This comes up occasionally and while it’s 100% true FOSS doesn’t mean you can’t get paid, any sufficiently big project is going to get folks repackaging it without the payment component.
A good example is for-sale Wordpress plugins. There are entire sites/communities for using the FOSS license to take those for-sale plugins and redistributing them for free. The RedHat debacle is another example although with some more nuance. Standard Notes had a similar situation.
It looks like the FUTO license is trying to prevent someone from stripping the payment features and redistributing. Personally I prefer when folks use a FOSS license but I think the “you can get paid for FOSS” argument is overly optimistic.
As someone that runs a profitable FOSS business, you can indeed get paid well for FOSS. Just be better than the status quo by a lot. Thankfully it is a low bar.
I took a look at your bio but after a glance (forgive me if I’m missing something obvious) it looks like you do consulting but I don’t see FOSS for sale. I’m curious what your project is if it’s something else, but if it’s consulting that makes sense. Consulting doesn’t really work for a lot of categories of software though. Like nobody is going to pay FUTO for consulting on following YouTubers.
We sell support, customization, ensuring packages some people care about most are supported, etc.
Also some people just pay monthly to ensure we stay viable because we save them a lot of work trying to implement and maintain what we do themselves.
Look at all the content creators that make a living on patreon etc. If you give stuff away for free people value but also make it really easy to support you, often people do.
An example outside my projects is Octoprint. Last time the founder had donations public, she was pulling in like 5k/mo for one person just doing FOSS dev for something totally free no one needs consulting for.
Our own projects individually are not that profitable as they are much more niche, so consulting makes much more sense for us.
That said, for projects that are fully open source you can get listed on opencollective so people can make tax deductible donations to specific open source projects, like the stagex project I founded: https://opencollective.com/stagex/donate
If you are going to do something for public good, make it easy for people to justify donating to you for a tax write off!
Interessting point with the tax right off. I asked my boss to donate to a open source software we used a lot in our dev department and he labeled it as license costs because donations aren't something he could argue for (big company tho).
A caveat here with the stock market comparison, although there are some betting exchanges like Matchbook, most betting is done with fixed odds. That is, the book isn’t letting the market set the odds in the sense of trying to balance their action and add vig, they’re trying to get the most “correct” odds. Often this involves tracking the sharp bettors within the market, but not the market as a whole.
The sharp odds is another factor that makes it impossible to be wildly successful (in addition to your callout on banning/limiting). Like NFL lines as an extreme example are so sharp that I don’t think anyone could reliably beat them.
The strategy this paper seems to be describing is well known as “chasing steam”. You keep an eye on the odds at a “sharp” book, one that’s good at tracking which clients of theirs often win and adjust their odds accordingly, then find books that are slower to adjust their odds. There’s a long tail of “pay per head” bookies, basically your classic street corner bookie but with a SaaS for taking bets, and they’re often the slowest to adjust.
The problem is that identifying this is very easy for a sports book. Basically “show me all accounts that consistently make bets right before we adjust the odds” and then they ban/limit those accounts. In practice the heavy lifting for winning sports bettors is building a network of “outs” or players that will place bets on their behalf. The idea is that you have a recreational bettor (i.e. bets for fun and usually loses) that puts down a bet on your behalf with your money, and if it wins they get to keep a slice. This masks the sharp bets with their personal bad bets.
Really the strategy to beat the odds is one of the easiest parts of the equation. It’s good old fashion people management that’s the biggest part of what makes it work.
When I moved to Las Vegas in the late 90's, I became friends with someone in my new circle who was from Brooklyn, NY and a pretty active sports better. I mean this wasn't the recreational type doing for-fun $20 parlays on Sunday, he was routinely doing $500 and $1k bets ("dimes" he called them). I had been to Vegas on trips before and remember bringing $300 for gambling for a weekend and thinking that was a lot. I was in utter shock at how much he would be riding on a typical NCAA Football Saturday and NFL Sunday. It was one of my first true experiences in my life of what hardcore gambling was and a side I have never seen or known.
Anyway, I remember very clearly how serious his betting was and how he solely looked to find any edges he could. It wasn't about handicapping a game, he was a line sharp. Remember this was a time where Internet was still dial-up and wagering off-shore was still very early days. Many times he would be calling old-fashioned bookmakers back home. He was paying for a service called Don Best and at the time it was pretty expensive but was able to get line-moves almost in real time. He was "Chasing Steam" as you called it. Watch for big line moves in Best and place bets where he could that haven't caught it yet. He was pretty successful and quit his full time job while buying a house, cars, etc. Not flashy but just a living.
Eventually, as all things gambling, it started to turn bad for him. He was getting accounts suspended and getting listed as a sharp. He would call customer support playing dumb and I remember one guy at an offshore book on speaker-phone flat out told him basically no longer want his business as every time he places a bet with them the lines were moving shortly after in his favor and wanted to know what he was using.
I remember his downfall being pretty fast after that. It started with just getting blacklisted at some and the few reputable offshore books left wouldn't keep him long when they discovered he was a steam chaser. He tried changing phone numbers and fake ID's and they caught onto that. Eventually any book that did take his action he started to hear Don Best line moves in the background on the phone and they would tell him to "hold on something is happening" then just give him the new adjusted line. The edge was gone and he started to bet with shadier old-school bookies that didn't have the technology, but they just didn't pay him anyway.
He started to see the writing on the wall and the bill pressures started to effect him as he started to just push into trying to handicap and pick winners based on gut and dabble into some line making software. At one point he was in for a very large sum after a bad Sunday, something like $70k he owed. He struggled for a good 5 years after that, divorced and back to a 9-5. Last I seen him was right before Covid and he was out of that world not having placed a bet in a long while he said and was now into options trading.
I doubt betting line moves is even a thing anymore. Information just moves so fast now and books have evolved way beyond. Plus with how big sports wagering in in the US, lines probably only move now because of large public betting waves or injuries.
> I doubt betting line moves is even a thing anymore
It definitely is and it is lucrative if you go down the right rabbit holes. When you are able to be disciplined and completely ignore any sports fandoms you might have, you can have many "dimes" riding at a time and not even break a sweat
> he was out of that world not having placed a bet in a long while he said and was now into options trading.
There are many ways of trading options as part of an investment strategy. But it also possible to trade options in a way that is functionally gambling.
Thank you for sharing this. The gambling world has always been a fascination of mine and I would’ve loved to have been a bit older during the heyday of offshore bookies.
Yeah it’s extremely sketchy but legal. Sports betting is treated as a game offered on the casino’s terms and they get to choose who and for how much they’ll play with. You can see it in the financials of the big companies. Where the theoretical win for the casino on most sports bets is around 5%, DraftKings and the others are regularly hitting 3x that much. They ban/limit winners and push everyone else toward bad bets (e.g. same game parlays).
Sometimes I wonder if you framed it differently would it be more appealing to tech workers. Like if there was a startup that negotiates on behalf of employees for salary, benefits, remote vs in-office, etc. using collective influence as more people from a particular company used it. Or to put it another way, how much of the distaste for unions is wrapped up in the term “union”?
There's more to a union than just negotiating on behalf of employees. Unions have quasi-government status wherein the National Labor Relations Bureau can just step in and force the company to make business decisions. Furthermore, unions aren't optional in a lot of states. If you want to work a certain job at a company, you have no choice but to join the union (or at least pay union dues).
Something like the National Press Photographer's Association [1] is a valuable organization. They provide resources like contract templates, and can help if a customer doesn't pay the agreed royalties and whatnot. But membership isn't mandatory. A software developer's association and a software developer's unions would be to vastly different groups.
You'd need a free market of competing startups which workers could freely switch between or choose to not use, which is antithetical to the very concept of a union.
> if there was a startup that negotiates on behalf of employees for salary, benefits, remote vs in-office, etc. using collective influence as more people from a particular company used it.
I...love this idea. And end-users could pay them dues, excuse me, fees for the service.
The company seems to be in rough condition. Say they go bankrupt and an ad-tech data broker buys their assets. Now DraftKings can laser focus their ads to folks genetically predisposed to addiction.
You’d have to work out what variants predispose for that which is no easy task. And once you did that you don’t even really need individual dna data. You might find say a swedish population tends to have the variant and you just target swedes in general.
> Say they go bankrupt and an ad-tech data broker buys their assets. Now DraftKings can laser focus their ads to folks genetically predisposed to addiction.
Dennis Montgomery, the man that sold Lindell the “evidence” in the first place, is a fascinating character. He has been pulling con after con, including $30MM from the Department of Defense, with seemingly no consequences.
I get the point you’re trying to convey but - at least in the US - you’re legally required to make donations to political candidates publicly anyway, so this isn’t really a regression over the status quo.
That's why you make your anonymous donation to the "Friends of John Smith" organisation, who is completely unaffiliated with John Smith and is merely interested in seeing him elected to office
SoundCloud's Roshi database is built on LWW-Element-Sets, but doesn't have an explicitly CRDT-based API. It looks like they no longer use it internally, however.
A good example is for-sale Wordpress plugins. There are entire sites/communities for using the FOSS license to take those for-sale plugins and redistributing them for free. The RedHat debacle is another example although with some more nuance. Standard Notes had a similar situation.
It looks like the FUTO license is trying to prevent someone from stripping the payment features and redistributing. Personally I prefer when folks use a FOSS license but I think the “you can get paid for FOSS” argument is overly optimistic.