[HN Gopher] How to pay your rent with your open source project (...
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How to pay your rent with your open source project (2020)
Author : gregnavis
Score : 282 points
Date : 2022-08-24 10:38 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plausible.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (plausible.io)
| aret wrote:
| The root cause problem here is having to pay rent in the first
| place.
|
| It's appalling to think of just how much of our hard work and
| economic output is being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily
| sit around doing nothing productive while receiving all the rent
| money that so many of us have to pay as tribute, just to avoid
| being homeless.
|
| All this hard work I do so my landlord can pay off his mortgage.
| Makes me wonder, what's the point?
| tiborsaas wrote:
| The point is that you can live at a place you can't afford to
| buy. If not rent, then a mortgage is waiting for you, but at
| the same time your responsibilities increase quite a bit.
|
| So what do you suggest? Free housing by the government? I'd
| love that too, but can I get a penthouse pretty please?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This is not a credible line of argument.
|
| Other countries - notably Finland and Austria, among others -
| have no problem providing reasonable state housing at
| reasonable cost.
|
| Finland houses its homeless as a matter of course because it
| turns out to be _hugely cheaper than the alternatives_ ,
| economically and politically.
|
| Some of those countries _also_ score well on affordable
| private home ownership.
|
| America doesn't - because the idea of a government that
| buffers its citizens from private sector exploitation is
| against the guiding creed of economic narcissism.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Comparing developed nations to America is kinda unfair, but
| ok :) My point was that just because somebody is a landlord
| it's not the root of all evil. (I'm not one).
|
| Governments can and do create programs to support families
| (too bad for singles in my country) but at the end getting
| all this for free is probably a utopia.
|
| Affordable home ownership exists everywhere, but nobody
| wants to move to most of those places, people need more
| than a roof above their heads, but that comes at a cost.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _The root cause problem here is having to pay rent in the first
| place._
|
| The root cause is life and economic reality. Working for free
| is antithetical to survival and simply cannot be sustained over
| the long run.
|
| _Makes me wonder, what 's the point?_
|
| I think the universe is instructing you to to become a
| landlord. Once this has been achieved, then you can spend all
| your time developing free software.
| ekianjo wrote:
| So you want stuff for free? You think buildings spring out from
| the ground by themselves?
| freemint wrote:
| No but the state can be much more effective at providing
| housing then individuals.
| 50 wrote:
| Well said. But let us go deeper:
|
| "Property must be destroyed before imagination can be developed
| any further." (Berger)
|
| "No matter how much it proclaims its pseudotolerance, the
| capitalist system in all its forms (family, school, factories,
| army, codes, discourse...) continues to subjugate all desires,
| sexuality, and affects to the dictatorship of its totalitarian
| organization, founded on exploitation, property, male power,
| profit, productivity... Tirelessly it continues its dirty work
| of castrating, suppressing, torturing, and dividing up our
| bodies in order to inscribe its laws on our flesh, in order to
| rivet to our subconscious its mechanisms for reproducing this
| system of enslavement. With its throttling, its stasis, its
| lesions, its neuroses, the capitalist state imposes its norms,
| establishes its models, imprints its features, assigns its
| roles, propagates its programs... Using every available access
| route into our organisms, it insinuates into the depths of our
| insides its roots of death. It usurps our organs, disrupts our
| vital functions, mutilates our pleasures, subjugates all lived
| experience to the control of its condemning judgments."
| (Guattari)
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| The capitalist system is bad --- except for all the other
| systems which are arguably even worse.
|
| The fact that you own a computer capable of making your post
| is a testament to the evil effectiveness of capitalism.
| honkler wrote:
| The nerds who actually made technology possible did not
| care a bit about money. Now, capital did make mass
| technology possible. But it cannot have pure innovation,
| only financial and operations engineering.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| _The nerds who actually made technology possible did not
| care a bit about money._
|
| Easily proven false.
|
| I know a lot of nerds/geeks who make technology possible
| --- I'm one of them. And virtually all of them have a job
| of some sort working for money.
| Otek wrote:
| aret wrote:
| Maybe then I should be paying rent to the construction
| workers who built the apartment I live in and the laborers
| who made the raw materials, as a thank you for all their hard
| work.
| badpun wrote:
| > The root cause problem here is having to pay rent in the
| first place.
|
| And having to eat. It's equally appaling.
| francis-io wrote:
| No one is forcing you to rent in a specific place. Go buy a
| flat or house yourself.
| asenkyr wrote:
| > _All this hard work I do so my landlord can pay off his
| mortgage._
|
| If you think that it is so easy and risk-free, why not take
| your own mortgage and let other suckers pay it off for YOU?
| endorphine wrote:
| Not OP, but some possible explanations:
|
| - it's against OP's values and principles - OP doesn't
| believe it's risk-free or easy (I don't believe they said
| that) - OP doesn't act solely based on financial incentives
| asenkyr wrote:
| He did not say it explicitly, but I think that it is
| implied in this part of his comment:
|
| > _being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily sit
| around doing nothing productive_
|
| I would argue, that doing something that is not easy and
| taking risks is the opposite of _lazily sitting around and
| doing nothing productive_.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The only real risk is temporary expense and inconvenience
| if a tenant turns out to be bad.
|
| Even if it's not possible to eliminate that risk, there
| are various not particularly challenging ways to minimise
| it.
|
| On a return-for-hours-worked-actively metric, being a
| landlord can be _extremely_ easy.
|
| And you can trade off money for more time by handing over
| more or less all of it to agencies and/or informal
| support.
| cxr wrote:
| I think the most charitable way to respond is to empathize
| with the person who has spent >=$X monthly for the last N
| years and did not had _contribute that amount to a mortgage
| instead_ as an available option. It 's easy to respond to
| your opponent by assuming that all the unbound variables are
| on your side. What if they aren't?
| asenkyr wrote:
| Don't get me wrong - I can empathise with how hard it can
| be to get your own house or flat these days.
|
| But I do not think OP's comment was fair to the landlords.
| It is not their fault that building materials are getting
| ridiculously expensive, that more and more people need to
| live in/near the cities to get a decent job and other
| factors that make owning your property less and less
| accessible.
| hurril wrote:
| That mortgage is paying off the people that built the house.
| What remains after that is to pay for the landlord's food and
| medicals. Take the landlord and the house away and where do you
| live now?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Just live in a van down by the river. That will show that
| landlord a thing or two!
| scombridae wrote:
| tl;dr a 2020 rehash of same ineffective saws (pro version,
| donations, support).
|
| Every ten year old realizes the easiest way to sustain the
| lemonade stand is not giving away the lemonade.
| nwilkens wrote:
| Triton DataCenter[1] is open source[2], and has commercial
| revenue in excess of $1M ARR. We were fortunate to acquire this
| product from Joyent earlier this year[3], and are now well on our
| way to the next revenue target.
|
| Triton was built on the backs of giants -- so a slightly
| different scenario than most.. But it is clear that customers
| will pay for open source products, and you can more than pay your
| rent one day!
|
| [1]: https://www.tritondatacenter.com
|
| [2]: https://github.com/tritondatacenter
|
| [3]: https://www.mnxsolutions.com/triton-faq
| O__________O wrote:
| Related post by Plausible Analytics:
|
| - How we built a $1M ARR open source SaaS
|
| https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas
| rthomas6 wrote:
| There is one important monetization strategy that is overlooked
| by this article: dual licensing. License the source explicitly
| for non commercial use only, then offer a commercial use licensed
| product (plus support, usually) for a fee. If there is a big
| community of hobbyists in the relevant field who do the same
| thing in their dayjob, I think this works well.
|
| Edit: A more open source version of this is to GPL the source and
| offer a more commercial friendly licensed product for a fee. I
| don't know if this technically goes against GPL but I have seen
| people do this.
|
| Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-licensing
| juergbi wrote:
| While this may be an option in some cases, this wouldn't be an
| open source project.
| chrsig wrote:
| do you mean to say it wouldn't be libre software, due to the
| commercial use restriction?
| random314 wrote:
| Yes
| jb1991 wrote:
| open source means the source is.. open. It does not mean the
| source is necessary free. These two points are not in
| conflict.
| jahewson wrote:
| That is not how we define open source. See:
|
| https://opensource.org/osd
|
| Openness is much more than "source available". Open for use
| by others is an important part of that.
| amrocha wrote:
| That's not how I've decided to define open source.
| Looking forward to seeing that page updated!
| vs4vijay wrote:
| Isn't it the Open Core model?
| rthomas6 wrote:
| It's related, but the Open Core model described in the
| article mentions extra paid features surrounding an open core
| anyone can use. What I am describing is the same set of
| features priced differently for different use cases.
| thanksgiving wrote:
| I anal but why do we need to restrict commercial activity?
| I say allow people commercial use but use AGPLv3.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_Lic
| e...
|
| > The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified
| version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added
| requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and
| let other users communicate with it there, your server must
| also allow them to download the source code corresponding
| to the modified version running there.
|
| > The purpose of the GNU Affero GPL is to prevent a problem
| that affects developers of free programs that are often
| used on servers.
|
| This allows people to run your code as is but as soon as
| they edit the source code, they must make it available to
| their users. My understanding is if they only use it for
| their employees on their own corporate network, they only
| need to share the changes with their own employees? I think
| that is a fair compromise, no?
| cal85 wrote:
| Software that is free for "non-commercial" use doesn't really
| get anywhere. It's a naive proposition. It is not simple
| drawing the line between non-commercial and commercial
| activities. Things that are non-commercial can easily slip into
| commercial by some definition, and then you'd suddenly be in
| breach of contract, no one wants to take that risk. This is why
| people use permissive licences if they want their OSS to be
| used.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| >Things that are non-commercial can easily slip into
| commercial by some definition, and then you'd suddenly be in
| breach of contract, no one wants to take that risk.
|
| That's part of why it works. If you start making money, you
| have to pay to use the software you've already designed your
| product around.
| joemazerino wrote:
| How do you enforce payment? Chasing vendors around? Adding
| analytics to your platform to tattle-tale?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > If you start making money
|
| Is that Net or Gross?
| jahewson wrote:
| "Making money" is not a workable definition. What if my
| product is free but my company makes money off support?
| What if it's freemium but I have not added a paid tier yet?
| What if my product looses money? What if my software is
| free but I use it to promote my personal brand and pick up
| consulting work?
|
| I'd say that all of those scenarios are commercial.
| glitchc wrote:
| Maintaining feature parity in a dual licensing model is the
| challenge. Incentives are such that over time the paid for
| version invariably incorporates features that are lacking in
| the open source version, simply because there's limited
| incentive to port them over.
| Gud wrote:
| If it's licensed for "non-commercial use", it is no longer open
| source. But you are correct that the dual source licensing
| scheme can work, look at NGINX(BSD license) and NGINX Plus.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| If the non-commercial use license includes a copy of the
| source, why isn't that open source?
| cercatrova wrote:
| Open source != source available
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Disagree. Stop mangling language. Open source literally
| means the source code is freely available. If that's not
| good enough you need a new phrase.
| Jon_Lowtek wrote:
| Beware of the fanatical votaries of OSI and their
| unyielding fight against those they deem heretics, who
| dare to challenge, criticize or reject the words given to
| them as dogma by the prophets of the holy GNU. They would
| rather praise and glorify those who corner markets with
| feature incomplete community demo editions, then ever
| accept any deviation from their 6th rule: "you shall not
| restrict usage of the source by license except as set by
| these rules". They will endlessly argue that "open
| source" exclusively and only means "licensed according to
| their beliefs" and no other definition of that word can
| or should ever exist. Do not argue with them about the
| term being deemed too descriptive to be trademarkable, or
| how language works and evolves, as this is not a case of
| law or of reason, but of emotion, of power and fear,
| centered around the prerogative of definition and the
| concept of identity. They will rather drown you in
| downvotes or burn you at a flame war, then ever grant
| freedom in the use of language, for they think that
| allowing any other definition for their holy words to
| stand unanswered will invite shism and confusion and
| forever taint the fundament of their cultish identity.
| Know that fighting them about this is pointless as there
| is nothing to win but grief and much time and sanity to
| loose.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| If we are going down that road, what does "freely
| available" mean? To me that would suggest Public Domain
| only. If you get access to the code under a license, even
| something as liberal as MIT license, it wasn't "freely
| available" you had to agree to the license.
|
| More to the point with a no commercial clause, it isn't
| freely available there are restrictions on what you can
| do with it.
| Gud wrote:
| No, this is not the definition of open source. Open
| Source was coined by OSI as an alternative (less
| political) than Free Software.
| clcaev wrote:
| Well, it was just as political... it's just the politics
| favor large companies who were convinced to use and let
| their employees contribute to projects under a license
| more akin to the public domain.
| cercatrova wrote:
| "Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code.
| The distribution terms of open-source software must
| comply with the following criteria:" (omitted here) [0]
|
| Crucially, one cannot make their code "for non-commerical
| use only" and have it still be open source. It must be
| available for any entity to do with it what they wish.
| One can of course restrict that, but it would no longer
| be open source. Source available, perhaps, but not open
| source.
|
| Therefore, ironically, it is you who should not mangle
| language, not me.
|
| [0] https://opensource.org/osd
| sarchertech wrote:
| > It must be available for any entity to do with it what
| they wish.
|
| By that definition GPL and attribution required aren't
| open source.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Taking two words that have a meaning when put together
| and changing that meaning is mangling language.
| opensource.org claiming open source means something
| different from what the phrase literally means is more
| harmful than helpful. I agree, we need to be able to talk
| about code that is actually free for all to use. "Open
| source" is not the way to do that.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Sorry, I cannot agree with you. OSI came up with the term
| "open source," hence I will use it as it is
| conventionally used, ie via their definition. If you want
| to literally interpret that, feel free to do so but know
| that others, such as those commenting on your thread,
| will not agree with you.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| The phrase doesn't literally mean anything. Does the
| phrase "open door" mean the door is freely available?
| Does the phrase "open book" mean the book is freely
| available?
|
| It's great that the phrase "open source" has been so
| intuitively understood but to claim it has an obvious
| literal meaning is just nonsense.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| I could care less about the terminology people use, but I
| feel like all your examples would point to the intuitive
| meaning that "open source" implies.
|
| An open door implies you can see what's behind the door,
| as opposed to a closed door. An open book implies you can
| see what's inside a book, as opposed to a closed book.
| Likewise, open source implies that you can see inside the
| source code, as opposed to closed source.
|
| So I think the claim that it has no obvious literal
| meaning is a bit hyperbolic, but I get where your
| thinking, since most developers automatically associate
| "open source" with "free code".
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Except the phrase "open door" doesn't mean that. It's a
| door you can walk through, not see through.
|
| Perhaps Glass Source would be a more accurate phrase for
| code you can see but not touch.
| kittiepryde wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-
| source_software#Definit...
|
| See the provided link. I am used to the source open /
| source available phrasing, but, I did not know the
| history behind it.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| The accepted definition of "open source" includes the
| ability to modify and redistribute freely. A "non-
| commercial use" clause limits this
| rthomas6 wrote:
| I see. My mistake then. I edited the OP comment to
| include an actual open source version what I am
| attempting to describe.
| varispeed wrote:
| It is open source. Just that big corporations can't profiteer
| from it. It seems like there is a concerted effort by people
| working for these big corporations to discredit dual
| licensing. Software that is free to be exploited for profit
| lets these companies avoid hiring extra employees and paying
| taxes.
|
| Promotion of (corporate version of) open source is designed
| to cut costs of R&D - so people use their own money and
| resources to create projects and then big corporation comes
| in and appropriates the successful ones without paying
| anything. Sometimes they contribute some code back, job done.
|
| Then you have a situation where big corporation makes
| millions or even billions using the software and original
| developers are struggling to make ends meet.
|
| This is wrong!
|
| Every open source project should be dual licensed, so the
| authors can be properly compensated!
| jahewson wrote:
| No, it's not open source. Period. Why are people trying to
| argue black is white?
|
| https://opensource.org/osd
|
| The OSD was created precisely to prevent this kind of
| underhanded twisting of words.
|
| Want to use a non-open license, go for it! But find your
| own phrase to describe it. "Open source" is taken.
| varispeed wrote:
| Look at the Sponsors list - it proves my point. That term
| has been hijacked by big corporations to ensure they have
| free access to projects created by community without
| remunerating the authors.
| jahewson wrote:
| That's a different angle though - you're saying that open
| source has limitations if you're an author wanting to
| commercially exploit it. That's true. I don't think that
| "corporations want stuff for free" really holds - they
| have waaaay more money than anybody and throw it around
| all the time. I think it's more like, if it's free for
| the taking, then why not? On the other hand, making stuff
| expensive is a great way to set up a barrier so that
| _only_ corporations can use it.
|
| Beyond security and interoperability I don't see the
| point in projects that anyone can contribute to but only
| one person can profit from. Why would I contribute? I
| always felt this way about dual-license GPL code. It has
| a first-mover effect that sucks all the air out of the
| room for someone to create a project with more liberal
| licensing. How am I to set up a rival project if I don't
| also want to be your business rival?
| varispeed wrote:
| In my country volunteering at for profit organisation is
| illegal. Which this essentially becomes if you allow for
| profit corporations to use the open source software
| without remuneration.
|
| That being said, if you contribute to an open source dual
| licensed project, you should be getting a share of the
| revenue coming from corporations paying for the license.
|
| Your idea of free software is similar to that in the
| music industry, where corporations want to pay for the
| content in "exposure".
|
| Another thing - that comes back to my first point - is
| that if we allow open source contributors to not be
| compensated, when their projects are being used
| commercially, we are creating inequality, where only
| privileged people who can afford to commit their time for
| free contribute to these projects, get recognition and
| then subsequently may be looking at getting better jobs
| than those who cannot afford to contribute, because they
| come from poor background and need to be in paid work in
| order to live. In my country, when unpaid internships
| were legal, they were usually taken by white kids from
| privileged middle class families, who could pay for their
| food and accommodation. They were getting experience and
| better start in life than their poor peers.
|
| Your idea of open source enforces inequality and is
| wrong!
| rascul wrote:
| A number of those big corporations on the sponsors list
| publish open source software and/or contribute to open
| source projects. I don't know how many, but there's
| several I recognized (Google, Microsoft, GitHub, Comcast,
| Indeed).
| ebiester wrote:
| AGPL is open source but in no way business-friendly.
|
| This is much earlier than sponsorship and goes to
| Stallman's Freedom 0.
|
| You're looking for "source-available."
| clcaev wrote:
| The open source definition originates from Debian, driven
| by quite thoughtful industry practitioners.
|
| Yes, permissive open source licenses tend to benefit
| large industry players.
|
| However, you have it backwards.
|
| We promoted these licenses to these industry players
| under the "Open Source" label so that we could use and
| contribute to free software at our day jobs, rather than
| being locked into a proprietary landscape.
|
| It seems you are solving a different problem.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Or, dual license with a negotiated commercial license, and a
| "business unfriendly" license like GPL. I've worked at a
| company that uses a library* that is licensed this way, and
| they went with the commercial license so they didn't have to
| conform to the rules of the GPL.
|
| * https://ckeditor.com/
| pksebben wrote:
| They do mention this as their own strategy - a cloud-hosted
| subscription version of plausible is available where they
| manage and run it for you.
| rthomas6 wrote:
| Technically, that is not the same thing. That's monetization
| through SaaS, which is one of the strategies mentioned
| (Hosted, plug and play solution as a SaaS).
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| It's disheartening, especially so in a tech community, to see
| comments appear so quickly to cast judgement. "Dual licensing
| is not open source!"
|
| This is same kind of pedantry that haunts every thread like the
| last. We know that a bowl of cereal isn't thought of as a soup,
| nor is a hotdog thought a sandwich. And yet, there's always
| someone out there with the time to argue semantics.
|
| The proof is in the pudding! Software developers who have any
| business sense will tell you that customers presume that open-
| source is synonymous with source-available. Marketing your
| software with that presumption isn't a moral failing -- It's
| business!
|
| And if anyone out their still has an unfulfilled quandary, I
| would recommend that they try to monetize their open-source
| code and experience the illucrative rewards of the MIT and BSD
| licenses.
| franciscop wrote:
| Exactly! I'm considering a small project in the future, and
| I'd make it open source _mainly_ for a security point of
| view. The kind of software in particular would benefit the
| users massively if they can read the code, and even self-host
| for the most paranoid (with a fee and a very restrictive
| license?). Sure, it'd not be in the "open source" space and I
| would personally not market it as such, but while it's way
| better than _not_ having access to the code I know if it ends
| up in HN comments like the one you mention will be plenty.
| jahewson wrote:
| Nope. Sorry but you don't get to hijack the term "open
| source". There's a reason we have gone to considerable
| lengths to define it https://opensource.org/osd
|
| Openness is an important principle and it includes not
| discriminating against fields of endeavour. Think "open
| society" not "open jar".
|
| And if you disagree? Well, then I have some free software to
| sell you!
|
| > Software developers who have any business sense will tell
| you that customers presume that open-source is synonymous
| with source-available.
|
| As a software developer with business sense, I call BS on
| this made-up "fact". All true scotsmen agree with me.
| nocman wrote:
| > Nope. Sorry but you don't get to hijack the term "open
| source"
|
| The problem with this viewpoint is that the OSI is not the
| final arbiter of the English language.
|
| Yes, the OSI has an "official definition" of what
| constitutes "open source" software, but there _is_ a large
| group of people in the industry that equate the term "open
| source" with the concept of the source being available, and
| nothing more. You can shout "wrong, wrong, wrong!" all you
| want, but I doubt you are going to change many of those
| people's minds.
|
| The Free Software Foundation has a similar problem with the
| term "free software".
|
| The people making the definitions are generally passionate
| about those definitions (for good reasons, mostly, in my
| estimation). However, I don't think an approach that starts
| with "Sorry but you don't get to hijack the term" is going
| to have a net positive effect. If anything, it will
| probably have a negative effect.
| jahewson wrote:
| Now _this_ feels like arguing semantics. Because multiple
| people are wrong, this makes them right? Sorry, no.
|
| As I said, there's a reason we have the OSD and it's to
| avoid these silly conversations in which people try to
| argue that because a sufficient number of people think
| that turquoise is blue, that it is therefore blue.
|
| This is a solved problem, it was solved 15 years ago.
| Nobody working in this industry has any excuse for being
| unaware of it. We should not be attempting to re-litigate
| it on every thread ever.
|
| Too many people trying to pass their work off as open
| source when it's not are not acting in good faith and are
| looking to trade off the goodwill of the phrase "open
| source" for personal profit. I'm going to complain about
| this, net positive effect be damned.
| interroboink wrote:
| A small aside: > Because multiple people
| are wrong, this makes them right?
|
| I am sympathetic to your point of view, but in terms of
| spoken language, this is actually how it works (to my
| dismay, sometimes).
|
| If enough people use the term wrong, then that becomes
| the new definition. c.f. "literally," which can now mean
| "figuratively." I roll my eyes, but there it is.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| "Literally" has meant "figuratively" for hundreds of
| years now. How old does usage have to be before it's no
| longer eye-roll-worthy?
| interroboink wrote:
| It's a good question, though I suppose it was mostly
| rhetorical (:
|
| For me, I feel there is some fuzzy line to draw between
| "some use" and "over-use". For "literally," it seemed to
| get really bad maybe 10-15 years ago, where literally
| everyone was literally dying over literally the smallest
| things, and it has tapered off a bit since then (just my
| personal experience).
|
| I feel like my eyes start to roll when it is paired with
| a lack of self-awareness. Using it as though it were for
| emphasis, but not actually being emphatic -- just tacking
| it on pointlessly.
|
| Now I'm getting flashbacks to the complaints about
| inserting "like" everywhere, which somehow has managed
| to, like, find its niche and persist irregardlessly.
| jjk166 wrote:
| That's the descriptivist take, which is useful for
| studying informal communication, particularly in
| languages like english where there is no recognized
| authority that could prescribe how a language is used.
|
| Many languages, and especially most subsets of languages
| in technical use are prescribed; however.
|
| Enough people using literally when they mean figuratively
| will eventually make literally mean figuratively in
| casual conversation. But no amount of people saying squid
| when they mean octopus will make squid mean octopus
| within the marine biology community.
| interroboink wrote:
| I think the interesting part comes when the technical
| community and the non- (or less-) technical community try
| to communicate, though.
|
| A marine biologist might reasonably talk about an
| octopus' tentacles, and understand what other people mean
| when they talk about those tentacles, even though
| octopuses actually have "arms" in strict terminology.
|
| Similar friction happens with the word "theory" in
| science or "proof" in mathematics.
|
| But back to the topic: I think enough people use "open
| source" in a non-rigorous sense that it's worth leaving
| room for multiple definitions, versus trying to stamp the
| non-technical ones out. Marine biologists don't generally
| go around emphatically saying "they're arms, not
| tentacles!" (well, maybe some do, but mostly in a good-
| natured, aware-of-how-silly-it-is sense)
| jjk166 wrote:
| Yeah, but in this case the conversation is on a marine
| biology site between marine biologists and the
| distinction between arm and tentacle is fundamentally
| meaningful to the conversation.
| interroboink wrote:
| I agree that the distinction is meaningful, but I suppose
| I disagree that it is safe to assume that everyone on HN
| has the same outlook towards the issue -- we are not all
| developers, nor are we all involved in Open Source
| proper, nor do we all have the same background. In other
| words: we are not all marine biologists from the same
| school, I don't think.
|
| Sorry to have tortured your metaphor so much (:
| nocman wrote:
| > Now this feels like arguing semantics. Because multiple
| people are wrong, this makes them right? Sorry, no.
|
| I did not say they were right. Effectively I said a lot
| of people use the term "open source" differently than you
| do, and that I didn't think the wording you chose to
| argue your case was going to be effective.
|
| I understand the frustration.
|
| > This is a solved problem, it was solved 15 years ago
|
| I guess that depends on what problem you are referring
| to. In my experience, the use of the term "open source"
| to refer strictly to "source available" software is about
| as common as it ever has been.
|
| > I'm going to complain about this, net positive effect
| be damned.
|
| Well that's your choice, but in my opinion by doing so in
| the way you have in this thread, you are working against
| the goal of persuading people to use the term in the way
| you want it to be used.
| jahewson wrote:
| Fair points!
| dwheeler wrote:
| Um, no. If something can only be used for "non-
| commercial" uses, then it is _not_ open source software.
|
| The OSI is not the final arbiter of the English language,
| but this definition is long-settled by the vast majority
| of people who know about software. For example, many
| governments (including the US) have definitions of "open
| source software" written into their laws and regulations,
| and they all basically agree with the OSI definition.
|
| For example, the US Government's "OMB M-16-21: Federal
| Source Code Policy" defines "Open Source Software (OSS)
| as: "Software that can be accessed, used, modified, and
| shared by anyone. OSS is often distributed under licenses
| that comply with the definition of "Open Source" provided
| by the Open Source Initiative
| (https://opensource.org/osd) and/or that meet the
| definition of "Free Software" provided by the Free
| Software Foundation (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
| sw.html)." https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/def
| ault/files/omb...
| nocman wrote:
| > but this definition is long-settled by the vast
| majority of people who know about software
|
| We obviously disagree on this point, although "the vast
| majority of people who know about software" is a fairly
| vague qualifier.
|
| The fact that many software projects distribute under
| licenses that comply with the OSI's definition is not
| particularly relevant to my argument anyway. I'm not
| talking about people distributing the software, I'm
| talking about the large number of people I am aware of
| who think of "open source" strictly as software where the
| source is available.
|
| The US government examples aren't particularly relevant
| either. A small number of people make those decisions,
| and there are legal ramifications for them in how they
| define things, so I'm not at all surprised that they
| define the term that way.
|
| As I said elsewhere in the thread, I was not arguing that
| people who use "open source" as equivalent to "source-
| available" are right. Mainly I'm arguing that there is
| still a _very_ large group that see it that way, and that
| the meaning of the term is far less settled among people
| who use it than some would like it to be.
| dwheeler wrote:
| I think government examples are relevant. Governments can
| haul you into court for fraud, for one thing. And they
| typically try to define things based on widespread
| understanding - they provide evidence that something _is_
| a common understanding.
|
| It's important to have clear terms for important
| concepts. If you mean source-available (aka "open box"),
| use that phrase instead. If you mean open source
| software, call it open source software. Although I don't
| think it applies in your case, in my experience many of
| the people who misuse the term "open source software"
| (OSS) to identify something that is NOT OSS are
| _expressly_ trying to deceive. Hopefully we can agree
| that fraud is not acceptable, and then move on to discuss
| whether or not this is (intentional) fraud.
|
| The term "open system" was not well-defended years ago.
| It has a definition, but vendors wanted to redefine it
| into its opposite. Eventually "every vendor with an open
| mouth had an open system", making the term "open system"
| mostly useless. It _is_ reasonable to defend clear
| definitions of important terms, because otherwise
| communication breaks down.
| varispeed wrote:
| You don't see that you have a conflict of interest?
|
| It is in those corporations (listed as Sponsors) interest
| to have access to vast array of Open Source projects to
| exploit them commercially without committing to any R&D
| costs and paying the authors.
|
| I would argue that you have hijacked the "open source"
| term.
| jahewson wrote:
| Nah. Corporations have mountains of money. They don't
| need a little bit of free code. Sure, they'll take it if
| it's there, but it's not necessarily that valuable to
| them, because they're perfectly capable of building it
| themselves at low marginal cost.
|
| What's valuable to them is to drive the price of a
| particular product down to $0, if that will undermine a
| competitor in an area that the original company has no
| hope of winning, or if that product being free will cause
| people to buy more of their product. That is worth a huge
| amount of money and is something that they are otherwise
| unable to achieve.
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| In my experience these "mountains of money" are not
| freely available to developers who need to get permission
| for spending it from their team-leader-with-a-budget. But
| YMMV I guess, lucky you!
| codegeek wrote:
| "because they're perfectly capable of building it
| themselves at low marginal cost"
|
| Casual comment. Being capable doesn't mean it makes
| viable sense to build it on your own and how are you so
| sure about the "low marginal cost". It never is when you
| have to build something, anything.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| Just to comment in the "little bit of free code" there
| are projects like python and numpy that would take ages
| to do properly and depending on the company would never
| ship (or function as reliably as it does right now)
|
| Sometimes they're buying decades worth of
| debugging/testing
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| Screw the pedantic flag waving. All I care about is being
| able to acquire the source code of what I'm using and
| compile it myself. Everything else is just noise. It sounds
| like you're just arguing just to argue. Some people want to
| make money from the hundreds (or thousands) of hours they
| put into their projects while also making that same project
| available for free to those who need it most.
| wolpoli wrote:
| > Nope. Sorry but you don't get to hijack the term "open
| source". There's a reason we have gone to considerable
| lengths to define it https://opensource.org/osd
|
| We have a legal mechanism for dealing with this situation.
| They could have trademarked the term "Open Source", but
| that wouldn't be very open then.
| googlryas wrote:
| Sorry, but it is the other way around. "Open Source"
| hijacked the common phrase "open source". You don't get to
| say people can't use standard English because you've
| decided a certain phrase holds special meaning.
|
| Anyone familiar with english but unfamiliar with the Open
| Source concept would just think that open source is "source
| code available", not that there are all these other
| constraints applied to it as well.
| adamdusty wrote:
| What gives OSI the dictatorial authority to make the final
| definition of open source?
|
| It doesn't really matter who defines it as what. What
| matters is what people mean when they say it.
| jahewson wrote:
| As professionals we need to have a meaningful vocabulary.
| This isn't Through the Looking Glass.
| googlryas wrote:
| Yes - the vocabulary is Open Source, but not open source.
| adamdusty wrote:
| Again, what gives OSI the authority to define that
| vocabulary over anybody else? If you want to use "open
| source as defined by the OSI" more power to you but I
| suspect most people will continue to use "open source" as
| "I can find the source code online".
| paydevs wrote:
| Completely agree, no developer of an open-source software
| has explicitly stated that a) his software is open-source
| and b) that he adheres to OSI's definition.
|
| Most developer just uploaded their project to GitHub and
| attached a license. If OSI defines some licenses as open-
| source or not is irrelevant. Legally only the license is
| binding.
| mym1990 wrote:
| But a hotdog IS a sandwich!
| caseyohara wrote:
| Hot dog is actually a taco according to The Cube Rule of
| food identification https://cuberule.com
| bsedlm wrote:
| what's worse, open source has nothing to do with freedom
| dllthomas wrote:
| Uncontroversially, dual licensing is not open source when
| neither of the licenses are open source.
|
| More controversially, a "non-commercial" license is not open
| source. This is clearly the position of the OSI, though that
| isn't _necessarily_ dispositive. But note that this is not
| the same thing as a license with terms that happen to
| incidentally make some commercial use impractical (like the
| AGPL), which _may_ be what the parent meant by "non-
| commercial", in which case we just have people talking past
| each other.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| OSI muddies the waters by accepting AGPL as an open source
| license. As argued many times, it is really a EULA, not a
| proper license in the sense that GPL or BSD or MIT are
| software licenses.
| monocasa wrote:
| Since when are EULAs not software licenses?
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190064 explains it
| well:
|
| > The GPL is a copyright license. It applies when
| copyright law would otherwise prevent distributing some
| program. If I were to violate the GPL, for example by
| sending someone a compiled version and refusing to
| provide the source, then there's a clear legal theory by
| which copyright law could be applied.
|
| > That "one added requirement" in the AGPL turns it into
| a EULA, because it's an attempt to regulate for which
| purposes a user may run the program. If I were to run a
| modified AGPL'd SSH server on my own hardware, the
| question of whether I'm violating the AGPL depends on
| whether I'm allowing others to access it remotely. If the
| AGPL can be violated without copyright infringement, it's
| clearly in a different legal category than the GPL.
| ahaucnx wrote:
| If you run an open source hardware project like we do with our
| DIY air quality monitors [1] you can also monetize it via selling
| hardware kits or work with affiliate links to e.g. Amazon or
| AliExpress.
|
| However selling hardware has some additional challenges e.g.
| warranty, lost shippings, component shortages etc that you need
| to factor in.
|
| [1] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/
| aothms wrote:
| What I didn't see discussed is VCs focussing on open source
| (quick search returns e.g https://oss.capital/). Does anybody
| experience with or thoughts on this?
|
| I read a lot of comments on the intrinsic difficulty of earning
| money with foss, so advising against it or to treat it as a
| secondary side project. It's pragmatic, sure, but sometimes foss
| is a central to the value proposition, like in situations that
| require high amounts of trust or adaptability. A couple of hours
| a week is not always sufficient to retain momentum. So imho there
| is really a need for true foss business models.
| endorphine wrote:
| I've started a hobby/passion project a few months ago, and I'm
| constantly dreaming of quitting my day job to start working on it
| full-time (as opposed to doing it at midnight and getting sleep-
| deprived). Hard to give up a well-paying job when you have a
| family and financial goals ahead, but perhaps it's doable with
| donations?
|
| Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
| tomrod wrote:
| The US Government has several programs that can be used for
| seed funding. If you want to pursue the Red Hat / Anaconda
| model where you generate an open source project and retain
| revenue based on support, it can be one of a few a viable
| options.
|
| You're looking at SBIR/STTR funding, phases up to $20M for
| final phases. Other funding vehicles also exist.
|
| Check out https://www.sbir.gov/
| Magi604 wrote:
| Film/record what you're doing and put it up on the web!
| YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram, etc. Build that audience. Put your
| passion on display and people will want to follow. The money
| will come.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| There are jobs that offer 1 to 2 hours (I've heard of 4, but
| haven't actually seen them) Fridays to work on passion
| projects. Now, this all hinges on how busy your current project
| is at work... I work at a company that gives an hour a week to
| work on passion projects (or "team building exercises" if you
| prefer), but since our project went off the rails, that ain't
| happening =)
|
| Though, I'm unsure as to the legal ramifications of such work,
| TBH.
| daggersandscars wrote:
| (Note: US-centric)
|
| Please read the latest copy of your employment agreement
| before doing this. In the US, it is not uncommon for
| employers to claim everything you do, on or off the clock.
| Some places restrict this to "related" work, others do
| not.[1]
|
| Some employers will say they would never claim your work, but
| it's what's written down that matters. If they won't, ask
| them to sign an agreement. I've had broad swathes of my
| personal projects excluded from my employment agreement just
| by asking.
|
| [1] I had an employer who claimed everything. Their view was
| they paid for your existence, so they got everything you did,
| regardless of whether it related to the firm's business. I
| was tempted to ask if they claimed people's children, but
| quit instead.
| rozenmd wrote:
| Do it in the two hours you have before work.
| amelius wrote:
| Or in the X hours you read HN.
| simongray wrote:
| ... at work?
| yarky wrote:
| I agree, I rather wake up earlier to work on side
| projects/study than working late at night. This way it's the
| job that feels like an extra and not the other way around.
| salmo wrote:
| After 40 years of wanting to sleep in as long as I can, I
| flipped and wake up early and go to bed early. It's
| amazing.
|
| My free time is now when I can think and play with hobbies.
| Those can be code, music, sewing, fishing, etc etc.
|
| After work, I'm usually zonked. "Too tired for having fun"
| (Devo cover playing in my head).
|
| I now just focus on kids after school, dinner, zone out,
| and sleep by 10pm. I listen to history podcasts and don't
| watch much TV, except college football and Star Wars
| series.
|
| But I don't pressure myself to "finish" hobbies anymore.
| Work is work, hobbies are for pleasure. If hobbies are
| generating anxiety, I pivot. That took me a while to come
| to terms with, given my ADHD.
|
| I have no dreams of making a passion project my job. I
| enjoy my work and "finish" there, but like having a
| separate life.
|
| My dad owned a business, and I don't want to live that
| "never off" lifestyle. I'm a very boring family man and
| love that.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| I concur.
|
| I loved staying up late and playing games, reading,
| coding, watching films, whatever.
|
| When I had kids, I had to start waking up earlier. So I
| decided to go all in and switch to early-down/early-up,
| and it changed a lot of things in my life.
|
| The biggest change was not working on or doing things I
| love while super tired and pushing through it anyway just
| because I love it.
| prox wrote:
| If you have the possibility, see if you can work less hours
| (even it's just 4 hours)
|
| Those hours can be used to work on your passion without
| damaging your life/work balance. Ofcourse if this works for you
| depends on a lot of factors.
| rikschennink wrote:
| This. It's how I got started, since you "buy" this extra time
| you're more likely to spend it well.
| eesmith wrote:
| No, it's not doable with donations.
|
| I mean, there might be a couple people who do that? I don't
| know of any. (And it's been tried.)
|
| In general, companies don't donate - they need a concrete
| benefit they can show to the tax agency. Eg, they _will_ pay to
| contract you to add features.
|
| So you're left with individual contributions, who have less
| money than companies. And the overhead of dealing with
| payments.
|
| Daniel Stenberg, of curl fame, confirms that it's hard to make
| money off of donations, starting at
| https://youtu.be/jVT37EmND8I?t=1688 .
|
| We can look to curl as an example.
| https://opencollective.com/curl#category-BUDGET say they've had
| $200K in contributions, which after fees is $178,598.94 raised.
|
| Over a period of 3 or so years.
|
| After decades of development, and as one of the most widely
| distributed software packages in existence.
|
| Find a customer willing to pay you to work on it.
|
| Figure out the market size, and what they are willing to pay.
|
| Figure out at what point you're willing to give up dream, in
| case your plan (and pivot(s)) don't work out.
|
| But do not, not, NOT, depend on donations to meet your
| financial goals.
| david_allison wrote:
| Strong +1 on this. Expect about $0.01/user/year from
| donations.
| asicsp wrote:
| May be look for jobs that offer reduced working hours? For
| example, quoting from https://sahillavingia.com/work
|
| > _People work at Gumroad as little as they need to sustain the
| other parts of their lives they prefer to spend their time and
| energy on: a creative side-hustle, their family, or anything
| else._
| vector_spaces wrote:
| For what it's worth, I went through a hiring process with
| this person and it was one of the worst/cruelest interview
| experiences of my life. I emailed him in response to a thread
| on Twitter where he indicated he was looking to hire
| diverse/nontraditional engineers mentioning I was self
| taught. He replied immediately with a take home project that
| ostensibly only required 3 hours but took me close to 24
| hours. He responded saying it wasn't up to par and then
| ghosted.
|
| I was way more green back then and looking over the project I
| sent him now, I understand what wasn't "up to par" about it,
| but I think it's fucked up to immediately send someone a take
| home without a quick phone screen unless you know them
| already, and also to ghost on someone who's put in a ton of
| work for you without giving any feedback or advice,
| especially when you claim to be interested in hiring
| nontraditional candidates.
|
| Anyway, as a result of that experience I no longer do take
| homes as a rule, and I am continually rubbed the wrong way by
| how much love Sahil's blog posts on being such a progressive
| employer get in these parts.
| codazoda wrote:
| I've also interacted with him via email and was put off by
| his response but after reading some of his blog posts I
| think this is how he gets stuff done with limited
| resources. The email was short and to the point, which
| feels "rude", but it gave me exactly what I needed in a few
| short words.
|
| Steve Jobs is famous for his very short emails and I
| suspect they evoked similar responses from people.
|
| I like to give more detail in my own correspondence, but it
| does take significant time.
| chucksmash wrote:
| Why do you feel the interaction was cruel? A brief "no"
| seems like all you'd get from most companies too.
|
| My understanding is the policy is intended to avoid
| pointless debates and inadvertent legal liability (e.g.
| "when you told the candidate 'good luck with the new baby'
| at the end of the rejection convo, it created the
| impression they were not selected because they have kids.")
|
| Why did he owe more feedback than "this isn't up to par?"
|
| Based on past threads on HN I'm in the minority in
| preferring take-home projects and not feeling I'm owed
| compensation for the time it takes to complete them.
|
| I like them because you have more of an opportunity to
| demonstrate your craft versus a standard leetcode
| whiteboard session where the 45 minute time constraint
| means you need to focus on pumping code out as quickly as
| possible. Also a good one can be an entertaining diversion
| in it's own right. Different strokes for different folks, I
| suppose.
| valeness wrote:
| Why do you feel like you're not entitled to compensation
| for your labor? Where is the line?
|
| I've experienced take home projects that were expected to
| take "10 hours". If I spend 10 hours on a take home
| instead of my consultancy I'm out thousands of dollars.
|
| I understand preferring take home projects, I prefer it
| over whiteboarding too, but I don't understand why you
| wouldn't be owed compensation. In my opinion the best
| evaluation is to work with the team on an actual story,
| task, ticket, etc. where you are paid the listed salary
| pro-rated for your hours.
| bratbag wrote:
| Because of how easy that is to scam.
|
| Also the cost is prohibative. I'm not paying dozens or
| hundreds of applicants to spend 3 hours writing code when
| most of them are going to be utter shit.
|
| If you want to deselect yourself by not doing it without
| pay, feel free.
| chucksmash wrote:
| > If I spend 10 hours on a take home instead of my
| consultancy I'm out thousands of dollars.
|
| My reasoning for not demanding I should be compensated:
|
| 1. Presumably something about the opportunity on offer is
| more compelling than your second best option of working
| on your own consultancy earning $200+/hour, otherwise why
| are you applying for the role in the first place? I'd
| argue that if the opportunity is otherwise compelling in
| the long term, demanding breakeven for one day's work is
| being penny-wise and pound foolish. Taking it to an
| extreme, if there was a job that paid $10 million/year
| but the interview process was so involved I needed to
| burn an entire year's worth of vacation time to interview
| for it, whether I'd do it would come down to expected
| value of the decision (i.e. probability of passing the
| interview), not the absolute investment I was making.
|
| 2. I'd consider this form of cost-analysis rationale a
| weak one because it can be applied to basically any
| decision in life yet it gets applied selectively, so it's
| kind of a roundabout way of saying "I don't want to do
| that." Nobody (probably?) is applying this analysis to
| sleeping 6 hours a night versus 8, yet that would yield
| 10 more billable consulting hours (per week!) too.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think the hurt of it made it feel cruel. But I don't
| think it was cruel. Just because I am hurt doesn't mean
| someone erred.
| insightcheck wrote:
| I can see it both ways. I initially thought the employer
| was already nice enough to give the applicant a chance,
| instead of denying at the outset.
|
| But then I remembered my own experiences of putting in a
| lot of work to apply for an opportunity, and then getting
| a curt denial saying I wasn't what the employer was
| looking for, or not up to the task at the time.
|
| I think it's important to remember the feelings of
| getting rejected like that. Later on, when I was in a
| position of rejecting candidates, I volunteered the time
| to send longer responses with minor feedback despite the
| opportunity cost, just because I remembered what it was
| like to be an applicant.
| [deleted]
| jjav wrote:
| > [...]took me close to 24 hours. He responded saying it
| wasn't up to par and then ghosted.
|
| And this is why I'll never do a take-home project for an
| interview.
|
| The time commitment is completely asymmetrical. The company
| can easily send the work to hundreds of people they have no
| interest it and it costs them nothing other than ~1 minute
| to send the email with some links.
|
| At least in an in-person interview every minute I spend on
| it, the company has to spend the same amount of time from
| some employee.
| eagleinparadise wrote:
| Sorry, but you admitted you produced work that wasn't "up
| to par" and he gave you immediate feedback that he was no
| longer interested. Why does he owe an unqualified candidate
| more time if they can't produce the minimum standard of
| work? And he's "f'ed up" for doing what any employer who
| has an unqualified candidate in front of them?
|
| You're being unfair to him
| asoneth wrote:
| Similar to how you decline take-home projects after getting
| burned by it, I decline to provide candidate feedback after
| getting burned by it.
|
| Unless I have some personal backchannel to pass feedback
| through I typically send a form-based response. While I
| tried to make sure any messaging isn't worded cruelly, it's
| still a rejection at the end of the day and that doesn't
| feel good.
| ogarten wrote:
| You gotta think like a business owner / founder. Your product
| can be open source but how do you want to make money? I doubt
| that you can get enough donation, at least in a reasonable
| time, to make a living.
|
| I would reduce working hours, work on your project and figure
| out how to monetize (e.g. self-hosted vs managed, consulting,
| ...). What can or cannot work depends a little on the industry
| you are in and also in what you want.
| andreacavagna wrote:
| Before quitting think about having a Business plan and a
| correct Business model canvas, think about how to monetize
| your project.
|
| Maybe the project can have an OSS target, and a $$ target on
| the enterprise solution.
|
| How much do you think to do with support with your project?
| those kind of questiona are the starting point whenever you
| want to create a business from your OSS passion
| hlandau wrote:
| One method this article doesn't mention is a "sell the binaries"
| model, usually combined with some level of support (consumer
| software) or a support contract (more complex/enterprise things).
| This model personally appeals to me.
|
| For example, I believe the Ardour DAW uses this model. But more
| importantly it's basically the business model of Redhat, which is
| presumably the most successful FOSS company there is.
|
| Another option is to combine the "sell the binaries" model with a
| trademark model, where only the official binaries can bear the
| name of the project. Third parties can offer their own binaries
| but just have to change the name. Again this is also obviously
| part of Redhat's strategy (and for the off-label versions, see
| CentOS, etc.)
|
| Another option is a variant on selling support contracts, but
| specifically about maintaining old versions of your software you
| maybe wouldn't ideally want to support anymore; it is possible to
| sell private maintained branches of older versions which are out
| of public support. However the viability of this depends on
| having some old versions, and depends on how often you break
| compatibility, which is after all what creates demand for the
| older branches.
|
| The "premium version"/"open core" option mentioned in the article
| has some serious downsides. The most obvious is that you create a
| systemic incentive to handicap the FOSS project. You end up
| competing with your own project, so you have to ensure the FOSS
| project doesn't become as good as your premium version.
|
| Imagine if feature X is implemented in the premium version only.
| Now an external contributor writes an independent implementation
| of feature X and raises a PR with the FOSS project. Is it going
| to get merged? Probably not. The conflict of interest compromises
| the operation of the FOSS project. Essentially, you create
| something that undermines the ability for the project to be as
| good as it can be. You create a situation where the
| organisation's stewardship of the FOSS project is detrimental to
| its potential. (Pertinently, today nginx just announced they're
| going to ease off on at least some of this...) [1]
|
| Fundamentally open core isn't a very satisfying answer to the
| question of "How do you make an income from FOSS?" because it is
| basically the answer "Make some software which isn't FOSS." It's
| not a true answer to the question.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32572153
| andai wrote:
| Aseprite uses the sell the binaries model. It's open source but
| you have to compile it yourself (and it has many dependencies).
| I've tried getting things to compile before and I consider it
| about as appealing as a visit to the dentist (only longer and
| more painful!) so I just forked over the cash.
| austinjp wrote:
| Interesting. A sort of "sell convenience" model. I'm a bit
| out of this loop, but isn't this how several SaaS/PaaS
| operators work? Provide open-source software but offer paid-
| for solutions such as hosting and/or support?
| digitallyfree wrote:
| As stated by another user it's not true open source, the
| source is solely available for personal use and for the
| submission of patches back to the author.
|
| Such a model can backfire though as it would appear to be
| legal for a third-party contributor to create a set of
| scripts that would compile and prepare the application (load
| all the dependencies in a container and so forth) and release
| those scripts. Those scripts could even become accepted by a
| Linux distro's package manager, similar to how package
| managers package freeware prop software by using a script to
| legally grab the binary from the developer's site and
| installing it.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Asesprite is is shared source, not open source.
|
| https://dev.aseprite.org/2016/09/01/new-source-code-license/
| https://bugs.debian.org/864990
| https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt
| https://opensource.org/osd
| hlandau wrote:
| I forgot to mention one more model which is kind of specific to
| games: open the engine/code, sell the assets (levels, etc.)
| which remain proprietary. This is an interesting compromise
| which seems to only be really available for games. Probably the
| most famous example of this approach is John Carmack's engines.
|
| (Of course, some games also get to enjoy this approach "against
| their will", namely when people like the game so much that
| someone reimplements the engine from scratch (see ScummVM)).
|
| Keeping assets proprietary doesn't really feel like a problem,
| since how do you open source art in the first place? Much art
| isn't really meaningfully modifiable after it's done, unlike
| source code. A .psd might have layers when a .png doesn't, but
| the difference isn't enormous. Art doesn't really have "bugs".
| candiddevmike wrote:
| A non commercial, no distribution source available license can
| work. Users can build it/hack around locally, and make
| changes/pull requests. Maintainers are the only ones who can
| monetize it. Throw in a clause that if the community makes more
| than 50% of the code changes it will be converted to FOSS
| (prevent maintainer neglect).
| hlandau wrote:
| This is by definition not FOSS.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I never called it a FOSS license, it's IMO a good balance
| of end user and maintainer rights.
| teddyh wrote:
| You implicitly did call it a FOSS licence, since the
| topic specifically is "How to pay your rent with your
| open source project".
| wongarsu wrote:
| The term FOSS (Free and open-source software) itself
| implies that there are things that are open-source but
| not FOSS.
|
| Calling it source-available is smarter to avoid the whole
| "what counts as open source" topic, but that's what he
| did call it.
| eesmith wrote:
| No, it doesn't.
|
| "FOSS" (and "FLOSS", which the FSF prefers) is used as an
| encompassing term for the two main political camps of
| "free/libre software" and "open source software".
|
| It's meant to express a neutral position about the
| underlying politics.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-
| source_software or Stallman's essays at
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
| point.... ("The terms "free software" and "open source"
| stand for almost the same range of programs.") and
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html ("A
| researcher studying practices and methods used by
| developers in the free software community decided that
| these questions were independent of the developers'
| political views, so he used the term "FLOSS," ... Others
| use the term "FOSS,".
|
| To be clear, there are a small number of licenses which
| the Open Source Initiative say are open source where the
| FSF says are not free software (eg, the NASA Open Source
| Agreement v1.3.)
|
| But that's not why people use the term FOSS.
| gowld wrote:
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| For definite; if it's software aimed at developers it doesn't
| matter very much, but otherwise you should definitely sell
| premade binaries for all platforms on your website. Then you
| can also include auto-updaters and the like.
|
| Bonus points if you can sell a subscription model as well,
| either product features like cloud storage / sync (depending on
| the application of course) or consultancy (for e.g. libraries,
| frameworks).
|
| I'm currently working with Nativescript, they have some people
| working on it whose business model is paid consultancy (we have
| one guy for 8 hours / week for example). It's used by big
| enterprises like banks, they will have plenty of money for
| professional developer support.
| knolan wrote:
| A few blender add-ons do this. The FLIP fluids one for example.
| They seem to keep the source a version behind too. Seems to
| work well too as they are producing solid updates for the tool.
| pksebben wrote:
| I have a concept sitting in <that folder with all the ideas> that
| is pretty high on my list of "man, I want to make this happen"
| but would need a team to execute on.
|
| The idea is to integrate the kickstarter model with github's
| issues (specifically, feature requests). You run an open-source
| project and people can submit feature requests that come with a
| fundraising campaign.
|
| When someone wants the software to do something new (support a
| new platform, implement an interface, etc) they draft a campaign
| a la kickstarter, someone who can contribute to the project
| negotiates with the drafter pricing, targets, and stretch goals.
|
| Past this point, it's the drafter's responsibility to do the
| marketing for the campaign and raise funds. Once the target $
| amount is hit, it's on the person who picked up the contract to
| get the work done.
|
| There are, of course, a ton of details to work out, and executing
| on this is going to be resource-intense on a number of vectors
| that aren't necessarily technical (legal, finance, hosting
| costs). Also, I suck at UI. The business itself would naturally
| be a non-profit.
|
| addendum: I also have a day job that I have no intention of
| leaving, so factor that in to time-to-completion.
| ghiculescu wrote:
| > The business itself would naturally be a non-profit
|
| I'm curious why this is naturally so?
|
| There's no shame in profiting off your work.
| pc86 wrote:
| Not the GP, but non-profit doesn't mean it doesn't make
| money, and it doesn't even mean the people that started it
| can't become fabulously wealthy. It just means you don't
| horde money, and that profit isn't necessarily the goal. Look
| at all the non-profits paying their executive half a million
| a year in salary.
| pksebben wrote:
| it's an ethos thing. I think a capitalist mindset (grow grow
| grow) is antithetical to _good_ open source. once money is
| the primary motivation, good software that does good things
| that people actually want can 't be the primary motivation.
| techdragon wrote:
| Sounds similar to bountysource. How do you see your idea
| succeeding where they have failed?
| blantonl wrote:
| Because it's his idea and he can do it better than them. he's
| also got luck on his side.
|
| While this sounds tongue in cheek, it's probably true. I'd
| bet 9 time out of 10, this is what literally happens.
|
| I know that for my highly successful business that I started,
| I thought I could do it better, and I was in the right place
| at the right time (luck)
| ksec wrote:
| This is both strange, and refreshing to hear on HN. Luck.
|
| Quite possibly a forbidden word in the worldview of US
| Media, VC and Tech.
| pc86 wrote:
| The tech mogul who denies luck exists and contributes all
| of their success to their own ingenuity and prowess is a
| straw man. Perhaps with a few notable exceptions, that
| person simply does not exist.
|
| Everyone knows luck exists, and almost everyone
| acknowledges it plays a key role in one's success.
| pksebben wrote:
| What's the business? My interested is piqued.
| pksebben wrote:
| I don't believe I can succeed where they failed- hadn't
| heard of em! would be awesome to not have to build it
| myself, so I'll go check em out.
| pksebben wrote:
| I don't! As mentioned in another comment, I had not heard of
| them before. I'll be trying them out.
|
| On first blush, it looks fairly close to what's in my head -
| so perhaps this is not a thing to chase.
|
| The one critical difference I can spot early on is that their
| system appears to be closed-source. Were I to do it, it would
| for sure be open. I want to see a method of supporting
| yourself with code far more than I want to make money myself.
| For example, in this moment, I like what they're doing and
| would love to contribute to the work myself to empower the
| goal of having more indie software devs in the world, but I
| would have to quit job (not happening), apply (might not get
| hired), and then work on whatever features are in the
| business' best interests (which won't necessarily be in the
| user's best interests).
|
| All that said, they did it already and I didn't, so hats off
| to them. I hope bountysource gains more traction in the
| future.
|
| Edit: another reason to have <bountysource-clone> be open
| source, is to recurse the value add. The site would develop
| in the same way any open source project does (if / when they
| get popular): by people implementing what they consider the
| most critical features.
| dllthomas wrote:
| I think my biggest concern with the idea as specified is that
| most projects probably need to be trying to fund multiple
| issues, but that could lead to overcommitting if multiple fund
| at around the same time. I suppose you could guard against that
| by capping estimated workload and preventing new issues from
| "succeeding" if they would put that over the top. It seems like
| it would be frustrating to have contributed to a goal and see
| it get enough money pledged, but then not get the thing I want
| because some other goal finished first. On the other hand, that
| might be helpful pressure to get people contributing?
| pksebben wrote:
| This is when I admit that the concept isn't quite done
| baking.
|
| My intuitive (read: hand-wavy) answer is that the negotiation
| between devs / feature requesters should take this into
| account - the pricing reflecting the amount of work * the
| scarcity of the dev's time.
|
| There's also no reason that a single project == a single dev.
| If it's really an open source project, the feature requests
| could be posted as bounties and devs could bid on them.
|
| Still don't have a solid idea as to how 'contribution
| timeouts' would work - with kickstarter, the timeline for
| funding + development + production are all managed by the
| same party, which simplifies things enough to (mostly) solve
| this issue. I'm sure that it would have to look different
| here.
|
| All that said, I haven't yet taken a look at the site that
| someone else responded with, which sounds like it does
| comparable work. If so, I might just hitch train to them.
| OtomotO wrote:
| Just a sidenote: One such detail is the timeframe... I am my
| own boss and I love to do contract work, but I cannot say "Yes,
| I will do this", commit to it and then after months the money
| is raised and I am drowning in projects.
| eljimmy wrote:
| Perhaps the money can be pledged and held in escrow either
| until someone accepts the work for scheduling or it gets
| withdrawn by the pledgee due to inaction.
| pksebben wrote:
| Truly a tricky spot. Who keeps an eye on the features for
| things like code quality / deliverables? I don't know how I
| would solve this, yet.
| rozenmd wrote:
| The revenue growth
| (https://twitter.com/MarkoSaric/status/1532284305086586880) makes
| me smile - as a developer, 0 to $400 MRR in 12 months from only
| "building in public" seems about right, it's something I
| experienced with my https://onlineornot.com project.
|
| Spending months just building and occasionally posting a Show HN
| or a producthunt launch is not nearly enough marketing. People
| need to know you understand them, and the problem, and you need
| to convince them you've got something that'll make the problem go
| away.
|
| It's not until you're really shouting from the rooftops (and
| putting out spicy articles about Google analytics being illegal
| in Europe) that people start to notice you.
| soheil wrote:
| Only if landlords accepted code as payment, ideally countable
| code, maybe by number of lines.
| bkq wrote:
| They wrote another article about how they went about building a
| $1M ARR open-source SaaS [1]. This details some of their approach
| to building the product in public as a form of marketing. The
| building in public approach works, if you already have a platform
| to stand on in my opinion. As someone who also has an open-source
| SaaS they're trying to market, I sometimes think if I should have
| also taken this approach, despite not having any reach at all.
|
| [1] - https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas
| tpetry wrote:
| The building in public didn't work either. The solo-founder
| (developer) wasn't getting any traction with what he did. The
| the co-founder (marketer) joined and only then they started to
| get customer and a lot of traction.
|
| It's not the build in public approach, it is someone doing
| marketing.
| austinjp wrote:
| To be fair, I think it's both. If the "sausage making" is
| grotesque, even an exceptional marketer would struggle :)
|
| A coder who understands what public signals are valuable can
| give a marketer something to work with. That might include
| "code quality" but it's probably more than that. Visible
| activity, responsive processes, valuable features, etc. Just
| guessing, though.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Or maybe both, in that, the marketing brings good attention
| (presumably from real buyers), but you still need a solid
| product/service to offer.
| nicbou wrote:
| To be fair, Plausible is a good product with effective
| marketing, and the paid version is just very convenient for
| most people.
|
| This approach might not work so well for libraries and tools
| mainly used by developers.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Some more resources on paid open source work:
|
| https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
| teddyh wrote:
| An open source project does not, and cannot, _in itself_ , make
| money (EDIT: Except if your project is very well-known; then you
| can solicit donations.). Something which makes money must, at
| most, be an affiliated activity. If I sell guided hiking tours,
| can I claim that the mountain makes money?
| agentwiggles wrote:
| Why can't it? I played a game (shapez) which is open source. If
| you like, you can clone the repo, build it locally, and play it
| for free. But if you, like me, would happily pay $10 to avoid
| working out another JS build process, you can buy a copy on
| Steam. The developer seems to be doing fairly well.
| tartoran wrote:
| I agree and its like selling foss binaries. My question is
| what stops a cloner from stealing your work? We've seen it on
| App Store over and over the attack of the clones and that is
| without access to your source code...
| [deleted]
| agentwiggles wrote:
| Well, nothing - in theory. You can, of course, license your
| code in such a way that you can at least send a cease and
| desist to a cloner, but that's really only useful in
| jurisdictions which would enforce it.
|
| But for the example of shapez, there's a lot of added value
| that's not in the source code. The creator is active in the
| shapez discord, and there are also paid DLCs on Steam which
| aren't open source. So there are at least some ways to
| monetize and make your community loyal that are still
| compatible with open source.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Brand recognition, enforced by trademarks. You can't stop
| people from publishing your work under a different name,
| but they could have cloned it anyways. Or alternatively
| being in a niche nobody pays attention to.
|
| The kinds of projects you can do solo are often trivial to
| clone because what makes you unique won't be raw manpower
| invested.
| teddyh wrote:
| In that case, the business is running a program build
| consultancy (with a monopoly, no less). Once you look at it
| this way, you can see the perverse incentives pop out.
| kube-system wrote:
| People can and do pay money for FOSS code, even though not
| everyone does.
| markild wrote:
| That sounds like semantics.
|
| They are not saying "prohibit free access" here.
| teddyh wrote:
| I think it's an important distinction. Many people want to
| work on free software, but also have bills. So they think
| "How can I make money from doing this?", which leads them
| down to a very limited set of options1:
|
| * https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html.en
|
| * https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html
|
| But these are _not_ the only means to make money! To return
| to my mountain analogy, you could easily imagine many ways to
| profit from the mere existence of a mountain. You could, as I
| wrote, give guided tours, but you could also build water
| slides, build an observatory at the highest peak, or mine the
| mountain for precious minerals. All these have some risk, of
| course, of damaging the mountain itself, but they are all
| money-making schemes which would not occur to anyone wanting
| to somehow profit off the mountain exactly as it is.
|
| _Therefore_ , calling it "making money from FOSS" is
| simplistic and limits your own thinking.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30293290
| ElCheapo wrote:
| If I sell courses about Windows, can I claim that Windows makes
| money?
|
| Your comparison is incorrect because you wrote a program
| whereas the guide didn't set up the trail or build
| infrastructure to hike on the mountains
| smeyer wrote:
| >can I claim that the mountain makes money?
|
| Sure? I feel like it wouldn't be unusual semantically to see a
| sentence like "the Foobar mountain brings in eleventy zillion
| dollars in tourism per year".
| teddyh wrote:
| Yes, but thinking this way does not help you in envisaging
| _more activities_ which could bring in more money.
|
| In this case, thinking of it as "mountain-related" income
| shadows the fact that your business is actually _tourism_ ,
| an insight which could lead you to invest in other, non-
| mountain-related but tourism-benefiting projects.
| saluki wrote:
| If you build a mountain and then sell guided tours for your
| mountain, can you claim that your mountain makes money?
| teddyh wrote:
| No, I would argue that the guided tours make money, not the
| mountain itself.
| saluki wrote:
| Right, but if you didn't build the mountain there would be
| no tours.
| teddyh wrote:
| After the mountain is built, the mountain must be
| considered a sunk cost. The mountain now exists, and you
| must move forward from there, independently of who built
| it and why. And then your business is a simple tour guide
| business.
| yreg wrote:
| >An open source project does not, and cannot, make money.
|
| Why not? What if you collect large donations?
|
| Wikimedia makes a lot of money (for itself) even with all the
| open-source-non-affiliated activities removed.
| teddyh wrote:
| You could say that it's the fundraising which makes the
| money, but I must admit that this is a weak argument at best.
| So I guess that you're right, you can finance a FOSS project
| by donations. But this only works for both very useful and
| very public projects, like Wikipedia.
| jimvdv wrote:
| Yes most people are not as precise about semantics as some HN
| readers and would understand what you mean.
| hengheng wrote:
| Well if you weren't keeping the public trails clean and
| maintained, you couldn't offer those tours.
| teddyh wrote:
| I agree, but you are now effectively operating a mountain-
| cleaning company. This is not, I would argue, making money
| off the mountain as one would normally interpret the phrase.
| hengheng wrote:
| I think we both see the fundamental misalignment of
| incentives. The company's job is not to maintain the
| mountain or the trails, and once it begins flourishing,
| it'll always be tempting to cut those branches because
| they're silly to spend so much effort on.
|
| It's a very helpful metaphor though, thanks for that. Free
| software is doing a ton, but there is a lot of space left
| unepxlored for economical reasons, surprisingly. I've seen
| projects refusing to document their code or clean up their
| APIs, leaving a high barrier to entry just to keep the
| consultancy running. Then there's the fact that
| infrastructure is never sexy, and then the whole xkcd #2347
| problem where the entire world relies on one destitute
| retired person in their dacha to keep their lights on with
| a key library that everyone uses quietly.
|
| Makes me think if there could ever be a model that
| implements micropayments for software library usage, a
| little like lambda calls or like pay-by-article models for
| newspapers. But the reason why that isn't feasible may be
| the same reason why hiking trails aren't toll roads.
| teddyh wrote:
| Thank you for understanding my point in the spirit in
| which it was offered.
| tomerbd wrote:
| luck
| mehphp wrote:
| If you are just building random passion projects, then yes. If
| you actually spend the time to find a real problem people have
| and build a solution for that, I'm not sure if I'd call that
| luck.
| phgn wrote:
| Please add (2020) to the title!
|
| I thought this was yet another plausible.io post about how much
| money they're making, but turns out it's the original one.
| asicsp wrote:
| HN discussion from 2020:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23963202 (168 comments)
| milkoolong wrote:
| > In general, it is useful for many projects to be aligned with
| something people or businesses believe in so much or find value
| in that they are willing to pay for.
|
| The end of the day it comes down to audience regardless of your
| code being open source. I chose an alternative analytics based on
| the founders' business acumen, morals and ethics before I even
| considered open source. Similarily, Discord Nitro over Matrix and
| Circle/Mighty Network over Discourse.
|
| The author shared good examples but for majority of projects, it
| doesn't make sense to open source it as a path to financial
| security. I'd argue it actually hurts many niches. I assume
| Plausible has a healthy dose of startup clients who are techie
| that see open source first as the holy grail for trust,
| transparency, and security. That's a solid audience! Otherwise,
| think again.
| paydevs wrote:
| For a curated list of monetization approaches have a look at
| https://github.com/PayDevs/awesome-oss-monetization
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Funnily enough I wrote my own version of this exact topic, based
| on the fact that I am too trying to make money from open source
| work [1]
|
| From experience, I find it that it's always better to start with
| a paid offering and an open core solution. For example: you
| rather host it, configure it and upkeep it yourself? it's free
| Everyone else: pay me a little money which will go towards the
| upkeep of the project.
|
| I do find that there's another viable option: Bigger companies
| writing open source software. In fact there should be MORE
| companies like that. They should be motivated in writing open
| source software. Why? They have more money and are very unlikely
| to just "fold" - as opposed to a developer vs the world.
|
| I dream of a world where all companies have salaried open source
| teams of maintainers , building technology in the open that they
| themselves use and find useful but that they will maintain
| throughout the years.
|
| If things go well one day we can get there....
|
| [1] https://dev.to/orliesaurus/how-do-you-monetize-open-
| source-4...
| klabb3 wrote:
| > From experience, I find it that it's always better to start
| with a paid offering and an open core solution.
|
| +1, today this is the best compromise, but unfortunately only
| really works well for SaaS, and less well for pure software,
| because of DRM. On the most extreme end, we don't use any DRM
| and the app is OSS, but then charging users becomes an honor
| system because how easy it would be to circumvent. On the other
| extreme, you have a closed source "paid portion" with DRM
| phoning home before you can access the full feature set. But if
| you can't build your own client, you can't eg audit for
| security.
|
| It's complex, but in short: it's difficult to combine an open
| source core with monetization without losing many of the
| benefits of open source.
| zild3d wrote:
| > Bigger companies writing open source software... They should
| be motivated in writing open source software. Why? They have
| more money
|
| That's not really a compelling reason for companies to write
| open source software. Developer branding, recruiting,
| engagement, "free work" from the community are probably more of
| the "why"
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I don't know...
|
| My thinking is that as a user, if a company puts money behind
| an open source project, I can at least trust them to keep it
| running to a certain level of quality for a little more than
| when a random single person writes a library and publishes it
| on npm - catches a blip of traction and suddenly I depend on
| that library for the foreseeable future.
|
| Maybe I am wrong though...
| benreesman wrote:
| I like open source / free software that has the financial
| imperatives in plain view: that enables me to make informed
| decisions.
|
| The best case when heavy lifting is taking place with a murky
| payroll is that there's an Enterprise version you'll eventually
| need. The worst case is, uh worse.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I too have a 'hobby project' that I have worked on for several
| years. I must say that my motivations have varied quite a bit
| over that time. I mainly do it because it is a passion of mine
| and I love to write great code that does amazing things. But I
| would also love for the project to actually make some money. I
| don't really need the money, but money is a great indicator of
| how other people value your work. Money would also let me buy the
| extra help that the project needs.
|
| It is a data management system called Didgets
| https://didgets.com/ and is currently in open beta. The ideas
| came from decades of experience working with other data
| management systems that I thought needed drastic improvement. I
| dug deep into file systems while writing network file system
| drivers and disk utilities (PartitionMagic and Drive Image). I
| spent years working with Postgres databases.
|
| I love writing code that does big things faster and uses less
| resources than traditional systems. I wanted to be able to find a
| group of files among 100s of millions of files in seconds instead
| of using long directory traversal methods or the arduous task of
| creating separate indexes that could become out of sync with the
| file system. I wanted to query huge DB tables in record time
| without needing separate indexing structures that can slow down
| transactions.
|
| So I will stay up until 2am tweaking an algorithm or
| parallelizing some code so that it runs through a large data set
| in 2 seconds instead of 20. This keeps me going, but I also
| wouldn't mind at all if a bunch of other people also found this
| valuable and decided to pay me something for my hard work.
| pbronez wrote:
| Neat project, thanks for sharing. Is it only available on
| Windows for now? Seems like neat thing to throw on a NAS.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| The code is cross-platform (C++ code with almost zero
| dependencies) including the windowing framework (Qt) that the
| browser application uses. I have built Linux versions in the
| past to test it and I would also like to build a MacOS
| version, but bandwidth makes it hard to support multiple
| versions for every build.
|
| If it starts to get some traction, I can work on that.
| pbronez wrote:
| Signed up for the beta!
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Welcome aboard. I sent you an email.
| franciscop wrote:
| I really like that this is one of the first Open Source Funding
| articles that I read that strongly acknowledges that devs create
| open source for many varied reasons. I have grown tired, as an
| OSS dev myself, to be bagged into a single category in most other
| articles and someone speaking for me saying things I might or
| might not want at all.
|
| Heck, what I want as an OSS dev myself, as well as my personal
| situation/context, has changed dramatically over the years and I
| expect will change again in the future, so thank you Plausible
| for not throwing me into a single-bag and for not speaking for
| me.
|
| Example: 4 years ago you'd tell me to write OSS part-time for
| 20k/year and I'd love it, today I'd strongly reject it, in 5
| years I expect to do it part time for free again (or maybe not).
| hospitalJail wrote:
| My 2 pieces of advice:
|
| >Don't expect it to pay rent for the first 7 years, after 7
| years, expect to pay 1-2 months of rent.
|
| >Use your fame to push a similar product to pay for the other 10
| months of rent
|
| I have learned that the first years are slow to gain popularity,
| but once you have it, you know what works and what doesnt work.
| Pivot to things that people really care about on a different
| project, maintaining the original product for
| popularity/advertising. 99% of what I give away is free, then 1%
| at a cost.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| >Don't expect it to pay rent for the first 7 years, after 7
| years, expect to pay 1-2 months of rent.
|
| This. Work on several projects simultaneously. Success often
| doesn't come once you deploy, it's a gradual buildup over the
| years. Ten extra users this month, 12 extra users next month.
| It's a snowball.
|
| If you ship and sunset your project after 3 months because you
| didn't get 100,000 signups, you are stopping too early IMO.
| Instead, automate everything, try to run at zero cost and leave
| it alone for a year or even better 3 years and go work on
| something else or get a full time job.
|
| I had a project make $100 for the first 2 years and $30000 in
| year number 3 without making any substantial changes.
| debugnik wrote:
| > try to run at zero cost and leave it alone for a year or
| even better 3 years
|
| I'd love to try, but by the end of year 2 I would have
| already lost 7200 EUR on social security contributions alone
| unless I evaded taxes. Running at zero cost gets really
| tricky in certain countries, I'm afraid.
| LoyCgg wrote:
| What would happen if you spent a couple of bucks on cheap
| facebook ads on first year?
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I probably just suck at this, but I had basically 0 success
| with Facebook ads.
|
| Worse, any posts on Facebook after spending Ad money are
| hidden by the algorithm.
|
| I personally did a decent sized social media blitz for a
| few months, then only posted when relevant to a parent
| thread.
|
| I suppose SEO on google helps too. Not that I try, I just
| naturally am the best at specific keywords.
| ogarten wrote:
| Not much. You are probably better of investing a couple of
| days into writing tutorials and creating show cases.
|
| A low barrier to entry is the single most important thing
| for any library.
|
| Almost forgot, a clear statement of what the library does
| and what kind of problem it solves is also something that
| doesn't seem too common when creating a readme.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I used Adsense. Only spent $200 or so but could only get a
| single signup or two. TBH I haven't used ads since and
| prefer word of mouth.
| erdos4d wrote:
| I swear this sort of thing strikes me as 10X the trouble as just
| getting a job. Even if you write something that others want
| (highly unlikely, let's be honest), trying to monetize it adds so
| much hassle to the whole thing, it isn't worth it. Easier to get
| a remote gig and just fund the project that way.
| debarshri wrote:
| May be I'm naive but would love learn why if the end goal is to
| monetize your software why does it have to be opensourced. From
| my naive perspective it feels like when you mix the accessing the
| source and business, conceptually it becomes very complex. From
| an end users perspective, all these different types of licenses
| makes the actual user experience of buying the software complex.
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