> This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid.

It is paid, even if not in money. It seems like maybe you lack awareness of the other forms of capital and reward that exist, because your framing implicitly insists that financial capital is the only form of capital and that monetary reward is the only form of reward. But there are also a bunch of other forms of capital, like social, cultural, symbolic, etc. which you have missed, and there are non-capital (non-convertible) forms of reward, like feeling good about something. It's the entire reason why permissive licenses still preserve attribution.

To wit, people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things. There are both intrinsic and extrinsic non-monetary gains here.

Stallman makes the same critical error in his foundational writings, so at least you're not alone in this.

(A foundational read on the subject of the different forms of capital is Pierre Bourdieu's The Forms of Capital: https://www.scribd.com/document/859144970/P-Bourdieu-the-For...)

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nlawalker 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things.

True, but the expectation means that taking on maintenance involves taking on and leveraging a large amount of reputational debt in a very risky way.

If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam".

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BugsJustFindMe 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It is incontrovertible that the entirety of the open source / free software world exists, in a very fundamental way, because people experience personal reward by doing work that they give away for zero dollars.

The existence of risk does not eliminate the existence of reward. It's called "expected value", and it's non-zero, and it's for the person to manage for themself like everything else in life. Working for equity also involves risk, and nobody says that it's not compensation.

> If you release something to the world and place yourself in a high-visibility maintainer position, burn out on it and then decide to drop it, it's very hard to ensure that your legacy and reputation in perpetuity will be "released something great and did the world a solid by maintaining it for a while" as opposed to "person who overcommits, bails, and leaves the world in a jam".

This is like saying you suffer reputational damage by retiring from a career. The claim is clearly absurd. It's not hard to step down from leading a project in a way that preserves reputation in the same way that it's not hard to leave a company without burning bridges. Some people are bad at being people and fail at both.

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nlawalker 3 hours ago | parent [-]

My point is that the OP doesn't >lack awareness of other forms of capital, they're asserting that those aren't sufficient on their own, and that one of the reasons for that is the risk that stems from stepping down being something that you can fail at in the first place, with the consequences of cementing a reputation of "being bad at being a person" regardless of anything that's happened to that point. You don't have the opportunity of accumulating reputation without having that risk at the end, unlike a career, where you have the opportunity of taking a job that pays a regular paycheck regardless of whether you leave at the drop of a hat and burn all your bridges by doing so.

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BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> My point is that the OP doesn't >lack awareness of other forms of capital, they're asserting that those aren't sufficient on their own

OP said "it should be paid" because "it is a job", and so the rejection of that claim is two-fold: 1) Uncertainty in the expected value of payment does not change the fact that it's payment, 2) Payment in units other than dollars is still payment. If I get paid in bitcoins, the bitcoin market could completely collapse before I cash out. It's not different than that.

OP's specific written framing, that because it's a job it needs to be paid, which is only additive commentary if OP believes that it isn't being paid, disagrees with your prediction about what OP really secretly bases their statement on.

We can look further back in OP's comment as well:

> The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user

This is only fractionally true, and it is only true in an unpaid way for a desire to consume free software. It is not true in an unpaid way for the desires to produce or maintain free software. Those are done because the producers and maintainers experience some kind of reward from doing so.

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Arainach 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Payment in units other than dollars is still payment. If I get paid in bitcoins, the bitcoin market could completely collapse before I cash out. It's not different than that.

I can't pay my rent or my server bills in "prestige". Entirely different.

	▲	BugsJustFindMe an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I can't pay my rent or server bills in "bitcoins". I need to leverage my bitcoins in some way to get "dollars" that I can then pay my bills with. Non-monetary payment is still payment. Rare pokémon cards are payment too. Also, in fact, people get things that otherwise cost money all the time based on prestige.