But that's the standard, isn't it? Better 10 guilty men go free than one man wrongly imprisoned? And since we're talking about lives saved versus lives lost, it seems appropriate to apply the same metric. So how many people would have to be actually guilty of murder and fairly executed to justify wrongfully killing a single innocent human being?
Personally, I'd say that number is really high, possibly infinite. I'm not inherently opposed to the death penalty, but I can't think of any fair number of actual murderers I'd be willing to execute if it meant the death of somebody who truly didn't deserve it.
It's a different case, because one compares two very different harms: "guilty man goes free" vs "innocent man imprisoned", and the other compares two very similar harms: "person dies".
The whole point of the "Better 10 guilty men go free..." aphorism is that the two harms are not equal, and that a guilty man going free is less than 10% of the harm of an innocent man imprisoned.
The driving interlock case is just a straight up classic trolley problem.
I guess the argument is we shouldn't be endangering people who desperately need to be able to drive "erratically" for good reasons, in order to protect drunk-drivers from themselves.
I suppose have some sympathy with that argument, which is why I said a minimum of 1:1 (a lower bound on the ratio).
Drunk drivers kill innocent people as well of course.
Have you tried to get ChatGPT to answer questions about factual topics at a level of junior grad student/hobbyist independent researcher?
It will generally tell you those things which are known to someone who has neither done detailed research, nor gained specific insights into that topic. (Together with made-up stuff.)
It seems odd to treat the suggestion that unnecessary emails cause excessive carbon emisions and the suggestion that unnecessary air travel causes excessive carbon emissions as the same or similar.
I think the implication is that on an individual level neither matters, and that suggesting, on social media, people stop traveling to prevent climate change is both ridiculous and harmful to anyone working to actually improve carbon emissions.
Yeah good intentions do often backfire (road to hell...), and this is one of the ways. Shaming folks for stuff they do normally when alternative is simply stop seeing parents and grandparents (for us this is currently way more carbon than all vacations combined). People simply shut off and go on to have a life, there is only so much existential dread you can pour on civilization before it becomes next norm, facts be damned.
I have 2 small kids, life is often a daily struggle in one way or another, I couldn't care less about current carbon footprint just like I don't care about another non-urgent bottom 500 priority stuff. Vote in politicians that will take care of that instead of focusing on smooth corporate profits if you want to send positive message and change, and motivate folks to do the same to increase impact.
> I couldn't care less about current carbon footprint just like I don't care about another non-urgent bottom 500 priority stuff.
That’s the thing: these narcissists on LinkedIn don’t care about their “carbon footprint” either. It’s all virtue signaling performance act targeting the Very Concerned people who eat these platitudes up. That’s what makes these statements so irritating.
I certainly do care about my carbon footprint and travel by train / bike when I can. I do take the plane when I need to and of course am not telling people to stop visiting family. I was asking to at least consider carbon footprint when making leisure world travel decisions. The ton of CO2 you release on a london-new York is 100% yours.
So become a contractor, work for an inflated fee for two months. Then take a month off and work for yourself on whatever you want. Or just do nothing, if you prefer that to working on your own projects.
Economic injustices and inefficiencies can and do exist in free-ish markets. But this isn't one of them. It's more like "old man shouts at supply and demand".
> Most complex, unique, value producing things have a path to monetization for the builder of the thing.
I don't think this is true. You need an extra condition 'that few people want to produce'.
There is lots of good free art. Why? Because lots of people want to be artists and make art. There is tons of good free writing. Why? Because lots of people want to write. There is masses of good free music. Why? Because many, many people enjoy making music.
There aren't people who collect garbage, clean toilets, dig holes in the ground, or work in oil refineries for free. But there are people publishing science, doing research, writing philosophy, producing erotic material, designing things, putting on theatre, producing textbooks and teaching people things, making clothes, thinking of jokes, answering questions, providing peer support to addicts, playing music, making games, making animations, all without monetary compensation. This is because the people doing these things want to do them.
This isn't a failure of our economic system. It's a great thing - it makes the products better, the producers happier (provided they have the economic freedom to spend time on these projects) and the consumers better off.
First of all, it's obvious that in the vast majority of cases, writing free software falls into the 'amateur art' category not the 'dirty, boring and necessary job' category. Many, many people enjoy the time spent on writing and maintaining software, are motivated to solve their and other people's problems, and take pride in doing so well. You might expect that only games, intellectual toys or fanciful projects would motivate people to work on them in their free time. The reality is that software projects which could be seen as dry and boring to non-technical people (OS kernel design, file transfer protocols, laptop power management support, database and webserver stability, document rendering) attract many very talented people to work on them.
Secondly, if we think that there's some deep inequality or instability in our society because (for example) critical Internet infrastructure depends on hobbyists and volunteers, doesn't it make more sense to try and improve the conditions for hobbyists and volunteers, and make it possible for there to be more of them? The alternative put forward seems to be to turn them into more of the people who both don't enjoy the time spent on what they do, nor produce the best product that they can.
Yes, the main reason why people don't do this is because they aren't psychologically ready to find out that the thing which cost them a lot of effort has very little monetary value.
You’re in the majority. But look through any issue list of popular(ish) oss projects and there’s a small but very vocal minority just sucking up the maintainers’ energies like vampires.
I hear this and it makes sense that a minority of users sucks up a lot of time, but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people.
I've never maintained a popular open source project so maybe there's something about the situation I just don't understand. But it seems like:
> Thank you for your feature request, we will add it to the backlog. The core team doesn't work on unfunded feature requests because they use up a lot of time and resources. We are happy to review high quality PRs from anyone interested in implementing the feature. We also have a variety of sponsorship options, and a list of past contributors and maintainers available for contract work.
> but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people.
One reason is that you're being told that that's an awful thing to do by basically every resource on "proper open-source" you can find.
Another is that these people are pretty good at starting shit storms trying to ruin your reputation if you don't comply with their unreasonable demands.
It's also worth nothing that some requests/issues/questions might be reasonable when viewed in isolation but not if there are hundreds of them.
Think for example stuff unrelated to the project but where you as a hacker could nonetheless help because you do know the answers/possess the skill.
For me at least, I find it hard to deal with that, because I know that I could in theory help that person. I just can't in practice because time and energy are both finite.
> We are happy to review high quality PRs
Are we though? There's a lot of work attached to reviewing even high-quality PRs.
Also, even if the PR is high quality, the maintainers will still be the ones maintaining that new feature so it's still significantly more work.
I've never read any resources on what constitutes proper open source. It seems like there are a lot of different and incompatible goals in the world of open source. For example, if I wanted to get paid I definitely wouldn't be reading something by Stallman.
Sure, reviewing and maintaining PRs is work too. If I wasn't willing to do it for free, I'd be clear and upfront, and say
> Unfortunately we don't have the time to review PRs without funding. If you are interested in having a PR reviewed, you can sponsor the project or contract a maintainer. In the past, it's taken a couple hours to review PRs. Keep in mind that even after your PR is merged, it will need to be maintained. If there are no volunteer maintainers able to keep your code in a decent state, it may be removed in future releases.
There's a very real chance someone won't use your project if you say this. They might use a competing project with maintainers that will work for free, or they might even fork your project. That's certainly their right.
I don't think I've ever seen a shitstorm arise from clear and open boundary-setting by maintainers. I'm sure I don't have an extensive catalog of every internet shitstorm, but the ones I can recall off the top of my head are usually situations that I'm sure felt like rug-pulls or shakedowns to users. I'm also having trouble thinking of a shitstorm over a minor incident that truly ruined someone's reputation, but I might just not run in the right circles to know about that kind of thing.
> but the ones I can recall off the top of my head are usually situations that I'm sure felt like rug-pulls or shakedowns to users
It’s funny you mention shakedowns, because I’ve seen at least one or two minor shitstorms (objectively, they were pretty minor, but I’m sure they didn’t feel that way to the maintainers in the moment) because language very similar to what you proposed was interpreted as a shakedown:
> We also have a variety of sponsorship options, and a list of past contributors and maintainers available for contract work.
And I think that’s where the rub is. Almost any strategy as a maintainer for trying to establish a boundary and ignore people (close issues or PRs automatically, offer contract services, etc) can cause these kinds of issues. People really dislike being ignored, and so a policy of ignoring things will kind of inevitably lead to conflict and confrontation with some percentage of people.
> Another is that these people are pretty good at starting shit storms trying to ruin your reputation if you don't comply with their unreasonable demands.
If you go on social media and offer your well-thought-out opinions about some controversial subject, you are very likely to get large number of people sending you offensive messages, arguing with you objectionably, trying to start pile-ons, attempting to dox you, etc.
Is the correct response to announce that "your participation in political discussion for free has become unsustainable", and that you need to be paid by all the people who find your comments interesting?
This is a bit tangential, but I actually think charging money to participate in certain online discussions is a really good idea.
For instance, I think it would be awesome if everyone sending an email to my main account had to send me $1. If what they are sending me isn't worth $1 to them, why should I get a buzz on my phone? Spam would be solved instantly.
I certainly don't think that every corner of the internet should be pay-to-play, and I generally don't think that the fees should be substantial to users participating in good faith. But I've got about five emails in the past two days from an airline bugging me to upgrade my seat. It costs me time and attention to weed through my inbox.
I'm sure this principle could be applied to sites like HN or reddit to raise the bar and put even just a little bit of skin in the game.
Your friends and family are going to pay you for every email? Every online purchase would be several dollars more expensive. Transactional email providers would go bankrupt.
No worries, we'll make plans to make it easy to pay. And it will be just cents So you just subscribe to your plan, send emails without worries because it's just cents, and at the end of the month you get a bill. Even cheaper than Migadu.
We can call it "Simple Mailing Subscription". Or "SMS" for short.
I've thought about doing this where the money is escrowed, and the recipient can optionally take it if they think the email is spam or otherwise unsavoury. You of course wouldn't take money from friends or family. Email marketing that you never asked for you would of course accept their money. Random spam phishing emails you would readily take the fee from.
The thing to notice about this system is that only people who send more emails than they receive lose out. It would end spam at a stroke.
And it doesn't matter if online purchases are more expensive, because you get that money back through email receipt fees.
Tougher challenges are the traditional ones with micropayments. Transaction costs. And maybe tax implications. And the differential incentive based on wealth. People struggling for cash would still try and minimise their outgoing communication, which is probably a bad thing for a healthy society.
While I don't think this idea is a good one, that problem is easily solved with whitelisting. Everyone gets to pick a set of senders who can communicate with them freely, or up to a cap.
> Is the correct response to announce that "your participation in political discussion for free has become unsustainable", and that you need to be paid by all the people who find your comments interesting?
>> but what isn't clear to me is why maintainers don't ignore these people.
>One reason is that you're being told that that's an awful thing to do by basically every resource on "proper open-source" you can find.
The solution is clear.
Just apply the grandparent's advice recursively:
Ignore these "resources" (!) on "proper open-source", too.
Also, that term sounds awfully entitled to me, too.
Who the heck is anyone to decide what constitues 'proper' open source "resources"? Total nonsense.
Everyone can have their own opinion about that, or not even bother to have an opinion, and just do exactly and only what they want for their own open source project, ignoring the naysayers, free-but-unwanted advice-givers, and freeloaders.
I didn't know that we were living in a socialist heaven. Hot tip: We are not.
Apropos of this thread, and related to the recent HN post about a new Calibre version release, I googled Calibre and its creator, Kovid Goyal, casually, and was interested to see this older HN thread:
Which does go to show both kinds of opposing viewpoints about this whole "entitled" attitude of some OSS users vs. the maintainers, w.r.t. to the specific case of Calibre and Kovid. Based on that thread alone, it shows that is easy to get prejudiced by one negative comment about a maintainer, whether true or false, and not know about or ignore all the other positive work and behavior by him/her.
It's like if you live in a quiet suburb, and someone walks up to your window every night and starts yelling obscenities for an hour or two.
It can be ignored, yes, but the worst offenders go beyond a polite discourse and will send emails to whatever email they can find, DM you on Twitter, Mastodon, etc., and drop weird and annoying comments anywhere they think you have a chance of seeing them.
Some people have thicker skins than others, but it's just a bit tiresome no matter how much you can deflect.
This is something I'd love to see, the problem is that any "pay for features" model runs into serious legal issues:
- for American developers, many of them have provisions in their employment contracts that allow them to do unpaid open source work, but ban any kind of commercial (i.e. in exchange for money) activity. The fact that this reach into off-time by employers is possible is nuts anyway, but doesn't make the problem go away.
- as soon as any kind of money is involved, a lot of jurisdictions have provisions regarding warranties and liabilities - and these can be pretty enormous, see the log4j fallout. Some of these can be put aside by contracts, but nevertheless it's a legal minefield.
- some jurisdictions don't allow you to just take money in exchange for a project, it exposes developers to tax and social security liabilities. Even labeling such stuff as pure "donations" isn't safe if your tax auditor is particularly focused on nailing you.
- what to do if someone from a sanctioned country donates you money? What to do if you're European and get money from someone in Cuba (which is not sanctioned by the EU), but are employed by / work for American companies or intend to travel to the US?
- what to do if some arms manufacturer donates you / funds money for a project that could be used in weapons? Virtually all countries have some sort of equivalent to ITAR regulations that you really don't want to run afoul of.
One of the best handlings of this I ever saw was on opal, where someone was ranting about a non-software issue calling for the removal of a prominent contributor.
I feel like public project roadmaps would really help here. If only for the maintainers to be able to flat out reject stuff because it's not on the map.
Just look around forums and socials like Reddit. I see people bitching how OBS Studio doesn't work for them the exact way they want it while contributing nothing to the project almost daily.
This happens less where the FOSS choice is a drop in a sea of established proprietary packages (FreeCAD, KiCad, Godot) but way way more when they have already established themselves as the popular pick (OBS Studio, Blender) so they get flooded by less tech-savy, more casual users that don't really see the value of open source other than they don't pay for it.
"Normal" people have always had stuff given to them for "free" (either "you are the product" or built-in licenses like Windows) so they don't realize the goodwill and sacrifices that FOSS goes through.
> so they get flooded by less tech-savy, more casual users that don't really see the value of open source other than they don't pay for it
this was solved 30 years ago by an important socio-technical invention called the FAQ, used together with a social convention of not elevating or rewarding vexatious messages.
A solution was proposed, the problem was never solved because people generally don't read or believe that social convention doesn't apply to them in this situation.
One example I noticed recently is when YouTube stopped allowing ad-blockers. You should have seen the people posting on the uBlock subreddit demanding it being fixed, it was kind of crazy.
However, there are entire industries that leverage open-source / free software, and put unreasonable, uncompensated demands on it.
At the end of the day though, I don't see the problem. As a maintainer of open-source, gratis, software, just don't do the work. It isn't like it is a job. If you don't do the work, they can't fire you.
Is that good for the community? Surely not, but who is asking whether the status quo is working for the developers? Nobody but them. So look out for yourself, and scratch your own itch, but don't treat open source as a job.
