Programming

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.

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).

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.

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.

Please, elaborate. I really want to hear your thoughts too, not just your conclusion.

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.