Good news! It is! It’s actually public domain. If you get ahold of some AI generated code, you can do whatever you want with it.

I am simply pointing out an unfortunate fact of how digital goods work. I am not saying your labor has no value inherently, but that because the product can be infinitely reproduced it becomes so diluted as to approach 0. Imagine an artist made a sculpture. It has immense value because it was very hard to make. Yet if they could snap their fingers and create 2? And then 20? 200? 2000? Suddenly its not worth very much.

You literally are saying that my labor has no value, because the product it produces is digital. A sculpture can be duplicated with a mold. Doing so without the permission of the artist is illegal, because a statue is considered copyrighted material. Just because you own a copy of the statue, or even the original statue, does not mean that you can make and sell copies of it. Are you arguing that you should be able to do that?

It’s even worse because with digital goods anyone can do the copying.

Just like anyone can make a print of someone’s painting. Or make a mold of someone’s statue. Or make a copy of someone’s book. What you’re describing is an inherent property of art, not just digital goods.

The reason I say the current model of proprietary software is exploitative is because it attempts to legally enforce a monopoly of this infinitely reproducable commodity in order to extract infinite profit from society in exchange for its use.

You are describing copyright law. Without it, artists and other creatives would not be able to profit from their work. Also, “infinite profit” is not a thing. I don’t know why you keep saying it.

I will clarify about the monetization model. If you wanted to write some code, then tell people they can access it for a set fee, and once accessed it has no DRM, no restriction on copying, etc then that’s fine. It’s not the act of asking for money in itself but the act of attempting to claim ownership over all the infinite copies I take issue with.

That’s the opposite of what you said earlier. Also, as an admitted pirate, you seem to take issue with this model.

What good is protecting the first copy, if I cannot protect any other copies? Should I seek to sell a year’s work of software for $100k to one guy, then just be done with it? I don’t think anyone would buy it. That’s an extremely silly model that absolutely would not work in reality.

There are many ways to monetize something without doing that. One of them is asking for donations. One is the single payment before access to an unrestricted product model above, and there’s all kinds of other ways too.

And you seem to have a problem with all of them except donation, according to your previous comments. I think in this comment, maybe you’re coming around to my side?

I do understand why you are upset by what points I made. I just think that you are wrong that we need to be fully communist to implement a different model. Many of the current issues with open source not recieving many donations, and not having much in the way of support is because of the massive companies with proprietary software that absorb all the software markets value for themselves. This also fragments the software infrastucture of society.

I’m not really upset with your points, I’m appalled by your entitlement. The points you made show a very clear dismissal of the value of software. I myself am a user of plenty of open source software, but I have a completely different attitude about it. I would never believe I am entitled to a piece of software. If the developer wants to give it to me for free, I will graciously accept it and thank them for that, because, and I cannot stress this enough, no one is entitled to the products of their labor but themself.

It is the attitude I see that you’ve displayed here that makes working as an open source developer so disheartening sometimes. I am literally giving you free stuff, and you are not gracious, you act entitled. You act like (and say outright) the mere fact that the product I’ve produced can be copied means my labor is worthless. Not that I have given you something of worth, for free, but that I have given you something worthless, that I owed you.

Most of the funding for software in general comes from huge companies. But they lock down the things they pay for. So nobody else can use them. This means open source devs have to reinvent the wheel to get anything done. If you got rid of the proprietary model companies would still have a need for software, and would still pay to have it made, but their software could then be repurposed for other uses. Developers would get paid for their initial labor by the companies and then the product is out there and can be copied for free by everyone else. This does not require communism to work. It just requires restrictions on how software can be locked down.

I am telling you, and I know you won’t believe me, but I feel it’s important you hear it from someone who’s been both in the software industry and an open source developer for almost three decades, you do not understand how the software industry works.

The overwhelming majority of software is funded through either advertising or subscriptions. Directly, being a binary or SaaS product offered to the customer, or indirectly, being a library or project supported by companies doing the former or paid for by services available through it as a platform. Only a minuscule amount of overall funding and contribution comes from donations from end users of open source projects. I think you understand this, but you seem to think that if all software were open source, this would change. It wouldn’t.

To give you an example, XNU is an open source operating system kernel. It is not funded by donations. It is funded by literally one company, and pretty much only used in their products. What difference does it make that it’s open source? To me, it’s exactly as useful as the Windows kernel, even though it’s open source. It’s not useful because being open source is not what makes a piece of software useful to the broader software development community. It is the community behind it and the direction and stewardship of the project.

Now as to the personal point. You asked above to list all FOSS software I use and say how much I’ve donated. I can’t list everything. I assume that was a point you were trying to make about the invisibility of things like libraries. So how are they meant to get donations? I use Debian. I give money to Debian. Not much, but I try to give them 5-10$ every year. I’m not a wealthy person. In fact I live below the poverty line. But I do this anyway because I appreciate what Debian does. It’s my opinion that the way this should be structured is as follows:

Visible Software (OS) -> Infrastucture A -> Infrastucture B

Visible Software collects donations. It has the visibility to request them. It should then be required (by law? by expectation and social pressure? We would need enforcement, I am aware.) to have a list of attestations. What other FOSS projects made their project possible? To what extend did they do so? Then Debian in this case would need to take their 10$ donation and divy it up. Infrastucture A was used by them then is given 1.50$ by them from that 10$. If Infrastucture B was used by A then A would need to figure out how much they helped it and pass on some to them. Say 50 cents. This would act like a donation dispersion model where a donation to Debian is a donation to all the infrastucture that makes Debian possible by proxy. This is sort of how Debian works now tho I don’t think they have it down to quite a science.

I mean, yeah, you see where I was going with this, but you still aren’t getting it. Just by using Debian, you are using thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of open source projects. At least you are giving two coffees worth of donations a year to one of them.

How do you think these projects stay funded? It isn’t from users like you. It’s from proprietary software companies who rely on them. Or, in the case of the majority of them, they are not funded. They are made by volunteers, for free. Unless we switch to a planned economy where they would be funded by the government, that’s going to remain how it is.

I think you are, my man. Go back and read what he wrote. He’s arguing that it is immoral to charge money for a digital good that can be copied easily without destroying the original. In other words, software. He said all software should be open source, and the only way anyone should make money from it is donations. He said that the value of the labor of a software engineer is zero because the product of that labor can be infinitely copied. (This would include the value of the labor of all artists, btw. Musicians, voice actors, authors, 3D modelers, graphic designers, CAD engineers, journalists, photographers, etc. Anyone who produces works that can be represented digitally.)

Telling a software engineer that their labor is worthless and being paid for their work through anything but donations is immoral is pretty fucking entitled. He literally feels entitled to the products of my labor. That’s actually his argument.

I’m a big fan of open source. So much so that probably 90% of the software I’ve written is open source. But people like him are the same kind of people who come into my support forums and rudely demand that I fix a bug immediately because it’s affecting them.

And people like you, defending people like him because you have stars in your eyes about a system that we don’t live under, don’t help. Yes, capitalism sucks, but it’s what we live under. Am I “corrupted by capitalism” because I want to be paid for my work so I can eat and pay rent? It’s giving

Honestly, it’s people like you, who feel entitled to my labor, who make me feel like it’s a mistake to release anything I make as open source.

Well, I am the “little guy” who is currently only protected by a patent and the fact that my project has not yet been released as self hostable. Once it is released, the only thing protecting me from big corporations will be the patent.

Else, they would just spin up my server software and offer it for less money, or free, since they can afford to undercut me until I go bankrupt.

If it weren’t for the patent, I wouldn’t even be considering releasing it as self hostable, and certainly would never consider releasing it as open source. Right now, I’m leaning toward a source available license (BUSL) that transitions to open source (AGPL). That way, I can license any individual who wants to use my project for personal use full access to do so, along with the source code, but any corporation who wants to compete with me would be violating my patent.

Yeah, I would agree with that. There’s already precedent with trademarks. You must use a trademark or you can lose it.

You’ve clearly never asked for donations for an open source project. I have. The vast majority of open source projects get no donations. Most of the rest get a small amount per month. Not enough to survive on. A handful get a lot of donations.

One of my libraries is used by about 3,800 other projects. It was actually the first popular UI library for the Svelte framework. I’ve not gotten one single donation for it. It has a donation page, and no one has ever taken me up on it. I’ve put hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours of work into that project since I started it in 2017. The only reason I was able to build it is that I also get paid to write proprietary software.

Most of the big, popular open source projects also only exist because of proprietary software. They get patches from the companies who use them.

That’s why I am telling you that what you’re advocating for could only work in a planned economy. I’m not going to work for free if I can’t afford to eat.

The argument for piracy was never about money. It was about ownership. I’m sorry that the reason you pirate is because you don’t want to financially support the artists. That’s very shameful. The reason I pirate is because after I’ve purchased some media, I want to own it.

So let me ask you this: can you list out all of the open source projects you’ve used, and how much you’ve donated to each one?

Corporations aren’t the only entities that can hold patents and IP.

In case you were wondering if this is slop:

Your view I feel would only work in a communist, or at least extremely socialist, society. Under the American form of capitalism, that would essentially make being an inventor worthless. Whatever you invent will just be copied by the biggest competitor in the field. A system of necessary monopolies.

I don’t disagree that your view (under a system of extreme socialism) is a better way to set up a society than American capitalism. But unless we abolish capitalism, I think what you’re arguing for is worse for the proletariat than what we have.

Do you realize how much work it takes to make that infinitely copyable software though? Like, yes, it would be super awesome if all software was open source, but if it were, I would probably be working in finance instead.

You see it as extortion to withhold something for money? So all labor should be free? Everything should be free? I should be able to just go set up shop in the Empire State Building like I own the place? Or, is that one of those slightly different things? Maybe just the labor of the construction workers should have been free.

Fun fact: I get to write open source software because proprietary software pays the bills.

You’re a big fan of monopolies, aren’t you?

They are certainly abused, but without them, there’s literally no protection from a big company stealing an entrepreneur’s idea and undercutting them. (Like what Facebook did to Snapchat.)

They should be reformed, but I think providing protections to inventors is not inherently a bad idea.

I am speaking as an inventor who has been issued a software patent, so take what you will from that. I’m happy that my idea can’t just be stolen by Google or Microsoft. (Or some slop slinger, for that matter.)

This is an incredibly bad idea on his part. Patents and copyright are not the same thing. It doesn’t matter at all if he genuinely reverse engineered it, if it violates their patent they have every right to sue him, and they’ll win. Claiming it’s a witch hunt also doesn’t matter. The court is not sympathetic to lone devs violating patents.

It used to be we could protect software with both copyrights and patents, because it was really hard to duplicate a large project. Now, with AI able to shit out a somewhat working implementation in a few days, we only have patents.

I’m pretty sure what we have now is as extreme as it gets. They literally have concentration camps.

I’ve literally heard these sentiments my entire life, and progressives keep proving it wrong every time.

The latest was my dad saying, “well of course a progressive could win in New York, but not anywhere else in the country.”

I think the nation has shown multiple times in the past decade that what we really don’t want is another fucking status quo democrat. The country is desperate for change, and if the democrats and people with your sentiment would take their foot off progressives’ necks and stand behind us instead, progressives could actually make this country great (for the first time, btw).

She 100% has my vote.

My thoughts exactly. Except also these models that people use to code are going to go from around $50 a month to around $1000 a month. What kind of idiot is gonna pay $1000 a month to keep their pet slop up to date? Abandoned slopware is the inevitable conclusion of all these projects.