Burning bridges...

Posted Oct 14, 2024 19:40 UTC (Mon) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051)
Parent article: WordPress retaliation impacts community

When a company or individual complains that "their" F/OSS is being used to make money that someone else, they say, "doesn't deserve", the spirit of F/OSS is already being dismissed.

Open Source does in no way guarantee *anyone* money, revenue or profit. Or fame. Or respect. Or a career. It just means what the license says, and that's it. (CLAs undermine the spirit as well.) If you are competing for business and profit, you have many choices in licensing your software. F/OSS may or may not be the right choice.

This article seems very relevant: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/how-open-source-foun...

Burning bridges...

Posted Oct 14, 2024 21:04 UTC (Mon) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not exactly unique to working on Open Source. History is full of examples of people who had good ideas but their employer took all the profit. Here's a $100 gift card for your trouble.

I did about 1/3 of the spec work for NVMe 1.0. I barely even got an internal "attaboy" reward. The Windows team got some Divisional Recognition Award for writing the Windows driver (this is a fairly big deal at Intel). Some people who contributed a few lines to the spec founded a company based on NVMe that got sold for $1bn.

You can't get upset about these things. Nobody owes you anything unless you have a contract.

Burning bridges...

Posted Oct 15, 2024 11:07 UTC (Tue) by Heretic_Blacksheep (subscriber, #169992) [Link]

And even then you better read the fine print and have a contract lawyer review any potential loop holes in the contract and relevant law with you.

Gatekept projects like this one should already have this big blinking sign over them that reads something like "You don't own this star, hitch your only wagon to it at your peril."

I'm unsympathetic with all sides, including the Word Press users, for the aforementioned gigantic red flag waving in the storm winds.

Use such products with the ongoing understanding that wagon's spars can be cut loose and destroyed at any given time and plan accordingly.

Burning bridges...

Posted Oct 15, 2024 13:52 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

> History is full of examples of people who had good ideas but their employer took all the profit. Here's a $100 gift card for your trouble.

This is an area where software engineering unions could help by facilitating an adult/peer conversation between the creators of value and the managers/takers of value as to how much each party should be skimming off the top for their personal wealth. There should be formal systems in place, like standard contracts, to ensure that at least some proportional part of the value makes it back to the people who create it and isn't _entirely_ captured by low-value middlemen (even if it mostly is ;-), $100 gift cards are probably not sufficient.

Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent. At least Automattic was willing to spend $30k/head to buy out 150+ employees who think their leadership is nuts.

Burning bridges...

Posted Oct 17, 2024 5:43 UTC (Thu) by kn (guest, #124511) [Link]

> There should be formal systems in place, like standard contracts, to ensure that at least some proportional part of the value makes it back to the people who create it

Should employees cover parts of company losses as well? If not that would just punish entrepreneurship and risk-taking. If people want a bigger piece of the pie, there are stock options. Most people don't like risk.