Hi All,

I like the idea of a metering system and that makes a lot more sense than
counting number of contributions or lines of code.  It gets difficult if a
company that wants to pay has difficulty figuring out how much it will cost
them.  I really like the concept of paying more for features used
because it highlights what contributions are important.  Maybe we could
consider having a set price for licenses but we use a feature metric that
determines who gets what share of that payment.  It would also help people
to understand what features are being used and where to focus efforts to
improve the system.  Bounties for developing new features would also be
interesting but it doesn't encourage collaboration and coordination.

If you have a metering system how do you then determine how people get
credit for the work they put into that system?  For example the VM seems
quite important! Who gets paid for that? Can we form teams and let the team
leader give out percentages?  What percentage does the VM get of an overall
license?  How do you choose where one feature ends and another begins?
There are also tools in the image that are not part of the running system.
They are just as important for design and productivity so they should count.

We need to also think about the impact of changing licenses.  For
businesses that want to use the software will they accept different license
terms?  We had a number of people that worked really hard to move us to
MIT!  We did that in an effort to get more adoption and hopefully build a
larger audience and get more contributors.  What impact would we see if we
changed the license to something else? How does the RedHat model fit in
here?  If we did something new, are we interested in relicensing to make
sure people get paid or do we just want to take the open source code and
repackage it, add support, security, additional features and professional
services and call it something else?

All the best,

Ron Teitelbaum

On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 4:28 PM Florin Mateoc <florin.mateoc at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Cannot resist :)
>
> First off, the discussion seems to have moved away from the stated
> premise, as quoted by Eliot, which talks about morality. I will address
> that part first.
>
> I could not disagree more with the author's position. He seems a pretty
> typical armchair quarterback, not contributing, yet pointing accusatory
> fingers at the people who do. More than that, what he is accusing them of
> is quite ridiculous: yes, openness and open-source might have been good
> (sometimes), but why don't open source developers solve all of humanity's
> problems? Well, duh, because that's not why they set out to do. People who
> are actually doing something, especially people who are creating something,
> need to focus on what they are doing. There are many people who earn a
> living as programmers, and clearly not all of them are the creative type,
> but, among those contributing to open source projects, I think a
> disproportionate number of them are - that's what drives them to
> contributing in the first place.
> Similarly, while software in general is not quite a science or an art, it
> is more so for the creative people who practice it. In that sense, they are
> closer to artists or mathematicians or scientists, at least having similar
> aspirations/drive. You don't/shouldn't expect mathematicians to solve
> humanity's problems, they already contribute a lot, whether they even care
> about the contribution aspect or not. Sure, there are exceptions like
> Bertrand Russell, who seems to have been a very moral person, but at least
> as likely one can find mathematicians closer to popular culture caricatures
> of the character, people very awkward at social interaction and much more
> removed from society than the average person. Somebody like Grigori
> Perelman. Now that would be a funny image - somebody asking Perelman why
> doesn't he do more for how mathematics are used, and why mathematicians are
> always so focused on mathematics, resulting in a system that sadly neglects
> people, And also if he thinks that mathematicians should maybe not publish
> their work in the open, they should rather discard openness as an axiom.
> Let us also not forget mathematicians of the past - why didn't Abel, who
> died young, poor and unrecognized, neglect his moral obligation to stop
> nefarious people like the NSA from using the results of his work?
> Which brings us nicely to the reward for contributions part, and
> acknowledging that most of us are more "normal" people, who would rather
> not still live with their mother on her pension, I think we have to
> recognize that, among the creative types that I mentioned, especially
> artists, we (alongside mathematicians with their NSA jobs) are the lucky
> ones. We do find employment, which, even if it does not allow us to fully
> pursue our interests, it is at least close enough that it can give us some
> satisfaction. We don't have to take jobs as waiters to allow us to do some
> programming on the side. But on the whole, we do live in a city of pigs. We
> have no use for poets, just like we have no use for pure mathematicians,
> why should we programmers be treated any differently? It's true, unlike
> poets, the powers that be do need our work, and there are a lot of us, so
> theoretically we do have some potential power to influence things. But I
> think this is all part of a bigger trend. A lot of jobs are going to
> disappear pretty soon, and society will need to find a radical new
> solution, hopefully one where we can all pursue our creative drive. Maybe
> we can try to influence things in that direction, and I think this kind of
> activism is a good thing, but I don't think it has anything to do with open
> source, and it is certainly not the open source movement's responsibility
>
> Florin
>
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 6:14 AM Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Don Goodman-Wilson’s moral critique of Open Source; essential reading.
>>
>>
>> “What if we look at Open Source values through the lens of moral
>> philosophy, by applying Scanlon’s contractualist theory of morality? When
>> we do that, I think it becomes pretty clear that we ought to discard
>> openness as an axiom, and start thinking about other ways to build software
>> collaboratively that do not make us accessory to horrors. We can create
>> open communities, better communities, more inclusive communities, without
>> Open Source.
>>
>>
>> The Open Source movement has always been focused on code. The result is a
>> system that sadly neglects people."
>>
>> ...
>>
>> “Here are some candidate principles to guide an ethical conception of
>> collaborative development.”
>>
>> https://don.goodman-wilson.com/posts/open-source-is-broken/
>>
>> _,,,^..^,,,_ (phone)
>>
>>
>
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