I'm in no way an expert, but IMO there is a major misconception in the free-ish software community that profit should be at most secondary to offering a fair and as good as sustainably possible product.
I strongly disagree with this. IMO developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible within the rules they think that should be followed (and those that are mandatory ofc).
Profit is not only by far the strongest motivating factor for others to adopt your set of rules, but also a guarantee to your community that the product will still be around in a few years and not turn into a rug pull because its developer is burned out after working 80 hour weeks for months or even years for less than minimum wage. It is also something you can trade for your values, e.g. offering great working conditions to your employees or funding projects or lobbying for laws you think will benefit society.
> developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible
Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.
Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.
Why don't YOU commercialize your fork of their service, and use the proceeds to hire developers to maintain the code? That would be infinitely more useful than armchair criticism of others.
This is a really interesting view, but I'm not sure I agree. So many amazing projects are truly free without the goal of profit yet their maintainers still do amazing work. I feel like part of the reason this works is because often the load is split between several maintainers (of which I hope to onboard soon, and have one or two offers already from people to contribute) and also the fact it's genuinely something enjoyable to work on (of course, to the extent it's not too stressful and overworked).
There's a difference between awesome projects that don't have a recurring cost (i.e. open source software that users run themselves) and a search engine. You cannot physically run a search engine without real-world costs today. Those funds need to come from somewhere. And offering a good product at scale costs a lot of money.
That is very true, and it's not cheap to maintain. I do however really hope that donations can cover it enough, and I have plans about other ways to monetise it while remaining not-for-profit without ads or anything that affects the user.
Honestly I agree. This is part of what I love about the idea of Kagi. I do believe a not-for-profit alternative is needed, however if there's any for-profit model a search engine should have, it should be paid for by the user rather than the advertiser imo.
There’s part of this that I agree to - I tend to disagree with most anti-capitalist (or anti-profit) sentiment. However, I disagree that builders “owe” anyone anything, and I strongly disagree with goal of as much profit “as possible”.
I miss the days when someone would make a service where the user would benefit as much as possible and the creator got compensated fairly. I feel like that system worked for hundreds of years. It’s only in the last couple decades that we’ve made this obligation for maximal profits - something that I personally hold responsible for all the mass enshittification going on these days.
It depends what you mean by "profit". If you mean "the developers/maintainers can pay the bills of a modest lifestyle", then yes, I think that's important. But often "profit" is used to refer to the idea of unlimited upside, that there are stocks, that the project will be sold, that some kind of sizable windfall is expected, etc. And that I think is to be avoided.
IMO too many people come to the conclusion that Qualcomm will in some way screw up the Arduino takeover at the expense of the community.
And I think these people are right, but that is not necessary a bad thing.
There is just about no reason a giant like Qualcomm would take over something like Arduino for any other purpose but to acquire resources (talent, customers, community, processes, documentation, ...) they can use to teach themselves how to become more open, to what degree they even want to and to have a trusted platform they can take their initial steps in and will get feedback from.
And the reality is, that someone with little experience will screw up badly, several times. I mean, look at the current state of the major silicon IP holders, the only reason they dont ship brain-chips with their NDAs that explode the moment you mention the wrong part number infornt of a competitor is because the NDAs for the documentation on how to install the brain-chips would get them stuck in recursion hell.
And just as little experience Qualcomm has at making open source a successful business strategy, Arduino has just as little experience at being a corporate Godzilla trying to carefully pet the egg they just adopted. And let's be real: Open source projects OWE it to their community to be financially successful, because it's that financial success that guarantees that the project CAN STAY open and wont force its core maintainers into choosing between their commitment to their community and a fulfilling lifestyle, although for someone like Qualcomm this success can probably be something else but financial in nature (acquiring talent, their products becoming a preferred choice, schools teaching students using Qualcomm products, whatever).
Both Arduino and Qualcomm will end up outside of their domain and it'd be surprising if this would not result in major mistakes being made.
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Qualcomm has to evaluate whether their new talent at Arduino is doing a good job and are suddenly looking at a giant dumpster fire, wondering what could have possibly caused this since their lawyers aren't even half-done sticking on the "by Qualcomm" labels yet.
Right now, instead of trying to pressure Qualcomm into making commitments they do not understand, the community should try to adopt the role of a stakeholder, who prioritizes a long and healthy relationship with a currently struggling contractor over getting the desired product at a reasonable timeline.
The community needs to make a cold day in hell happen, calm down, get together and formalize what they think they liked about Arduino up until now, the fundamental requirements that need to be retained or even developed and what would be nice to have.
Wearing a mask in public while wearing your unique style of clothing, BUT you may be able to exit your apartment building through the service entrance if your landlord is into spelunking and replaced the front door with a nutty putty cave imitation.
I cannot overstate how much of a pain it was to share 51Gbps of peering with 40M other homes and 60M mobile customers. Luckily they now have made generous upgrades, shoving an additional 15M to 20M customers through a whopping 371Gbps.
Unless of course the network your traffic is headed to has deep, widely open and sufficiently climatized pockets.
Regarding NixOS, I'm mostly afraid of them going on a user purge after their developer purge. You just never know who this group of people will come after next, especially after they started defining "Fascism" as "anyone asking for how they define Fascism".
And the jump of getting rid of people you hate who contribute to your project and you can do little harm to, to getting rid of people you hate who are of no use to you and you can do genuine damage to (e.g. by installing a tor exit node) is a step down if you think you could get away with it.
> Regarding NixOS, I'm mostly afraid of them going on a user purge after their developer purge
... Why? I don't know what developer purge you're talking about, but getting rid of people running a project almost never means suddenly they'll start to get rid of users, I'm not sure why that assumption is there. Not to mention that they couldn't even "purge users" if they wanted to, unless they make the download URLs private and start including some licensing schema which, come on, hardly is realistic to be worried about...
To provide some opinionated context for this unhinged rant:
The community developing nix had a falling out with a couple highly unsavory groups that basically consisted of the Palmer Lucky Slaughter Bot Co. and a couple guys who keep trying to monetize the project in extremely sleazy ways. This wasn't some sort of Stalinistic purge, it was people rejecting having their name attached to actual murder and sleazy profiteering.
Unless you mow your grass too low. Always assume the old rule of "your grass reaches just as far underground as it reaches up in the air" still holds.
Also if you mow your grass drastically shorter or you let it grow for a long time before mowing, do not fail to fertilize it from above right or soon after, start aggressively plucking the leaves of weeds (or other selective methods of fighting them) for a few weeks and (optimally, but highly recommended) verticulate it no sooner than 1 week after cutting. Also time it well to grant your lawn at least 3 weeks of ideal growing weather and climate (It won't die because of a week or two of awful weather, but you'll have A LOT more work fighting weeds ahead of yourself).
You can also use just heat. Like a long propane torch or one of the newer electric infrared ones. It doesn't need a lot of heat, a short burn (like a bit less than a second) is perfectly sufficient to make them wilt within a few days.
Weeds are the flora equivalent of VC-hype-startups. All growth, no substance and no plan B. They pop-up everywhere, with seemingly infinite growth resources and hope you'll despair and do nothing.
Just going around plucking leaves from everything that looks like you won't like it for a few weeks twice a year works wonders.
Basically regulatory capture for your lawn. No need to help along your darlings (in the beginning), just make everyone else play with stupid rules. And once things start going down the drain, it's time for subsidies (fertilizer) and public contracts (pre-germination).
Thank you for making my morning coffee, consumed while looking down on downtown San Francisco, presently chock full of "AI" weeds, substantially more entertaining.
I've burned them before. It's pretty effective if you understand the true goal. Despite the name you do *not* want to actually burn the weed! Burning the weed is no better than cutting off the part you burned--which obviously doesn't work very well. The objective is to give as much as possible of the weed a light singe--it takes a bit of experience to even see anything. The weed spends all it's energy healing the damage and dies.
IMO the goal is a bit different. It'd be just way too much data to track people successfully, even with on-device filtering, especially because everyone with ill intentions would just use non-backdoored devices for their malicious activities.
A much more achievable goal is digging up dirt on specific people and opponents. In the end governments can struggle to justify how they got their hands on info about an affair you had or that you shocked dogs ~~on stream~~.
Such device backdoors are just a get-out-court-free card and a way for the media to justify not asking any serious questions.
I strongly disagree with this. IMO developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible within the rules they think that should be followed (and those that are mandatory ofc).
Profit is not only by far the strongest motivating factor for others to adopt your set of rules, but also a guarantee to your community that the product will still be around in a few years and not turn into a rug pull because its developer is burned out after working 80 hour weeks for months or even years for less than minimum wage. It is also something you can trade for your values, e.g. offering great working conditions to your employees or funding projects or lobbying for laws you think will benefit society.
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