What is the Unlicense?
The Unlicense is a template for disclaiming copyright monopoly interest in software you’ve written; in other words, it is a template for dedicating your software to the public domain. It combines a copyright waiver patterned after the very successful public domain SQLite project with the no-warranty statement from the widely-used MIT/X11 license.
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I love free software, this whole thing currently runs on it.
I am a bit disappointed though that free software and earning a decent living seem to be mostly incompatible. I don’t know how sustainable it is to expect that brilliant people will continue churning out shit for free when they’ve got bills to pay and lives to live. I think most of them do it as a hobby in their free time, and that really doesn’t help.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I really wish there was a better solution where people could get adequately rewarded for their work, without falling into the corruption of commercial models.
couple things. thoughts on these models? https://infogalactic.com/info/Business_models_for_open-source_software
also code should probably be adjacent to producing some other tangible good, and money can be made from that. like designing a 3d printed good, and selling that physical good.
code is indeed something problematic because it is “intellectual property” which isn’t really a thing in my view, so in itself it does face monetization issues, because “ideas” aren’t tangible products. Another route could be to think of it as something a nonprofit produces (and fund it through people giving to charity basically?)
I’ll also note that I’ve seen a management-programmers conflict and dynamic that I think ultimately will often devalue programmers; therefore programmers need to work at businesses where managers are programmers, or start their own business it seems, if they want to “actually” code.
I think these are good general discussions to have if you have any thoughts on the topics
I feel like donation models don’t really work though, look at the Lemmy dudes, they’re not getting anywhere near from donations as they could get if they just got a programming job.
In my professional experience, some of the best managers I have worked under have been non-technical and not really subject matter experts, but they knew how to be good managers and would take directions from you. They don’t need to be as good as you at what you do, that’s why you’re there.
I think in a functional company, everyone plays an important part. The managers make sure shit gets done, top leadership steers the ship in a certain direction, product packages it into something the market wants to buy, marketing makes it attractive, sales goes out there and sells it, legal makes sure you don’t get sued out of existence, etc. This is a lot of stuff that a single dude writing some code will not have any access to.
I think at the moment it works as a passion, people write open source code in their free time because it’s something they care about and they don’t depend on that to survive. For example just hosting HC would never work if I actually needed to make some kind of income from it to keep it running.
