Have you used Amazon, Netflix, PayPal, or LinkedIn recently? What about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has had over 1 billion users and boosted OpenAI’s valuation to nearly $30 billion? If so, I have a question for you: What is core-js?

All these services and many of the Internet’s most popular websites rely on core-js, a JavaScript library used to implement many browser features and operations. However, zloirock on GitHub, who developed and maintained this library, revealed that he received approximately $2 per hour for his work in most months. How can someone who builds something that keeps much of the modern Internet running be paid well below minimum wage? It’s because he has kept core-js a FOSS project.

zloirock’s full story is heart-wrenching, and I encourage you to read his blog post to learn the details. Despite his contributions to the Internet, he has been facing financial difficulties for several years. When he tried to generate revenue and ask for donations, he received significant backlash. To sum it up, his work has gone largely unrecognized, unappreciated, and uncompensated for years. Although the Internet transcends borders, his ability to receive financial support for his work has also been hampered by current geopolitical conditions. zloirock is based in Russia, which is currently under significant economic sanctions. As one famous XKCD comic illustrated, the situation with core-js is not unique. Many FOSS maintainers struggle to receive appropriate compensation for their work, even though FOSS projects are the foundation of most modern digital infrastructure. Although FOSS is one of our only hopes for subverting what some scholars have called surveillance capitalism or data colonialism, creating an anti-capitalist mode of production within the larger capitalist system is not a trivial task.

Freedom Through FOSS

Commentators from both sides of the political spectrum have identified how “big tech” threatens privacy, national security, and personal liberty. Yet, many proposed solutions to these problems—such as banning software or attempting to otherwise police speech on the Internet—are accompanied by their own privacy and ethics concerns. This situation is ironic, given that many early Internet pioneers saw the Web as a pseudo-libertarian paradise where people could carve out their own spaces to do whatever they wanted. This culture of “hacking” (taking things apart and reconstructing them to serve one’s personal ends) is still reflected in today’s software development culture. Many developers enjoy and actively work on maintaining projects FOSS projects, which, by definition, are decentralized, auditable, and modifiable. While the libertarian-influenced ideologies of early Internet pioneers had and still have problems, the lingering legacy of their approach to the Internet may be one thing that can save us from surveillance capitalism.

As the economist and innovation scholar Eric von Hippel has documented in his work on “user-driven innovation” and “free innovation,” non-commercial, freely distributed designs, ideas, and software can and often do “outcompete” products from major firms (Hippel, 1988, 2017). Apache is a viable and common alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) on web servers. Open-source projects like Joplin compete with proprietary options like Evernote. As a Linux user, I argue that open-source operating systems can serve the purposes of many PC users better than Windows. Rather than collecting data and allowing a handful of companies to control how people use digital products, these FOSS alternatives democratize the Internet and provide an alternative to the current paradigm. As Yochai Benkler stated in one of his studies on what he termed “commons-based peer production,” the FOSS model “places intrinsic and social motivations, rather than material incentives, at the core of innovation, and hence growth,” “challenges the centrality of property, as opposed to the interaction of property and commons, to growth,” and “questions the continued centrality of firms to the innovation process (Benkler, 2014).”

There is a reason why so many firms use FOSS products as the foundation for their proprietary tools. The flexibility and malleability of open-source software make it a perfect base for further development. Similarly, such software is unencumbered by the licensing and patenting issues that drive up transaction costs and slow innovation when attempting to build on existing proprietary tools. FOSS licenses typically assert no legal relationship between the user and the producer, making it easy for open-source software to do what the Internet already does best—transcend borders. Let’s return to zloirock, in Russia. Due to modern geopolitical affairs, it would be impossible for many US-based companies to license or pay for proprietary software he developed. Yet, all the firms listed at the start of this article continue to use core-js freely. This is only possible because core-js open-source. The lack of legal obligation or entanglement between the FOSS developer and the end user is a strength, but it is also a weakness that hampers the growth of the FOSS model.

FOSS but not Free

Almost by definition, FOSS projects are side projects for most people. Developers or enthusiasts with full-time jobs write the code for a feature they want and request a merge with the project. Corporations sometimes pay people to work on FOSS projects through awards, like Google Summer of Code. The employees of for-profit tech companies might also upstream modifications or innovations they develop while using an open-source product in their software or workflow. Corporate-backed FOSS projects hire developers using the money they charge to provide special support or additional add-ons for power users or other corporations. 8bit Solutions, developer of Bitwarden (which you should probably be using), and Red Hat, developer of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are examples of this model. Some individuals can work on FOSS projects full-time through donations, but this is the exception rather than the norm.

Supporting people working on essential but time-consuming FOSS projects is a challenge. In an ideal world with UBI or some other system that allows us to live in a manner approaching a post-scarcity society, those who enjoy software development would find projects they like to work on and contribute to them as much or as little as they like. zloirock would still be able to make ends meet even if no one wanted to donate to him or pay for his work. However, we exist within the capitalist system where people only get the means to eat or put food on the table if their work gets recognized as productive. Similarly, there can be much psychological distress when the community that uses a FOSS project disagrees with changes and harasses the developer. There’s also the risk that the entire Internet might temporarily collapse or have significant security vulnerabilities if there is only one maintainer for a critical system and they decide to abandon a project or are just slow to make a change. So, what is the best way to ensure that FOSS projects stay FOSS while also compensating the creators and ensuring the project is well maintained? That remains to be seen.

References

Benkler, Y. (2014). Peer production, the commons, and the future of the firm. Strategic Organization, 15(2), 264–274.

Hippel, E. von. (1988). The sources of innovation. Oxford University Press.

Hippel, E. von. (2017). Free innovation. MIT Press.