Did you know that your article was one of the reasons I quit my paid job to attempt to find a solution for open-source funding?
At that time, I was exploring existing solutions like Gitopia, Tea, or even Polar. I believed that these solutions would not meet your needs, so perhaps it would be a good idea to create a solution that would.
Turnaround has always been high in small team (1-3 people) free software projects. That's exactly normal and expected: people build something while it's useful for them, and then move on. If someone else comes along, great, if not, that's ok too.
> That's exactly normal and expected: people build something while it's useful for them, and then move on.
That's one explanation, but another is that they build something useful to themselves, grow an audience of users who demand features and bugfixes which are required due to the complexity of the new features, and eventually the burden becomes too much to bear.
And yet... we wouldn't have the wonderful ecosystems of GNU, BSDs, etc. if not for people who love their unpaid work and feel they owe the world something, even if they really, truly don't.
Most of the open source devs from that generation did this as a hobby - many of us had to write dreary business software at our day jobs and loved UNIX, so creating these tools was just fun. If it ever felt like a burden, you'd just step back and let someone else fill in or not and not worry about it.
This is the reason I don't work on free software anymore. The entitlement of the users was too great and their demands were too unreasonable.
More than once people have threatened to: sue me, dox me, put a bomb in my mailbox, assault me, kill me, kill my family, sexually assault me, sexually assault my family, plant a bomb under my car, get me fired from work, and spread lies about me on the Internet.
I'm aware that they're a minority of the users of free software. I get that they're probably mentally ill or going through it. I get that maybe they're just a few terrible people, but they by far were the most common messages in my email box from users - users who liked the software or even found it useful weren't enthusiastic enough about letting me know about that. For every 20 threats I got I'd get maybe one message thanking me for the software.
You know what nobody ever did? Offer to pay me a couple of dollars for either consulting support or to implement a feature they needed, but they were more than happy to threaten me with legal action if there was a bug that I had no way to test for.
I did most of my work on Gnome, admittedly when internet was a different place, and only ever got a few minor "you are dumb doing things this or that way". I got plenty of praise and even a job at a well known free software company back in late 2000s.
I know there are nightmare stories from open source main-trainers, but are they actually an issue on smaller projects that are build for your own consumption?
We have an ODATA client package for node that’s publicly available and has seen an increasing number of downloads for whatever reason. It surely must be people who are crazy since we make breaking changes all the time with absolutely no regard for anyone who might use it. Which is sort of my point, we don’t even have a place where people can complain or even contact us, it’s only on the public NPM because it’s free. Once we eventually move away from ODATA it’ll be completely abandoned. Now my point here isn’t so much that you should do this, but it’s that you can. Unless you’re actually working to get adoption you don’t have to give any care to your “community”.
Everyone’s definition of a successful project varies, but 5k GitHub stars (at time of writing before people started gaming the metric) qualifies to me.
Modesty aside, the general principle reminds me of Alex Graveley, the eng lead on GitHub Copilot, saying his compensation for creating Copilot was only a $20k bonus and a title bump.
They’re both good illustrations that “make something people want” is a necessary step to turning code into wealth, but not a sufficient step.
Starting to notice a huge influx of OS projects not being funded and maintainers drop off of something that's valuable and their passionate about. It's unfortunate.
It's not unfortunate at all. Every company I've worked for has been an unbelievable freeloader on open source projects. Tens of billions of dollars in revenue, almost nothing to the projects they rely on.
I think the open source experiment has failed and that we need to embrace moving toward a compensated-commercial source model. Companies are strongly opposed to this because they can't freeload on volunteer work and other companies anymore, but it should be done.
Open source has not failed. Attempts to build viable business models around it may have. That's not a weakness of open source but a weakness of software business.
When you have a product with very low marginal cost of production, the market price for the product often tends towards $0. If you have a business that sells software licenses and someone develops a viable alternative (for whatever reason) and starts distributing it for free, you may have a hard time competing against them. And if the free alternative gains enough market share, both parties may find it difficult to pay for continued development. That's just how the market works.
There was never any centralized open source movement. Just a bunch of people making open source software for various reasons. Some joined related communities, while many didn't. Some got paid, while many didn't. Some did it as a hobby, while many didn't.
Software is essentially worthless once it exists. Even if many people and many businesses rely on it, there may not be any economic value in maintaining it. If you need to get paid, you may have to do something else for living.
People eating is not a software problem, it's a capitalism problem. Code just sits on a server, and in 99% of circumstances the costs of retrieving or modifying it is negligible enough to copy it.
What you're describing is where the interests of commercial users and free contributors diverge. When that doesn't align, commercial users have to tow the line. If they can't make that work, that's not Open Source's fault.
imo it still serves as a way to strengthen resumes of job applicants. Just have a few GH projects with decent "stars" to show you know how to build things. I don't endorse it (because the projects then often get abandoned after employment)—maybe it'd be better to have a "badge" on the GH page showing what the purpose of the project really is.
> Starting to notice a huge influx of OS projects not being funded and maintainers drop off of something that's valuable and their passionate about. It's unfortunate.
Why is it unfortunate? Mother nature is not kind.
If an open source maintainer can’t pay their bills, maybe they should spend their time on something that does pay the bills.
Steel manning here, the outcome is unfortunate because presumably these projects have positive externalities (benefits accruing to people other than other than whoever is paying, if anyone) and so the optimal funding for them from a social/aggregate point of view is greater than it currently is. That they are not funded enough is a case of market failure.
Of course this doesn't contradict your point, that is fine for the maintainers to respond to these incentives. (Edit: to that end I agree with one of the main points of the article, developer's shouldn't be embarrassed about doing things for money, seeing as it's somewhat necessary for the world we live in).
I’ll use this opportunity to say that D Lang is awesome and that I wish it gains wider adoption. I simply love that language and the community and I thank you for everything you do.
On topic, indeed, shaming is never an option. But still I wish companies would donate to projects - in some countries there are even tax incentives to do so, and the benefit is that they essentially externalise development of a valuable tool for them. Also would earn a lot of good will - as steam does (while not sponsoring money directly).
Isn't the typical licensing model for open-source projects designed to differentiate between personal and commercial usage? Or is the real challenge that enforcing such licensing terms is practically unfeasible?
We use the Boost license which does not distinguish personal from commercial use. This is on purpose. We have no agenda for anyone's use of D. We are especially happy to hear from users who have made a lot of money from using D.
No, they are not. And the most popular licenses (Apache-style) these days don't even require commercial entities that fork your project to contribute back their changes. Free software / copyleft licenses like the GPL which do require that are these days shunned by many.
"Open source" has become synonymous with "free labour" for a lot of firms, and there's a whole class of SaaS projects which amount to gluing together other people's open source work and then supporting it.
I think this was all fine for people during boom time; you built your resume up on GitHub, you got street cred, often your employer paid for you to work on it. But I think it's starting to lose its sheen for some people.
Open source business models differentiate by providing value to commercial entities (support, extended features, whatever.)
Traditional open source licenses and definitions of open source demand that the licenses not differentiate between different use types (personal, commercial, governmental, etc.) Newer licenses are coming up that do differentiate. Traditional open source orgs are often saying that they're source available, not open source.
Monopolization is too slow, the goverment should force the fussion of every big tech company into a single entity that is forced to employ everyone in the country with great salaries and 4 hour workday, then people would have resources to do what's good. How would you like that MAANG?!
And maybe they should be funded by society enough to live.
It's funny because this kind of social darwinism or capitalist world view is not the only possible way society could be successfully organized. Yet the (fallacious) appeal to "nature" would suggest that arbitrary monetary value is somehow the most important thing to optimize.
There's NLNet (funded by EU grants). It's a shame there aren't similar foundations and public funding for projects like this in other countries (afaik, correct me if I'm wrong).
> is not the only possible way society could be successfully organized
True, if you have a rather low bar of success. Capitalism has produced wealth for average citizens inconceivable only a couple centuries ago. Even the poor in capitalist countries have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
The “poor” in capitalist countries have a higher standard of living than medieval kings?
In so far as they have electrical heating, access to global food products, information technology, modern medical care, sure, plenty of people have a “higher standard of living” versus pre-industrialized societies. That’s a trivial statement. It’s vacuous.
Actually, what’s relevant is that the “poor” in any country have to work long, difficult jobs in order to survive. Some people even die or receive brutal injuries at work. And none of them are being compensated enough, because some people — like our version of medieval kings — don’t have to work at all.
In the context of this discussion, we have situations where people can’t afford to do obvious things that benefit themselves and others. I can’t point my finger and say “capitalism did this”, because the whole engine of human relations (economic, social, cultural) is incredibly vast, and capitalism is such a massive, loaded concept.
But I can sincerely say that somewhere along the line in this engine of human relations that there are very glaring issues that should make us question our sense of humanity.
I am not advocating for some massive, state sponsored rewriting of economic relations or technocratically calculated wealth transfers. The former was empirically a disaster in the 20th century. The latter is purely an academic debate. Nor am I saying that we ought to guilt trip people into donating more to support developers working on free projects. That feels manipulative, although making any community more self-sustaining and caring is obviously good.
I don’t know how fruitful parroting one of coldest takes (capitalism made people richer) can be in light of the lived realities of billions of people, working poor, passionate developers, and everyone who isn’t a 21st century robber baron. We are capable of being kinder and more open-minded.
The truth that society is constantly being reorganized every day. Even the shift from feudalism to “capitalism” happened over hundreds of years. In 300 years, people will look back at our current society and give it a name and analysis, because by then we would be living under a different paradigm. However, until then, future is what we make of it. And we could be more empathetic, and more imaginative.
Capitalism doesn't generate wealth - it's a paradigm of wealth distribution.
People generate wealth, and they do so regardless of which wealth distribution system is in power.
Also your comment is snarky and uninformative, contrary to the spirit of HN discussion.
Capitalism encourages generating wealth since people get to keep a slice of it, instead of being all looted by the state. The productivity gap is huge between the two systems.
This is why communist societies struggle to even provide the basic needs like food and clothes to their citizens while under capitalism citizens face a "tyranny of choice".
> Capitalism encourages generating wealth since people get to keep a slice of it, instead of being all looted by the state. The productivity gap is huge between the two systems.
1) In current capitalist system, almost all the "slices" are taken by owners and banks. Most workers only get crumbs of the wealth they create.
2) Communism and capitalism are not the only two ways of distributing wealth - there's a huge contiuum between them (like European socialism), and a huge number of paradigms outside of them.
No, it's the threat of dying of hunger that provides the incentive to produce.
The fact that almost all slices are taken by owners and banks actually creates incentive to capture as much value as possible regardless of production of it.
I'm not contradicting anything, you just didn't get the distinction:
Incentive is to capture value, not create it. Workers create value because they have no other choice, but the system encourages capturing of value on a large scale. Rent-seeking and debt-collection is the most profitable activity in capitalism, not creation of value.
It is quite trivial to become owner today. All you have to do is buy a share (or even a fraction of it!), and you can do it from your very phone - the wonders of Capitalism.
> huge contiuum between them (like European socialism)
That explains quite well the why Europe is falling so far behind USA in the 21st century: in the communism - capitalism continuum EU slid a little too much to the left.
> huge number of paradigms outside of them
Please do present them because I keep hearing they exist but nobody is giving any working, real-world tested examples.
Healthcare in European countries is leagues above American healthcare for ordinary people, and so is social support system. In US, if you run out of money, you're simply left to starve or die of disease.
Here in Eastern Europe we are thankful for private healthcare every day - the state-run socialized healthcare literally kills. Recently there was a case of a senior citizen left without a simple oxygen tank until he was braindead - just because the state employees did not give a crap.
Hospitals look like in the First World War movies. Every little thing (like toilet paper or soap in the communal bathroom) is missing. You have to buy your own medicine and bring consumables with you... I could go on.
> left to starve or die of disease
Who are food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid programs for then?
As a follow European, having lived in several countries east-to-central-to-west, I concur.
Where did this myth that European healthcare is some sort of panacea originate?
Maybe from far away, if you squint really hard, through ideology-tinted lenses?
Or some viral study referring to 1990s Sweden?
You want to avoid the public healthcare system like the plague. GPs, dentists, specialists, palliative care… always look for the "private" option first. I scare-quote "private" because the industry is heavily regulated so that even private care must be half-public, in order to operate legally.
The resulting public system is depersonalized, bureaucratic, uncaring, underfunded (inevitable corruption and inefficiency of mind-boggling proportions rather than lack of funds as such). The system survives through heroic efforts of overworked & abused "public" doctors and nurses.
In my home EU country (CZ) the medical staff are either revolting [0] or resolving to good old bribery to restore the market conditions [1].
And CZ is just middle of the pack: most European countries have it worse, according to the Euro Health Consumer Index [2].
Thanks for providing your perspective! It’s incredibly frustrating to keep reading from people whose hospitals look like 5* hotels coupled with the Space Station praising a system they never used and have no idea how bad it can be.
Just because they perceive it as being free (although we are paying it through the nose in our monthly taxes) while theirs require a job and an insurance (which ours pretty much requires too).
> Hospitals look like in the First World War movies. Every little thing (like toilet paper or soap in the communal bathroom) is missing. You have to buy your own medicine and bring consumables with you... I could go on.
That's just bullcrap. I live in a fairly poor Eastern European country, and public hospitals work fine. The only problem is that you may have to wait up a week to get an appointment (because everyone is using public healthcare), but apart from that I've never had a problem with public healthcare in my life. They diagnoze you, they give you prescription (which you don't have to pay for), and you go home.
Maybe you resent that the buildings don't look like 5 star hotels, but all I care about is that place is clean and sanitized, and does the job.
So communism, for example, generates the same wealth as a free market country, it just distributes it differently? History amply shows that to not be true.
Sure but what would they have to steal from the Soviets?! I mean the West had A/C, cars, color TV, computers and so on while USSR was struggling to feed its people. Reminds me of the old Soviet joke brilliantly included in the Chernobyl series:
"What’s as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shit-load of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces?
A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces."
Soviets have had a very strong educational system, and a large number of scientists and engineers. Even mathematics, on which all the other science rests, was actively developed by the Soviet. E.g. Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov basically invented the modern probability theory.
To claim that their engineers have done nothing but wait for spies to come back with US knowledge is a little absurd.
How much of the technology in your car was developed by the Soviets? How about the last airliner you flew on? How about your computer? How about your phone? How about your TV? How about agriculture?
Yes, the techonology created by free market countries. The evidence abounds. Your computer, for example.
> As a counterexample, I'd like to point out the Soviet space program.
Yes, the Soviets did have some technological successes. But look around you. How much in your home is communist developed technology? I can't think of any in mine.
Capitalism describes only who gets the money from a factory according to a pice of paper with no other relation with the work performed in said factory.
With taxes funding the work, there will be some (aggregate) metric to decide who gets the grants, and some committee to decide said metric and apply it. Which inevitably leads to corruption, both in directly gaming the metric and in greasing the committee wheels to choose the metric that favors certain kind of projects, certain kind of credentials, and/or certain socio-ethno-economic identity markers of the authors.
While the capitalist system is nakedly brutal, at least offers a skilled, determined and lucky person the opportunity to spend a part of their career earning (temporary) financial independence, and then spend it to finance their own projects.
For example, what if you were guaranteed housing, food, and water for working some government job (assigned at random even) a couple of days a week? Most likely people will not want to be janitors and the like so it makes sense to tie social needs to the benefits to offset this, and the food provided does not need to have a lot of choice, as long as it meets nutrition requirements.
Ambitious humans may want more, fine, allow an industry as we do now for people to grow and expand. In fact, competing with the government guaranteeing basic needs puts an easy floor on otherwise exploitative jobs. You have to at least beat the floor to attract any labor.
I'm starting to notice that roughly half of the comments on these threads that even lightly touch on the "ecomonmics" of Free and Open Source software are from who think they or their peers are somehow entitled to money and attention just because they put some code on the Internet.
Maybe I'm old-school but I was always under the impression that a paycheck and recognition are things that are earned, not begged-for or guilt-tripped into.
The name of your app (within the context of this post) made me think it was was a way to analyze GitHub repos to see what the bus factor is for maintainers.
People should devote a little time to learning about money and business as they do with programming or any other ability they have.
If you believe that "Money is a dirty word" you should check your social environment and make friends that do not have those limiting beliefs so you could support each other. Creating a support group of people like you(developers) is a great idea.
Could be easily solved by stating that if you used the product and your income is bigger than $x per year, you owe $1000 to the project per year. But the OS gurus convinced the developers that it should be free for everybody. Even companies that have billions in cash. Develooers are really smart but also very gullible.
Large corporations are going to play by the rules just because in general it's cheaper than risking going to court eventually over not following them. Sure some small fries who borderline should be paying you may not, but in the grand scheme that won't be losing you a ton of money compared to the big fish who will pay.
Oh that makes sense. I thought the suggestion was referring to individuals and not corporations - eg "individuals should buy a license if they earn more than $80k/year" or something. That seems tougher to enforce.
As others said it enforces itself. Also if a company has wild success with your software there is a good chance you will find out. Also, in my country there is an angency that checks that companies paid for the software they use.
The "it's not open source" gate keepers really are bringing everybody down. I don't know why people care so much about the OSI and their arbitrary and narrow definition of such a generic term? It seems like owning a premium domain name (opensource.org) is all that matters for having credibility on the internet.
Maybe I'm being unfair, and that org actually does something useful? Can someone enlighten me if that's the case?
Why do you care so much if your license is an OSI-approved one? No one is keeping you from releasing your software under any license (or lack thereof) you choose.
There is a way to do that while still keeping your project free-software. Set a dual license (A)GPL/Commercial License. Most businesses will not want to have anything to do with GPL so will choose the commercial one, will other open-source users/companies will not be affected. Gifksi is a successful example of such pattern: https://gif.ski/license.html
It's strange how some people believe that their own worldview should be the only correct one.
I have a few small open source projects and have contributed to hundreds more, and I am perfectly happy knowing I will never see a cent for those efforts. My reward for all of that work is not monetary and I would never want it to be.
It's like people are straight-up _offended_ at the notion that there might be a person out there doing programming for free and then giving it to the world with nothing expected in return.
... but they will convince your crypto startup investor that you’re on the hype train so that they’ll sink money into baiting the next round of idiots.
hey HN! thanks to whoever posted this. An update on this is that Sizzy is still going strong!
Lately I've been super busy with building [Benji](https://benji.so) which is a Life OS and organizes your habits, todos, routines, planner, fasting, meal tracking and a billion other features. I got tired of paying subscriptions for 31855 mediocre apps so I built a single master app that combines everything.
A lot of people ask me about my philosophy of shipping so I made [Zero To Shipped](https://zerotoshipped.com) which teaches the details of my stack along with my mindset about shipping paid products. So far there's 92 videos and 10 hours of content, but the final version will be more than 200 videos.
I hope I'm not violating some HN rules when I'm talking about the things that I made...
Feel free to AMA and I'd happy to answer your questions!
Buy a building.
Fill it with applicants with the most github stars.
(Validate the stars)
Don't charge rent.
let them do what they want.
Find sponsorships.
"I'd spend hours to automate a task that takes 3 seconds just so I don't have to repeat the steps ever again. Meanwhile, my sister was swapping the batteries between two remotes 10 times per day for almost a year without buying a second pair of batteries and she was absolutely fine. I guess everyone is different."
This here is hilarious and true.
I'm pretty sure this kind of thinking creeps back into engineer's personal lives.
The girlfriend has a TV that blew up. Occasionally she powers it up to see if it works or not again. This blows the breakers to her apartment. So she leaves it there for a couple of months and tries again. Of course it blows the breakers instantly every time. It blew up initially 6 years ago. I am wondering if she's still going to be doing this in 6 years. She has more than enough money to replace it but that or repairing it is "too much hassle" so she doesn't bother. So it sits there. Then again she has a psych PhD so perhaps it's just an experiment.
People are weird when it comes to ensuring they get absolute maximum value out of the things they buy.
I had a 3 year old $20 electric shaver that got dropped into water a few months ago. It wasn't water proof. It stopped turning on but I noticed if I let the battery drain and then plug it into an outlet it worked. I got about a month out of it this way. After it stopped working using that method I tried every day for a week using all sorts of combinations to see if it would turn on, it never did. Eventually I bought a new one but I wasn't happy about it.
That would be a severe underestimation of my persistence on such matters. I held a support case open for nearly a decade at MSFT on Connect. It only got closed because they shut Connect down.
“I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Availability (or lack thereof) of source code is not a business model. "Open source" doesn't magically make money, and neither does closed source. I agree that too many people out there think that they can publish something to Github and the cash will start rolling in. Regardless of how useful your product is, you still need to build a business around it.
> I agree that too many people out there think that they can publish something to Github and the cash will start rolling in
Does anyone think this? I thought we were just publishing this stuff for nerd status points. I never expected money other than through a salary from possibly getting hired via it would manifest
> Countless stories of companies turning back from open source to restrictive licenses.
> Will open source survive? Except maybe the iconic projects that have already a certain status such as Linux, LLVM etc?
I’d say that 95% of open-source is made by normal people like you and me, not by companies. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2347/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33540293 (11 months ago, 239 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20683735 (4 years ago, 176 comments)