9 replies

1. Khalid ⚡ Mastodon 5 min later

   @zachleat So… does that mean you’ll make a stop at the 7-Eleven to pick up a soda or is this the wrong time to ask?

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 10 min later

      @khalidabuhakmeh 7-11ty is allegedly open 23 hours a day (but not now)

      1. Khalid ⚡ Mastodon 16 min later

         @zachleat 🤔

2. Tiro Typeworks Mastodon 41 min later

   @zachleat Don’t forget the parts that are like showing up at a jobsite and doing a bunch of work for free, all in the hope that some future work might actually be funded.

   1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 47 min later

      @TiroTypeworks this perspective doesn’t resonate with me, knowing my incentives and internal motivations as a maintainer (not an “external” contributor) but I am curious what you mean!

      1. Tiro Typeworks Mastodon 1 hr later

         @zachleat There’s this notion in FOSS, which I have heard from numerous people over the years, that open software/font development is a service industry, so you make a thing, release it under an open license, and then customers come along and pay you to extend, modify, or customise it.

         I’ve seen a lot of unfunded work done in that ‘make a thing’ phase. In some respects, this isn’t very different from any speculative development, except you’ve given away the thing that is most easily monetised, i.e. the rights, in the hope that a customer needs something a bit different and will pay you, rather than anyone else on the planet, to modify what you made.

         [To be clear, I like FOSS, but development needs to be funded.]

         1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 1 hr later

            @TiroTypeworks a ha, yes — that gives me a lot more detail and makes a lot more sense: thank you!

            1. Zach Leatherman Mastodon 1 hr later

               @TiroTypeworks The other wrinkle I think about a lot is how GIANT megacorps or investors can fund a free or near-free service at a loss to completely change the incentives of customers to be less friendly to existing creators trying to succeed sustainably in the same space.

               Reminds me of Walmart/Amazon decimating the economy of small towns

               1. Tiro Typeworks Mastodon 1 hr later

                  @zachleat I’ve tried to describe this, in conversations with free software fundamentalists, in terms of disparity in ability to leverage value. What you describe is a particularly brutal way to leverage value from FOSS, but it is part of the larger issue that is simply stated as ‘Capital can leverage value at a scale and in ways that lack of capital can’t’. So when I release a font under OFL, I am aware that I am giving something to users — yay! —but I am also providing exploitable value to capital — boo!