Free as in "free puppy," not free as in "free beer."

May 10, 2021 1:27 PM

Nadia Eghbal gives a Long Now Foundation seminar on the maintenance of open source software. (SL one hour of video or audio)
posted by eotvos (11 comments total)

I went to the auto-captions as a transcript.

As preface: I have spent several years working on maintenance and funding for under-supported open source infrastructure, and I think Eghbal's Roads and Bridges report was great. I have read (and deeeeeeply disagree with much of) Eghbal's recent book Working in Public.

"and so talking about this communal nature of open source, an idealized world where people are highly substitutable and anyone can swap in and out of maintainership .... I think it's a role that should be treated with more reverence"

I agree that it's important to respect and appreciate the work of maintainership. But I don't think the either-or is "reverence" or "they are swappable". There's another path forward, where we actually treat maintainership as a valuable role that people can be trained for, and give people paths into and out of maintainership. I am working on this myself.

"So I think the big shift that we're seeing in this question around people being paid for open source work is not just thinking about how do we pay for a specific project but how do we think about sponsoring or supporting a specific developer, and I was really happy to see GitHub last year released their Sponsors product to allow more people to sponsor open source developers or any sort of developer on GitHub. And they when they launched it they made it about sponsoring developers and not just about projects, I think to help encourage some of that shift, um, culturally that we sort of need to like readjust to when thinking about what it means to to pay someone..."

I'm in favor of individual developers and creators being able to crowdfund their work, sure. But in her book -- at least as I read it, so please correct me if I'm wrong -- she suggests that the path forward really lies with developers getting individually paid by other individuals, rather than by the businesses that derive so much benefit from the infrastructure those individual developers are maintaining. I am dubious about the workability of this proposition as a means of reducing the instability of existing open source infrastructure.

In her book she also basically dismisses any potential role for governments -- or at least the US federal government -- in directly funding open source infrastructure. Around 52:16 in this interview she is somewhat more receptive to the possibility of governments incentivizing the production/maintenance of open source infrastructure using tax incentives -- "or making it easier for an individual to take a lower salary or lower pay to work on something that is perceived to be in the public good". Another path forward, in my view: health care for all, so that an US-based open source creator can choose to live in a cheap place and live off Patreon/Tidelift/GitHub Sponsors money instead of working a full-time job on something else.

Eghbal is an ex-venture capitalist who worked at GitHub and now works at Substack. I am glad that she has brought attention to the issue of underinvestment in open source maintenance. But many of her conclusions are very different from mine.
posted by brainwane at 1:56 PM on May 10, 2021 [33 favorites]

brainwane, where did you find an auto transcript? I looked for one and didn't see any.

(I agree the questions are more compelling than the answers. But, it's also not a thing I've spent any time thinking about.)
posted by eotvos at 2:29 PM on May 10, 2021

eotvos: youtube-dl can download the subtitles from a video into a text file.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:29 PM on May 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

The post title is brilliant.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:55 PM on May 10, 2021 [7 favorites]

The Register had a long article yesterday about open-source sustainability and the nonprofit Open Source Collective.

OSS projects aren't hierarchical or legal structures, explains Open Collective co-founder Pia Mancini. The collective isn't about supporting individuals so much as the community that builds up around an open-source project, she explains.

"We believe a community is most effective when it can survive its founders," she adds.
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:49 PM on May 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

(The shades of Free in Free Software are infinite:
Beer, puppy, couch, mattress, house you will inherit if you just sleep there for one night...)
posted by wotsac at 8:51 PM on May 10, 2021 [9 favorites]

Nelson Mandela?
posted by howfar at 4:44 AM on May 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

Nah, there can't be Truth and Reconciliation when they insist it's not reasonable criticism but a witchhunt.
posted by k3ninho at 12:34 PM on May 11, 2021

brainwane, where did you find an auto transcript? I looked for one and didn't see any.

"Watch on YouTube" -> "..." menu -> "Open transcript"
posted by vasi at 2:34 PM on May 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

I didn't grep the full video, but the intro grated on my eyes like a Scientology recruitment seminar. I often wonder about the general evolution of both OSS and the cultural niche it inhabits. I guess a cult is not the worst outcome.
posted by ueyfeuor at 1:19 AM on May 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

I didn't grep the full video, but the intro grated on my eyes like a Scientology recruitment seminar.

I haven't seen the video. The "read from a script" audio format is what I've learned to associate with the way things are done by law school and social science academics. It still seems really weird and stilted to me, but I'm sure my professional presentations (unscripted talk over figures with no text) would look like mad chaos to them.

If I were going to join a cult, Stewart Brand isn't a bad guru. He's often wrong, but never boring or dumb. I'll take LongNow over Scientology any day.
posted by eotvos at 8:57 AM on May 13, 2021 [1 favorite]