
GitHub stars won’t pay your rent - tosh
https://medium.com/@kitze/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent-8b348e12baed
======
kstenerud
I'm closing in on 100 public, nontrivial, nonforked repos on github. Since
github's inception, I've received a total of $200 in donations for my OSS
stuff, 1 job from a company that uses a product of mine as the foundation of
their business, and many job offers from people who are familiar with my work.
I don't make money off OSS, and never have (at least not directly).

But I just. can't. stop.

I can't. I've tried suppressing the urge to create, but I just can't do it.
Ideas, challenges, problems, unmet potential, are everywhere, and I can't
unsee them. On many days I despair that I won't live long enough to build even
a tiny fraction of the things I see in my mind. It's infuriating!

And so I do my best to keep my focus small. I have a full time job, so I try
to keep my extracurricular coding down to at the very most 3 hours a day if I
can, but my idea list just keeps on growing faster than I can keep up.

I keep thinking that maybe I'll calm down as I get older, but I started at 8,
and I'm 44 now. If I had no financial pressure at all, I'd be doing this stuff
all day. The only difference would be that I'd burn through my list faster.

But long story short, don't write OSS for money. Have a full time job and do
OSS on the side.

~~~
paulcarroty
> don't write OSS for money

Why not? I'd prefer working with OSS for money over proprietary products.

~~~
codegladiator
Because you won't get money from OSS contribution for most part. If your
priority is money, then OSS is not the best option unless you have a clear
strategy of monetizing it.

~~~
therealmarv
I will tell you a secret: There are corporate and non-profit organizations out
there which want to you to write open source software and they pay you for it
(I know it's shocking).

~~~
alexellisuk
Dozens of open jobs at VMware for professional / career Open Source positions:
[https://careers.vmware.com/search-
jobs/Open%20Source%20Engin...](https://careers.vmware.com/search-
jobs/Open%20Source%20Engineer/1567/1)

Big companies have an Open Source Program Office (OSPO) where community / OSS
skills and licensing knowledge mean you can help the company both consume OSS
and contribute back to it.

------
strenholme
Been there. Done that. Pretty much every open source developer hits a point
where they realize that even very popular open source projects don’t keep food
on the table.

However, what gives open source value is that a project with 10,000 Github
stars looks very good on a resume. That doesn’t matter now, where pretty much
any programmer can get a good job, but it will matter after the current
economic expansion stops and we are in the next recession.

I got not one, but two job offers in the middle of 2010, during a very tough
recession, because of my somewhat notable open source project. My open source
project allowed me to keep my skills current while I was living in Mexico as
an English teacher and professional translator.

To this day, in job interviews, it allows me to demonstrate I was still
working on computers and with technology after the dot-com bubble crashed.

The important thing to keep in mind is that users are not customers until they
pay for the code. If they don’t like the fact you won’t implement their
favorite pet feature request, you can give them a full refund, which won’t
cost you anything. Never let your users cause you stress.

~~~
mettamage
> _To this day, in job interviews, it allows me to demonstrate I was still
> working on computers and with technology after the dot-com bubble crashed._

You mean 2001? The dot-com bubble happened then, yet you write about 2010
which could be a recession year in some countries from 2008?

I do think you mean 2001, not entirely sure though.

~~~
strenholme
The dot-com bubble crashed in 2001, which left the entire tech sector in a
recession throughout the first 2000s decade. The foreclosure crisis started a
recession in 2008 which really didn’t end until 2015 or 2016.

------
slang800
> Honestly, it felt kind of shitty to delete the repository and unpin the
> project from my profile.

It is kind of shitty to do that. Why not just archive the repo and add a note
to the README that you've turned it into non-free software? At least that way
you don't break the main link to the project or remove all the content from
the issue tracker. This is a project that other people have contributed work
to, so it's rude to just destroy that.

The most recent fork I can find is here:
[https://github.com/kuldeepkeshwar/sizzy](https://github.com/kuldeepkeshwar/sizzy)

~~~
thekitze
The author here. If you look at the contributions, the only ones were a change
to the readme, adding prettier and git hooks for linting, fixing typos, and
few CSS one-liners. If the project had major contributions it would definitely
be a shitty move.

------
onion2k
Lots of developers have an expectation of "Build it, they will come" as a
route to market, and they end up disappointed. Selling a piece of software,
regardless of whether or not you also give away the source, is really hard.
Moving people from "I want this handy tool" to "I will pay for this handy
tool" is the hardest part of sales no matter how amazing your app is.

People who have relatively limited amounts of money (eg anyone who isn't a
millionaire) will always want to keep their money if they don't _have_ to
spend it so you need to give them a truly compelling reason to spend if you
want to make money. Just writing an app, even a useful one, isn't enough.

~~~
z3t4
It depends on the sales model. If people instantly see the value of the
product, like in this case, people will come. But if they do not see the
value, you have to manually sell it to them, which is a lot of work. For
example if you invent a new programming language, even if it's revolutionary,
it will still be a lot of grunt work teaching people how to use it, pitching
it, explaining how it's better then current languages, etc. It's no
coincidence that for example the most popular web frameworks are from Google
and Facebook. And that TypeScript, #C is developed by Microsoft. All multi
billion companies spending million of dollars marketing and selling said
technologies.

~~~
icebraining
> the most popular web frameworks are from Google and Facebook

Curiously, that's mostly not the case on the backend - Django, RoR, Express,
were all created by individuals or small companies.

------
segmondy
Code != Project Project != Business

Folks keep conflating these things. Sometimes we wanna code, no problem, code!
if you feel like sharing, share! Expect nothing! If you feel your code
deserves more and wish to turn it into a project, cool! Projects require much
more time and effort to maintain. With a project, figure out what you want.
Recognition? High usage? Job offers? Whatever it is, it can't be money. If you
wish to get money, then you must turn it into a Business. Don't expect
millions!

It's a business after all, not a startup. but that's another discussion.

------
tonyedgecombe
_Here’s the catch: when you give away something completely for free, people
aren’t that motivated to pay for it._

It's worse than that, people don't value it very highly if it's free.

~~~
huffmsa
I was just thinking the other day, _" If Wikipedia became a paid product,
would I pay for it?"_

Really, what would happen if it became a for profit product? Would I pay for
access to the greatest single repository of information the world has ever
seen? Or would I shrug my shoulder and let Google tell me that I actually
meant to query something else, and trust that the top placed link is really
the best?

~~~
skohan
How would monetizing Wikipedia even work? That raise a lot of questions about
fair compensation for the people creating content.

~~~
huffmsa
Its a different line of discussion, but one which is being wrestled with all
over the internet. How do you compensate content creators who are not your
direct employees for producing content on your platform.

See YouTube.

------
bad_user
Just a note — open source doesn't mean free of charge. I think you can make a
business from open source, even as a one person operation.

Off the top of my head: Newsblur, Bitwarden and Standard Notes, services I pay
for, for one because I like to support open source, but also because I'm not
in the mood of hosting them myself. I'm also evaluating Wallabag.

These examples are of web apps that require hosting, self hosting is a pain,
so I prefer to just pay for it. And I did give up on 1Password for Bitwarden,
because I'd rather support open source stuff, in spite of the former being
superior.

\---

The author's article is however correct in saying that donations don't work. I
too have thousands of stars collected on GitHub and I barely got donations for
hosting the documentation websites.

In order to _make money_ :

1\. you have to ask for it

2\. people need to get some value out of that payment and this means creating
scarcity

With the online services I mentioned, what I'm paying for is the hosting and
I'm happy to do it.

------
inDigiNeous
Really good writing on many of the challenges of launching your own
application.

Went through the same cycle, of first releasing an open source software that
had donation support. Gathered an user base over many years, at max I was
receiving maybe 500 - 800 USD in donations over a year, after working on the
software like 3 years.

Was really reluctant to make the software a commercial version, because I was
limited in my thinking that software should be available for anyone to use.
You can't make a living out of that, except in some very rare cases.

Once we launched a commercial version of our software
([https://OmniGeometry.com](https://OmniGeometry.com)), got a lot of backslash
from users complaining about the price not being free anymore, and actually we
priced the software lot higher than people usually do, but we are implementing
something that fills a very specific niche, where we have almost no
competition.

As a result of that, we are now actually making money that can support the
continuing development of the software and can support our two man team as
creators. To be honest I am surprised that we managed to do that, but are very
happy about it of course.

I agree with what is written in the article:

"Don’t let anyone tell you how much you should charge for your work"

Writing software can be very difficult and complex, and usually takes many
years to reach anything usable and even then it is a risk if it will become
anything that people will use.

Almost certainly you will receive hateful or resentful messages from people if
you are charging for your work, as on some levels they would like to use your
software, but would like it to be free also, so they just lash out at you for
not making it free.

Something just have to get used to when selling software these days it seems.
If people had any idea how much skills and dedication it requires to even be
able to write usable software, maybe they would agree that paying for example
200 usd for a software package that will give you possibly hundreds of hours
of entertainment is a good investment.

~~~
fragmede
> "Don’t let anyone tell you how much you should charge for your work"

Feel free to ignore the choosingbeggars who are after freebies, but pricing is
a dark art, and IMO when making the leap to charging money for things you've
built, it seems way more common to undercharge, especially for apps like Sizzy
made by perfectionists.

Patio11's article on SaaS app pricing:
[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pricing)

------
qrohlf
I have been in an interesting similar situation with my Trianglify [1]
library, and have made money off of it a few different ways:

\- Commercial licensing (the library is GPL) occasionally gets me a few bucks,
but isn't a reliable source of income.

\- Consulting on custom integrations/tweaks has been slightly better, but in
general it's a simple library that's well documented and easy to use, so there
isn't much need for this.

It became pretty obvious after I launched the project that my primary audience
wasn't developers who could consume a JS library, it was designers. I wound up
building a productized UI [2], and I've been experimenting with

\- making money via donations (abysmal)

\- ethical non-tracking advertising (low conversion rate, people hit the tool
to accomplish a task, not click ads)

\- and lately, paid functionality (so far, this has been the most successful
approach)

I think that the skillset for developing a good and useful piece of OSS and
the skillset for monetizing it are almost completely orthogonal - it would be
really great if there was a way to make decent income off an open-source
project without building a flashy website, learning basic marketing, getting
in bed with advertising companies, etc etc. Unfortunately, the above seems to
be what the market cares about.

[1]
[https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify](https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify)
[2] [https://trianglify.io](https://trianglify.io)

~~~
detaro
> _\- Consulting on custom integrations /tweaks has been slightly better,_

Interesting, can you share a bit more detail? Not asking for customer names or
anything, but curious what kind of customer is interested in stuff like this
enough to buy consulting for it)

------
davnicwil
Firstly, this post is really excellent and quite profound - I read it end to
end and would recommend you do so too if you've just come directly to the
comments - it goes a lot broader than the title might suggest and contains
quite a few quotes I'll be referring back to.

That said, on the surface point about making money directly from open source,
I'd just like to chip in with my own perspective that wasn't really covered in
the article (it's a different type of thing).

In the article the author is talking about building a complete, functional
_product_ and open sourcing it, and how that means users are very unlikely to
pay (donate) cash to the author. This is 100% accurate, and the point is very
well made (again, seriously, read this article, it's great).

I've put out a few libraries and tools on my github (i.e. not full products,
but smaller component parts others can build products from), mostly to solve
my own problems, and have the source easily available and properly licensed to
reuse between projects. And hey, if someone else finds them useful, great.
This is pretty important - I did this for my own benefit, and I get this
benefit regardless of if anyone else stars or uses the repos.

Most of these repos, that's exactly what happened, 1 or 2 stars at best, only
I use them. But one of them, react-frontload [0], actually took off because it
turned out to be useful for quite a lot of people. Now, the reason for writing
and open sourcing that library was the same as all the others. I don't expect,
need or frankly even particularly want people to donate money for me to work
on that. Any time I invest in improving it pays off anyway, because I use it.

But what _has_ happened because of my work on that library is I've had people
contacting me for contracting work integrating it into their product, general
job offers, meetup talks, etc etc. So in a way, it has actually led to
opportunities for making money, more or less directly. As in, had I not open
sourced that, none of these things would have happened.

Just to add that point to the discussion here: whilst you definitely shouldn't
expect to make direct money from open source, especially via donations, you
absolutely can find it opening doors to opportunities and making money in
other ways. But even then, that shouldn't be your motivation going in. I
suspect if it were, you might have a lot lower chance of it happening as a
result, ironically.

[0] [https://github.com/davnicwil/react-
frontload](https://github.com/davnicwil/react-frontload)

~~~
ghaff
It's a lot like writing books in technical fields. Should you do so with the
expectation that you'll get rich or even that it will pay for a really nice
vacation? Probably not. Some people probably make 5 figures (USD) but it's not
common.

However, being a _published author_ builds credibility in a lot of respects
whether it's within many large companies or doing consulting/etc. work.

ADDED: I've written a few books. I've made no money off them (to a first
approximation relative to everything else). But they've been immensely
valuable in other respects.

------
nottorp
So going from free to subscription based.

How long do people think this subscription thing will last? "It's cheaper per
month than one Starbucks coffee" stops working when you have to pay for 100+
Starbucks coffees per month... and then the subscription bubble will crash.

~~~
jkoudys
It's not a bubble, it's a model for paying for things you value. People used
to pay a lot for their TV, satellite dish, VHS tapes, all the space to store
them, newspaper subscriptions, 3+ magazine subscriptions, phones (which were
actually just phones), long distance calls, etc. We came in and replaced so
much of that with software, which is still overall cheaper and much better if
you pay for it.

~~~
nottorp
Yeah but all the things you're listing are ongoing services.

Maybe the app in TFA is one too, it does need constant updating because the
browser is a moving target right now.

However that doesn't go for the other 3 million productivity apps that want a
subscription.

------
jarfil
Altruistic FOSS works best when there are many more users than issues, ideally
technical users capable of fixing them, so a fraction of the users can donate
just a small amount of their time and get the project going. Alternatively,
when some business players decide to collaborate on a project and fund its
development.

Otherwise, when there are many more issues than users, particularly users who
aren't capable or willing to fix them, then it's just a few developers working
their skin off to pull the project, and that requires a more direct form of
compensation.

~~~
jkoudys
Truth. It's especially stressful, because too many will value your time as
much as they pay for it. If you work on a team doing some big $10M deploy for
an enterprise client, that client will be buying you dinners and setting you
up in a nice hotel. You get on the hotel wifi and check into your foss
projects and find a dozen messages saying how angry they are because some
feature wasn't implemented, or see a comment on a post about it saying how
much your work sucks and that they have written something better (that will be
released some day "soon").

------
zrth
Wondering what percentage of the donations the author forwarded to the library
maintainers and authors that his product relies on..

~~~
jkoudys
10% sound fair? Split it 20 ways for each lib. I'm sure they'd all enjoy their
47 cents.

~~~
zrth
10% Sounds low. I can't judge for the product in question but for my programs,
they are usually tiny blips standing on the shoulder of giants (libraries). So
far i have never ask for money, if i'd do so i maybe would need to pass on 80%
to not feel bad about it..

Not sure if you are cynical of sincere, either way, if the library devs get 47
cent from every donation driven program that relies on them, this could add up
to some nice sum.

~~~
jkoudys
You're telling someone who saw years of work amount to only $96 that they only
deserve 20% of that?

~~~
zrth
No i am not saying this. I am saying that: "I can't judge for the product in
question "..

------
jankotek
I have a consulting business centered around my OS project. Project itself
does not make much, but related things (support, consulting, opportunities,
contacts) are good. It was a good way to leave cubicle and get remote job,
once my daughter was born.

------
dharma1
would be great if GitHub had some kind of patreon system built in, to make it
very easy to do recurring donations. Especially for companies that use open
source software for commercial activity, it would be great to have an
automated way of paying each month and a culture for that, so that it's almost
the default option.

I know there are ways of doing this today, but if it's not super frictionless
and integrated into the platform, it's less likely to happen

~~~
krzkaczor
Yes! I really hope that this is what Github Sponsors will end up being. They
should make it trivial for businesses to spend each month X USD to split
between open source projects that they rely on.

~~~
dagw
_They should make it trivial for businesses to spend_

Donating money is always incredibly tricky if you work at a larger company,
especially if you get nothing in return. I can a buy a license or support
contract easily, with a bit more effort I could probably sponsor a local FOSS
meetup/event. But just giving someone $50 as a thanks for writing that
software we rely on, is basically impossible unless I just pay it out of
pocket.

------
Mr_Goldberg
A lot of people/companies don't like paying for software. You would be
surprised by the amount of straight up pirated software some companies use
before they get caught.

It's no surprise that offering your product for free won't make you much
money.

------
conradfr
Sometimes you don't even really want your side projects or GitHub repos to
become popular.

When you're the only user of your app it's fun, you can deploy easily, maybe
prod is also your staging env ... You can afford to screw up your database
etc. If you have users you now have to be careful, if your deployment fails
the downtime becomes a mental burden, you have to manage backups etc.

Maintaining an open source project is also a lot of work. Issues piling on,
Pull requests to review, which are not that more fun at home than at work. If
you ignore them you start to feel guilty. If you lose interest or have no need
for the project anymore you'll feel guilty as well.

Anecdotal evidence, my father have made an open ESP*-based webradio. Somehow
it got popular (especially in Eastern Europe for some reason). It's fun,
people sending you photos of their finished projects etc but then requests for
features you don't care for start piling on, you have more bug to fix.

He has a donation button and he could monetize more but he's retired and
doesn't really care about money, he just wants to have fun making something
and the success is a double-edged sword in that regard.

------
adonese
Open source for me personally and my company was more of a marketing
advantage. We work in fintech and the culture there is that the code will
always be closed source (like there’s no way it can be remotely open!). When
we (the engineers) suggested that we should open source our whole system (make
the whole development open source), the marketing team were so pissed and they
just couldn’t imagine what benefits an open source will offer.

A few months later, our project is well known by major banks here and it
became clear that my startup excels in software. The first thing we say when
discussing with a client our offer is that the whole system is free and open
source and they can copy-paste it without our help. And that turned out to be
very great as many of our customers had vendor-locks before.

The thing I’m actively developing our core business in Github and quite happy
with its evolution. It received a small amount of stars (like 9 or something),
but I really didn’t expect any stars nor direct users contribution anyway. And
it helped us a lot in building our reputation as a FOSS startup and it will
also contribute to my teams resume.

------
joeblau
> when you give away something completely for free, people aren’t that
> motivated to pay for it.

I created gitingore.io about 8 years ago and it's almost at 5000 stars. I had
nearly 100k MAU's and that was still not enough to survive. My customers
included developers form top tech startups and major companies in the world
but the product was free. I ended up selling it so I can re-focus on something
more valuable.

~~~
treve
I think this is a good example of not all projects are equal. I have donated
to projects that have an especially large impact on my project, or that solve
an especially hard problem. I don't think your project is either. Lots of
people might use it, but relative impact to productivity will probably always
be low. I think that's ok, and it's a neat project though.

~~~
joeblau
Yeah I totally agree with you — It definitely took me a few years to learn
that but you're obviously sharper than I am :).

------
yakubin
Two gold quotes from the article:

#1

 _I started working on the landing page, but ended up working on a React
library for making landing pages (maybe I’ll release it one sunny day)_

#2

 _Or imagine entering a supermarket and starting to yell at the cashier
“WHAT?! THIS MILK IS 3$? DO YOU KNOW THAT ON THE OTHER END OF TOWN I CAN GET
THIS FOR 2.5$? I CAN EVEN BUY MY OWN COW, RAISE IT, MILK IT EVERY DAY, AND
DRINK MILK FOR FREE!11!”._

I died. :D

------
tjholowaychuk
GitHub stars will pay your rent if you sell out the hype to a VC instead of
building a real company. I can definitely name a few startups that have almost
no product, certainly not technically challenging or particularly well built
ones, but they've made many millions in VC funding solely from GH star
hype.This industry is a bit of a joke that way, but it works.

~~~
freshbagels
Do you mind naming these startups?

------
frankohn
Well for this problem I have since a long time an idea I am sure will works, I
just need to kick-start it in the right way.

It is the "fair publishing edition", a system of publishing a work in a way
that is fair both for the author and for the users. The author get paid an
amount that is proportionate to the amount and value of its work and the users
gets a fair value in return from their money.

The principle is simple, the author publish a work and decide a fixed amount
of money that he judge correct as a fair total reward for his work. In turn
the people that begin to buy the product pay only a small quota of this amount
and the more people buy the product the smaller gets the amount. If the
product becomes successful eventually the entire amount of money will be paid
and the product will become free for everyone.

A detail, the first people will pay a larger amount of the latest people and
this is a little bit unfair. Yet this is a minor problem that can be fixed by
not making the payment immediate and when other people buy the product the
payment of the first people will be reduced. In this way the problem will not
disappear but it can be smoothed so that it will become more acceptable.

The faire publishing edition can be applied to any product that is trivially
copiable, so for things like books, software, games, movies etc.

Each product launch will be caraterized by the amount requested and by a
paying time which is roughly the time the author estimate to complete the
payment of the product.

Note how this is much better than the current situation: free software authors
doesn't get any reward for their work. It is unfair for the authors! At the
other side traditional editor get indefinitely paid for a work, doesn't matter
how much money they have already collected. It is unfair for the users!

If some people want to help me to kick-start this project, hey, just make me a
message! :-)

------
lone_haxx0r
[Unrelated]

> But the factory lector didn’t have Medium and Hacker News to tell him every
> single day that the radio is coming to take his job.

My thoughts: Who reads Medium everyday?

> Sizzy got 2352 upvotes on Product Hunt. It was the product of the day, the
> product of the week, and third product of the month.

My thoughts: Who uses Product Hunt? Who cares about Product Hunt upvotes?

Also, the other day, Korean Github users started complaining about some
company "cheating" to get Github stars. My thought: who the hell cares about
Github stars?

Am I the odd one here? This cult of the platform is kinda weird. I admit that
I use Hacker News everyday, but in the end I don't care about it. If I lost my
account tomorrow, I wouldn't care, If my comment gets downvoted to oblivion, I
don't care.

(Congratulations to the post author on shipping a valuable product.)

~~~
cercatrova
Just as you read HN, others get their news from Medium, Reddit, and so on, and
they do care that the news source is sustained so that they can get future
news. I do the same for HN, it would annoy me if it disappeared tomorrow, so
perhaps you are the odd one out. Nothing wrong with that, just an observation.

------
enneff
I wonder how many open source projects the author uses and donates to? If the
answer is zero, then I wonder why he thought people would donate to him? Open
source software is not a good way to make money. It never has been.

------
skohan
I would really like to see OSS funding continue to move in the direction that
other content creation has gone in the past decade or so: pay for the
_creator_ , not the _product_ \- like the Patreon model.

------
caniszczyk
I've written about how donations are the wrong approach and things like GitHub
sponsors are giving people a false promise of sustainability:
[https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-
open-...](https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-
gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/)

The author is on point that you need to build a business or product that
someone is willing to buy :)

------
stared
A lot of people bemoan that companies make hiring based on people's repos (and
how it may be unfair for some demographics, types of character, focus, etc).

But (having a few non-forked repos with >200 stars, one >1k stars) it seems
that it does not matter much. Basically, works as any volunteering work.

For bigger companies, it seemed that there was zero care if I have any GitHub
project. (Typically there was not a single question relevant to these
project.)

------
fulldecent2
You're doing it wrong.

My top repo has ~5,000 stars and some contributors. It was fun, it lets you
broadcast AM on a stock MacBook or iPhone. That's how I found Hacker News, it
found me. Zero dollars. Virtual tip jar, zero tips. I got everything I wanted
out of that project and more.

Next, I open sourced my research on vowel pronunciation / language learning.
The same exact program sells on the App Store. For $10. Yes really. And the
app links to the free repo, in case they want to check it out. This pays rent.

Next, I'm an expert on some blockchain topics. And specifically related to
enterprise. If you're in that scene you might recognize me, I'm all over that
(=all over GitHub). I put my phone number in a few choice places and qualified
people call. This lands large contracts, no interview. This pays rent.

Google and Facebook regularly interview/hire directly from GitHub. No resume,
direct interview request from GitHub. I don't work for Google any more, but
these are opportunities to pay rent.

------
piccolbo
How much does he pay for Electron and React? Imagine the sw world with no OSS,
not just your app but no OSS at all. Then you can compare the for pay and OSS
models. Not everything you need is OSS and the one thing you sell is
proprietary. That is the best, for you, of course.

------
RomanPushkin
It won't pay rent directly, but there is one caveat. I have 5000 stars for all
of my open source projects, and I have a salary way above average. I'd easily
find a job with a better pay if I want to. So on average every star makes me
at least $10/year when it comes to salary only.

~~~
geddy
With that logic, if I have only 1 star, then I make $my_whole_salary per star!
I should aim to get 2 stars, that'd be a real life changer.

------
dmitrygr
This is why all my projects are published under a non-commercial-use-only
license. Hobbyists are free to use it, but companies need to contact me to
license and pay for using my code. Makes me very good money, and my code is
still out there for free for hobbyists to use.

------
swat535
Am I the only one who is confused by all the recent uproar in open source? I
think open source software should be created purely based on joy with no
monetization expectation from the creators.

On the other hand, people using the software should have no expectations
either, they should be grateful for the gift they have received. I believe the
spirit of OSS should be contribute if you want to, if not, that's also ok.

If you demand compensation for your OSS work or you demand the OSS maintainer
to implement features yesterday, you're doing it wrong.

I feel like the spirit of people creating software for the sake of software is
fading away.

~~~
goostavos
Have you ever maintained a large open source project? It is so, so far removed
from the pure "just creating for the sake of software" idea. It is a job. It
can exhausting, frustrating, boring, tedious, etc... you trade your nights and
weekends for... the creative spirit? The joy of creating?

People talk about OSS like /r/choosingbeggers. "Why would I pay you for art?
You should do it because it's your passion"

To be honest, I still love open source, but I have to take long breaks from
maintenance because the "work" side of it -- the tedious zero effort issues
opened, just gets to be demoralizing. The next large project will be closed
source. I'm getting too old and grumpy to do project maintenance for free.

~~~
swat535
I've never maintained a large OSS project, it's mind boggling to me that the
community have somehow managed to push the maintainers towards burnout instead
of being grateful for the free gift they are receiving.

Expecting the maintainer to keep pushing updates forever is insanity imo. It
also rubs me the wrong way when maintainers demand monetary compensation I
feel like this muddies the water. But maybe this is the reality we are living
in now.

~~~
jart
Don't blame the community for pushing maintainers towards burnout. Blame the
folks who make maintenance needlessly necessary, by doing things like pushing
for systemic tooling reforms that only serve big company use-cases, or the
ones who create license drama. If it weren't for them, then works contributed
to the open source commons wouldn't need maintenance any more than the Super
Mario Bros. ROM needs to be maintained.

------
paulcarroty
Donation in open source works only for BIG projects. Small project get pennies
in 99% cases. The hard truth or/and dark side of FOSS.

People should just learn the all details of any kind of business their doing
or planning to do.

------
amclennon
> Last summer I tried using the app again and my first reaction was “omfg why
> do people even use this thing, it can be so much better”. But people didn’t
> see it that way.

This part resonated with me quite a bit. However, I've often found that a
certain percentage of these people are sometimes willing to pay for support or
having specific features added. Especially when using your software can save
the organization a tangible dollar amount.

I've personally been on both sides of this equation.

------
yboris
I'd love to see more people donating to charity. With my software, it's MIT
open source, but pre-packaged it's pay what you want ($3.50 minimum) and $3.50
of every purchase goes to my favorite charity: Against Malaria Foundation.

[https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App](https://github.com/whyboris/Video-
Hub-App)

~~~
freshbagels
I'm curious of the effectiveness of this model. Do you have any metrics on how
many users have paid?

~~~
yboris
Close to 800 paying customers since the launch about 1.5 years ago.

I've been documenting the donations as well on the blog:
[https://videohubapp.com/blog.html](https://videohubapp.com/blog.html)

------
homie
This person has very strange and misguided idea of what open source software
is intended to be.

------
m-p-3
I don't really develop any project or repos (I raised issues, submitted fix
through forks), and I use stars mostly as an on-site bookmark to remember
project I might have a use for. I guess this is the intended purpose of these?

------
factsaresacred
> _The title in my bio doesn’t mean shit. I’m making an app, who cares, it
> doesn’t matter what you call it._

Amen. Those more obsessed with what they're doing, than with telling other's
what they're doing, are the most sincere.

------
ourlordcaffeine
I see creating/contributing to OSS projects almost as a form of payment, i.e.
you are paying your dues for being able to access a large array of free open
source software by contributing back to the movement.

------
2mia
How is this different than Adobe Shadow? I guess it makes sense to be a
product for one-man show, but hard to productize ( read: doesn't move the
needle ) for a big company.

------
z3t4
Anyone know the editor/(IDE theme) used in the product video and twitter post
?

~~~
thekitze
Hey, author here. I'm using WebStorm with Material theme.

------
gingabriska
Same way as going to acting school doesn't guarantee you become successful
Hollywood actor.

But what about those who went ahead, uploaded their code for free and launched
new companies, thanks to the support/popularity received from users of their
free code.

Such people minted millions or even billions which they could have never been
able to achieve in their lifetime charging normal rates for programming.

You want to be part of a lottery promising big bucks but not happy because not
everyone gets suitable payout. Congrats! you discovered how lottery works.

And now you want a payout which helps you pay rent? Such jobs exist, but you
might have to write boring code.

------
einpoklum
That guy wasted not only his time in writing a non-FOSS application, but also
the time of other people who will need to redo that work later on.

It is illegitimate for the use, distribution and modification of software to
be restricted. Due to inopportune social arrangements (e.g. Capitalism)
people, like the author, are kept in an artificial state of material want,
which forces them to play the corrupting game of intellectual property and
close-source software.

I try to avoid that (even if it isn't easy sometime.)

