The more I talk to people about how to make software sustainable, I'm reminded that most people haven't spent time thinking about how anything gets paid for. Most employees haven't really considered exactly how it is that money ends up in their paychec...
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Marco Rogersreplied to Brian LeRoux 💚 last edited by
@brianleroux people definitely don't understand compounding. I don't think that's gonna help at all.
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This is what I keep trying to talk about in different ways. I believe I'm still doing a poor job of framing it.
I think there's a very strong culture among devs that says the only work that should make money is work that we all wish did not exist. If it's stuff we actually want and actually enjoy doing, then it should somehow magically be "free". Both in terms of money and labor. And that is wild to me.
https://kolektiva.social/@aredridel/113143016020333128 -
I talked about this a while back. So many devs who are working hard to remain gainfully employed building shit that they hate. And in their "free" time, they toil at making free software for users that are perpetually ungrateful and don't wanna pay for it. Meanwhile, there are millions of other people willing to pay good money for software that corporate interests will never give them. All of the parties involved are unhappy. And yet nobody can see any alternatives.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112492234408125161 -
It's really okay to pay money for things that you want.
It's really okay to tell people that you'll only pay them money if they build the thing you want.
It's really okay to tell people you'll only build what they want if they pay you.
It's really okay to make people pay you for the thing even if you enjoyed building it and would've done it either way.
It's really okay to stop working for free. Even if the people who decided to use your free work might be unhappy it.
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@polotek Do you think we need to push back against the whole idea of FOSS and go back to more proprietary software with enforced paid licenses? Actually curious, not trying to argue; I'm not sure myself.
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@matt FOSS has always been an ethos targeted at a very small subset of the population. I'm sure the idea was for everybody to learn to tinker with code. But that was never a reasonable expectation. OSS should exist, but we should have the right expectations about it. Making the software transparent is actually a radical act. And it works because the software artifact is not the actual value to end users. Capitalism makes money by creating artificial scarcity around software.
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@matt But that's not the only way of doing it. We can do business on the real value and still keep the software itself open. But we have to get better at actually selling value. Developers are the worst at this. We devalue our work constantly. And we frequently show contempt for our users because they want something different than what we want.
I believe all of these things can be different. But they are cultural changes. And that's hard.
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@oscarjiminy @matt if space exploration had accelerated at the kind of rate we were led to expect in the 60s, we'd be having this conversation on Mars by now. I believe people are greatly overestimating that growth curve.
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@polotek @matt That's a fair point but a shaky analogy.
The jump from 2012 to now's pretty remarkable. If corporates orient their resources to refining to a particular narrow objective, it's plausible coding can be done by an AI (given a skilled AI operator).
Seems well past time the industry organised to unionise.
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@oscarjiminy @matt coding can be done by an ai today. It's just not sufficient. Because producing valuable software is about more than producing text tokens in the right order.
Just like the power of rockets isn't the main reason we're not on Mars. We could take a bunch of people to Mars right now. They would just die shortly after.
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@polotek @matt I think robots on mars may be more illustrative, a given set of problems resolved with a given set of technologies.
I don't mean to reduce developers' skills and talents to mechanical simplicity, as someone who doesn't code it seems entirely possible to me a codebase may be like an epic novel or symphony. I have zero doubt there is a ton of artistry but there are a ton of artisan professions that don't exist anymore due industrial developments.
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@polotek I find this whole thread/conversation confusing because sometime it smells like it's talking about custom work ("build this app per my spec"), other times having a cluster of apps, similar-but-different (e.g. note-taking), some-FOSS-some-paid, and make a choice ("this app looks best, but my #2 choice is free, how do I decide?")
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@billseitz I'm not sure why you need the conversation to be about only one thing. Maybe try asking some questions?
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@oscarjiminy @matt it feels like you're working backwards from a conclusion. I'd rather not.
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@polotek @matt Ok but my position was that the principle of FOSS addressed a problem that is generated by corporate ownership and control. Corporates harnessed the idealism embodied by the FOSS community to establish and fortify the market they would foreclose on were it not for FOSS.
Developers deserve the same security as any other workforce but they have to fight for it. Picking at the idealism that undermines complete corporate control of the industry is working against your own interests.
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@oscarjiminy @matt
> Picking at the idealism that undermines complete corporate control of the industry is working against your own interests.No it isn't. You're doing that thing where you assume that becuase other problems exist, we can't be responsible for our own choices and actions. I don't subscribe to that. Nor do I subscribe to the notion that if we just talk nice about ourselves and ignore these issues that it will somehow fix corporate interests.
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@oscarjiminy @matt I do want to reiterate something I've said to you a number of times. If you want to have a conversation with me, please start by framing what that is and asking questions. Please stop drawing me into debates you're having inside your head and making me work to suss out what your responses mean.
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@polotek @matt You’re making a lot of assumptions here Marco, something you often complain about others doing. We’ve once had an exchange in the past but I guess one’s a number too.
My position’s clear. Your industry needs to organise to unionise or whatever demands you might have’ll only be met where and when convenient to corporate bosses.
Suggesting folks who ‘work for free’ are somehow undermining your objective to be fairly paid, fairly treated is a misdirection. I can see how you might reach that conclusion but it’s a symptom of denial of the situation the profession finds itself in.
I can see you don’t enjoy exchanges with me, which’s fine. I’ll endeavour to hold my tongue and keep my views to myself (I’m clearly not your intended audience).
No hard feelings, best wishes.
Oscar -
@oscarjiminy the only assumption I'm making is that you can't actually tell when you've switched to talking about some shit that I'm not talking about. You keep repeating to me what you *think* I'm saying, and you're just fucking wrong about it. You don't really seem to be open to that possibility though. Because you rarely ask questions before creating your strawmen. So I guess I can stop giving you the benefit of the doubt.
This will be where we go our separate ways. Take care.