Based on my observations, 99% of FLOSS projects are maintained by a single author, and being FLOSS doesn't really benefit the author or the project as such, since everyone's essentially just getting free shit, with no one giving anything back. This applies for some quite large projects too. @Gargron is basically doing most of the work alone. He benefits from donations, but would Mastodon be any worse off if it was closed-source freeware (and no one had any objections to that)?
@hector I understand the ethos. I'm poking holes in the logos; the pragmatic argument that making your software free will make it better, because you can leverage your community. If making software free is a charitable act that rarely benefits the developer, and the developer isn't all that altruistic, the idea suddenly becomes much less attractive.
@hector It also becomes a less interesting proposition for businesses, most of which are *not* releasing free software because they love you and want you to be happy.
@thor @Gargron I boosted this because I think it's an interesting question. But I also think I disagree.
Mastodon, for example, has had 475 contributors. I don't want to take anything away from the fantastic work ＠mastodon.social has done, but I don't think you should just ignore the litterally thousands of commits others have made.
Plus open source is about way more than just contributions. For one thing, if turned evil tomorrow (not likely) the license would let us fork
@codesections @thor @Gargron If it was closed source he wouldn't have been able to do it himself as there wouldn't have been contributions. He would neither have been able to build on ActivityPub/OStatus but forced to do it from scratch. Which would have meant VC funding. Which imply a need for revenue.
So Mastodon wouldn't have existed as it do in its current form... It would in other word have been way way worse.
@shellkr @codesections @thor Okay, I have no interest in arguing in favour of being closed source, but I feel the need to correct some things.
OStatus/ActivityPub have no requirement for the implementations to be open-source or free software. And a big chunk of protocol-critical code and features was written by me. (When Mastodon went viral for the first time, the percentage was 100%)
@Gargron @shellkr @thor Thanks for pointing that out. Like I said initially, no intention *at all* of minimizing the *fantastically hard work* you've put into this. Even with my much smaller-scale open source projects, I know how hard, and sometimes thankless, the work can be.
I think that open source has a lot of advantages that aren't captured by pure contribution count, but I absolutely don't want talking about those advantages to take anything away from your contributions.
@Gargron @codesections @thor Ohh... I stand corrected. Should have looked up which license it was under.
But as you are on the line.... Why did you open-source it?