He could pay people for their work [LWN.net]

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 28, 2025 22:12 UTC (Tue) by lunaryorn (guest, #111088)
Parent article: FOSDEM keynote causes concerns

In 2024 Forbes estimated Jack Dorsey's net worth to be about 5.6 billion.

With that money he could pay all FOSDEM 2025 attendants, all 10000 of them, a yearly salary of $50000 for their work, for ten years, and still have 600 million left, which is about two orders of magnitude more than I, as an employed software developer, will ever make in my entire life.

He took other people's work for free, never gave much back in return, and then gets to talk about how great is is to do open source work for free?

I don't know, but with that in mind I find giving him the center stage on a volunteer conference of mostly unpaid volunteer developers just gross.

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He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 28, 2025 22:55 UTC (Tue) by cen (subscriber, #170575) [Link] (11 responses)

Kindly disagree. Open source licenses explicitly allow any company to take the work and not return anything, as long as they respect the license terms. It's about code freedom, not about fighting capitalism and extracting money. As a matter of fact, my general feeling is that the majority of OSS not only believes in "Free as in freedom" but also in "Free as in beer".

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 28, 2025 23:48 UTC (Tue) by warrax (subscriber, #103205) [Link] (1 responses)

That depends very much on the particular license. MIT/BSD license certainly, GPL maybe, AGPL... less so.

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 29, 2025 15:35 UTC (Wed) by ericproberts (guest, #139553) [Link]

From the AGPLv3:

> This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program.

> If you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

As long as you don't modify the source the AGPL absolutely lets you "take the work and not return anything". Even if you modify the source the only thing you have to provide is the modified source code, and not even to the original authors -- to "all users interacting" with the your service.

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 29, 2025 0:00 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

Both parent posts are missing the point. For a discussion about the criteria for speakers at a FOSS conference, the question should not be license compliance or wealth.

It should be about who is a valuable member and contributor to the FOSS ecosystem.

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 29, 2025 13:03 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Open source licenses explicitly allow any company to take the work and not return anything, as long as they respect the license terms.

Sure. But that doesn't mean those who just parasite off of the ecosystem get to come to a venue and preach about how they know open source.

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 29, 2025 15:02 UTC (Wed) by lunaryorn (guest, #111088) [Link] (6 responses)

Sure, but - sticking to the "free as in beer" analogy - there's a world of a difference between volunteers who organize a free beer party, run it, work the counter, clean the glasses, etc., and people who come to such an event and truck off whole barrels of free beer to sell them elsewhere for big money.

Even if that was legally allowed, or even considered the volunteer free beer party community would probably not appreciate if one of the truckers later came to their event and held a keynote about how great and tasty the beer was ;)

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 29, 2025 17:55 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (5 responses)

> and people who come to such an event and truck off whole barrels of free beer to sell them elsewhere for big money. Even if that was legally allowed, ...

As you demonstrate yourself, this is a poor analogy because "stealing" open-source does not deprive anyone else from using it. That aside...

> the volunteer free beer party community would probably not appreciate if one of the truckers later came to their event and held a keynote about how great and tasty the beer was ;)

That's an expected and very natural response, but it's an emotional and not very useful one. The better response is to try to leverage the opportunity of an exchange with the rare (legal) "thieves" who come forward to study and understand why and how all the many other "thieves" also act like this and what could be done about it.

This reminds me when University of Minnesota researchers were adding vulnerabilities to the Linux kernel https://lwn.net/Articles/853717/ A lot of reactions looked like "Booo, you are BAD people! You're banned!". Emotionally and totally missing the critical point and iceberg below the surface: how are many more and much more discrete actors doing the same thing? With a lot more money and resources.

Unlike an authorized "Red Team", those attempts were not ethical at all but it was actual and useful research and these researchers had things to share. I hope they got a chance to. Maybe they did outside of the public eye and asocial networks.

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 29, 2025 19:47 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

And also it's completely missing the point - it's not clear but it looks like twitter provided a SERVICE using FLOSS software, and I get the impression that Dorsey was a willing and full participant in the FLOSS ecosystem. The fact that he then sold his SERVICE-provider company and earned megabucks as a result speaks to his clever business sense, not to any desire (or reality) to take advantage of others.

Again, I get the impression it's just people who lack the ambition, the guts, and the skill to take advantage of an opportunity, who have gone green at the gills because Dorsey has made his own luck.

And at the end of the day, if they can't make money off FLOSS but Dorsey can, good luck to him! As I say, he doesn't appear to have broken any rules, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence he's even betrayed the spirit ... !!! It's just a bunch of detractors consumed by the green-eyed god ...

Cheers,
Wol

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 30, 2025 8:33 UTC (Thu) by lunaryorn (guest, #111088) [Link] (1 responses)

Do forgive me, but I find this a bit of a simplistic standpoint.

We're not living in Lockean times anymore (if indeed we ever did) where you mixed your labour with nature and extracted your property from the land with your own bare hands, metaphorically speaking. There's no labour theory of property anymore in our complex multi-national, highly specialised societies.

As such, I do not believe in the idea of someone seizing an "opportunity", and I do not think it offers much ground for debate. I'd much rather prefer to debate the economical, regulatory, and financial environment of internet companies, which creates these "opportunities" in the first place, and how it's - in my opinion - exceedingly and unfairly favorable towards these companies, compared to traditional industries.

And that said, as others already pointed out, Dorsey, as a person, never participated in any Foss community.

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 31, 2025 17:47 UTC (Fri) by alltheseas (guest, #175700) [Link]

> And that said, as others already pointed out, Dorsey, as a person, never participated in any Foss community.

This is false. Dorsey participates in the FOSS nostr community. Via nostr Dorsey has demonstrated he is looking to give back to FOSS communities.

Dorsey attending FOSDEM is a vote of confidence in the FOSS approach, and FOSS contributors.

It is extremely strange y'all are trying to scare away a potential ally who can help further FOSS contributors passion and vocation.

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 30, 2025 8:02 UTC (Thu) by lunaryorn (guest, #111088) [Link] (1 responses)

This is about FOSDEM, _the_ social community event for FOSS people who are deeply attached to their FOSS communities. FOSDEM is a community event, first and foremost. It's all about emotions. Emotions are what make people pour in all those countless hours into their favorite projects.

No one would have objected to this keynote if it had been at a commercial developer conference

He could pay people for their work

Posted Jan 30, 2025 10:21 UTC (Thu) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

I have learned to ignore keynotes at commercial developer conferences, and move on...
(except for the Fireplace Chat with Linus ;-)

For FOSDEM keynotes, people still care...