I recently learned that Kubernetes is running on a lot of free labour. The main draw and ever increasing underpinning for lots of services provided by the behemoth infrastructure entities…
Software labor is so funny. Here we are, with software engineering salaries some of the highest of any profession in the US. While at the same time much of the most critical and commonly used software was written completely for free. It’s an interesting juxtaposition.
I wonder if there's a license pegged to some meaningful metric (a hard problem unto itself), that prevents usage if the dev fund/devs are not compensated an X amount in a specified interval.
Something like an SOS License.
Support Open Source
...
All development on this project will cease to exist if dev fund does not meet "DOL Software Dev CPI adjusted Blah Blah Salary" * Number of active/approved devs.
Bugfixes will stop if dev fund falls below Y amount or something
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Just some half baked thoughts, many conditions can be added or removed depending on the project structure/goals, but the underlying thought would be that Devs Get Paid is a key requirement in there somewhere.
Lots to consider here, but it's weird that no popular licenses have this as a clause in there - almost like it's frowned upon to ask for money?
> I recently learned that Kubernetes is running on a lot of free labour.
Not sure what is your source for that? At a quick glance most contributions come from Red Hat, Google, VmWare, Microsoft, Amazon. Lot of independent contributions are done independently but as part of employment, which I guess is not free labour?
It is opensource so there is still a lot of volunteer work going on there but the infrastructure (CI/CD, image hosting, etc) is also paid for by corporations and not by the community. Its millions of dollars a year in contributions.
i wouldn't really call $400k/year in total "heavily subsidized", that's around the all in cost of a single developer at one of these sponsoring companies