Healthy for whom? Creator of Vue.js pulls in like 240k. Every open source contributor of any sort of popular project should be getting at least that much through various deals or pull the plug. Hold your software hostage, get freeloaders to pay a pittance for it. Ridiculous that so many billion dollar companies use these things and feel no obligation to sustain their development and have a mechanism set in place to do that automatically or as a part of due course of using that software.
Projects can do this already. It's the reason we have licenses. The problem are people want to license under MIT, but want more than just recognition.
If you want to get paid, use the GPL, and offer dual licensing. It's that easy.
Oh, it's not "that" easy? So you are really just using MIT as a marketing tool until you get large enough where you can pull the rug out from under everyone and start demanding things?
The problem isn't open source. The problem is the expectation that the MIT license means more than it does. You got what you asked for.
...should be getting at least that much through various deals or pull the plug. Hold your software hostage, get freeloaders to pay a pittance for it.
Funny, but this was almost exactly the unspoken (and actual) ethos of the Sales department dominated old school software company founded in the late 60's I used to work for.
I'm Chris from Airwindows. I'm patreon-backed and make upwards of fourteen HUNDRED dollars a month to serve a specialty market, audio plugins, that is heavily burdened by selfish devs and burdensome DRM strategies. Some of these companies are maybe million dollar companies but many are relatively small fry who still believe they 'should' get 240k (as if! This is still the music business! Or you could say that nothing in the music business is actually popular, therefore none of these can count as popular projects were they OSS)
I license by MIT license. My pitch regarding that is that I require credit, and nothing else. From my point of view, in my business (again, the music business) since long before I was born, the only people who get to be 'popular' are those who sign off on horribly exploitative contracts and get abused just like the OSS developers people are talking about. I assume it'll be the same with me so I allow 'exploitation' on the grounds that I generate enough goodwill to slap back at anyone who's found to be ripping my stuff without credit or shout-out. It's my problem to turn that into revenue.
I can easily believe the '1% to 10% of what you'd make commercially' line. I'm seeing more like 20-25% of what I would make commercially, but if you are an entrepreneur you must consider cashflow. The commercial thing is bursty: feast or famine, and it drives you in perverse directions, makes you play to your impression of what will be the most popular thing.
If you market yourself as an OSS dev free to do anything creative regardless of market pressures, that's its own demographic. It's working okay for me, because I do not have to pay Silicon Valley housing costs, or employees. Like Robert Fripp, I am a 'small, independent, mobile and intelligent unit'.
Why?
You said freeloaders. That angers me. I have a different name. I call them 'musicians'. Often they make the musics and genres I personally like. They also have to eat. I am able to provide them with tools that become their resources. I'd do more if I could: working on it.
If you aren't living on under $1500 a month you have no business calling a sum of money a 'pittance', and in no case do you get to tell me to hold my software hostage. (so I won't. No hard feelings)
You appear to be talking from a 'capital maximization' position, and from that angle all you say checks out. I am talking from a 'providing freedom' position, from which the actions of companies mean diddly-squat. I am there because should they license my stuff (some is trivially simple, some is quite significant) they will take my musicians and hold them hostage and demand a 'pittance', or better yet they'll demand 'a lot' simply because they can.
My musicians (or at least many of the worthy ones) are starving broke, because art does not make money. OSS is a way for me to make some money in a context people understand while giving these people not only tools, but the RIGHT to own, use, redesign these tools. What I give can't be taken away.
Won't trade that for money.
If that is hard to understand ask RMS. (ironically… since I'm using MIT and not GPL. But he would understand, plus people can take my stuff and extend and GPL it if they like. I could switch to GPL at ANY point, if I wanted)
Coming from ex-USSR country, I really don't get people who shake their fists saying that somebody is not fairly compensated, and deserves more, and somebody (rich businesses and enemies of nation obviously) should pay for it. Venezuela waits for you, evil capitalists are defeated here, and govt takes care of everyone.
> Every open source contributor of any sort of popular project should be getting at least that much through various deals
If they don't have such deals, who is to blame?
Users who are busy with their life, take a lot of things for granted and don't think much about thousands of FOSS libraries and apps they use every day?
Government which doesn't subsidize FOSS contributors?
Or maybe contributors themselves who are sloppy at selling themselves and getting deals?
> Ridiculous that so many billion dollar companies use these things and feel no obligation
Maybe exactly because FOSS is about terms which allow such use, and enable companies to build business models on that?
Maybe exactly because FOSS is about terms which allow such use, and enable companies to build business models on that?
Sure, but if such a business takes off and is awash in money then the owners should help to water the tree. Maybe that means writing a check once a year (boo hoo, goodbye money uwu) or contributing some business skill/innovation so that developers or artists can concentrate on their professional discipline rather than having to gain a load of business skills that they may not be temperamentally or intellectually suited for. Why isn't it as easy to monetize as to share a repo?
I suggested a simple solution for the problem. Ask users to meet a certain fund raising goal and if they don't come up with it, either stop working on the project, or pull it entirely and let them worry about it. This is a capitalist approach to the problem of capitalists exploiting communists. Better approach is probably not license your stuff under exploitative licenses and put clauses in there for bigger companies using your work.
The problem here is, nothing you can possibly do is worth more than money to a dedicated capitalist who already has tons of money.
You can do stuff they exploit, or not. Doesn't change the relative size of the pool of money from your true userbase (likely much smaller), and nothing you do can force the capitalist to buy into your code at a less-exploitative license.
They can and will just pass. And you can pressure your users in a wide number of ways: they are the same dark patterns used by proprietary, totally-closed software. You can become that to get paid… or, more accurately, you can become that, try to squeeze blood from a stone, and find out whether you can torture your users into providing you with the level of luxury you see fit.
This is not the motivation of Free Software, and is barely the motivation of Open Source. Might as well just be proprietary and be done with it. All this works on many levels and money/compensation is only one of the levels.
What is the problem you are talking about? Who exactly has that problem? What are "exploitative licenses"?
If money paid by licensees is the primary driving motivation for development, then FOSS is completely wrong type of licenses for this. This is called commercial development.
I expect creators of big libraries to make even more than $20K a month because of speaking gigs etc. But specifically why did you list $240K for Vue.js creator. Are they making money in some specific way?
Healthy for whom? Creator of Vue.js pulls in like 240k. Every open source contributor of any sort of popular project should be getting at least that much through various deals or pull the plug. Hold your software hostage, get freeloaders to pay a pittance for it. Ridiculous that so many billion dollar companies use these things and feel no obligation to sustain their development and have a mechanism set in place to do that automatically or as a part of due course of using that software.