This sounds like the sort of infrastructure project the Linux Foundation should be supporting.
In my opinion it's criminal just how often this happens. Big business making obscene profit off the back of volunteer work like yours and many others across the OSS community.
Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it's not perfect, it's one of the better uses of my tax euros.
Didn't they suspend, or greatly hinder, that recently?
There was an EU-wide one that gota lot of its funding redirected to AI stuff recently that you might be thinking of.
It's criminal to let someone do the thing he actively volunteers to do? It's criminal to use software that someone intentionally puts out into the world as free?
If you're willing yo do something for free, people are going to let you 🤷♂️
It's criminal the propaganda that lead people like this developer to believe they should do the work for free, and not worry, because the corporate world always gives back :)
That "propaganda" is the very idea behind free software. Work on what interests you and is of use to you, and share it with others so they can do with it whatever they want, as long as it stays free software.
The idea that all that work must be paid for by whoever uses it is exactly the opposite of what free software is about.
Not really. The problem with FOSS licensing is that it was too altruistic, with the belief that if enough users and corporations depended on the code, the community would collectively do the work necessary to maintain the project. Instead, capitalism chose to exploit FOSS as free labor most of the time, without any reciprocal investment. They raise an enormous amount of issues, and consume a large amount of FOSS developer time, without paying their own staff to fix the bugs they need resolved — in the software their products depend on. At that point the FOSS developer is no longer a FOSS developer, and instead is the unpaid slave labor of a corporation. Sure, FOSS devs could just ignore external inputs, but that's not easy to do when you've invested years of your life in a project. Exploiting kindness may be legal, but it should never be justified or tolerated.
Sure, FOSS licenses legally permit that kind of use, but just because homeless shelters allow anyone to eat their food, and sleep in their beds, that doesn't make the rich man who exploits that charity ethically or morally justified. The rich man who exploits that charity (i.e. free labor), and offers nothing in return, is a scummy dog cunt; there are no two ways about it. The presence of lecherous parasites can destroy the entire charity; they can mean the difference between sustainability and burnout.
FOSS should always be free for all personal, free, and non profit use, but once someone in the chain starts depending on FOSS to generate income and profit, some of that profit should always be reinvested in those dependencies. That's what FOSS is now learning; to reject the exploitation and greed of lecherous parasites.
The point I don't get is: How can the corporation turn the Dev into a slave laborer when he isn't employed by them? He can just ignore their issues and say "deal with it, or pay me". It's not his problem the corporation depends on his software.
Because not enough creative believe themaxisnm of "fuck you pay me".
So then it kinda just sounds like they're doing things they want to do
The free software as a passion project idea became untenable long ago. It works for UNIX style utilities where the project stays small and changes can be managed by one person but breaks down on large projects.
As a user, try to get a feature added or bugfix merged. Its a weeks or sometimes months/years long back and forth trying to get the bikeshedding correct.
As a maintainer, spend time reading and responding to bug reports which are all unrelated to the project. Deal with a few pull requests that don't quite fit the project, but might with more polish. Take a month off and wait for the inevitable "is this being maintained?" Issues reports.
I contribute back changes because I want those features but don't want to maintain a longterm fork of the project. When they're rejected or ignored its demoralizing. I can tell myself "This is the way of open source" but sometimes I just search for another project that better fits my needs rather than trying to work on the one I submitted changes to.
That is the happy path. The sad path of this is how many people look at the aforementioned problems and never bother to submit a pull request because it's too much trouble? Git removed most of the technical friction of contributing, but there is still huge social friction.
Long story short: the man pages maintainer deserves something for all the "work" part of maintaining. He can continue to not be paid for the passion part.
I don't get why the maintainer can't just ignore all the additional workload and say "I do this in my free time, if that isn't enough for your needs, pay me or find another solution."
It's easy to get pressured into thinking it's your responsibility. There's also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it's what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.
Definitely agree, maybe it’s time to share Paul Ramsey’s talk on the subject again
Bruce Perens is currently working on a new licensing model called Post Open requiring that business with sufficient revenue to pay up.
I hope it catches on!
I doubt it. It is basically equivalent to buying a proprietary software license for 1% of a revenue. I doubt any large business would be willing to spend that much on a single piece of software. And it would always be only one piece of software at a time.
Still better than being exploited
to be quite honest I don't want to see any large business around my project unless they are paying. They are not my target audience, and I'm not writing to funnel money into their pockets
Everything needs to be slapped with the AGPL. Fuck corporate America
Creative Commons-BY-NC would be better.
Alright we should use that then
AGPL on documentation? What would that do?
Things like this make me wish I was a tech CEO. I'd totally be the guy ensuring we give back to projects if I was.
That is part of why you're not a tech CEO. You're not supposed to have compassion! No investor would want that.
P.S. This is an attack on CEOs and investors, not on you :)
Nah, the investors don't see it as a benefit to your growth to pay people you don't have to
10k for a company making millions annually is nothing, 1% or less. But split between some of these projects, especially the less appreciated or funded ones, can be life changing.
But you're unfortunately right
The 10k can pay dividends in PR alone, and will attract more developers to apply for job openings.
Exactly. Promote it as community outreach, it's more useful than feel-good Pictures at dog shelters.
Unfortunately, people like this don't become CEOs.
I think its this site? https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
I don't see any option to give money. So he does not accept donations from users like you and me and only asks for sponsorship?
An alternate website can be found here: https://linux.die.net/man/ However, I don't know how much they differ.
Edit: What I don't like with both of these sites is, that they are powered by Google. I would like to see an alternative engine, at least an option to set it up. That's probably a reason why I never used it and actually wouldn't want to support it.
You do realize that man pages don't live on the internet? The kernel.org one is the offical project website, as far as I know, but the project itself is very much not for the web presense, but for the vastly useful documentation included on your distribution.
The few times I've needed to man [app name]
on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I've always been able to find what I need in the included docs
I hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don't think you need until --help
doesn't cut it
honestly I use the man command whenever I can. It gives distro-specific info, that documents the right version and any distro-specific patches
You do realize that man pages don’t live on the internet?
What part of my reply is this an answer to? I know we have our man pages offline. But the website here is online and they use Google as a search machine. My critique is using Google and not providing an alternative search machine setup.
I mean that the product made in here is not the website and I can well understand that the developer has no interest of spending time for it as it's not beneficial to the actual project he's been working with. And I can also understand that he doesn't want to receive donations from individuals as that would bring in even more work to manage which is time spent off the project. A single sponsor with clearly agreed boundaries is far more simple to manage.
I see, it was a reply to me why he isn't accepting donations from individuals. The given reason here makes sense.
He absolutely deserves it.
Quick, print them all out now before they're gone!
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