Cory Doctorow, nailing it as usual.
If you care about how people are treated by platforms, you can’t just tell them to pay for services instead of using ad-supported media. The most important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn’t whether you pay with cash instead of attention – it’s whether you’re locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to.
↫ Cory Doctorow
I’m sick and tired of the phrase “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product”, because it implies that if just you pay for a product or service, you’re not going to be treated like ass. The problem is, as Doctorow points out, that this simply is not supported by the evidence, and that it isn’t whether or not you’re paying that makes you have a good or bad experience – it’s whether or not you’re locked in.
If you’ve got nowhere else to go, then corporations can treat you like ass.
There are so, so many free services and products I use where I’m anything but a “product”. My Linux distribution of choice, Fedora. My web browser, Firefox. The countless open source applications I use on my desktops, laptops, and smartphone. Those are all cases where even though I’m not paying, I know I’m being treated with respect, and I feel entirely comfortable with all of those. And no, you don’t get to exclude the open source world just because it’s inconvenient for the “you’re the product” argument.
There are also countless services and products where the opposite is true; I’m a paying customer, but I still feel like I’m the product. I pay for additional Google Drive storage. I pay for an Office 364 subscription because I needed it as a translator (I’m working on OSNews full-time now, and could use your help keeping the site going), but I can’t cancel it because my wife, my parents, and my parents-in-law use that same subscription. We pay for Netflix and one or two other video services. I don’t know if our ISP or wireless provider do anything malicious, but it wouldn’t surprise me. And so on.
Being a paying customer means nothing. It’s how easy it is for you to stop being a customer that matters.
Honestly I think you’re misinterpreting the phrase. “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product”, and that is leading to a confused argument.
Its not about the service you receive. It’s the fact that no service is truly free (as in beer).
So,if it isn’t monetised by you paying for it (like photoshop subscription), they are monetising something else. YOU. Google is the biggest example of this. You don’t pay for google search, but they use your search history and other details to monetise you as/for targeted advertising.
Linux is given away for free, and the way It monetises you is through usage stats, bug reports, code contributions, etc. It might not get the same value from Every user. But it is gaining value.
For example consider why Redhat give Fedora away for free. I’d put money on the fact that every free home Linux user (who is in a position to choose a server OS at work) chooses Linux. Likely the same distro family they use at home. Those professional installations translate into Real support money.
Not every exchange if value in very broad sense monetization. Spending time with your friends is not monetizing their attention.
Time is money :p
Seriously though, that’s not what the phrase refers to either..
Yes, and no,
“You” are not the product, but “your time” is.
In an ideal world, we could be paying for Google services, either as a lump sum, or with automated micro transactions. However people choose not to do that. (They had an experiment, which more or less failed).
Basically, Google offers about $100 worth of services per yer (Search, GMail, Drive, …), and makes slightly more than that through advertisement.
And that advertisement is selling the screen space to third parties, not selling your data to them. (Which would never make sense, as they are the best at using your data to make money).
However (1), there are services where you have the option to pay and have no ads (for example Google Workspace, or YouTube Red), (2) there are online brokers that actually sell your data (too many to list), (3) there are paid services that sell your data (your phone provider like T-Mobile or ATT which will sell location for $200 to “bounty hunters”)
per year*
Google doesn’t sell user data, but they do buy it, typically without user permission. Personally I feel both the sellers and buyers of private data need to be criticized. Obviously these markets are drive by both supply and demand – If there was no demand these markets would dry up.
Erm, Thom, you are spreading two myths that I am getting “sick and tired” from encountering.
The first one is the logical fallacy that “if A then B” implies “if B then A”. It doesn’t, you even give a counterexample yourself, but it is hardly unique. “If something is a bear, it is a mammal”, “If Jack wins the lottery, then he is rich” are other ones.
The second one is the myth that free/libre software is a free product. Free software comes with the expectation that users contribute to the projects or free software ecosystem. This can be a financial contribution, but also something as simple as a bug report or helping someone with a technical problem via a forum.
I’d even argue that a donation to osnews would be a way of giving back to the community, since it reports so much on open source projects.
Mote,
It’s interesting that both you and Adurbe have said this. It would be nice for users to contribute something back to FOSS, but I would argue the opposite is true for the vast majority of users. Most use the software while contributing exactly nothing, and to be fair to them, the license allows it. I’m not saying it should be this way, but I think it would be somewhat naive to pretend that it isn’t. This is why it is so difficult to base one’s business entirely on developing FOSS software without another way of getting paid.
> Most use the software while contributing exactly nothing, and to be fair to them, the license allows it.
Doesn’t matter – just like the companies that advertise can expect only a small percentage of users actually purchasing the advertised product, projects will do fine with having only a fraction of users contribute (directly).
Furthermore, someone not contributing now and to the specific software that they use at the moment does not mean that they will never be participating in the broader open source community (financially or through participation).
Like I mentioned before, a simple question on reddit/discord/github can already be a meaningful contribution to the community.
Mote,
I would say that the level of support very much does matter. When only a small fraction of users support it, even by your lax definition of support, the developer can easily end up burning out and getting nothing in return and may even have to pay for expenses on top of their time. Meanwhile big companies like amazon, microsoft, apple, facebook, etc may be using the code to advance their business without contributing a cent back to the devs. This has been the norm for FOSS, and it’s allowed by the license, but I don’t think I’m alone in questioning the fairness of it.
Sure, but obviously contributions along those lines don’t match the developer’s efforts or pay the bills.
For example, I am in the market for a usb oscilloscopes and I am noticing a lack of support for linux. There are several projects that are either abandoned with several years of inactivity and/or very limited support for older hardware only. I am thinking “Here is a fun project that’s right up my alley. I could personally fix this!” I know that I could build great FOSS oscilloscope software that supports many more models. And I could, but it would cost me tens of thousands of dollars just to buy the hardware I’d like to support and those users who you say are “meaningfully contributing” would keep asking me to support XYZ without actually contributing anything to cover my expenses, and it would turn into a full time job, very likely unpaid. I am not independently wealthy and it wouldn’t be financially sustainable. In the end my pet project would end up being like the others, incomplete milestones with limited hardware support when I can’t afford to go further and well intentioned users asking when XYZ will be supported. Incidentally this is what is happening in the forums for most of these projects. I saw one author explicitly say he can’t afford new hardware.
So while it’s nice to say “users contribute meaningfully on redhit/etc”, honestly I think FOSS developers deserve better than that. It’s tough.
The FOSS model definitely leaves a lot to be desired in how money is distributed. Especially to unsexy core building blocks.
If you look back through recent-ish OSnews stories there have been multiple individuals burning out recently. Something needs to be done differently. But not sure what/how…
I really think that you understand open source wrongly. It was never meant to be a business model at first.
Instead, it was about developers implementing stuff for themselves only and then sharing their work for the greater good.
In this context open source works perfectly fine and the freebie-users still add benefit by testing my stuff and returning with use-cases and exceptions I would have never considered, making my solution robust and stable.
Once this is achieved, you have a fair chance to gain commercial interest and to sell support contracts.
For example, the small excellent H2 database has been offered money several times and they are not interested. You could easily establish a whole enterprise providing commercial support for it — all open source and even Apache License.
> For example, I am in the market for a usb oscilloscopes and I am noticing a lack of support for linux.
Set-up a shell company and a business plan. Some nice white-papers and slides how you will implement full support on linux. Add a business plan showing the needed investment and the return/incentives for the investors. That’s the simple part.
Then travel around, present and look for investors. Everyone who NEEDs those devices fully support on Linux and/or BSD. Convince them to invest into your company and sponsor the implementation and setup cost.
Once there is enough funding, start buying the equipment and develop your stuff. Once matured, get support and consulting contracts.
Andreas Reichel,
The problem is that it distributes the work and cost on the backs of a few without compensation when their work get used by not only millions of individual freeloaders, but also by fortune 500 companies. Virtually all of whom justify their freeloading using the very same points you are using “It’s not meant to be business model….FOSS is for the greater good”, etc. Meanwhile the disparity remains strikingly unfair. Even if we choose not to care about the unfairness of it, we should recognize that this lack of resources is a common theme for strained FOSS projects. From the devs behind openbsd and openssh running out of money and XZ supported by an overworked loan developer.
Trust me, when I first graduated, I tried. Getting investors interested in funding FOSS projects is not simple. They don’t want to pay you to develop software that users and competitors can copy for free. Even popular & successful companies are facing financial pressure from investors to sort of undermine FOSS, looking at redhat here.
It’s not just Linux FOSS oscilloscopes that come up short. There used to be several active/vibrant FOSS VOIP stacks. I came back years later only to find those devs burnt out and nearly all the projects I once used unmaintained. It turns out having users who feel entitled to use your software for free is a hard way to run a business, and the truth is that I am partly to blame for it as well.
https://nerdvittles.com/some-asterisk-resolutions-for-the-new-year/
Even just a small project of limited scope to add motherboard support to linux can turn into a grind for devs who have to deal with both user demands and kernel politics.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/IT87-Linux-Driver-Axing
The notion that we do this for the “Greater Good” is fine and dandy to clear our conscience, but it still doesn’t negate the fact that FOSS devs are doing real work and spending their own money. Don’t you think they deserve any compensation?
Honestly I understand the appeal of FOSS philosophy, there is a sort of naive innocence to it. But the reality is that the exploitation of unpaid work is rampant. I don’t know what the solution is. I am concerned that we may be systematically sweeping a lot of problems under the rug to give the industry a clean bill of health, when things aren’t that simple.
@Alfman,
unfortunately I am not able to respond to your last comment — although it is so interesting and there are so many things to say.
@Thom,
not sure if this is just me but I feel like this kind of discussion is as valuable as the original content of your site. Leaving Alfman’s posts unanswered because of technical restrictions in thread depth is unsatisfying!
Consider the successful open source models (financially speaking).
It’s those that generate revenue from support. Redhat, basically the king when it comes to monetization of FOSS.
I’ll use their Old model as it more simple to describe for the purposes of the point I’m (trying) to make but Ubuntu has similar.
They give CentOS away for free, an exact duplicate of their Premium Redhat product.
They make 0 money off of that. Indeed, it Costs to build the distro as they hire employees to do it.
Out of those free users, 1% want/need a support contract. Someone on the end of the phone. So they pay for Redhat. That 1% covers the costs for the other 99% (and then some).
The 99% may/may not submit bug reports or other things, but if something does wrong, they participate in forums, helping others in the future.
I am writing this on Fedora. I build a couple of RPMs on COPR and have helped where I can on forums and taken part in release tests. I’ve not paid anyone. But I’ve given my time freely to help (myself and) others.
Adurbe,
A few things to unpack here.
Most of the developers whose software is featured in RHEL won’t see a cent of redhat’s sales. I don’t know how much redhat donates to FOSS projects, but if you are a FOSS developer who’s software gets picked up by redhat, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be compensated for your work. To be fair, FOSS licenses allow redhat to sell software without any compensation to the authors.
I agree that CentOS used to be a clone of redhat, but it isn’t any longer. It’s been repurposed by redhat to be a test/staging distro. New forks have taken on the previous role played by centos, but this is happening without redhat’s blessing. https://rockylinux.org/
This is all business as useful for FOSS, but recently IBM/redhat have started requiring customers to agree to new license terms that punish them for trying to exercise FOSS redistribution rights. This to me signals that redhat’s support for FOSS has shifted rather dramatically. Customers are no longer welcome to redistribute FOSS software under FOSS terms unless it comes from one of redhat’s upstream testing distros. In other words, RHEL wants to take the community’s work, but they don’t want the community to take theirs.
Many people here on osnews have voiced support for redhat, saying they deserve to get paid. Obviously I’ve been pushing similar messaging here. But I also see major hypocrisy in taking FOSS software from upstream without compensation, selling it, and then trying to tack on new license terms to block downstream users from doing the same thing redhat did. It really seems like they want one set of rules applied to themselves and another for others.
Alfman,
Not that I doubt you, but this is the first time I saw this claim:
Is there any more information / links?
As, this would be pretty much against GPL both in spirit, and legally. And why is FSF not on top of this?
sukru,
https://almalinux.org/blog/our-value-is-our-values/
sukru,
I am of that opinion. After looking just now I did not FSF coverage, if you find something would you post it?
Also if you manage to find a copy of redhat’s contract published somewhere, I’d like to read it for myself too. I’m not sure they want it to be public though.
There’s been a lot of discussion over whether it violates GPL, which you should have no trouble finding 🙂
https://itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/rhel-source-availability-questions-over-whether-red-hat-is-violating-gpl.html
> It would be nice for users to contribute something back to FOSS, but I would argue the opposite is true for the vast majority of users.
They contribute a lot — just by using it. Let me explain: One of the biggest challenges in life is “fair valuation”. What is your time worth? And what is worth your time?
In my career I landed maybe 1 out of seven, in reality it was closer to 1 out of twelve. Knowing which one before you run for too long into the wrong direction is priceless.
And those freebie users can help you with that! For free!
If they start using your sketch or POC you will learn immediately if it is something to push for or if it was just a good idea at the wrong time.
We’ve moved beyond TANSTAAFL into a paradigm where “We Are All Sheep To Be Sheared”. (WAASTBS?????)
Thank dog for MXLinux, Firefox and ublock.
“The most important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn’t whether you pay with cash instead of attention – it’s whether you’re locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to.”
Really? We know Facebook keeps shadow profiles. Google has Analytics everywhere. You so much as show your nose on the internet, identity made available or not, and companies are trying and mostly succeeding to track you. Flight risk? There is no flight risk. The internet has become Hotel California. “You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!”
Your choice is FAANG or companies that dream of being FAANG.
The old internet is still there, in small alternate platforms. Cool places. Lovely for the people who don’t mind that their direct loved ones aren’t there too. Also lonely places if you want a shared online life with the people you care about in your direct circles.
IMO, the dream that the internet connects us all in a meaningful way is dead.
In a strange way the platform issue has a parallel to democracy. You’ve a democracy if the society can plausibly change the ruling block at will.
There’s a great book by Yanis Varoufakis called “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism” which goes even further than this hot-take. He points out that algorithm driven store fronts aren’t even markets. Great read.