It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.
If you develop software for a living that means you spend the bulk of your work week writing code for money, probably for a for-profit business writing closed-source, proprietary software.
And please don’t get me wrong… That’s not to invalidate the volunteer work that you’ve done in your free time for whatever FOSS projects that you’ve contributed to. That’s a commendable and generous use of your free time and as a FOSS enthusiast I appreciate whatever you’ve done.
But now just imagine if you could spend your work week writing code for FOSS projects, while still making a decent living for yourself or your family. Imagine how much more FOSS code you could write with entire weeks of time instead of just the odd weekend here and there. Imagine how much effort you could dedicate towards maintaining larger projects and reviewing code from other contributors to accelerate the pace of development. Imagine how much more, high quality FOSS software would be available to everybody to use, for free, all over the world if more people like you could spend their days writing FOSS code instead of writing proprietary code.
That’s the point of what I’m saying.
Obviously not every project can afford to pay every developer for their one-off patch that they submit on a random weekend. Most projects don’t have the funding to do that, and even if they did the logistics of it are unreasonable. But that’s not really the point. More sustainable funding for FOSS means that more developers would be able to spend the bulk of their time writing FOSS code and maintaining FOSS projects. Large FOSS projects like Blender absolutely rely on this concept.
In my opinion people who are genuine allies of FOSS should want more stable and sustainable funding for FOSS development, so that more talented people can spend more of their time doing work for FOSS projects instead of for-profit companies.
It wouldn’t be great to spend my work week writing code for FOSS projects - it would be great to spend my “work” week coding whatever the hell I want. In my previous job I got code upstreamed into one or two major open source projects which did occupy my work week and it was just the same as any other work - I was working on the company’s priorities, not my own. Now obviously we all try to find places to work where those priorities align because that’s what makes work pleasant, but that is the real difference. From a personal perspective, how the code I’m writing is going to be licensed doesn’t affect my enjoyment to a great extent.
My reaction to the blog post is to question who it’s aimed at, and how it’s meant to change their behaviour. For-profit businesses, maybe, to encourage them to open-source more of the code that they write? Well, that might be worthwhile, but I think a lot of tech companies already understand open source and incorporate it into their strategy. Google and Meta undoubtedly do. My current and previous employers do. For them it’s a business decision whether to open source their code and whether to assign developers to open source projects, and this post doesn’t seem focused on that business decision. Surely the post isn’t aimed at individual contributors, because the action they can take is to withhold their time unless paid for it, which is absurd, because those people are for the most part contributing because they enjoy it. Sure, that means that companies can benefit from the passion of people making things for free, but that’s not a bad situation to be in.