My gut answer is “yes!!!” or “revolution” but I want to hear what y’all think. For those unware, some creative professions such as film writers get paid a small portion of all revenue generated by their work after it’s been produced, which is called a “residual,” and it’s part of their current fight with hollywood not properly paying those residuals due to the streaming loophole.
Since most programs that are profitable are based on the work of long gone developers (basically capital that gets worked on by machine labour), I think this might be a great demand for an eventual software development union.
What do y’all think?
The USSR didn’t grant any individual citizen IP rights and it worked out pretty well for them.
I’m saying this with all the love in my heart, but royalties under socialism is a petit bourgeois dream. “I’ll make a super cool app and get paid millions for it and never have to work again!” and I get it, because who actually wants to get up every morning in capitalism?
But in socialism, the result of your labour is socialised. We don’t have the socialisation of labour and anarchy of production, we have the socialisation of both.
You make a great app, you get perhaps some recognition, the state takes ownership of it, and can make it available to your peers free of charge. Remember that by being granted royalties for your creation (as much as it can be considered your sole creation), you effectively increase the costs for someone else to use your product and prevent some from using it. This shouldn’t happen in socialism. It would lead us right back to capitalism.
If it’s a team effort and you have 5, 6 or more authors, with all of them being paid residuals, you have to multiply the price of the product to cover their share as well.
It’s in fact become more apparent than ever that software needs to be free in all ways in the 21st century.
It’s actually interesting you mention film directors because their unions fought to get residuals. They used to be (and still are outside of the big names) considered employees of a studio who were hired to deliver a product, and once again studios are trying to cut the costs of labour. They used to be paid a pittance to direct movies (compared to the time put into a single project) and then the company would make millions out of this. It also gave them revenue during the “off-seasons” if there were fewer productions or smaller budget ones ongoing, since they were at the mercy of the studio putting them on a project.
Fair points!
I think the perspective I’m going with this is more of a reformist socdem-ish “current conditions” one rather than the ideal world after a revolution. A lot of my colleagues had to jump straight from job to job without time to re-orient themselves, or even work without vacations for years for fear of being “let go” under the gig economy situation that is enforced particularly on poorer people. And it’d be very hard to enforce paid time off on freelancing afaik.
So the intent behind the idea is less of a “I will make a blockbuster app and make millions” but rather a “I’ll be able to afford rent even if I get fired.” But once we get to the point where people aren’t thrown on the streets for being unemployed, I definitely agree that residuals (or the concept of IP or non-FOSS software for that matter) shouldn’t be maintained.
The writers (and their current fight with AMPTP) are direct inspiration specifically because of how it was one of their strongest demands in the 70s and from what I heard it really made their lives more liveable, and it seems to be a pretty similar job structure to software development. A good intersection of those is the game dev industry, that is structured around hiring as many fresh developers, overworking them and then laying them off once the game is done. AFAIK they don’t have any residuals guaranteed by law, and their working conditions are generally pretty hellish being part of the biggest entertaining industry.
It’s a strange balance to make on a software union, because freelancing is not entirely a bad thing (i.e. more flexible hours and work from home by default), but a lot of already established STEM unions are explicitly against it and that puts off a lot of people from organising. Specially those who really need that freelancing job for their own particular reasons. I’m kinda trying to think of ways to reconcile those two very different forms of software work in my head in a way that doesn’t hurt either of them. I would be happy to hear more suggestions or feedback.
I feel IP is not the way to go, ever.
Strengthening the concept of IP by creating passive income for individuals does not build a better world.
Is there a way from a software union perspective to ask for more work in gpl/foss based components, maybe?
That would be another way to go about it, but I can’t see how we could either force the corporations to open their source, or use that to better compensate workers. I probably could’ve gone through it more in-depth in the post, but I thought of this idea specifically to help out contractor-type workers who usually don’t have basic guaranteed rights like paid time off, but who would not want to lose some of the benefits of contractor-type work by joining the union.
I see now from all the comments how it can have a lot of counter-productive side effects, and I definitely think that FOSS should always be at the heart of every software union (and also internal training, for that matter), but I can’t think of a way to use it to solve this specific problem (which I forgot to include in the original post lol).
Ive been thinking a bit about it, but there’s no obvious solution. We’re reasonably well treated by the capital.
Anything we ask is likely to lower our financial returns in the short term, in my opinion, since free-software can’t tap into “free-market” money as easily, for it’s intrinsic scaling/copyleft characteristics.
Specifically, we could ask that union members have to dedicate (say) 5% of their hours to free software initiatives. We’d not be releasing proprietary code, but it would be contributing to the ecosystem.
Still, I think something we miss as software developers is the willingness to find our own customers, to use FOSS to compete seriously with middleman giants, like uber and booking.
I’m finding activity pub and lemmy a really interesting case for free, decentralised competition, and a possible solution to scam, by giving providers a chance to build their reputation. There’s also opencollective.com’s business model, where anyone making money with their platform has to pay them.
How that ties back down with unions, I’m not sure, but I feel those discussions could move forward hand in hand.
Labor should only get remunerated for the time spent in producing the thing. Someone making nuts and bolts doesn’t get paid residuals, so I don’t see why someone producing software, which is a commodity like any other, should either. And those residuals would have to come out of the pockets of those actually creating value.
a commodity like any other
I think this is where I may be a bit misguided. I have been thinking of software both as a commodity and as effectively industrial capital. In that sense, a lot of the “value” generated by corporations like google comes by using automatic labour of hardware on software (both of which are the corporation’s sole property) for which nobody in the company actually gets paid, specially if the developers no longer work there. There are always people working in maintenance and administration, but in my experience those are a very small number of workers compared to those who produce the software before being “relocated” or laid off.
But then it gets really confusing and contradictory for me, and I admit I don’t know much about the labour theory of value in the first place. I just really feel that this is why corporations really like to pretend like software development is cool, but then do their best to promote their programmers to managerial positions or just fire and rehire a lot, because the subsequent labour force is paid at kWh rather than rent prices.
This assumes money is validated in the first place. In a utopian society, people are given what they need, and are asked to contribute to society in the form of labor. A programmer is just as necessary as an artist or a garbage collector, so they would likewise be given whatever they need.
I guess the point there is not about how life should be under communism years after the revolution, but a pragmatic question on a current day union demand. In an utopian society there might as well not be any money and everybody automatically gets their fair share, but that’s a bit far off for starting an union under our current conditions.
Well, the current system of paying programmers for as long as they’re employed works in that case. In my experience, you tend to work on much the same software the whole time anyway. If it were more like phone apps, then yeah, you kind of do get residuals in the form of a 99¢ payment each time somebody buys it. Another analog is software licensing. I don’t know about you, but I hate “renting” software. I’d much rather just pay a lot now and be done with it.
I don’t know about you, but I hate “renting” software. I’d much rather just pay a lot now and be done with it.
I very much agree, though I’d much rather it be free (open source) software, at which point there would be zero residuals because it’s free. Obviously that creates an incentive against working for companies producing FOSS that I didn’t think about beforehand. It then starts to look like those 20th century “homeowning initiatives” from the USA to make people invested in property rights, which is exactly the opposite of what I’d want. Not sure how that’d play out in practice, but it’s worth considering.
I also didn’t think before the post about the corporations “outsourcing” the costs to either costumers or other employees, and I’ll definitely consider that. Though in my shallow defence, it’s mostly because I already see most tech corporations as very “lean” and have gigantic profit margins, so they already have very deep pockets that we could reach into. And there’s also lots of them that actively operate at a loss to disrupt the competition, at which point I’m not even sure how residuals would be calculated, because profit vs revenue would yield vastly different numbers.
No.
Please, elaborate. I really want to hear your thoughts too, not just your conclusion.
Propietary software stops progress and enforces the unjust relations of productions that keep people enslaved. It is as simple as that.
Software, like information, wants to be free
This sounds like a great way to be forced to take responsibility for code you wrote decades later either legally or socially if there is a bug or future development. Feels slightly concerning to say the least
No.
Working as a software developer, creating software is a team effort. The developer doesn’t necessarily come up with the requirements. The business is the driver of what the software becomes. You would have to account for the product team as well. What percentage would go to whom?
How would you quantify usage? Number of API requests? Number of downloads? What if the app is only run locally. Are you going to phone home every time the data parser is fired up and charge users on a per row of data processed basis?
What about features being disabled or removed? Refactored by another dev? Now you are talking about algorithms to monitor source control to track who receives residuals. Sounds like a mess.
Sounds like an entire governing body would need to be in charge of how to track residuals. More bureaucracy is bad.
Someone else mentioned responsibility for code after you have left a company. I think one of the most relieving things about getting a new job is the mess of systems you leave behind (only to walk into a new mess).
I’ve signed a contract with every employer I have worked for that states what I work on is their IP. Employees should go in knowing that.
Another issue is fair pay. Ideally everyone would be payed fairly for their work. In the U.S., software engineers are known for being compensated well, so I don’t think that is an issue.
To tie this back to the current situation with writers, a precedent has been set in that industry, where residuals are expected. I do believe there is creativity in software development, but the extent of that is on a person to person basis. Many people write convoluted code their entire careers, which simply gets the job done. Often times creating more work than they realize when it comes time to extend.
This concept also seems to go against those most vociferous pioneers of the industry who advocate for free and open source software? Torvalds, Stallman, Jimmy Wales etc…
The business is the driver of what the software becomes.
More bureaucracy is bad.
If other people work at developing the software, however they do, they should also get residuals too under this scheme. Which is why I wrote “(and every other IP-producting labour).” And the metric for it is actually pretty simple: “How much money did the company make from the software that lists these developers in its credits,” much like how it works for writers, actors and other film workers. Nobody will be charged more for it, specially since tech companies already make boatloads of money from digital (zombie) labour with their IP anyways.
And in my experience, software development is also one very overworked profession with lots of companies with ridiculously high employee turnover rates. You mentioning the US is particularly troublesome because many of their states have “right to work laws” meaning people can be laid off without any proper compensation, and their corporations also offshore a lot of their development work to lower income countries, which complicates their “median salary” statistics.
Thankfully, I don’t live there, but the idea here is specifically to counteract the allure of gig economy outsourced freelancing with stable income from well done jobs. Now, all those questions of how things should be done once it’s decided is for the union to decide, but we already have examples of similar issues having been worked out by the WGA. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
P.S.: I don’t know about the other 2, but I’m pretty sure Stallman’s take is along the lines of “don’t you ever work for a company that produces non-FOSS software!” so I don’t know how you think he’d be particularly opposed to this one vs the current state of the industry.
