by peatmoss on 1/16/19, 2:41 PM
My best argument for UBI is, “I’d love to be able to work on F/OSS full time.”
Kudos for making it a reality. It may be scratching a personal itch, but the positive externalities to society are real.
by Leace on 1/16/19, 2:31 PM
It's inspiring to see people work full-time on free software. I remember the shock when I found out Conversations.im creator is also working "9-5 days in Open Source." [0]
Good luck Drew!
[0]: https://twitter.com/iNPUTmice
by kev009 on 1/16/19, 1:44 PM
It's funny seeing people from niche things you used to be into pop up in other places. When I was in my teens I did a lot of Ultima Online emulator stuff and have seen many of the server devs at places like Google in my career. I remember Drew's name from minecraft reverse engineering and development when I was in college.
by andrepd on 1/16/19, 2:22 PM
Funny, just yesterday I stumbled upon your blog and the post about your plan to working in Free Software full time. Your enthusiasm transpires, and your level-headedness. Now I see you've done it! I just want to say, congratulations!
by seba_dos1 on 1/16/19, 4:17 PM
Glad to see that! Recently I've been lucky enough to be contracted as a freelancer on GPL projects, or at least projects with LGPL core, with sending improvements to upstream projects being part of the job. It's so fulfilling and liberating that I wish it will stay this way forever :)
by kstenerud on 1/16/19, 7:03 PM
It would make a lot of sense for larger software houses to donate to open source developers who develop the tools they use. This is win-win since they get the best person to maintain the software, have the developer's ear, and don't have to deal with labor laws or office space or management. They don't even need to be in the same country or time zone.
Plus, it's a cheap way to virtue signal, and goodwill is always good for business!
by dominotw on 1/16/19, 2:44 PM
I wish America had universal health care. If i do this, I can afford to pay for rent and food in a low cost of living area but not health insurance.
Anyone know of a nonprofit that pays for health insurance for ppl working on OSS?
by mr_puzzled on 1/16/19, 1:30 PM
That's amazing, best of luck. Will the revenue info be public? Are the current subscriptions close to replacing what you were making at your fulltime job? Hopefully sustainability is not far off and I look forward to the day when you can hire other prominent contributors such as emersion.
by jordigh on 1/16/19, 2:44 PM
Really brave to take a gamble on negative income. I really hope it pays off. This could be a very good example of how to make free software.
by simlevesque on 1/16/19, 4:40 PM
<3 Thanks for your work on Sway, wlroots and sr.ht ! I use all three every day.
by dustfinger on 1/16/19, 2:58 PM
I would like to do the same thing Drew. Thank you for making an example.
Cheers!
by simplecomplex on 1/16/19, 5:17 PM
Please think twice before spending your life savings, especially if you have no solid plan for getting donations to pay for your living expenses. It’s much less risky to increase donations before quitting your job.
Just be careful if this is your life savings.
by dajohnson89 on 1/16/19, 8:08 PM
This guy got me into Bitcoin in 2013, on freenode. I helped him diagnose a bug using git-bisect, and he paid me in btc. Had to create a coinbase account to receive the bounty.
Best of luck Drew, and thank you.
by interfixus on 1/16/19, 2:45 PM
Anyone working on Alpine and Musl wins my more or less automatic upvote.
And then full-time, with no immediate reimbursement and no long-term guarantee. Refreshing. Thank you, sir.
by ISNIT on 1/16/19, 3:43 PM
For anyone who'd like to try their hand at paid open source work, an organisation I write code for is hiring an Android dev to lead development on their Wikimedia-funded open source app...
https://kiwix.org/android-dev/by harlanji on 1/16/19, 4:05 PM
I have been doing this for a year. Check my Twitter for how it’s going, same handle.
by mStreamTeam on 1/16/19, 5:40 PM
You're the guy who got into a debate about chat protocols on my project, mstream. Man it's a small world.
Good luck with everything. And thanks for checking out my project.
by jammygit on 1/16/19, 11:04 PM
I saw your website last year and thought your projects were intriguing. Congrats on being able to do it full time!
by isacikgoz on 1/16/19, 2:21 PM
Congratulations! It is a great devotion of you, I would like to support too!
by kevinherron on 1/16/19, 3:40 PM
Congrats Drew. I've been rooting for you since your original post.
by jai_ on 1/16/19, 4:39 PM
Will you be planning to contribute on the osu!lazer project again?
by knocte on 1/16/19, 2:38 PM
Welcome to the club!
by ktta on 1/16/19, 2:24 PM
Wishing you all the best!
Looking forward to sr.ht being a success :)
by JoshuaRLi on 1/16/19, 4:38 PM
Drew, thank you.
by skrowl on 1/16/19, 2:53 PM
Here's my best argument for why UBI can't work in the USA. Let me know where i went wrong:
My TV told me a "living wage" is at least $15 (but probably higher in liberal controlled areas like NYC / most CA cities / etc due to high cost of living & taxation), but we'll start with $15 to make it easy.
$15/hr at 40hr/week = $31,200 per year.
$31,200 * 328,300,000 population of USA = $10,242,960,000,000
Written out (for emphasis) that's TEN TRILLION TWO HUNDERD FOURTY THREE MILLION DOLLARS. That's just the handouts, not counting in any overhead / administrative costs to give out the handouts. It'll likely be more than that if you adjust it higher than $15 for people living in NYC, etc.
Meanwhile, the entire GDP of the USA is less than 20 Trillion. That's the current GDP where people are incentivized to work, so it would likely go down (perhaps drastically) when people are paid to do nothing under UBI.
Let me know how that adds up.
by kongDaKid on 1/16/19, 3:35 PM
Hi Drew. I follow you on mastodon and your blog and appreciate your contributions and insights. Best of luck to you to succeed in your new venture