature requests.
Attribution isn't the issue, it's balancing the need for building a community vs the financial incentives to actually support the people building the thing you're using.
I'm recording a podcast, called Open Source Underdogs, focusing on open source business models. You can find it on iTunes, Google, Stitcher, etc or on the website https://opensourceunderdogs.com
IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business.
What about Cloudera? What about Automattic? What about MongoDB? What about MariaDB?
The podcast has 9 episodes, and we have about 20 more in the queue for 2018-2019.
Tune in... Some of the gurus of open source software share some valuable insights.
> IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business.
It's more about sustaining the business. Redhat's most recently reported quarterly earnings growth was negative. Did they sell now because IBM approached them with an absurdly high price? Or did Redhat executives need to shop around for a buyer, because they felt they were near a local maxima and things were starting to go downhill?
edit: that said, this is a subject I care about and will be adding your podcast shortly. Hopefully you figure out podcast sustainability as well =)
But Canonical (and I assume SuSE as well) has quite a few proprietary bits (definitely more than RedHat), with some of their offerings being more or less "Open Core" (for examples, see comparison of MAAS free vs commercial, or how to distribute software to Ubuntu Core systems). That kinda matches what the article is saying.
To update the terminology - the RedHat model is freemium - you give away something to market the part that you sell.
The problem with freemium is always how much you give away and how much you charge for. One idea that I have not yet seen is to do the split in the time dimention - sell licenses that convert into a Free Software or Open Source license after a year or two.
"We had made the product so easy to use and so important, that we had out-engineered ourselves."
Yeah, so "easy" that we had to debug and extend microdhcp code to properly support PXE booting and add option 150 because you guys offered nothing with which to properly boot XEN VM's; XEN was so woefully unfinished that we had to finish it for you and now you're telling us how complete of a product it is and patting yourself on the back.
"Details-schmetails", it's "the big picture" that's important, which is that someone cashed out, am I right?
This is one of the reasons why my passion and love for computers turned to bitter disappointment: the lies and really bad, half-cooked software. Damn it all, Keith Wesolowski was so right[1].
Readit News
That is really, really not the case. You don't pay for someone holding your hand. You pay for support because you either simply have the resources to do so or your business requires you to pay for the things you use.
If you need help setting up Kubernetes, glusterfs or something else you get help from a third party contractor. That's what we do.
You pay for support because your want someone to keep sending out security patches even if upstream should roll over, and you pay for Red Hat specifically because you want to have an upgrade schedule your business can adhere to (as opposed to when upstream feels like it).
Put another way, you pay for the privilege of having someone to sue.
A nuance: many big businesses require that you pay for software you use, and part of what you are paying for is an indemnification via the vendor, which makes sense to purchase for big businesses with deep pockets https://www.scl.org/articles/3030-indemnity-and-limitation-o...
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSC623_11.7.0...
edit: clarified acronym
You find out frequently that people who use the tool have ten things they never asked for because the tools don’t even handle basic common sense concerns. It feels like asking for a pony, possibly from a neglectful parent.
You fix a few things and get labeled as clever or useful. People come to you with more stuff and it expands your grasp of the organization. For me this strategy has opened up leadership opportunities.
You can still be laid off but everybody else will wonder who was the idiot who got rid of the person who was keeping the ship afloat.
But if you poured resources in A with the hope of making supporting A your bread and butter, and A is so easy to use no one needs help, well, you kind of wasted your time and money, UNLESS you managed to make it so popular that the 5% of people who still need help anyway are enough to keep you afloat. That's hard though.
Everything must have a legal contract that specifies support terms, penalties, etc. Large company's motives are risk avoidance to ensure profits for shareholders.
Basically companies will pay a premium to have someone they can call and yell at if something goes sideways. Usually corporate finance departments have no logistical way to accept a reimbursement from a vendor for missing a SLA but they like to put clauses like that in a contract.
The other part is the professional services arm tied to the sales process. RH can provide experts that only they can provide - they are the ones writing the code sometimes. Other companies like Oracle have professional services but I doubt they are committers on the products being sold.
Of course, you can work around the core incentives (eg by marketing), and a lack of competition changes everything (consumers take whatever they can get, producers sell as high as they possibly can without bankrupting the consumer), but in a well-behaving market it should be fine.
Your RH-upstreams examples can probably be sufficiently explained by lack of competition, due to a captured market. Which isn’t behavior specific to OSS, but to every market. Notably, breaking RH’s stranglehold would be naturally easier than say apple’s
The incentive you identify only goes away if the software is a product with no support - and then businesses won't buy it, because there is no support.
Yeah but reality shows that standard unix utilities are not used by the majority of people. So many people use unix based systems, especially macOS which has much more simple/bare-bones tools than GNU/Linux and still few people do read man pages for instance
I typically see this attitude at the developer level, but the line of business never sees it like that. Devs don't have incentive to care about these things. They also just want to deal with the vendor.
What you sell is more "insurance" and a guaranteed timeline on bug fixes/releases.
As someone who supports OSS, why should you be able to demand I ship something on a certain schedule if you're not paying me? If it's a business transaction, then there's a contract and aligned incentives on both sides.
Taking this a step further, this is usually not enough which is why we then see open core business models like elastic search, gitlab, (and also my company skymind) selling a combination of support + licensing.
Of course if they made it perfectly easy they would be out of a job since the software is free. But so long as it's within a certain margin it works out.
It is powerful, but was never made remotely easy to set up or administer. They finished it and called it Databricks.
In such a place, people would be free to work as hard as they want for additional gain. They could also, however, take as much time off as they desired to go to school, learn on their own, spend more time with loved ones, or just relax and explore life in their own way.
In such a society, I think many people would be motivated to give their labor to open source projects. I think the machines that run such a society would necessarily be open source, and many people could give back to society by contributing to the design and improvement of the machines that provide for us all.
What do you all think of this? Would you want to live in a place like that?
Sure you can delete someone’s job. But you just leave a job-shaped hole in the person that then goes and finds a new purpose. It only seems like a disappearance for the season, and then you find something new growing there.
The idea that we are anywhere near “doing all the work” is batshit. We are presently doing maybe 1% of the work that needs doing. You could automate the entire economy 50 times and still have 50 more careers waiting for the globe’s population.
Bioremediation in he wake of climate change alone could occupy an entire generation of earth humans. Mental health another. Building permaculture cities will be the work of an entire generation. None of those things will be amenable to robot labor.
The point is that a society that requires everyone to work all the time sucks for a lot of people - particularly those at the bottom. We can and I believe should build a world where working a job is optional. I fully expect people would still work a lot, but it would be optional in the sense that their basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, access to computers and internet) would be provided to them by society.
It is certainly possible to build this. And many people want it. The key, I think, is to build the system based on voluntary interaction. Find people who are willing to help support others and then have those people collectively drive the cost of that support down through engineering.
I’m not trying to eliminate work. You can never eliminate work. I want to eliminate jobs.
but who is going to want to pay for such things? The whole reason "jobs" exists is that it's a task somebody wanted done, and is willing to pay some resources for it.
Yes, but you're going to need to have the political capital to ratchet down the work week and split productivity gains with labor and capital. That does not exist yet, and without it, the advances you speak of will be used to funnel more wealth to the top.
Disclaimer: I am active on the political side, and will be running for office in the next federal Congressional election cycle. Drop me a line if you want to chat on how we can work together to obviate the need to work down the road; that's the future I want for everyone.
You should make an announcement or something for us in HN (when the time comes)! I'm sure there would be quite a lot of people here to support your candidature.
> and without it, the advances you speak of will be used to funnel more wealth to the top.
All the technologies for mass production so far has indeed funneled to the top huh? And this I believe has also slowed down advancement in technology (unless it's something that is very profitable).
> split productivity gains with labor and capital
You'll be called Socialist. Giving what the laborers deserve is Socialism. "Share the means of production!"
However, the fact that Bernie had a following is a good indicator. There's also Corbin whom is pushing for a 'right to own' policy.
There are many points of entry: Using FLOSS for governments, for schools, releasing all government funded code, etc.
Generation or so back in the USA that was the the general over-the-rainbow vision of where technology would take us.
The robots would do the work while people would afford more time to spend on leisure/artistic oriented lifestyles.
1. Put a 1000% tax on advertising spending.
2. Taxed property at a much higher rate, but gave each person a basic income.
3. Set a ceiling for the ratio of funds that education institutes can spend on non-professor things. (At least here in Canada they waste most of the money on things that don't actually teach skills, they just look impressive or market the university in some other way.)
4. Set caps on how much individual patents or works of art could earn before they lost financial protected status.
5. Set corporate taxes as a function of in-country sales and total affiliated market cap.
6. Punished corporate region shopping for tax havens and other advantages with trade agreements.
7. Made public healthcare optimize on happy person-years saved and with emphasis on prevention.
8. Make more areas that are 7 storeys tall so people can walk or bike to get their daily things.
9. Set high taxes on cars and invested in high speed city-to-city trains.
Then we'd have houses that were safe, but affordable. Cities that had some quiet areas, but were dense enough to be viable for everyone. Great education via well-paid professors and TAs. Reasonable returns in investments in technology and art, without Walt Disney and other soulless corporations milking the same characters year after year. Products that competed mostly on quality instead of advertising.
Instead we have almost the opposite. Nobody can afford anything because property gets sucked up into mortgage fuelled bubbles and in classes of 100 people where each person is paying $40k per year after subsidies we have professors and TAs struggling to get grants to fund their research.
Why? A single course for a four month term is $350–$500k worth of product. Where did all the money go?
Same place all the money always goes: Competition for the best students to get the best reputation to get the best students to get the best...
While it's nice to think of a FLOSS utopia, unfortunately human behaviour will never allow it to happen.
But the silver lining is that we are creating a collective conciousness through tools like the internet. Humans can naturally create this collective sentient being when forming a tribe for instance. Our problem, in our particular point of history of civilization, was always the problem of scale.
Now with the internet we are again able to form this collective mind in a bigger scale. We are still in the infancy of this process, and thats why this collective is acting as a dumb giant. But I think that as we evolve in this process, this collective mind will get more sophisticated. And soon we will be able to collectivelly control whats best for the greater good, trying to repel all hostile movements that could try to control the resources to the benefit of a few.
The problem is: it will take a lot of fight to get there, some of us will fall, but i believe that some of us will get there first.
It's a problem that ethereum.org is working on. They have an mvp, but not yet ready to scale.
But one can argue that the internet has enabled some of that utopia. And the printing press from the point of view of those who weren't allowed to read. Yes the Church didn't want people to learn how to read, but humans have prevailed. Hopefully we can solve current problems before the Doomsday clock reaches midnight.
Whenever some human has amassed more power over others, and a group feels ill, the robots solve the problem.
All such a robot would have to do is apply current laws, facebook is too big, google is too powerful, banks are bankrypt, robot just swings the hammer the elected politicians failed to do.
For some projects a couple hours of my time might be more valuable to everybody than the twenty bucks I’m willing to donate. And ten hours a week would increase your take home pay by about 6%, versus working 50-60 a week for your employer for a slightly bigger raise.
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The parent comment didn't want to get rid of work. Just focus open source work improving robots that did the jobs we used to.
All of human desires for competition and struggle would still be catered to.
I have full faith that if work is this valuable, we’ll do it voluntarily. I cannot believe the fantasy that we have to be forced to work or we’ll be miserable. Humans are way too intelligent to just sit there getting more and more miserable because they don’t have to work. Yes, people coming from a capitalist society usually don’t know what to do when their work goes away. But people in a society where no one needs to work will find things to do. Maybe they’ll repair motorcycles as a way of finding Zen.
There is a lot of work we can do that is not focused on economic productivity. In a world where people don’t have to work to survive, they choose what they do. Some will waste away, just as some do now. Most will not.
People will do creative things.
Ambition will exist even if the useless work we do today (getting clients richer with more software).
Related - Interview of Noam Chomsky regarding Work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBLCBxq1k8
If you mean the communist one, then their program was rather different, and included things such as "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Note that all economic systems are concerned with distribution of resources so the idea of distributing capital is not unique to a "welfare state".
A better target than automoting away cashier jobs at pointless retailers would be to target universal access to healthcare and social services as the key economic drivers
Then folks aren’t tethered to dumb jobs and can make jewelry or chairs and such for personal needs when they’re on vacation from their job that supports the health economy
Creating is an important human outlet. Don’t think it’ll do to automate it away. But we can open it up to anyone learning to create whatever so long as they don’t need to be tethered to a dumb job
VC's love the winner take all big platform investment world. I suspect (and hope) that era is coming to an end, not open source...
No, we won't see another company that's exactly like Red Hat. That's how the technology industry works. We're not going to see another successful Facebook, either. But we will see many more companies that push our expectations and moves the industry forward. Many of them will absolutely be based on open source software and communities.
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That recently many historians have began to consider this line of thinking "wrong" because of the rise of illiberal democracies, i.e. Russia, Hungry and the success of China as a Pseudo-Capitalist Dictatorship.
Building a business model on top of my open source Sidekiq[0] project was the best decision I've ever made. That doesn't mean my approach will work for all (or even many) projects but anyone who is trying to build a popular project needs to consider: if I succeed, what will the project look like five years from now? Will you or a core team still be helping users every day?
[0]: https://sidekiq.org
However, seems like there's lots of features that is proprietary (or at least non-free licensed).
Almost all of those features are available as OSS plugins. Do you want to gather 5-10 complex plugins, integrate them all, debug them and support them for years to come? Or pay for a turn-key solution that takes literally one minute to buy and get running?
If a business can afford a laptop, it can afford my Enterprise product.
An external auditing company with APIs to streamline the process of rev share and attribution back to the open source community and contributors, so that open source projects will make revenue and have the resource to reinvest and improve the projects.
Attribution isn't the issue, it's balancing the need for building a community vs the financial incentives to actually support the people building the thing you're using.
Well, SUSE isn't public, but they're mostly "standalone". And there are plenty of other companies based around a single open source platform.
Sure, they aren't $1B+ companies, but they don't need to be.
IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business.
What about Cloudera? What about Automattic? What about MongoDB? What about MariaDB?
The podcast has 9 episodes, and we have about 20 more in the queue for 2018-2019.
Tune in... Some of the gurus of open source software share some valuable insights.
It's more about sustaining the business. Redhat's most recently reported quarterly earnings growth was negative. Did they sell now because IBM approached them with an absurdly high price? Or did Redhat executives need to shop around for a buyer, because they felt they were near a local maxima and things were starting to go downhill?
edit: that said, this is a subject I care about and will be adding your podcast shortly. Hopefully you figure out podcast sustainability as well =)
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The problem with freemium is always how much you give away and how much you charge for. One idea that I have not yet seen is to do the split in the time dimention - sell licenses that convert into a Free Software or Open Source license after a year or two.
Yeah, so "easy" that we had to debug and extend microdhcp code to properly support PXE booting and add option 150 because you guys offered nothing with which to properly boot XEN VM's; XEN was so woefully unfinished that we had to finish it for you and now you're telling us how complete of a product it is and patting yourself on the back.
"Details-schmetails", it's "the big picture" that's important, which is that someone cashed out, am I right?
This is one of the reasons why my passion and love for computers turned to bitter disappointment: the lies and really bad, half-cooked software. Damn it all, Keith Wesolowski was so right[1].
[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/