> it is not okay to consider that this labor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the people/person behind are just doing it for their own enjoyments.
I am. I enjoy making things, and it's even better when others enjoy them. Just because you have expectations that you should be compensated for everything line of code you write; doesn't make it ubiquitous, nor should your expectations be considered the default.
I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong. Equally, if you expect someone creating open source owes you anything, you're also part of the problem, (and part of why people feel they deserve compensation for something that used to be considered a gift).
All that said, you should take care of your people, if you can help others; especially when you depend on them. I think you should try. Or rather, I hope you would.
I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…
I've made my living working fulltime on a single open source project for more than 15 years now.
I think it is important to differentiate between different kinds of projects that people might undertake, and 3 particular categories always come to my mind (you may have more):
* "plumbing" - all that infrastructure that isn't something you'd ever use directly, but the tools you do use wouldn't function without it. This work is generally intense during a "startup" phase, but then eases back to light-to-occasional as a stable phase is reached. It will likely happen whether there is funding or not, but may take longer and reach a different result without it.
* "well defined goal" - something that a person or a team can actually finish. It might or might not benefit from funding during its creation, but at some point, it is just done, and there's almost no reason to think about continuing work other than availability and minimal upgrades to follow other tools or platforms.
* "ever-evolving" - something that has no fixed end-goal, and will continue to evolve essentially forever. Depending on the scale of the task, this may or may not benefit from being funded so that there are people working on it full time, for a long time.
These descriptions originate in my work on software, but I think something similar can be said for lots of other human activities as well, without much modification.
If a "well-defined goal" project gets popular and sticky enough, it can metamorphize into an "ever-evolving" project by injection of VC capital.
> There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it
Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books.
But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
If you think that literally no one is motivated by making more money than the minimal amount they need to survive, how do you explain rich people who still work? UBI isn't a proposal to make salaries illegal, so the problem of "how do we financially motivate people to work" isn't going to change if people happen to get a subsistence wage without employment. The assumption that there's a binary of "people will either be motivated to work or they won't" is nonsensical; there's a entire spectrum of what motivates different people (and how much they're motivated by them). Some people who work now might stop under a system of UBI, but plenty still would continue to. There's a fair question about what the correct amount of money for this is to balance things properly, but without the flawed assumption that motivation is a binary, I don't think the answer is nearly as obvious as you imply.
Seems like you are making same binary assumption that people either work or they don't. The important question is probably how well/hard do people work. Lower productivity means people that work produce less so prices rise. Many make mistake thinking only about having money, but forget the supply part of the equation. If productivity is lower, there are literally less things available to everyone. And these equations are not linear. Look at the current RAM situation for example.
But the major issue is that the progress slows down. Effects of slower progress accumulate with time. At first you are only a few years behind, then you are a few decades behind etc. Imagine inventions, cures being available decades or hundreds of years later (depending on what timescale we look at).
I think UBI sounds nice, but is far from an optimal solution. Wouldn't be better, if we could solve same issues UBI promises to solve in a more efficient way (with less negative side effects)? UBI is just throwing money at the problem, hoping it will solve itself.
I don't disagree that people work with different amounts of efforts, but if anything, to me it seems far more likely that people who have to work only because they won't be able to survive otherwise are going to be more stressed and less likely to be able to work productively. If the only people who work are the ones who choose to rather than an additional set who are forced to in order to survive, the average motivation level is going to be higher, and it's not obvious to me that this wouldn't be better even if the total number of workers is lower. This just seems like another balancing problem, and there's still no obvious reason to me why the default assumption is that maximizing the number of people who work will end up being the best option.
Most work is worthless for progress though.
No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketry or some other pursuit they have interest in. Providing UBI means that geologists don't need to hoard data because they won't starve if they don't get a cut from it's usage. The people involved in technological break through are often doing it for self-interest or fame and don't stop once they've hit some financial breakpoint.
We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody and at this point it's all gravy. For obvious reasons we couldn't feed/house everybody if they wanted to solely live in NYC but IIUC no UBI proposal is about that; UBI lets you live in below median-desired places without additional income.
But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc. While they might not make progress directly, they enable other people to make progress.
> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody
Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of anything is completely relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
> But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.
Of course money is not the only thing that motivates people. But there's a lot of empirical evidence that it matters. A lot, unfortunately. And I say unfortunately as I would rather have it matter less. But me whishing it doesn't change the data.
UBI is a high concept pitch, that is memorable and catchy, but AFAIK it's not well supported either by psychological models or by empirical economics data. It gives some social safety net. Problem is that it gives a rather weak safety net. We can actually do better.
Can I ask you why exactly does it need to be UBI? If another system (more complex, with less sexy pitch) could provide a bigger safety net and have a more positive economic impact, wouldn't you rather choose that?
I actually volunteer to take care of parts of the trash in our neighborhood. Like with a proper garbage truck. And the amount of volunteers so big that I only have to do it a few times a year. All the money they make with recycling goes to the local school. It is fun to do, even in cold rain. The garbage truck driver gets paid, but I am sure in an IBU world even drivers would chip in if they could afford it. People want to contribute and feel useful.
> But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need
You're making the mistake of conflating UBI with "no one works anymore". This is a silly mistake to make. It's like believing that providing a universal healthcare service that provides basic care to everyone somehow meant supply and demand for private health services would be eliminated. In the meantime, look at pretty much any European country which already provides free universal healthcare.
Listen, UBI stands for Universal Basic Income. Universal means everyone gets it, Income means an inflow of cash, and Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs. Think of a kind of unemployment benefit for all that doesn't go away once you find a job. Once you get a job, you get paid an income that supplements your basic income. That's it. The biggest impact is that if you find yourself out of a job, you still get an inflow of cache that allows you to meet basic needs.
UBIs does change the economy. For example, most if not all poverty-mitigation policies can be effectively replaced by UBI. Instead of food stamps, use your income to buy food. There's no longer a pressing need for unemployment benefits if you already are guaranteed a basic income.
> Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs
But what are these basic needs that are not much? Housing costs, medical expenses...?
I’ve met a lot of people who are passionate about public cleanliness to the point of organizing rubbish pickups, beach cleanups, and river dredging using their own power. With UBI, you may have to take your own trash to the landfill but rest assured the larger ecology will still be taken care of by passionate people.
I think a bigger issue will be that the people who are passionate for a project may not be the most effective at accomplishing it, and without income you can’t motivate those more effective people into working on the project.
UBI is not in contradiction to paid work to make more than the minimum that is guaranteed. Think of it as being like food stamps that you get in addition to whatever you do or do not make.
Interestingly, UBI would be compatible with ending the minimum wage. If survival is guaranteed, then there is no reason to insist that a low end job pay a living wage. As long as someone wants to pay for the work and someone else wants to do it, let them!
This sounds like it'd be one of the many ideas that sounds great on paper but in reality just creates an even greater stratification in society. I think you're completely correct that in many places, particularly higher end - people would come together to keep the place looking great, possibly even better since you get to 'own' it on some ways.
But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. But I also think we're looking at things superficially. There's a lot of technical work that can't be casually done like plumbing or electrical that is currently moderately compensated. In an UBI world costs for this would likely skyrocket which would lead to an even higher UBI which would lead to even higher costs which would lead to Zimbabwe.
Pessimism aside I would probably actually support it, simply because I think it would be the ultimate expression of liberty - but you have to realize that you're not going to create anything like the same society we have, but with everybody being able to independently support themselves. You're going to completely destroy the contemporary economy and create a new entity that would probably be much closer to something of times long since past when the overwhelming majority of America was self employed. 'The Expanse' offers a realistic take on what UBI would probably entail.
> But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly.
You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other place, be it rural, suburban or urban. You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
Of course OP is silly in making the mistake of believing UBI will get all people working on urban waste management fired and out of a job. It's like believing that if a service provides a free tier, all other services will suddenly vanish. But presuming people don't care about their surroundings because they live in an 'urban' neighborhood reflects a problem that's about prejudice and not UBI.
> You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.
I think that is what observation actually is, you get to see what others have done in the recent and not so distant past, or am i missing your point.
The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.
Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study.
I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisible because their extreme pathological avoidance of attention. You don't know them and their contributions because they don't want you to know that they still live at home, out of their car door dashing because no company ever hires them, are shut-in because of serious unhealed trauma, are still deeply in poverty in such a wealthy industry etc.
A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
Many prominent pseudonymous devs have had hikikomori traits. _why practically inspired a generation of Ruby devs. visualidiot (RIP) was a crucial driver behind a lot of web dev culture in the 2010s. Heck, I made significant contributions to Joomla and WP themes back in the day -- you have probably used sites with themes or plugins I made. Also I ran a blog a decade ago that used to rank prominently in google and receive dozens of emails a month from people struggling with mental illness -- many people crediting me with saving their lives. Surely that is something of value to society.
Don't go around spreading bullshit like it is facts about a group of people we know little about.
Love a headline that conforms to Betteridge’s law
Strangely though, all the studies cited on the wiki page seem to suggest that there is a higher number of "yes" questions than "no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#...
You assume much about what I know about the hikikomori demographic. My power level is well over nine thousand.
>> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
> Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about.
Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
> A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.
"likely", "might" - this is all speculation on your part too. There is no reason to believe that a lot of humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would, in fact, contribute more to society, nor that the contributions from those that do would, in fact, offset those that don't.
It's speculation on both sides of this particular argument I see no compelling evidence at all.
> Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?
If we can't tell, the "they aren't" bit is of course made up. Are you not arguing in good faith, or are you just not paying attention to what you're quoting?
"they aren't, plain and simple" is the made up bit I was calling out. There is literally not much more to the original comment to be calling made up.
"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.
Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.
The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.
People who are specifically not employed because they aren't motivated to do anything at all don't seem to be the best sample for what average people could do if they had more free time during their waking hours.
It seems unlikely that the most motivated people will take up UBI; the most likely UBI recipients are those who are marginally employed, and likely marginally motivated.
Guess what the U stands for
- [deleted]
did you mean to write the opposite of what you wrote?
Accidentally posted in the middle of an edit; corrected now, thanks.
You posted the edit over 7 hours ago and it still doesn't make sense. You should check what the U in UBI stands for.
What do you think UBI is and how do you think it works? Honestly.
> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true.
This seems a non-sequitur. People whose motivation is isolation are unlikely to try to generate anything for other people.
But your general idea is correct - is there group where motivated people don't need to worry about money?
Well yes - we see this in artist colonies and indeed in entrepreneurial retreats like https://www.recurse.com/
a) I'm not sure it logically follows that the hikikomori would be a particularly artistic group, thus don't understand the assertion; b) how do we know they aren't? By definition, they wouldn't be out promoting their works or gaining recognition.
Also, there is at least one example of UBI contributing to an increase in activity:
"According to the research, 31% of BIA recipients reported an increased ability to sustain themselves through arts work alone, and the number of people who reported low pay as a career barrier went down from one third to 17%. These changes were identified after the first six months of the scheme and remained stable as the scheme continued." [1]
[1] https://musiciansunion.org.uk/news/ireland-s-basic-income-fo...
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: the flourishing of the arts in Bohemian districts[1] in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Maybe there’s a feedback loop with societal expectations regarding the hikikomori / NEETs? The more they are demonized as unproductive, the less productive they become.
Hikikomori seems to be largely a symptom of mental illness. NEETs almost by definition are not productive.
The fact that these groups are not producing mass amounts of creative works in no way implies that currently-productive people would not produce significantly more creative works if they had the time and resources to do so.
NEETs are, by definition, people who are either unwilling or unable to do anything productive, so I don't think they are a good example. I expect you'd get better results if you include the people who are employed today.
Hikkis will barely have their (speaking from Maslow) physiological needs met, and seldom their safety and security needs. This leaves them with very few mental-emotional resources to put into even having any creative thoughts. UBI would absolutely uplift these people into a position where they can start producing output.
Um, hikikomori are a hotbed of creative works, though. Your entire premise is false. I don't know that you could get reliable statistics proving this claim, but Japan likely has the highest number of creatives per capita of any country in the world, and a ton of them are NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels. The vast majority of this creative work isn't commercially successful, of course, which is part of why they're NEETs.
> "NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels"
And you expect the voting public to be persuaded to support UBI because of the immense societal value of an tsunami of gooner fanart (yes, I do have some passing familiarity with the sort of output Japanese NEETs generate) and "trashy webnovels"? I'm pretty sure that when the person I'm replying to talked about "the incredible artworks [and] literature ... that would spring into existence", that's probably not what they were hoping for.
Can it really be a 'hotbed' if there is no demand (or even maybe awareness) of the works? That just seems like a hobby done for selfish reasons.
Quoting GGGP:
>There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
As it happens, the Japanese internet is absolutely rich with content created by individuals, most of it done for the sake of love for creative work rather than financial motivation. I spend much of my free time either consuming it or contributing to the pool of such work myself. The entire point of this discussion thread was about the potential for creativity if you were to unshackle it from the demands of financial self-sustenance.
As an aside, I believe this phenomenon manifested as strongly as it has in Japan because of the extremely low cost of living relative to the level of economic development; a studio apartment can be had for less than the equivalent of $200 USD per month, and many parents can afford to and are willing to pay this price to get the NEETs out of their house. In essence enabling them, not that they want to enable their adult children to depend on them but the burden is small enough that they can tolerate it.
I have no problem with people doing whatever they want, but if nobody else values it, there’s no ‘contribution’ to society, art, or anything else.
People valuing something is not at all the same as people spending money for it. For one, there is always competition with an abundance of freely available material. At the very least, you’d have to compare with a situation where nothing of the sort whatsoever would be freely available, and that’s very hard to do.
That being said, I’m skeptical of UBI being workable as well.
I think that's an unbelievably cynical worldview, one I don't agree with at all, but within that view: what of the things people value, but which they do not pay for? Much of the tech of the world is built on the free labour of FOSS developers. Are they not contributing to society because they are not compensated for their contributions?
I contribute to FOSS, and everything from issue reports to branches and pull requests are indications of a project’s value! True value is difficult to measure, but there are many projects which contribute no value.
It's quite possible to be creative while not contributing to society or whatnot.
A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.
I never disputed the fact that shut-ins can be ‘creative’, but instead focused on ‘hotbed’. I would characterize artistic failures as being more ‘original’ and perhaps ‘creative’ than successes, but they still lack value (to anyone but the creator). Regardless, this seems pointlessly semantic.
Counterexample:Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered in the 1840s that hand-washing dramatically reduced deaths in childbirth. The medical establishment rejected his findings, and he was institutionalized and died tragically, vindicated only after his death.
Surely this was a contribution even if not valued at the point of making it.
Even given the other objections to your argument, there are an extraordinary number of examples of now-very-appreciated artists, writers, etc whose work was not valued at the time they were creating it.
All hobbies are selfish, that's kinda the point?
and yet their hypothesis is true, there are already many people, with or without UBI, that volunteer, create things and in general help people surrounding them without any reward and they are the backbone of every society, not the career-chasers
I think phenomena like hikkikomori have more to do with (at least perceived) social rejection than lack of motivation. If the only acceptable message you receive from society is that you must chase the brass ring constantly and any setback means you are an abject failure, then withdrawing from the pain of that rejection makes sense for anyone who has experienced enough setbacks or strongly feels alien to that culture. A broader societal shift would occur if it was truly universally understood that everyone has value as a human being separate from their labor market leverage or capital accumulation.
There will always be strivers who measure their self worth against superficial standards (Russ Hanneman “doors go up” hand gesture here), I just don’t see why everyone should be forced to play that game or starve I suppose. Giving everyone the option to settle for a life of basic dignity while caring for those around them, or going all in on some academic / creative pursuit seems equally valid investments for society.
Yes. The only real conclusion from people like NEETs is that society failed them. Outside of a fraction of total people (or when addictions are at play), it is very rare that someone never wants to be productive.
The UK music culture of the 1960s was in large part due to the "dole" or cash payments to poor people.
I don't think that's the only reason since the dole exists today too and there's not as much good music coming out.
Jazz and other music genres in the US came without government welfare, they came from struggle and oppression. Motivated artists will still work part time to fund their dream, they don't necessarily wait for welfare to start making art.
IF you were to give a lot of people free money today, will you get more and higher quality art in return, or will most people just drink and smoke that money while playing videogames at home?
Society, people and the world today are vastly different than back in the 1960s, so we need new polices targeting the society of today, not 1960s policies.
What do you mean there isn't much good music coming out? Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preference, or you aren't looking for it and are just relying on major media companies to show it to you, but ive never had more high quality music of more variety than ever before.
Much of it is farther in the electronica genres that many people somehow still ignore the existence of but I haven't had to listen to the same song twice unless I wanted to in a number of years. Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
>Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.
How is that proof of "good music"? That's just background noise.
From the post you replied to:
Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preference
What do you think those policies might look like? It's true that we have more screen based entertainment options today. We also have a very different music distribution system that is likely influencing things substantially. In the 1960s, I imagine getting on the radio was what it took to launch a career, now it's matching the algorithm on spotify.
I don't know what the right policies would be, but I noticed that smart, driven and disciplined driven people will always find a way to work around algorithms to get to the top, it's not something the government can legislate in order to get a desired outcome.
It's not like becoming famous back then was easy either. Plenty of good bands never got anywhere. The Mona Lisa wasn't a famous painting until someone stole it in 1911, before that nobody gave damn and now it's the most famous of them all. Survivorship bias and randomness in art is real.
No that wouldn’t. If the zeitgeist, culture, society at large are antagonizing toward you, if you are meant to feel like a useless negative part of society, why would we expect amazing output from them?
This reinforces others talking about the flaws of hustle and grind culture. The status quo create the conditions for the negatives and then point to that and say “see”.
> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.
It's funny how you chose to frame groups as "NEET", but you somehow failed to refer to "aspiring artist" or "aspiring musician" or "aspiring novelist". I mean "aspiring artist" already implies engaging in an activity albeit not professionally or reaching success.
You also somehow failed to refer to "amateur artist". As if not enjoying enough success to live comfortably with your art to the point of requiring to hold a job to pay rent is something that would validate your argument.
I'm not sure you are even aware of the fact that most of the mainstream artists you see around are not even professional, in the sense that in spite of their success and touring they still need to hold a job to make ends meet. Check out any summer festival, pick any random non-headliner band, and see how many members hold jobs, and had to take time off to go touring. Even some music legends have a history of holding humble jobs at least up to the time they made it. See Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory.
It's not just music, either. Luminaries like Fernando Pessoa could very well be classified as the ultimate NEET as he spent years of his early life not in education, employment, or training.
I support UBI, funded by high capital gains taxes, to offset the growing value of capital relative to labor due to ever-improving automation, but I think it's silly to think a significant number of people will ever be happy with UBI alone.
First of all, "baseline needs" are fluid. These days, electricity and internet are broadly considered baseline needs, but would have been unimaginable luxuries for previous generations. The future will inevitably bring new "baseline needs" we can hardly yet comprehend.
Secondly, the vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum, no matter what that minimum is. If you have a friend who can afford fancy things, and you can't, then more likely than not, you will not be satisfied. It's also much easier to attract a partner if you're financially successful, for similar reasons. That's just human nature. Just because you don't have to worry about starving or succumbing to the elements does not mean people will stop competing with one another.
> The vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum
Isn't that a benefit for UBI? If everyone's basic needs are met and they want more, nothing would stop them from taking a job and making more money right?
Ya. I'm saying I support UBI, and that the concern most people raise about UBI (usually along the lines of "I don't think anybody should just coast by without working") is completely unfounded.
The parent post was talking about how everybody would have more time for unpaid pursuits if only we had UBI. I'm saying that I don't think UBI would change that much. People will continue to pursue unpaid hobbies much like they do today, but making money will still be just as important.
I'm generally an advocate for a robust safety-net such that people shouldn't be on their knees every month just to scrape by with food/housing/healthcare, and would love it if we reached Star Trek/The Culture levels of post-scarcity, but I'm simultaneously not convinced by this idea, but possibly from another angle.
1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists).
2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded.
TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.
Not really against welfare programs...but...
UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.
You need to impose a tax called the Land Value Tax to prevent landowners eating up the public money. Even then we got a long list of much needed public spending before we can even think about a Citizen's Dividend.
> UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.
This is only true if there’s a static supply of rental units, which isn’t true in most places (despite new construction being constrained by regulation in many places). I support an LVT, but it is not a necessary precondition for redistribution.
Somehow no one talks about the incredible plumbing.
> Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.
If people find these things useful, they can actually pay for them. If you can't find people who value it enough to pay for it, then may be it's not as valuable as you think it is.
By that measure, doing something for a poor person who cannot pay would be entirely worthless, while delivering food to a particularly generous billionaire would be more valuable than an entire month of an average person's work.
The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.
“Strong” social safety can be achieved only by enslaving producers who have to provide the ground for “many many” caring people. This is always the case. Consider Russian support of young families: the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have. Personally, I cannot imagine a worse moral depravity than supporting this atrocity as a matter of justice.
Capitalism is not “slavery with extra steps,” it’s freedom in a fragile world repleted with conflicting goals. Just because people don’t agree with your goals doesn’t make you a slave.
>the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have
IDK, this seems perfectly reasonable if the state also provides an old age insurance / pension system for retirees. Without a younger generation of people paying into the system (i.e. the children of parents) these systems collapse. It seems appropriate to support the people that keep the government functioning.
Of course, I’m guessing you oppose systems like social security too, given your comment. I just find it odd that you can’t imagine anything worse than giving money to parents, given most governments give money to a lot of people, most of whom aren’t opting into anything as noble as parenthood.
Giving uncharacteristically large direct stimuli for procreation disproportionately incentivizes the people in dire need of money, meddling with the rationality of the decision and increasing social tension later.
The only other way to be promised a big pile of cash from the govt there is a military contract.
UBI is an idea from another money-centric ideology, namely “libertarianism”. It’s not an idea for fostering creativity. It’s an idea for dealing with less employable dependents of society, while the true dependents (parasitic capitalists) take the real spoils of industrialized productivity.
1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.
3. Now I'm really angry! I should have gotten some money from them!
4. The government must force my neighbours to pay a salary to me!
5. Continue to work for free making open source code for giant corporations, so they can profit.
How about instead?:
1. Don't work for free or give away your code. Instead charge a fair price for people to use your code or software.
2. If your code is good, people and corporations pay you for it.
3. Now you're really happy! You got money for your labour.
4. The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary.
5. You can continue to work for money and make more money.
I'm not agreeing with the OP proposal, but with LLMs today, no matter how you license your code and no matter what ToS or other prohibition you put on it, there does not seem to be any way to prevent LLMs from absorbing and using it to implement a replacement based on your code unless you choose to only do closed source code - there's no "opt out" for someone's source code, let alone an opt-in (again, unless we give up open source). (A very different situation from the AI companies themselves, where companies such as Anthropic make Claude Code closed source, and their ToS provide strict prohibitions on using it to work on something that could compete with them - can you imagine if Windows or MacOS's ToS prohibited people from using their OS to work on a competing OS, of if the VSCode ToS prohibited people from using VSCode to work on another editor?)
> The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary
Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly that's it includes levying taxes, so that's pretty much a meaningless characterization.
Let's put it in more concrete terms: if the US government passes a law to raise taxes to fund UBI, that probably wouldn't even make the last of the top 100 most oppressive things it's done to innocent people in the past year. If the strongest objection to this policy would be "I don't want to pay taxes to fund things for other people", it's in pretty good company.
> Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly
Yes, and that's why great care and respect should be applied to how the government uses the tax money which they have raised from oppression.
Paying somebody to work for free for a giant corporation is not a justified use of that money. Those corporations should pay for their labour themselves.
I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour. When it's done to pay for an army to defend ourselves against enemies, for the justice system to protect all citizens, or for healthcare to save lives, then that's palatable. As well as for a myriad of other things. But to pay a programmer so that he can make server infrastructure so that Amazon doesn't have to pay him? That's not palatable.
>I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour.
Really?
Not among the standard things which every government always does. Are you thinking about crimes against humanity and such?
For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost every government engaged in during the covid pandemic, and which I am against.
> I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech
I guess we're just not going to agree on any of this then, because that's pretty much the opposite opinion of mine
I think you've missed the point again, it's more like this:
1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.
3. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.
If you can't go to step 3, then you are doing it wrong and need to change step 1 from "giving it away for free" to something like "giving it away for free to the common people and at a price for corporate."
Which you could say "but that's not open source!" and you'd be right, which is exactly my point here: I don't think you want to do fully open source software, you want to do software and get paid for it somehow. If you do open source and get paid eventually and non binding, that's a nice little bonus, but it's not the main goal, never was with open source.
Although I agree with your overall point, there is a middle ground here: (commercially) non-free but open source software.
I believe that's where the biggest disagreement ITT lies. There are currently good ways to do FOSS, proprietary closed-source and free closed-source software development. But if the OSS is worth charging for (commercial) use, devs are left with asking for donations, SaaS or "pay me to work on this issue/feature".
There arguably should be better mechanisms to reward OSS development, even if the largest part of an OSSndev's motivation is intrinsic.
Agree completely, that's why I don't understand these people who demand payment for open source code after having given it away to the world.
And everyone can get stuck with big corporation proprietary software that they have no idea how it runs or what it does under the hood
You can then make your own software. Nobody owes you free software.
You're not wrong, but I think it is increasingly harder (and perhaps socially taboo) to stay far away from proprietary software while still being part of a functioning society.
FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.
My apologies - you’re correct. I didn’t mean that as “you should never expect anyone to have contributed code for free/the pleasure/for the puzzle solving aspect”. I do it all of the time.
I meant - it’s unfair to consider that because this labor “fell from the sky”, you should just accept it - and as others have said, in the case of projects that become popular, that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.
If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work they hadn’t necessarily signed up for (who signs up for burnout?) - it’s ok/necessary/mandatory to see how everyone (and or Nvidia/Google/OpenAI etc) can, like, help.
My insistence is on the opt-out nature of this so that people who would be ok being compensated don't have to beg.
Consider how the xz malware situation happened [0]. Or the header & question 8 from the FAQ for PocketBase [1].
Instead of forcing Github to force users to pay a fee to support OSS, why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work? Then that requires 0 coercion and those who feel undervalued for their work/projects can be compensated as the market dictates the value of their projects.
There are a lot of dumb and even disagreeable open source projects. Why should someone be de facto forced to fund those projects?
It's like this ass-backwards way of selling something because you're allergic to markets or something. Honestly, it's quite rude to go on and on about free software and liberation and all these things and then turn sour grapes years later because everybody took you up on it. Nobody is forcing anyone to maintain any of these projects.
And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
> And maybe if you wrote some software that forms the basis of a trillion dollar + company and you're still sitting in the basement you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
Yeah, maybe. Maybe if it wasn't released as MIT but released as GPLv3 you'd actually get compensated in the form of patches, bugfixes, features, etc in "your" software.
The whole RIIR movement is doing this - replacing as many GPL components as possible with rewritten MIT components. I find this completely disrespectful: trying to displace pro-user software with pro-business software.
You just read the title don't you?
> GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month
It's about org, not about every single person using Github.
The idea is basic and should have been written in the article. When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.
A contributor wouldn't like a free for personal use either. The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue) »
> you're kind of dumb for giving it away and that's your fault.
It happens so many times and no just about software (but then it's not a million dollar company). It's not that you are dump, you done the right thing and some companies with money/power/opportunity to capitalize on it, did it and didn't compensate you fairly.
> When a contributor release FOSS, it's fair to compensate if you business rely on it.
Nope.
Put it in the license, sell the software, or work for free, but stop complaining about it.
It's nice if businesses who benefit from specific software packages want to pay or show support, but it's not nice to release something "for free" but then jump on a moral grandstand and demand everyone pay so you can feel good about your ideology at the expense of everyone else.
> The ideal license is the Unreal one free for « Individuals and small businesses (with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue)
Then make that your license?
You're not wrong, but I feel like a lot of people are hung up on the purism of the OSI definition, and a license that's not so blessed may prevent a project from gaining significant traction, if that is part of their goal.
I think it would be nice if there were a license that was more widely accepted that introduced a monetary component that could compensate the developer(s).
> why don't OSS maintainers just charge for their work?
What if we turn this from a rhetorical question to an actual question?
My totally unverified take:
1. Missing transaction / Payment infrastructure. The same reason why paid music streaming services were successful depite piracy being a thing.
2. Bureaucracy associated with earning money. In many countries, going from "unpaid" to "€1 per month" is a nightmare.
... and a suggestion to make both less dire: A transaction infrastructure that allows small projects (that wouldn't be a cash cow anyway) to forward all payments to another project of the project Author's choice.
Edit: See https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/d2ic2e/krita_is_now_...
I don't disagree with any of what you wrote here, but I don't think the solution is "well we haven't figured this out, OSS who talk all the time about free as in beer free software now all of a sudden want to get paid for their work" is to just go around uncharging other people/organizations to support their projects, especially if not all OSS projects are worth supporting.
- [deleted]
I agree with echelon; don't apologize. I'm not objecting to the message, only to the framing.
How to create more code I can enjoy using has been something that I've been thinking about for a long time. I've even advocated for a stance[0], similar to yours. While I don't agree it's correct to conflate the malign intent surrounding the xz takeover, with the banal ignorance as to why so many people don't want to support people creating cool things, (and here I don't just mean financial support.) I do acknowledge there are plenty of things about the current state we could fix with a bit more money.
But I don't want open source software to fall down the rabbit hole of expectations. Just as much as I agree with you, people opting-in to supporting the people they depend on is problematic. Equally I think the idea that OSS should move towards a transactional kind of relationship is just as bad. If too many people start expecting, I gave you money, now you do the thing. I worry that will toxify what is currently, (at least from my opinionated and stubborn POV), a healthier system, where expectations aren't mandatory.
The pocket base FAQ, and your hint towards burnout are two good examples, describing something feel is bad, and would like to avoid. But they are ones I feel are much easier to avoid with the framing of "this work was a gift". I have before, and will again walk away from a project because I was bored of it. I wouldn't be able to do so if I was accepting money for the same. And that's what leads to burn out.
I do want the world your describing (assuming you can account for the risks inherent into creating a system with a financial incentive to try to game/cheat), but I don't want that world to be the default expectation.
>The simplistic answer is the same for why seemingly everyone chooses proprietary software; it’s just easier.
This is honestly the exact opposite of my experience. Though I may just have very different desires and frustrations
> Equally I think the idea that OSS should move towards a transactional kind of relationship is just as bad.
GPL is transactional; that's the whole point. What you are calling OSS includes GPL, true, but it also includes BSD/MIT, which are not transactional.
To be clear; I don't consider GPL to be completely free software.
I also don't think all software needs to be free. I also don't think all software needs to be a gift. (But then I just said the same thing twice.) The part that I care about is which direction the default [default definition?] shifts.
In my perfect world, more code would be MIT not GPL. But in my perfect world, the GPL wouldn't be useful in practice. The world is far from perfect.
Don't apologize.
"Open Source" is hugely conflated in terms of the reasons people write open source software.
There are people who truly don't care to be compensated for their work. Some are even fine with corporations using it without receiving any benefit.
Some people prefer viral and infectious licenses the way that Stallman originally intended and that the FSF later lost sight of (the AGPL isn't strong enough, and the advocacy fell flat). They don't want to give corporations any wiggle room in using their craft and want anyone benefiting from it in any way to agree to the same terms for their own extensions.
Many corporations, some insidiously, use open source as a means of getting free labor. It's not just free code, but entire ecosystems of software and talent pools of engineers that appear, ready to take advantage of. These same companies often do not publish their code as open source. AWS and GCP are huge beneficiaries that come to mind, yet you don't have hyperscaler code to spin up. They get free karma for pushing the "ethos" of open source while not giving the important parts back. Linux having more users means more AWS and GCP customers, yet those customers will never get the AWS and GCP systems for themselves.
There are "impure" and "non-OSI" licenses such as Fair Source and Fair Code that enable companies to build in the open and give customers the keys to the kingdom. They just reserve the sole right to compete on offering the software. OSI purists attack this, yet these types of licenses enable consumers do to whatever they want with the code except for reselling it. If we care about sustainability, we wouldn't attack the gesture.
There are really multiple things going on in "open source" and we're calling it all by the same imprecise nomenclature.
The purists would argue not and that the OSI definition is all that matters. But look at how much of the conversation disappears when you adhere to that, and what behavior slips by.
> If/when someone ends up becoming responsible for work...
You're only responsible to the people who pay you to deliver something. It's not complicated.
> that the burden should just automatically fall on the shoulders of someone who happened to share code “for free”.
Exactly what burden?
I agree with you, but I do think we have a bit of a problem in which an open source creator makes something and then suddenly finds themselves accidentally having created a load-bearing component that is not only used by a lot of people and companies, but where people are demanding that bugs be fixed, etc., and we lack great models for helping transition it from "I do this for fun, might fix the bug if I ever feel like it" to " I respect that this has become a critical dependency and we will find a way to make it someone's job to make it more like a product".
I gather that the open source maintainers who have found themselves in this situation sometimes get very unhappy about it, and I can see why -- it's not like they woke up one day and suddenly had a critical component on their hands, it kind of evolved over time and after a while they're like "uhoh, I don't think this is what I signed up for"
In that case the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything. If somebody depends on the maintainer's package for a critical component then they should consider paying them and possibly drawing up an explicit contract. That's what we did at my work for a critical open source component, where we paid the maintainer to add several features we needed.
It's commendable that your organization did this.
But...
> the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything.
Assumes (especially in cases where "maintainer == original author" psychological capabilities that simply might not exist in the maintainer.
I don't know of a good way to deal with this, other than to be kind and try to notice potential signs of impeding burn-out before an implosion.
Public funding from governments would make sense. Open source software are effectively public good.
Europe is doing this: https://eu-stf.openforumeurope.org/
I don’t think the added idea of “I pay good money for my GitHub subscription and some of that pays you, you are obligated to support me!” would help here.
I agree - but maybe if there were easy ways to opt-in to "hey I want to actually get paid for this thing and in return I'm going to spend more time on it" it might be a good thing. I'm not sure the model in this post is the right way -- I like what Filippo Valsorda has done in creating a small company of developers who do contracted OSS crypto software maintenance. But complicated.
I think expecting to get paid to fix bugs, add features, etc. to one’s open source code is much more reasonable and there should be marketplace infrastructure that makes this much easier to do (compared to the current system where developers have to apply for corporate grants for long running projects).
Yes and yes. I make open source software because I fundamentally enjoy the act of learning something new and then applying that knowledge by making something. I publish it for the ego boost only. I am equally likely to be irritated by contributions than to be excited by them. My day job contributions are up for scrutiny but the personal projects I publish on github are my island, my sovereign ground. As exciting as PR interest is, sometimes I don’t really want someone to paint over my painting. It’s mine after all. I obviously don’t speak for all open source contributors but I don’t want compensation. If someone wants to fork my work and turn it into a community then they are free to do so as a result of my licensing choice. If the first few contributions I receive are pleasant and someone takes over then that is great too. My point is that not all creators are aggregators. Leave us alone and stop complaining. We gave it away for free after all.
I'm pretty sure you didn't wake up at 5am to an urgent issue. Because I did last night, and for sure __MY WIFE__ expects me to get paid for it!!
In general, people's time is not free if only because they have rent/mortgage, food, transportation, medical bills, education, etc.
>Urgent issue
Urgent issue for whom? If there is some org relying on something you maintain voluntarily, in your free time, that seems like a "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine"-type situation to me.
At the risk of sounding like a poor man's John Galt: If you wouldn't like to get out of bed at 5am to work without getting compensated, then you should just not do that.
I was going to comment exactly the same thing, thanks for expressing it so well and here's my upvote. I think part of why I wanted to comment the same, is that for me this IS exactly the reason I make open source! It is my gift for everyone, please use it well.
I do think it would be nice to get paid anything at all, but that wouldn't change at all how I do things/release code. In fact, unless it'd be really no-strings-attached, I'd prefer to keep the current arrangement than being paid a pittance per month and then have extra obligations.
People really want to have a business with none of the work of running a business. They want to make something useful, then have people just pay them for it without any of the things that go into operating a business. In a perfect world value would directly correlate to income, but it isn't even close to being the case, there's a lot of coercion and control of supply that goes into owning a business.
> I'd argue If you're creating and releasing open source with the expectations of compensation, you're doing it wrong.
I think this is a little unfair, given that many (especially younger maintainers) get into it for portfolio reasons where they otherwise might struggle to get a job but stick around because of the enjoyment and interest. It still sucks that so many big orgs rely on these packages and we're potentially experiencing a future when models trained on this code are going to replace jobs in the future.
I think a lack of unionisation is what puts the industry in such a tough spot. We have no big power brokers to enforce the rights of open source developers, unlike the other creative industries that can organise with combined legal action.
Redistributing unwanted funds would be a good chore to have to do!
thanks grayhatter. well said. been programming for 20+ years never earned a dime from it dont want it. its a silly assumption that everyone's motivation is money. this is very far from the truth.
Agreed. I do this too.