Fair enough on use of the word "courage" in this case. I will gladly walk back on things I am wrong about when I realize it. If DRH prefers the business model of giving away something for free and selling consulting support for it, then bully for him. It might result in less income, but I'm sure being a consultant is lot less stressful than running a corporation based on SQLite with >200 employees would be.

However, I will not devalue the work of software engineering by giving away solutions to difficult problems for free and fostering a culture of self-entitlement toward software engineers. Treating prosperous and purposeful existences as conflicting aspirations is an unusually pernicious self-deception. Go get yours, I want you to get paid for your work. You deserve to get paid for the value you create.

Besides that, it's naive to think that if you give up the portion of value you can capture, that it will go back to the people you're really trying to help. In reality, when you publish really good open source work that mega-cap tech companies can use at scale, they are the ones who capture the lion's share of the value you created rather than the end users they are data mining.

"Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn." -Deuteronomy 25:4

If even Jews and Christians- for as much as the self-abasing communists on this site resent them- can concede that even a lowly beast of the field is entitled to a portion of the value it creates, then how much more deserving is dignified man of his recompense?

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pstuart 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not contesting the need to be compensated for work.

My point is that there's stuff that I have worked on to scratch an itch and don't feel the need for monetary compensation. I believe there's an intrinsic need to be part of something bigger than ones self, and participating by volunteering time to have the satisfaction of knowing that you helped make something you care about better is not a bad thing, if on your own terms.

The way DRH has talked about SQLite is that he is financially secure and by giving it away gets both the reward mentioned above as well as maintaining the value of the free software which he can still make money off of support contracts. He is choosing to do this because for him that effort is the most rewarding.

FOSS has been a foundational facet of the work we get well-paid to participate in. This is a case in which we have the option to have our cake and share it too.

None of this means you have to participate in this way, but I suggest that your viewpoint is yours and may not be shared by everybody else in the community.

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president_zippy 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm working on something I plan to give away for free as well. I'm backporting request multiplexing into HTTP/1, calling it HTTP/1.2, and working on updates to a few HTTP servers that rejected HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. I wrote my RFC draft first to really hammer out the edge cases before I go in blind on the implementation. I just finished the RFC draft 2 days ago and it took 9 pages, but the code changes in my estimation will be no more than 300 LOC for every existing HTTP/1.1 implementation I fork. My protocol adds one header to correlate a response and its originating request, and defines a new transfer encoding scheme that's just "chunked", with the the request ID in each chunk. It's simple stuff: I just want to multiplex request handling without having to adopt a binary protocol with a complex state for each request-response pair.

I'm not doing it because I'm Bill Maher and I'm offering the solutions to all of society's problems for free. I'm doing it because I want an HTTP server that does just what I need to do and is not a pain in my ass for my small set of use cases. I've use OpenBSD and its httpd for a couple years now, and I want to fix the only real problem I have with it because I know it's not hard to do. If they won't take my change, the worst they can do is say no and leave me to maintain my own fork in perpetuity.

As for group identity, giving altruistically and being part of something bigger than oneself are completely separate if you really dig into it. Those young women who joined Charles Manson's murder cult were certainly part of something bigger than themselves, while self-employed people who donate a portion of their wealth or adopt children out of the infamous foster care system are not.

I'm not saying group identity is necessarily bad, I'm just making my case that it's neither good nor bad. I would make the case for individualism as paradoxically foundational to creating the kind of society that creates people of stronger moral character, but that's just idle and unprofitable philosophizing, and any schmuck can wax philosophical and sound intelligently profound.

"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." -Henry David Thoreau

	▲	pstuart 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What you're doing almost requires giving it away as it only has value if other people use it. One small nit: "group identity". I have no tribe, no group (alas). The only tribe I can lay claim to is humanity itself. I'm at a point in my life where one tends to ponder the value of one's actions in the scant time left to act. I try to acknowledge the nihilism that whatever I do will be forgotten in short order, but while I'm here I may have the opportunity to somehow "make the world a better place". Life's funny that way. I wish you luck with your project and thank you for engaging in depth with me.