What if every software became FOSS? Who would put in the free labor to write the software

The implication that we can make all software FOSS and have nothing else about the world change is a textbook example of putting the cart before the horse. It’s like asking “what if everyone became vegan, who would pay the cattle ranchers?”

The world FOSS strives for, the world where it is the norm, has a fundamentally different economy from our own.

It’s not a valid thought experiment to ask “what if all software was FOSS (but nothing else changed)?” because that creates a hypothetical world that has a fallacy at its core. A world where entire social movements can blink in and out of power without regards for sociological and historical factors is a world unconstrained by logic as we understand it. The correct framing should be: “what would our world have to change to enable FOSS to be the norm?”

The distinction is subtle, but cuts to the core of the contention betweem movements aiming to change the world in radical ways and their detractors offering criticism that boils down to “but the future you propose doesn’t integrate seamlessly into the present state of affairs.”

We all want change, we just don’t want it to change things.

That’s an interesting take on FOSS - that’s it’s a free buggier alternative to “mainstream” software?

Linux is ubiquitous across many devices (you won’t even know you’re using it) and servers yet it’s all based on FOSS. There isn’t an alternative for many of those usage cases.

Browsers like Firefox are FOSS. The alternative is not less buggy, but it is less private and sells you to advertisers. But even propriety software like Chrome is based off an open FOSS codebase from Chromium.

Other software has no better alternatives. Look at VLC (for video), OBS (for streaming and video capture), Calibre (for eBook library management). There are arguably all the best in their class and they all FOSS, and that is just scratching the surface.

Tools like WINE are FOSS only but they are revolutionising gaming having been repurposed into the Steam decknfor example.

Eveb the software that might be characterised as “alternatives” to thebincumbant proprietary software servers a major purpose. GIMP (alternative to Photoshop) and Libre Office (alternative to MS office) are free but also now increasingly important do not require any online subscriptions and data sharing with big corporation. For many people that’s hugely important - why pay money and subscriptions for things you can get for free at high quality?

FOSS is a huge ecosystem of software, all of it free to use, change and share.

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It seems like most FOSS I’ve seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software,

That’s probably confirmational bias. Plenty of FOSS projects out there that are pretty stable. If this weren’t the case then we wouldn’t have critical systems running Linux, FreeBSD etc. For instance, take your router, it’s not only probably running Linux, but also uses several dozens of FOSS tools that are a core part of the ecosystem - if FOSS is really as buggy as you think, then critical systems like routers and basically 90% if the internet would be crashing all the time.

or create something more complex like a machine learning advanced AI software?

Ironic you should say that, because some of the best machine learning/AI tools right now are FOSS (eg Stable Diffusion, Llama 2, Claude, GPT4all etc).

What about people who have bills to pay? Would their bills be covered?

They’re either paid by donations (via Patreon, Github Sponsors etc), or they get hired by companies which depend on their work (eg: see how Valve hired developers to work on various FOSS projects that the Steam Deck depends on; or the best example is the Linux kernel itself)

It seems like most FOSS I’ve seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software, which resolves a problem the user had.

I don’t know what kind of sw you use, but usually I find Foss software to be sleek, functional, fast with good support and updates, while commercial software is ridden with ads, trackers, bloat and bugs. Exceptions on both sides but the notion that free software is generally worse is categorically incorrect.

Everyone can contribute, but how do they make a living?

So first not everyone can contribute. Usually people who also use the software and have personal (or monetary) interest in it, contribute.

And why does everything has to be about monetisation? Yes, both people and gigantic corporations make money off foss in various ways, I’m sure others have explained that already. But people also do things for other reasons than just money.

But I’m just baffled how people so often declare that foss can’t work or that it’s qualitatively worse, even though the entire planet has been dependent on foss for decades.

No, just because someone sells something directly, doesn’t mean it’s inherently better.

The goal is to collectively free humans from the enslavement and dangers that proprietary computing represents.

It’s a collective fight for freedom. Then of course we must continuously question and revise the tactics, and invent new ways of funding, sustaining, supporting, etc… the goal.

I suspect the OP is trolling or phishing for material for his own post or essay. Why else would you post such questions in an open-source community? :D

“FOSS doesn’t seem sustainable. Everyone can contribute, but how do they make a living?”

Your concerns about the sustainability of FOSS suggest that most contributors must be sidelining it for other income. However, major corporations have built their entire business models on supporting open-source software. Companies like Red Hat are testament to the economic viability of FOSS. Additionally, large tech firms like Google and IBM heavily invest in open-source, further ensuring its sustainability.

“It seems like most FOSS I’ve seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software.”

You label FOSS as a ‘buggy alternative,’ but it’s crucial to recognize that the vast majority of software around the world relies on open-source modules, functions, and frameworks. This isn’t a coincidence; it’s a result of rigorous maintenance and improvement by a global community of developers. Open source doesn’t just run ‘some’ of the internet; it’s the backbone of almost all modern digital infrastructure.

“What if every software became FOSS? Who would put in the free labor?”

Wondering who will contribute the labor misses the point that contributions to FOSS are often mutually beneficial. Developers gain career benefits, improve their skills, and sometimes even receive direct compensation. It’s not ‘free labor’; it’s a collaborative economy of shared resources and mutual benefits.

“Would it simply be that everyone provides for each other? Everyone pitches in? What about people who have bills to pay?”

Finally, your concern about financial sustainability in a FOSS world seems to overlook the multiple ways people monetize their contributions, either directly or indirectly. Besides, the value of open-source contributions isn’t merely monetary; it includes invaluable intangible benefits like skill development, community building, and personal freedom.

The questions you’re posing have been practically answered by the existing and thriving open-source ecosystem. It’s not just an idealistic notion; it’s a proven, sustainable, and indispensable aspect of the global software landscape.

Richard Stallman listed four freedoms essential to software users: freedom to run a program for any purpose, freedom to study the mechanics of the program and modify it, freedom to redistribute copies, and freedom to improve and change modified versions for public use. To implement these freedoms, users needed full access to the source code. To ensure code remained free and provide it to the public, Stallman created the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allowed software and the future generations of code derived from it to remain free for public use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

In my words: It gives back control to the consumer. Instead of the big corporations effectly being in control of your computer, smartphone, the internet platforms, what videos you get to see. And which updates from your friend’s will result in a notification and which of your friends to drop. And they’ll happily sell your personal data, track you, show massive amounts of advertisements to you and program their software so you get manimpuated into staying longer than you would have wanted on their platform and manipulate you into buying and doing what they like. The Free Software movement is trying to give control back to you, so you can’t be exploited.

There are ways to combine free software with making money. For example by selling additional services, consulting and maintenance. There are more and it’s a complicated topic.

And there are other challenges. For example our way of using technology today, mainly ‘the cloud’ makes things even more complicated.

I think you may be misunderstanding the “free” part of FOSS. FOSS - also known as free software - is free as in freedom, not beer (this confusion is also why I refer to it as libre software). It has nothing to do with money - it is all about having control over the software that you use.

Some here have already pointed out the massive proliferation of libre software that forms practically the entire foundation of the Internet, but I would also like to mention that there are some projects that might even say that being libre software has made it more sustainable; for example, here’s a talk about how the GPLv3 (a copyleft libre software license) keeps the Samba project alive.

There are certain monetization approaches that are infeasible with libre software, yes, but I would argue that this is only ever the case with practices that are anti-consumer. Games as a service is a good example of this; I think it’s absurd you can buy a game that you should rightfully own indefinitely, only for it to become literally borked because it was specifically designed to always be connected to the game company’s servers which could be taken down at any moment. With libre software? You have access to the source code, so it’s not impossible anymore to get your own server running if someone else hasn’t already made the necessary modifications to make it happen.

The philosophy of (and reasons to care about) libre software isn’t quite the topic of this post so I won’t elaborate too much on it (unless you want, of course), but feel free to take a look at this page which discusses just that if you’re interested.

At least for the moment I’m doing it because it is fun. The main project I’m involved with is a fork of something that was pushed to the side and killed off by the big corporation developing it. Are there other tools that do the same job? Yes. But the fact that a small community came together to save the application they liked and is having fun working on it is the only justification I need.

The goal of FOSS has been evolving since.

Let’s start from Richard Stallman, the first promoter of Free Software (that’s the original naming of FOSS, free means not at no-cost but as of freedom to share and modify the software).

In 1970s, there has been little-to-no protection of sharing the software (examples of then-important software was: code compilers (C, FORTRAN), interpreters (LISP, also FORTRAN), mathematical tools, hardware drivers, shell utilities and the operating system itself). The main consumers of software were the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), DARPA (a military experiments lab, creator of the ARPANET that then evolved into the modern internet), university researchers (like MIT Artificial Intelligence lab) and the computer manufacturers (like IBM). There used to be no difference between computer users and programmers, in contrast to the present time. Instead, all of them were hackers (until it became a buzzword by mass media to denote bad actors). They were the people who were striving to push the limits of computation. The software was viewed as common good everyone can reuse, modify and share. It all was so until the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act when software became copyrightable and lots of software manufacturers began developing proprietary software. Stallman was one of the first Free Software fighters. He founded the GNU Project and the legal basis for the copyleft software (that forbids embedding it to the proprietary software). It also coincided with absurd pricing of the influential UNIX operating system, that skyrocketed to thousands of dollars per unit. So the GNU Project managed to write its own C compiler and many shell utilities.

Stallman, and most of the first wave of Free Software supporters, wanted to ensure that computers are used for freedom and that proprietary software was banned. Although he pointed out there must be a method programmers have to be paid, he couldn’t provide a scheme about how programmers could be rewarded, leaving the development of Free Software to very few fanatic developers that see the development of Free Software as lifelong satisfaction.

The second wave started in the late 90s, after Linus Torvalds had already created his own kernel, Linux, that allowed computers to run the complete operating system without dependence on any other proprietary software. The newer generation started acknowledging the fact that 1) private companies are not necessarily evil; 2) free software developers should focus on inclusion, rather than rejection of anyone who don’t conform to their standards (private companies, again). This lead towards a schism among developers, and a new wave of Open Source software began to appear. Open Source software aims to broaden the userbase of people using FOSS, attract new developers, improve code quality of FOSS, etc., instead of de-proprietarizing the whole world.

TL;DR: There are two directions of FOSS:

1. Free Software strives we don’t live in a proprietary dystopia;
2. Open Source software aims to maximize the userbase of FOSS.

Now, about your concerns about software quality are legit. But there is a paradox. The more devs and users are working with the software, the better quality it is. But users don’t want to work with the software that is of poor quality => less users => less feedback from the users (bugs, feature requests and the general idea on how the software is used and should it should be used) => lower quality. And there are factors on devs, depending on who makes the software. Volunteer devs, in general, are more pleasant with making new stuff instead of maintaining the old software. Even worse, they don’t want to maintain software that is poorly maintained and/or unpopular (doesn’t have a catching perspective). This is how FOSS programs die.

Further watching: Revolution OS (2001 documentary about FOSS)

Freedom and privacy. Usually all this free software is providing you a lot more privacy compared to its commercial alternatives, which all require some sort of registration and data collection.

And you would be really surprised how much those commercial solutions rely on FOSS software.

I can only tell you that humanity wouldn’t be so technologically advanced if free software didn’t exist.

There’s no single goal to FOSS. I write software for my own needs, and it literally costs me nothing to give it to other people. It makes no difference if I give it to one person, or one million, or one billion - it’s no harder, or easier, than giving it to no one. Other people seek recognition or the approval of other people. There are probably as many goals as their are FOSS authors.

Financially, you either try to support yourself by soliciting donations, but that just makes it work, and - for me - imparts a sense of obligation to my users. But, yeah, most people have other jobs.

Look at Blender and MediaWiki (the software running Wikipedia). They’re both FOSS and are developed and maintained by volunteers, backed by the end users. They’ve become such a big part of people’s lives, both professionally and privately, that they’ve become the mainstream choice.

What if every software became FOSS? Who would put in the free labor to write the software to print a page, or show an image on screen, or create something more complex like a machine learning advanced AI software?

There’s already FOSS examples of all of these. Many FOSS developers are paid to work on FOSS software, either by companies that depend on it or by donations.