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The Internet Open Source Programming

The Internet Relies on People Working for Free (medium.com) 89

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Who should be responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting open-source projects? From a report: When you buy a product like Philips Hue's smart lights or an iPhone, you probably assume the people who wrote their code are being paid. While that's true for those who directly author a product's software, virtually every tech company also relies on thousands of bits of free code, made available through "open-source" projects on sites like GitHub and GitLab. Often these developers are happy to work for free. Writing open-source software allows them to sharpen their skills, gain perspectives from the community, or simply help the industry by making innovations available at no cost. According to Google, which maintains hundreds of open-source projects, open source "enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real-world problems."

But when software used by millions of people is maintained by a community of people, or a single person, all on a volunteer basis, sometimes things can go horribly wrong. The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions. Other times, developers grow bored and abandon their projects, which can be breached while they aren't paying attention. It's hard to demand that programmers who are working for free troubleshoot problems or continue to maintain software that they've lost interest in for whatever reason -- though some companies certainly try. Not adequately maintaining these projects, on the other hand, makes the entire tech ecosystem weaker. So some open-source programmers are asking companies to pay, not for their code, but for their support services. Daniel Stenberg is one of those programmers. He created cURL, one of the world's most popular open-source projects.
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The Internet Relies on People Working for Free More

The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

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  • 1998 called, and they want their FUD back (Score:5, Funny)

    by yelvington ( 8169 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:19AM (#59203088) Homepage

    Guy writing for free on a free blogging site says you shouldn't trust free software.

    • Re:1998 called, and they want their FUD back (Score:5, Informative)

      by Owen Williams ⚡ ( 6245142 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @10:20AM (#59203406)
      Hello! Writer here! I'm a paid columnist for Medium (not FT, just a weekly thing) that's compensated for my work–they actually pay well above market and are very thoughtful about how they treat people who write for them. It's fun to assume, but... yeah.
      • Congrats on making money with a pen. Not easy these days. In regards to your article... yes heart bleed was bad but that implies commercial software written by welll compensated FTE employees is better. If Windows and MacOS were better written there'd be no concept of malware. We'd only patch OS's to add new features, improve perform and reduce memory consumption. Never for security bugs. If I had to get my life on the next zero day coming from MS/Apple or an equally critical OS project... I would not

      • No, you are paid $200 to write a blog on a crappy website. If you don't deliver clicks they will stop paying you $200.

        • So you counter the OP's statement that he gets paid by saying he gets paid? You're almost mentally retarded enough to run for president.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      I didn't interpret his article as suggesting that you shouldn't trust free software.

      It was drawing attention to the inherent conflicts in extensively using a resource for which there are no guarantees of continued maintenance and support, limited financial incentives to do so, and a level of contention regarding whether those financial incentives should even exist.

      Seemed reasonable to me.

  • facepalm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:24AM (#59203106)

    We get it . . . open source devs are the new victims, voluntarily exploited just like Uber and Lyft drivers. Quick, blame the nameless global multinationals on the Twitter! Outrage! Outrage!

    Seriously, how does this shit even make Slashdot?

    • Seems like you're really overreacting to someone mentioning a possible issue.

      • What's the issue? This is how shit has been since the 70s, at least. There was a weird 80s/90s era blip from MS that made it appear for a moment like it might turn into something more formalized and professional, but it never happened.

    • Wasn't it big COMPANIES who SHRIECKED "we can't make money because of Piracy, we can't get compensated for our work.. bla bla bla..." throughout the 1990s and 2000s? And now its somehow JUST FINE that thousands of open source contributors to big, hugely profitable commercial products go without financial compensation? What kind of world does that create? The Companies are FULLY ENTITLED to compensation and can SCREAM about it all day. People who write the clever code that ALLOWS THEIR PRODUCTS TO EXIST have
      • The companies you're screaming about likely use a license that reserved their rights. The open source devs whose code is being re-used likely did not. Anyone (big companies to individual coders) can pick the software license most appropriate for their own situation. This is likely THE most fundamental aspect of putting code on the Internet for everyone to use (open source with no restrictions versus otherwise) that's as old as the modern Internet itself, so I can't tell if you're deliberating ignoring th

      • If you are a coder who has avoided learning the basics of copyright law, there's no help for you.

      • People who write the clever code that ALLOWS THEIR PRODUCTS TO EXIST have no claim to any sort of compensation???

        (I know your post is tongue in cheek, but it deserves a serious response for anyone who might take it seriously.)

        The truth is that most open source developers today do get paid. There's plenty of free work being donated to a multitude of tiny projects, most of them used only by their authors, but all of the big projects are developed primarily by people who are paid for their work. To take the most prominent example, look at the the stats [lwn.net] for a recent Linux kernel release. Only 3.9% of lines were writt

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dissy ( 172727 )

          Seems even simpler than all that.

          I take offence at these people for denying me my right to choose $0 as my price.

    • A lot of OSS devs are doing it to get a GIT hub account they can use for job interviews. Sort of like an Artists portfolio. But in the old days you got paid to build that portfolio.

      Worse, I've had friends that have had "Job Interviews" where they're called in to solve a problem as a "test" and it's very clearly the employer trying to get free consulting services. A few of them wrote the code for free without getting a job when they were young and dumb and didn't know better. I gather since India took ov

      • My GitHub account is mostly shit I got paid to write. Not sure why you think people aren't getting paid for that stuff.

        Now, if your GitHub account is filled with half projects including a bunch of framework boilerplate that doesn't do anything useful, you probably should not get paid for that. But that's exactly what the "portfolios" you're talking about are.

      • Re:They kind of are in a lot of ways (Score:5, Informative)

        by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @10:28AM (#59203450) Journal

        Worse, I've had friends that have had "Job Interviews" where they're called in to solve a problem as a "test" and it's very clearly the employer trying to get free consulting services.

        I don't believe your friends. I'm not saying they're lying, just wrong.

        Any problem that could be solved in the course of a job interview is too trivial to be worth paying for, and any company that would use such code is completely stupid. If they are so completely lacking in engineering talent, what are they going to do if the code breaks, or doesn't work exactly the way they want?

        What I believe is common is for interviewers to ask for solutions to real problems that they have faced in their work. There are several advantages to using such real problems, rather than the typical contrived ones, among them that the interviewer has spent weeks, or months, thinking about the problem and potential solutions, and is therefore well-positioned to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the candidate's solution -- recognizing that the candidate had very little time. The biggest disadvantage is that real problems are often too complex to even explain in the course of an interview, much less have time for the candidate to generate and code a solution. Often they can be suitably simplified without losing their connection to reality, though.

        • It wasn't in interview (Score:4, Interesting)

          by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @11:39AM (#59203906)
          he was brought in to do a bit of "consulting" to "prove" he was a good fit for the job. Young, dumb, excited.

          I'm not saying it was a lot of work, but it's a quick and dirty way for a small business to get something that's just a little broken on their website fixed.

  • What's the difference ? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mrlinux11 ( 3713713 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:28AM (#59203128)
    Closed Commercial software is abandoned all the time and there have been huge security issues. Open/Closed/Free/Commercial are all the same, the big difference I see is that if the open source project is abandoned by the developers, someone can at least pick it up and continue, not so much for abandoned Closed software

    • Re:What's the difference ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @10:00AM (#59203274)
      That stood out to me as well. There are a lot of other bad assumptions made by the article as well. Typically when I've contributed code to an open source project it's because I wanted the application to be able to solve some need for me, not because I wanted to make something for free that the rest of the community could benefit from. Since I get value out of it (and probably more than my time contributed back is worth), I don't really have a problem if a few other people get some fee value out of my contribution in turn.
  • Slashdot runs on Linux [netcraft.com] . . . how dare they exploit the freely contributed labor of others to run a for-profit website without compensating the devs?

  • Or are we talking more of a pandora model, where a portion of the proceeds for where you are drawing support gets paid back to those devs who are providing support?

  • Always been that way (Score:4)

    by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:34AM (#59203160) Homepage

    First the UUCP then the Internet have always depended on some one working for free. Back in the '80 I was routing messages down stream on my Amiga using UUCP. A service I provided for free on software written and provided for free.

    The current Internet is no exception. Most of the software that is doing the real work was written for free. I imagine it will always be that way. Someone will do the work to keep the system working.

  • been there, done that, sucks to do base Open Source infrastructure code stuff :-/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • The vast majority is employed, and it is part of their job! E.g. because they use it.

    And the rest also do it, because they get somethig from it. Like tme submitting a patch in my free time, that fixes what bugged my on my home server.

    Work is paid. In some direct or indirect way.
    The RESULT of the work, is free!
    And that is exactly how it should be!

    Want more money? Do more work! This is not the Content Mafia! Nor stock trading!

    Hell, I do not evem want any money! Because I do not want to work more! I want to li

  • Discogs / Wikipedia are perfect examples of this (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:57AM (#59203252) Homepage Journal

    ... and not just the Internet, but a lot of other work too. It's amazing how much time people willingly and unwillingly volunteer. It's funny because if you asked for money, most people wouldn't give you any but they will give others their time. It's bad because no matter how much time you give, you still have no say in how the project is administered. It's never democratic and there's never any profit sharing, the people at the top take all the cream and yet everyone tells them how great they are!

    So many people get easily rich by taking a lot off the top and not paying back the many people who each gave up so much. It's basically modern wage slavery, pay as little as possible in order to profit as much as possible. ;~(

    • Back before Wikipedia was the serfdom it has become, and other big content platforms like Facebook, people that were subject matter experts would often (gasp) host their own websites. I know, crazy, right? But that's how we rolled, and the Internet was a place with a much better signal-to-noise ratio, and with a lot fewer ads too.

      Remember -- participating on Wikipedia is completely voluntary, as is contributing to an open source project. No one puts a gun to anyone's head and MAKES them contribute. Ther

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

        Back before Wikipedia was the serfdom it has become, and other big content platforms like Facebook, people that were subject matter experts would often (gasp) host their own websites. I know, crazy, right? But that's how we rolled, and the Internet was a place with a much better signal-to-noise ratio, and with a lot fewer ads too.

        Remember -- participating on Wikipedia is completely voluntary, as is contributing to an open source project. No one puts a gun to anyone's head and MAKES them contribute. There is no coercion. So, while I agree that the behavior you describe happens, I see the comparison to "modern wage slavery" as a bit far-fetched. A lot of these contributors do it as a hobby, for example, and they very much enjoy the time they spend.

        Wanna control what happens to the content you create? Pick the right license [choosealicense.com], and host in on your own site. All the tools are there -- in fact, they've never been more available and easy to find. There's nothing stopping you.

        often it's not practical, like the rest of your argument, clearly, no, it's not really a choice, if you need to contribute in order to further larger goals, they kind of own a part of you

        my point is that they take far more than their fair share, they really need to share more to get more ...

  • We dumped Curl for Postman several years ago. WAY easier to use, and hey, their developers are paid. :)

    - Necron69

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @10:08AM (#59203316)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Not only that, but sometimes I scratch a personal itch by writing some software or modifying some code. It was work I was doing just for me. Afterwards, I might as well share it since maybe someone else has that same itch. No need to waste resources having everyone reinvent the wheel.

  • But not all forms of compensation are monetary.
    Sometimes the person might be seeking fame, or to build a portfolio to get a job later on, or in many, many cases, just for the fun of it.
    For example, people that write emulators, in many cases do it for the fun of reverse engineering a closed system and the gratification that comes when the software starts to run better and better, until it gets to a point where everything runs, (including software he don't actually own that just happened to land on the harddr

  • Not just the Internet but a lot of software in general relies on many open source components. Some of those are developed by people paid by companies some by volunteers.
    One problem is that the state of such open source components is hard to assess and it's easy to believe everything is fine with just time-limited volunteers or a small number of paid coders. It takes a lot of time and effort to do things right but since the code is just available it's easy to take but no one wants to pay for maintenance and

  • There certainly are many people working on FOSS projects as volunteer/hobby work, and that's awesome. But there are also thousands of engineers who are paid by their employers to work on FOSS projects because those projects are valuable to the employer. For example, numerous companies that utilize Linux pay their engineers to work on it, such as IBM, Google, Samsung and Microsoft as well as hundreds of smaller companies. https://www.zdnet.com/article/... [zdnet.com] . Don't think of FOSS as "hobby" software, think of i

  • which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions.

    OpenSSL might have only 1 full time developer but it also has many part-time developers that lend their skills when needed. This does not take into account that the amount of work required. For example OpenSSL 1.0.2 has about 500,000 lines of code. Also the same criticism could be applied to closed source with the difference being that the public may not know how many developers or lines of code in closed source.

  • Young, idealistic people who are new to computers do most of the Open Source heavy lifting. It's only after someone exposes them to Bill Gate's Open Letter to Hobbyists that they start to question if it's better to be a capitalist fed than a member of the invisible academy.

  • I'm ok with this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by duke_cheetah2003 ( 862933 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @11:14AM (#59203754) Homepage

    The alternative is all the code that makes the internet work would be proprietary and locked down.

    I think that's why the open source community does this. There is a payoff, it's just not in dollars or food.

    They also just enjoy programming I think. I mean who would do such a thing for free if they hated it?

    Bottom line, better think carefully about what you're asking for. If you want 'paid for' programming running the internet, better be prepared to not get the source code with it.

    This current model works well. It may shaft some people, but I think ultimately we as a species win in the end. I think these selfless people who do all this work for free are the unsung heroes of our era.

  • OpenSSL was a bad example (Score:3)

    by gmiller123456 ( 240000 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @11:20AM (#59203784) Homepage

    OpenSSL was a poor choice for an example. The entire SSL spec is more an example of a bunch of companies getting together with the goal of making something simple virtually impossible to implement for free. I remember when the spec was first made public, there were lots of questions as to why it was so overly complicated, and the spec witten in a way it was very difficult to understand. People who worked on it at Netscape said it was done intentionally, though didn't say why. Though I think it's pretty obvious, and few people would disagree, they were trying to lock out competitors. Had SSL followed similar paths like open source projects, we'd very likely have a much easier spec to work with and lots of open implementations.

  • Companies that use open source software pay developers to develop and improve it, and also have to pay people to manage license compliance in large projects.
  • I.e. big evil tech companies like MS and google paying their employees to work on open source code while at work. In other words people not working for free

    • They are. The writer is an idiot who doesn't know anything about the subject matter. That is why he writes for a blog.

  • So what's the alternative? (Score:3)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @11:44AM (#59203934) Journal
    What's the alternative? Demand only paid employees write code? Sounds like yet another great way for some company like Microsoft to basically own all computing devices, and {insert software company here} having a de-facto monopoly on any application you might need, charging your thousands of dollars for it, basically pricing 99% of everyone out of the market for it. In a world where there's no FOSS and some company somewhere owns any piece of software you might want, we'd be back in the 1970's, where computers were only for scientists and big corporations, and any code you wrote would come with a mandatory royalties agreement from the company that owns the compiler you used. It would be a world like having the equivalent of the RIAA and MPAA and ASCAP taking control of anything anyone wrote. It would also have a stifling, chilling effect on creativity when it came to software. The current system may be flawed, but so are most other systems. I'd rather have it the way it is now, thank you very much, otherwise I'd be writing this on Windows and Internet Explorer, not Ubuntu and Firefox. ;-)

  • The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

    Correct. *downloads from Piratebay* ;-)

  • Not to mention the cases where the authors retire or are incapacitated. There is also the case of software that is not critical, but helpful to have and appreciably better than competing systems.
  • ‘virtually every tech company also relies on thousands of bits of free code, made available through "open-source" projects”’

    There is no "open-source", that should be Open Source.

    “an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code”

    “they”, has slashdot been bitten by the PC bug? The developers name is Dr Robin Seggelmann. So unless he's decided to self-identify as 'a

  • ...I haven't written much code for free. I mostly wrote open source code because my employer wanted me to (or allowed me to) as part of my job.

    I'm sure there are people writing code in their free time, completely unrelated to their jobs, but all the open source devs I know are getting paid, either by working for big orgs that pay them, or by working as consultants.

  • That in the early days of System V Unix and Linux - we used to say once in a while you'd have to call someone and hear their mom say "Johnny, come inside there's someone needs support on that application you wrote."
  • 'voluntarily' or as the eloquent wannabes might try to say 'out of their own volition' ... huge difference , even in case where but "you don't HAVE TO" ...

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