If I give you a puppy, and it gets sick, should the vet bill me?

If I gave you a car, and the wheels fall off two years later, is that my problem?

In this instance people have been using this Java package for years I gather without problems. Why is the responsibility for changing the package anyone but theirs, the people using it; now that they're decided they have stricter requirements for that need?

Even the entertainment industry's notion of "ownership" isn't so endless. They'd like to be paid every time we use their product, but have settled for "licensed media" ... but that license doesn't extend to replacing the media when it wears out.

> So it is with free software. You literally cannot pay for it. If you do, it becomes something else.

This is really the crux. Everyone is mad there’s no money in writing free/os software, but if there was money it wouldn’t be free/os software. It would just be like what we do at our day jobs.

You can write the code someone else wants and get paid for it (aka a day job). You also have the option to write the code YOU want to write, but in this case you’ll need to figure out a plan for making money on your own.

So funny.

> how startups tend to go bankrupt and their tech dies with them

I have this mental model, which may not be entirely accurate, that the original Iridium corporation successfully launched satellites into orbit, erased the multi-billion dollar costs of the launch using bankruptcy, and then handed over control to a successor corporation who inherited control of the constellation but none of the startup costs.

Do I have the story right? Is there any other example like this where a failed company manages to leave us with something useful while its immense costs were just … evaporated?

I honestly got a bit bored of reading it and stopped, but the idea stays with me. This essay captures some of that idea - why you can't pay for a gift, how gifts work differently. They are a form of capital in that gift givers get social credit or something, but it's a very different system, a more traditional one than capitalism.

You give it away for free, no guarantees and such? Great, we appreciate it.

You sold something to someone? Okay, well, like with food and buildings and cars and airplane rides, we understand that if it's done wrong it can be really harmful, so we have real legal consequences for getting it wrong. Where you sourced your inputs is not my problem when it does -- whether that input was "free software" or "rotten ingredients" or "faulty concrete."

I don’t know if it’s the book he’s talking about, but Simone Weil makes this argument in the beginning of The Need for Roots[+]—that the correct way to think about our relationship to society isn’t “rights” (someone else’s problem) but obligations (our problem).

[+] https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/need-r...

This resonated with me. When opensource involves money, incentives become misaligned... And all the bad parts of a SASS product become important, vendor lock in, upselling etc...

Fred comes clean: “I owe Barney $10,000 and I promised to pay it tomorrow. And I know he needs it, because he bought a new set of golf clubs to use at the company golf tournament this weekend on credit, and if he doesn’t pay, he’ll have to take the clubs back.”

Wilma picks up the phone. “Betty? Sorry to call you so late, but would you give Barney a message? Tell him that Fred doesn’t have the $10,000 he promised. Yes, that’s all. Good night!”

Fred stares at Wilma, aghast. “What did you do THAT for?”

Wilma smiles. “It’s Barney’s problem now. Let him toss and turn, we can go to sleep!”

Is this not a quote from Stallman? Is he really so badly in the internet's doghouse that we can't even say his name?

For instance, we have collected some money and funneled it to developers to give them time to do what would otherwise either take many years of nights and weekends, or just be too hard to get done without time to focus on it alone. This software is still Free, though.

Blender's original investors' capital not totally evaporated but the $100k buyout to release it as open source was a small fraction of their $4.5 million:

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab...

It isn't. Every open source consumer is ultimately responsible for the use of the code. That's baked into every open source license I'm aware of. Even the "share and enjoy" mantra is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a rhyme that ends with recommending what porcine orifices you can put your head on if you don't like the software.

... But there's more to be gained by the original authors, in glory and internet points, by publishing a fix for the problem than in washing their hands of the whole affair. Some people want their code correct as a point of professional pride alone.

Many of my open source contributions came from fixing bugs or adding features because I needed them for my job. Many of the biggest open source projects I use come from big companies that have full-time engineers working on them.

I’ve also worked at two separate companies that have hired developers of very popular open-source projects. It didn’t work out in either case because the company wanted them to prioritize work related to the company, but they wanted to continue focusing on the community as before.

On a micro level, it’s surprisingly difficult to arrange to pay someone outside of a company to work on a project for you. The amount of overhead that goes into arranging the contracting agreement, communicating the issue, setting up the contractor with your environment, and managing it all can quickly snowball into a massive commitment for even small work. The exception is hiring contractors or contracting companies who have made a business out of working in that exact domain and are already up to speed on the project and have good relationships with upstream maintainers, but those are rare.

When it's written out like that I think most people would recognize why it is not very realistic to get paid for something like that, but it is still a very tempting vision.

Of course no one is obligated to maintain anything, open source maintainers abandon stuff all the time without any repercussions beyond passive internet rage.

Where a legacy Internet behemoth mistakenly clicks "Buy It Now" on a startup for eleventy billion dollars during some drug-and-drink fueled bender and then wakes up the next day and offloads it to some rando on Twitter for whatever they have lying around in their PayPal balance.

Pleading: But sir, you must respect my rights.

Reply: I do not see the necessity of that.

> If I gave you a car, and the wheels fall off two years later, is that my problem?

So in Western culture there's this notion that a gift creates no further obligations. The recipient should just be happy he got what he got and not expect anything more. As if to say, at least you didn't get nothing, you can still get nothing, you want nothing?

I would say with the puppy if it gets sick and the recipient can't afford it, you should accept paying the bill. Before it was the "giftee's" puppy, it was your puppy for some small amount of time after you got it and before you gave it. Surely when you gave me a puppy you expected me to be able to keep it alive, right? And as for the car, it's not right to give someone a car whose maintenance they can't afford. The puppy and the car are two excellent examples of gifts that cannot be given without forming a relationship between the giver and the receiver.

On the other hand a gift you can give and split and that's it is food or money. Just handing money to a beggar, he might ask for more, and you can walk.

In some African cultures it's more like, if you do me a favor, do me another favor, and then we're true blue and you can rely on me to help you in return, but never in a tit-for-tat manner. It's in the book Debt: The First 5000 Years.

His blog is a hair trimmer, now I have to kill the memory it occupied in my brain (return the gift).

We're had lots of nasty security breaches lately. These breaches overall have nothing directly to do with free software but it's pretty easy to see what they have in common.

Security breaches grow like hardy weeds on the ground of "I don't have to face the consequences of bad security, my customers do". The Solar Winds and Log4j breach/hole came from wildly different software types but each had the quality of paying for security at the rate that it might harm you, not at the rate it might do harm in general. And comes because security is inherently expensive - since "security is a process, not feature", done right costs the entire organization time and money rather than simply involving a purchase.

Which to say: "Everyone is mad there’s no money in writing free/os software, but if there was money it wouldn’t be free/os software. It would just be like what we do at our day jobs." seems totally incorrect.

QT makes money selling open source software. Red Hat makes money selling open source soft. If there was a market for tightly secure, verified open source software, people would be working writing (and especially testing) that. But companies whatever crap onto their machines, whether barely maintained java or dubious closed source stuff.

If I give you covid, is that my responsibility?

If I give you a piece of software with a backdoor in it, is that my problem?

In reality, all actions carry various kinds of responsibilities. And well designed backdoors looks exactly like oversights, so the difference isn't all that clear cut in pratice.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with treating many libraries as a starting point in some of my projects. Meaning I read and use the code, often removing things I don’t need.

So I fork and maintain my own lesser / crippled version (and hope authors don’t take this as passive aggressive criticism!). This helps me lower attack surface and better understand what’s going on.

This doesn’t work for everything obviously. I’m not forking an OS or database, so there are still lots of black boxes, but for some stuff for I’m liking this approach.

Now if another dev inherits my code I doubt they’ll see it my way. The industry wisdom points at simply assembling libraries and only writing your specific business logic. So what if you use a library to do one thing that just happens to do 100 other things (this having a much larger attack surface and bug potential)?

I don’t know yet if I’m being foolish or if I’ve stumbled on some ancient programmer wisdom I simply failed to grasp earlier. At least I’ll probably never run into a leftpad issue.

> The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier. There are a lot of insights in there but beware that the writing is kinda problematic in some ways, so it doesn’t get my full endorsement.

https://twitter.com/apenwarr/status/1476590932619567104

> Sometimes liberty is differentiated from freedom by using the word "freedom" primarily, if not exclusively, to mean the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; and using the word "liberty" to mean the absence of arbitrary restraints, taking into account the rights of all involved

It's from Wikipedia, and it implies this is the modern take of the definition. I think it's how I think of it as well. So it is neither of the two you mentioned, but a combination of them with the focus being the balance between them.

Liberty would assume all have rights they are entitled too, and that none shall arbitrarily restrict ones ability to do as they please, where non-arbitrary is defined as not restricting of other's rights.

I don't think it really puts people against each other. Some people simply disagree with liberty and favor freedom instead. Which would mean, some people want to be free to do whatever their power allows them too. You can think of it as whatever I can get away with because I'm more powerful. It would mean if I'm stronger I can strongman my way into doing more things, same if I'm richer, more influence, etc.

Fundamentally it's a disagreement with your objective. If you don't accept that the less powerful still deserve certain rights, or that power should not dictate rights and restraints, there's no amount of discourse to be had, you will be optimizing for different outcomes.

I also find the framing of rights as someone else's problem misleading. It is not someone else's problem, oftentimes it is because of restraints society imposes, the other person's problem is due to their restraint on other people's rights. For example, that I can't just walk in your house and sleep in your empty bedrooms as I please, and eat the food sitting idle in your fridge, or build myself a cabin using wood from your trees and on your land, those are all restraints society is imposing on me. So if I'm now homeless and without a job, I cannot just do these things to provide for myself shelter and food. But if you believe everyone has the right to shelter and food, and you are restraining my ability to get them as such, you need to offer an alternative, it isn't entitlement, it's the trade for accepting the restraints being pushed on me.

For me, it's the fundamental agreement, you accept the restraints from laws in exchange for rights. If the rights don't come, you're not getting your side of the deal. Now off course people can impose restraints with power instead, and that's almost always what used to happen and still to a large extent does today, but at least we seem to try harder today to be just.

We have liability regulations for the actual things that use software. (And in some cases too much and in some cases too little. See healthcare, medical devices, FDA on one end, and Boeing and the MCAS fuckup on the other end.)

One reason Amazon got sooo big is that they do have a consumer protection regulation. (The return everything no questions asked policy. Of course they also have a fucking big problem with scams, and they are too hostile with merchants, because they are a fucking de facto monopoly, and are not forced to work much on those problems or "metrics".)

Isn't there a risk it software would become as ineffective as healthcare?

It seems to me that private enterprises aren't good at handling huge uncertainties (like liability). So businesses would aggressively minimize liabilities. Sure we would get better software, but we might get less competition, higher barriers to entry, more expensive products, and less capable products.

Suing companies for doing the wrong thing is an expensive mechanism. Gradually regulating supply-chain documentation is probably cheaper.

This right here is the problem. I'm very familiar with Simone Weil's ideas, and also the criticisms. Her entire philosophy can be reduced to "Ubuntu": We are who we are, because of who we all are.

The problem is that this doesn't follow with a free society. Or individual liberties. It's basically that the "individual freedom" is reduced to the lowest common denominator of what the society will comfortably tolerate. And that, by definition, is tyranny.

You don't pay for the software, but that doesn't mean "there is no money" or that it is very different from "what we do at our day jobs".

A few. Most people leech.