[kortilla]

These kind of projects are just “open washing” at that point. The source is available, but outsiders can’t meaningfully contribute stuff outside of the preordained roadmap nor is the project beholden to community consensus.

As an open source contributor, it’s very unfulfilling and disappointing to find out you’re essentially an unpaid contributor to a company project.

[dhodell]

I'm playing Devil's Advocate here because I sympathize with your point, but isn't there a way you can squint and look at this weird that it's true of pretty much everything else? IBM makes tons of money off of Linux, for example. iXsystems profits off of FreeBSD. Facebook profits off of their wildly popular C++ libraries.

I think we really need to divorce "profit" from "open source". OSS is great because we can contribute our own ideas to it, because we can learn from it, because we can form communities around it. It's also useful because it's a vector for entrepreneurship. Edit: why should these be mutually exclusive properties?

It's fair to point out that it can be a vector for exploiting unpaid labor. But that's an accessibility issue that exists already. For example, it's easy to tell folks interested in the field to "do open source work" if they want to get a job in the field. If you're a low-income single parent, this doesn't make CS more accessible, it's a sick joke. Even without profit, open source isn't this bastion of opportunity that we sometimes like to think it is.

You make an excellent point that it's hard to learn large new systems. But it's not impossible. Indeed, it's possible to make super meaningful contributions to the system in "limited time", starting with net zero knowledge: https://blog.quarkslab.com/playing-around-with-the-fuchsia-o.... To that end, I have to disagree that we're the kind of project that outsiders can't meaningfully contribute to.

I've addressed the point of community consensus elsewhere. All I can say here is that I personally owe my career to open source, and I'm therefore committed to helping others do the same. We opened the project to communicate with people. My personal goal is to do this and help as many people as possible succeed professionally through this vector.

[chme]

> IBM makes tons of money off of Linux, for example.

Personally I would rather contribute to a GPL licensed project, because if big companies try to profit of it, they will also have to release their changes. Those could improve the project, and now the community does no longer have to do themselves -> Community devs get payed back in development time that they would have to spend themselves.

With permissively licensed projects (or commercially dual-licensed), where big companies are allowed to just take and improve it internally without giving anything back to the community, a community dev would pretty much be an unpaid developer for those companies.

[dhodell]

> they will also have to release their changes

Strictly speaking, they only have to release their changes to people they distribute their product to. It's convenient to keep it entirely open, but not a requirement.

I agree that folks should contribute code to places they feel comfortable in any case. As I mentioned in GP, if you separate out pay, there are other reasons to work on OSS, and these motivations can coexist.

[sanxiyn]

I think unpaid internship is unquestionably a good thing. It's consensual, and unpaid interns are usually happy to do unpaid internship.

It makes sense you are not happy to do unpaid internship, but the only thing it shows is that you are not the target audience.

[fnord123]

>I think unpaid internship is unquestionably a good thing.

Unpaid internships are definitely questioned. You're very much incorrect here.

[ac29]

For one,they provide a major advantage to people who have enough money to be able to afford to go unpaid. And really, if a company can't or won't pay you even minimum wage (something like $500/week on the high end in the US), that should be a huge red flag.