The problem being that as a maintainer, I refuse most contributions. Not only because they are low-quality (it happens), but also because they are often out of scope, or I just disagree with the direction. It's my project, I maintain it, I choose what goes in it. But you're free to fork it with your changes, that's exactly why I made it open source. If you make an interesting fork, I may totally import some or all of your changes! And if you first ask in an issue, I may offer you to open a PR directly.
I almost always use copyleft licences: it makes it mandatory to share the modified sources with the user, who can then upstream them.
Many times in companies, if I need to patch a permissive dependency, my company will not allow me to spend time upstreaming my patch. Whereas if it is a copyleft licence, I can tell my manager that I am obligated to open source my changes (which is not correct, but managers usually don't know that, don't care so much about the nuance, and anyway it's a win if we follow the copyleft conditions to the letter).
I'd argue all merge requests matter, not only those that were accepted upstream. Sure, only those accepted generate value upstream, but there is a lot of byproduct from a rejected MR that still has value, either as a reference for further discussions or as resource for forks.
But my experience has been that most managers are not competent in that regard. If you have a good manager that understands that, then that's great. But it's rare. Most of the time, it works better to bullshit them with the legal consequences of not allowing you to upstream your changes.
I don't think dropping a random software developer into a random project to do their open source duty would end well
It takes a _lot_ of time for someone to meaningfully contribute to a project, and would just result in maintainers having the overhead of training that many new people on a project
I'd much rather figure out a way to finance those open source projects in a sustainable way where those projects can decide to hire full time employees.
Completely agree. I'd rather have the people that want to be there, to be involved.
An alternative take I'd rather see is "Employers guarantee 8 hours per week of time to work on open-source projects, including ones I start myself". Employer gets no IP stake in the project, and it's done for public good + a means to allow employees to upskill.
Otherwise it just becomes a case of another grindset. You're expected to do more, with the limited free time you have.
I get that the author is making a "modest proposal" here, but even so it's kind of antithetical to at least my own feelings about open source. If I release something as open source, the whole point is my users owe me nothing. They have limited obligations that are explicitly spelled out in the license and that's it.
Sure but the real problem are the companies that consume, not just the developers. A lot of developers would love to contribute back, but companies put schedule pressures and have limited interest in contributing back.
Companies actually want a kind of vendor relationship, but they don’t want to pay any money.
Devs want something dev focused, and open source is usually code for being dev focused.
I don’t think either truly wants actual “open source”
I think most of the comments here miss that contributions is not equal to code.
Contributions to the documentation, translations, or helping managing the community are also extremely valuable and do not require the same technical skills.
So, like compulsory jury duty and the draft, this would be directly against the 13th Amendment.
Then again, according to the Supreme Court, even forced, unpaid road duty (chain gangs anyone?) is an inherent power of the government, so maybe this is ok.
> In view of ancient usage and the unanimity of judicial opinion, it must be taken as settled that, unless restrained by some constitutional limitation, a state has inherent power to require every able-bodied man within its jurisdiction to labor for a reasonable time on public roads near his residence without direct compensation.
(spoiler alert: according to the ruling, the US Constitution, including Amendments, does not limit this power; and this is in fact cited as justification for upholding the draft)
Do you have any reason to believe that amendment was ever intended to cover things like mandatory jury duty? Or are you advocating for reading the text verbatim with zero consideration of the context or history? That kind of reading impacts a lot more than this, and not entirely in a good way.
I think there are much better argument for mandatory jury duty, like the fact that it's an inherent and explicit part of the preexisting Constitution, and that was not explicitly repealed nor (as far as I know) considered.
But the Court chose not to use those arguments, perhaps because they are less absolute and don't apply as cleanly to the draft.
Personally, I think that jury duty as it is today (no real pay, sometimes very long trials, "hardship" completely at the discretion of the judge) is actually a substantive violation of the principles of liberty that the 13th Amendment (along with the rest of the Constitution, notably the 5th Amendment) was meant to protect; (though I myself would likely enjoy actually being on a jury, and am fortunate that I can afford it/my work would likely pay).
And I don't think it would've been crazy to require an Amendment to institute a compulsory military draft, or better yet interpret the 13th Amendment to allow the draft (and jury duty) on narrower grounds but use it to better protect soldiers against various abuses inherent in the current military power structure and lack of exit option.
I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do. I think the (explicit) argument that the takings and due process clauses protect your money but not your labor is patently ridiculous.
> I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do.
Let me make sure I'm getting this right. You're making a serious claim that if the state required you to, say, clean the road by your house every morning, you'd feel like your experience would rival those of 19th-century slaves? You genuinely think that was the kind of thing the amendment was written for and do not see a meaningful distinction between the two?
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Obviously the experience wouldn't rival one of a 19th century slave and nobody is making that claim. However, forced labor for no compensation is slavery, by definition.
As an open-source developer... no. No, no, no, no.
The toil of dealing with low-quality, half-assed first-time contributions is often higher than the effort of implementing the same features or bug fixes from scratch. And that's if you agree the features or fixes are useful in the first place.
I've already seen college students forced by their teachers to contribute to open-source projects and it's almost always just sad. The patches don't follow your project's practices, they usually have an array of subtle bugs to diagnose... and on top of that, you're dealing with a person who probably doesn't want constructive feedback in the first place. They just want a good grade on their assignment (or, in this proposal, want you to sign off the completion of their "OSS duty").
If you compel 100x as many people to submit half-assed contributions, you'll just drown in noise. Nothing good will be accomplished this way.
Totally agree, I’ve seen people put it as a sort of badge of honor that they are contributing to open source, but are clearly not passionate about the projects that they are contributing to and not ashamed of using AI to do so. Overall open source projects suffer more as a consequence of these low grade contributions, and it sucks for the people reviewing them
The vast majority of my open-source contributions have been for completely selfish reason, namely: I want X feature/fix, and don't want to maintain a fork (or, if applicable, do wild monkey-patching). It just happens organically, no social pressure required.
Hard disagree! Making open source contributions mandatory for those who lack genuine interest or motivation would lead to lower quality contributions ultimately increasing the workload for maintainers. Many maintainers already face burnout. This will only make it worse.
On another note: There's very little substance in this post. It comes across as a lazy, shallow, "hot" take! Which is fine. It's your blog and you should write however you like on your blog. But is this really a good fit for HN? It's frustrating to see shallow posts with no substance like this rise to the top but higher-effort go unnoticed.
Governments should set aside some pool of money for distributing to people maintaining critical projects. We have so much surplus and some portion of it should be allocated to such projects as digital infrastructure. Google did that with Summer of Code. Shareholder value can go and take a jump into a nearest lake.
OK this would obviously be bad, I think everyone gets that.
But the note in the article is getting at something that feels interesting. I think there's a more fruitful conversation around "how might this work in spirit?" instead of "would this work literally?"
I never comment on this site and I use an app to view it that doesn’t even have sign in capabilities. But I disagree with this nonsense so much that I had to go login just to vocalise that.
People should have choice and freedom in what they want to spend their time doing. I respect the open source community and some day I’d love to find the time to contribute at my own will, not because I’m called to.
Off topic but: Jury trials are one of the weirdest things about America: If I’m ever on trial for some crime I want my case decided by professional judges not a team of random idiots.
On the other hand, there’s a good argument to be made that if you think the judiciary can be captured for political ends, a trial and verdict by your peers at least gives you the opportunity to get a fair(er) shot. And in many (most?) US jurisdictions you can waive your right to a jury trial and ask for a bench trial instead.
While I do agree that every dev should contribute to open source at least once in their lives, I fear more and more will try to push poorly generated AI slop and make everyone’s jobs harder
So you think that, for example, every single person who uses LibreOffice is morally obligated to contribute code to the project? Even though the vast majority of them don't even know how to code?
No. Not obviously not every person is obliged to give back to every project they ever remotely used.
But in general, yes. One receives and one can give back.
And contributions can be way more than code. Documentation, testing, good bug reports, moderating forums, hosting events for a coding session, ... or just money.
I have done a lot of open source and I disagree.
The problem being that as a maintainer, I refuse most contributions. Not only because they are low-quality (it happens), but also because they are often out of scope, or I just disagree with the direction. It's my project, I maintain it, I choose what goes in it. But you're free to fork it with your changes, that's exactly why I made it open source. If you make an interesting fork, I may totally import some or all of your changes! And if you first ask in an issue, I may offer you to open a PR directly.
I almost always use copyleft licences: it makes it mandatory to share the modified sources with the user, who can then upstream them.
Many times in companies, if I need to patch a permissive dependency, my company will not allow me to spend time upstreaming my patch. Whereas if it is a copyleft licence, I can tell my manager that I am obligated to open source my changes (which is not correct, but managers usually don't know that, don't care so much about the nuance, and anyway it's a win if we follow the copyleft conditions to the letter).
I'd argue all merge requests matter, not only those that were accepted upstream. Sure, only those accepted generate value upstream, but there is a lot of byproduct from a rejected MR that still has value, either as a reference for further discussions or as resource for forks.
Surely the value of patching upstream is so you don't have merge conflicts for eternity?
Oh yeah, that's for sure.
But my experience has been that most managers are not competent in that regard. If you have a good manager that understands that, then that's great. But it's rare. Most of the time, it works better to bullshit them with the legal consequences of not allowing you to upstream your changes.
Again, that's my experience.
I don't think dropping a random software developer into a random project to do their open source duty would end well
It takes a _lot_ of time for someone to meaningfully contribute to a project, and would just result in maintainers having the overhead of training that many new people on a project
I'd much rather figure out a way to finance those open source projects in a sustainable way where those projects can decide to hire full time employees.
Completely agree. I'd rather have the people that want to be there, to be involved.
An alternative take I'd rather see is "Employers guarantee 8 hours per week of time to work on open-source projects, including ones I start myself". Employer gets no IP stake in the project, and it's done for public good + a means to allow employees to upskill.
Otherwise it just becomes a case of another grindset. You're expected to do more, with the limited free time you have.
> Completely agree. I'd rather have the people that want to be there, to be involved.
It’s like the strategic difference between relying on a volunteer army vs conscription
Dead on. Financing is the most urgent need, not contributors.
User: Please suggest the most absurd, over-the-top blog post title that will nonetheless get me to the top of Hacker News.
System: "Contributing to Open-Source Should be Required, Like Jury Duty"
Indeed, well said. This is like a spotlight to moths haha
I'm bound to get downvoted here, but I ran this by my own local model.
> No One Understands Software Because No One Understands Time
> All Programming Languages Converge to English Eventually
> The Best Database Is Just Two People Talking
> Stop Writing Code. Start Legislating Software
And my personal favorite:
> AI Safety Is Just the New Gluten-Free
I would totally believe all of these to be real headlines if I saw them on Hacker News.
I know! Tempted to write them…
I think a more viable strategy would be, any software that is paid for with tax money, should be open source.
I get that the author is making a "modest proposal" here, but even so it's kind of antithetical to at least my own feelings about open source. If I release something as open source, the whole point is my users owe me nothing. They have limited obligations that are explicitly spelled out in the license and that's it.
Should it be mandatory also for the maintainers to accept these contributions? Every project would degrade into pure entropy.
If it's like jury duty, the maintainers will reject all of the developers who show any sign of independent thought or domain knowledge.
Sure but the real problem are the companies that consume, not just the developers. A lot of developers would love to contribute back, but companies put schedule pressures and have limited interest in contributing back.
Companies actually want a kind of vendor relationship, but they don’t want to pay any money.
Devs want something dev focused, and open source is usually code for being dev focused.
I don’t think either truly wants actual “open source”
I think the point is not about us being developers or employees, but about us being a civilian.
I think most of the comments here miss that contributions is not equal to code.
Contributions to the documentation, translations, or helping managing the community are also extremely valuable and do not require the same technical skills.
Congratulations, you just reinvented slavery.
But if you take the government out of the equation, and instead mandate contribution via project licenses, that might be worth a try.
So, like compulsory jury duty and the draft, this would be directly against the 13th Amendment.
Then again, according to the Supreme Court, even forced, unpaid road duty (chain gangs anyone?) is an inherent power of the government, so maybe this is ok.
> In view of ancient usage and the unanimity of judicial opinion, it must be taken as settled that, unless restrained by some constitutional limitation, a state has inherent power to require every able-bodied man within its jurisdiction to labor for a reasonable time on public roads near his residence without direct compensation.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/240/328/
(spoiler alert: according to the ruling, the US Constitution, including Amendments, does not limit this power; and this is in fact cited as justification for upholding the draft)
Do you have any reason to believe that amendment was ever intended to cover things like mandatory jury duty? Or are you advocating for reading the text verbatim with zero consideration of the context or history? That kind of reading impacts a lot more than this, and not entirely in a good way.
I think there are much better argument for mandatory jury duty, like the fact that it's an inherent and explicit part of the preexisting Constitution, and that was not explicitly repealed nor (as far as I know) considered.
But the Court chose not to use those arguments, perhaps because they are less absolute and don't apply as cleanly to the draft.
Personally, I think that jury duty as it is today (no real pay, sometimes very long trials, "hardship" completely at the discretion of the judge) is actually a substantive violation of the principles of liberty that the 13th Amendment (along with the rest of the Constitution, notably the 5th Amendment) was meant to protect; (though I myself would likely enjoy actually being on a jury, and am fortunate that I can afford it/my work would likely pay).
And I don't think it would've been crazy to require an Amendment to institute a compulsory military draft, or better yet interpret the 13th Amendment to allow the draft (and jury duty) on narrower grounds but use it to better protect soldiers against various abuses inherent in the current military power structure and lack of exit option.
I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do. I think the (explicit) argument that the takings and due process clauses protect your money but not your labor is patently ridiculous.
> I do think that mandatory road duty is about as direct a violation of the purpose of the 13th Amendment as anything else the state could do.
Let me make sure I'm getting this right. You're making a serious claim that if the state required you to, say, clean the road by your house every morning, you'd feel like your experience would rival those of 19th-century slaves? You genuinely think that was the kind of thing the amendment was written for and do not see a meaningful distinction between the two?
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Obviously the experience wouldn't rival one of a 19th century slave and nobody is making that claim. However, forced labor for no compensation is slavery, by definition.
> So, like compulsory jury duty and the draft, this would be directly against the 13th Amendment.
I'm pretty sure my Federal grand jury duty was compelled.
Yeah, I'm saying the Supreme Court is obviously wrong to allow it on the grounds that they do
Ah. Gotcha.
As an open-source developer... no. No, no, no, no.
The toil of dealing with low-quality, half-assed first-time contributions is often higher than the effort of implementing the same features or bug fixes from scratch. And that's if you agree the features or fixes are useful in the first place.
I've already seen college students forced by their teachers to contribute to open-source projects and it's almost always just sad. The patches don't follow your project's practices, they usually have an array of subtle bugs to diagnose... and on top of that, you're dealing with a person who probably doesn't want constructive feedback in the first place. They just want a good grade on their assignment (or, in this proposal, want you to sign off the completion of their "OSS duty").
If you compel 100x as many people to submit half-assed contributions, you'll just drown in noise. Nothing good will be accomplished this way.
Totally agree, I’ve seen people put it as a sort of badge of honor that they are contributing to open source, but are clearly not passionate about the projects that they are contributing to and not ashamed of using AI to do so. Overall open source projects suffer more as a consequence of these low grade contributions, and it sucks for the people reviewing them
Considering that most people hate jury duty and will do anything to get out of it, are you sure you want similar behavior from developers on OSS?
The vast majority of my open-source contributions have been for completely selfish reason, namely: I want X feature/fix, and don't want to maintain a fork (or, if applicable, do wild monkey-patching). It just happens organically, no social pressure required.
Hard disagree! Making open source contributions mandatory for those who lack genuine interest or motivation would lead to lower quality contributions ultimately increasing the workload for maintainers. Many maintainers already face burnout. This will only make it worse.
On another note: There's very little substance in this post. It comes across as a lazy, shallow, "hot" take! Which is fine. It's your blog and you should write however you like on your blog. But is this really a good fit for HN? It's frustrating to see shallow posts with no substance like this rise to the top but higher-effort go unnoticed.
Governments should set aside some pool of money for distributing to people maintaining critical projects. We have so much surplus and some portion of it should be allocated to such projects as digital infrastructure. Google did that with Summer of Code. Shareholder value can go and take a jump into a nearest lake.
OK this would obviously be bad, I think everyone gets that.
But the note in the article is getting at something that feels interesting. I think there's a more fruitful conversation around "how might this work in spirit?" instead of "would this work literally?"
Contributing to open source could also substitute the current bankrupt method of screening candidates for a position.
Look at what happened when they were giving free t shirts based on open source contributions (hacktoberfest) to see how well this idea would go.
Anyone smart enough to contribute to an open source project will probably get struck early in the process.
I never comment on this site and I use an app to view it that doesn’t even have sign in capabilities. But I disagree with this nonsense so much that I had to go login just to vocalise that.
People should have choice and freedom in what they want to spend their time doing. I respect the open source community and some day I’d love to find the time to contribute at my own will, not because I’m called to.
No. Freedom is valuable.
Many would love to be able to get an LLM to do their jury duty.
Make it required to see AI generated PRs and README updates
to quote hot fuzz
Weird that this onus is being put on the developers, and not on their employers.
I constantly use FOSS for the commercial gain... Of someone who isn't me.
Off topic but: Jury trials are one of the weirdest things about America: If I’m ever on trial for some crime I want my case decided by professional judges not a team of random idiots.
On the other hand, there’s a good argument to be made that if you think the judiciary can be captured for political ends, a trial and verdict by your peers at least gives you the opportunity to get a fair(er) shot. And in many (most?) US jurisdictions you can waive your right to a jury trial and ask for a bench trial instead.
While I do agree that every dev should contribute to open source at least once in their lives, I fear more and more will try to push poorly generated AI slop and make everyone’s jobs harder
Software developers (plural) have not made their fortunes on open source, just big companies (who should obviously be paying, not me.)
“I sure do wish FOSS was less free.”
No, it should not.
SHOULD a person do it? Yes.
SHOULD they be forced to do it or go to the Gulag? No.
Save jail for violent criminals, not this white collar BS.
As a moral obligation, yes. But as a law? I see so many ways this will go wrong and not be helpful.
> As a moral obligation, yes.
So you think that, for example, every single person who uses LibreOffice is morally obligated to contribute code to the project? Even though the vast majority of them don't even know how to code?
No. Not obviously not every person is obliged to give back to every project they ever remotely used.
But in general, yes. One receives and one can give back.
And contributions can be way more than code. Documentation, testing, good bug reports, moderating forums, hosting events for a coding session, ... or just money.
ok, if they pay to train me up.
ha ha, in a lot of cases it is "required," but people keeping choosing not to use the software where the contributions are "required"
...or pay Free Software with tax money.
Looking at the quality of most “contributions” - “hey I added a bunch of unnecessary ai slob to your readme” - oh god please no
Always look at the bottom of the page for what is surprisingly often the most insightful comment.
Addendum: Particularly when the forum has gone sour.