I think Gibson’s stance is coming from the same place as anger or outrage over big profitable businesses using open source software without financially contributing to its development or maintenance. This is very understandable! And I suspect what they really want is not financial assistance ongoing as much as a reward for the prior work.
A blanket ban on asking for unpaid labor, i.e. asking for volunteers, seems … ridiculously excessive? It’s hard to know exactly how they’d imagine that ban working in practice (even if it’s only enforced by social norms).
I suspect open source might effectively be something like a workaround for the practical difficulties of paying for software.
It’s easy enough (if expensive!) to pay a programmer or a team of them for some purpose, e.g. writing or maintaining software. It’s much harder to succeed at the larger purpose, or even the instrumental purpose of writing correct-enough software, let alone to do either for a long time.
To then add on the top of all of that some kind of piecemeal each-feature-is-a-contract financing/purchasing seems like it would almost inevitably cause the relevant transaction costs to explode! How would they be billed? A flat rate set by the developer or maintainer? Surely the benevolent dictator, or oligarchy, or whatever, would receive the money but also be obligated to give or share some of any payments with the individual contributors that actually write or modify the relevant code, right? That seems like something that would very quickly become awful, especially for the median open source developer/maintainer/contributor.
The workaround then – to avoid basically being required to become a software company – is for people to write whatever code they want to write, share it with whomever they want, and cooperate or coordinate with whomever else is also willing. Adding some money – possibly; subject to (inevitable) dispute! – seems likely to be strictly worse than working for free, or for a software company.
The somewhat viable middle ground is, e.g. Patreon, a simple regular (ideally, recurring) transfer or payment to someone or some team for their prior work on ongoing efforts.
I agree with your take.
I think Gibson’s stance is coming from the same place as anger or outrage over big profitable businesses using open source software without financially contributing to its development or maintenance. This is very understandable! And I suspect what they really want is not financial assistance ongoing as much as a reward for the prior work.
A blanket ban on asking for unpaid labor, i.e. asking for volunteers, seems … ridiculously excessive? It’s hard to know exactly how they’d imagine that ban working in practice (even if it’s only enforced by social norms).
I suspect open source might effectively be something like a workaround for the practical difficulties of paying for software.
It’s easy enough (if expensive!) to pay a programmer or a team of them for some purpose, e.g. writing or maintaining software. It’s much harder to succeed at the larger purpose, or even the instrumental purpose of writing correct-enough software, let alone to do either for a long time.
To then add on the top of all of that some kind of piecemeal each-feature-is-a-contract financing/purchasing seems like it would almost inevitably cause the relevant transaction costs to explode! How would they be billed? A flat rate set by the developer or maintainer? Surely the benevolent dictator, or oligarchy, or whatever, would receive the money but also be obligated to give or share some of any payments with the individual contributors that actually write or modify the relevant code, right? That seems like something that would very quickly become awful, especially for the median open source developer/maintainer/contributor.
The workaround then – to avoid basically being required to become a software company – is for people to write whatever code they want to write, share it with whomever they want, and cooperate or coordinate with whomever else is also willing. Adding some money – possibly; subject to (inevitable) dispute! – seems likely to be strictly worse than working for free, or for a software company.
The somewhat viable middle ground is, e.g. Patreon, a simple regular (ideally, recurring) transfer or payment to someone or some team for their prior work on ongoing efforts.