Mile
Zero

Assuming that the hamster powering the Chrome web store stats is just resting, Caret clicked over to 10,000 installations sometime on Monday. That's a lot of downloads. At a buck a piece, even if only a fraction of those people had bought a for-pay version, that might be a lot of money. So why is Caret free? More importantly, why is it free and open source? Ultimately, there are three reasons:

1. I feel like I owe the open source community for the value I've gotten from it (basically, everything on the Internet), and this is a way to repay that debt.
2. Caret isn't really just mine. It's heavily influenced by Sublime, and builds on another open source project for its text processing. As such, it feels awkward to charge money for other peoples' work, even if Caret's unique code is significant in its own right.
3. I think I get more value (i.e. job marketability, reputation, skill practice) out of being the person with a chart-topping Chrome app, in the long term, than I would get from sales.

Originally, I had planned on writing about how I reconcile being a passionate supporter of paid writing while giving away my hobby code, but I don't actually see any conflict. I expect a paycheck for freelance coding the same way I expect it for journalism — writing here (and coding Caret) doesn't directly benefit anyone but me, and it doesn't really cost me anything.

In fact, it turns out that both industries also share some uncomfortable habits when it comes to labor. Ashe Dryden writes:

Statistically, we expect that the demographic breakdown of people contributing to OSS would be about the same as the people who are participating in the OSS community, but we aren't seeing that. Ethnicity of computing and the US population breaks down what we would hope to see as far as ethnicity goes. As far as gender, women make up 24% of the industry, according to the same paper that gave us the 1.5% OSS contributor statistic.

Dryden was responding to a sentiment that I've seen myself (and even been guilty of, from time to time): using a person's open source record on sites like GitHub as a proxy for hireability. As she points out, however, building an open source portfolio is something that's a lot easier for white men. We're more likely to have free time, more often have jobs that will pay for open source contributions, and far less likely to be harassed or dismissed. I was aware of those factors, but I was still shocked to see that diversity numbers in open source are so low. We need to do better.

As eye-opening as that is, I think Dryden's middle section centers around a really interesting question: who profits?

I'd argue that the people who benefit the most from the unpaid labor of OSS as well as the underpaid labor of marginalized people in technology are business owners and stakeholders in these companies. Having to pay additional hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for this labor would mean smaller profit margins. Technology is one of the most profitable industries in the US and certainly could support at least pay equality, especially considering how low our current participation is from marginalized people.

...Open source originally broke us free from the shackles of proprietary software which forced us to "pay to play" and gave us little in the way of choices for customization. Without realizing it, we've ended up in a similar scenario where we are now paying for the development of software that large companies financially benefit from with little cost to them.

Her conclusion — that the community benefits, but it's mostly businesses who boost their profits from free software — should be unsettling for anyone who contributes to open source, and particularly those of us who see it as a way to spread a little socialist good will. For this reason, if nothing else, I'll always prefer the GPL and other "copyleft" licenses, forcing businesses to play ball if they want to use my code.