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I think we all agree the answer isn't, "No one should make any money writing software." I also think we can agree that the answer isn't, "you should charge money for every bit of software you write."
So how do we decide which is which?
I don't want to stop being a professional software developer. I have loved being able to support myself and my family by doing my favorite activity. It has let me enjoy going to work every day for over 20 years.
I also don't think I should charge for random code work that I do for fun, though. I am not trying to monetize every minute of my day... but I do want to monetize enough of it that I can pay my mortgage, buy food, save for my retirement, and have some fun along the way.
I don't know exactly where I am going with this, but it is my gut reaction when I see a post about how horrible it is to make money off of writing software. It has to be more nuanced than that.
In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing. Many bakers love the craft but nobody expects free baked good (except maybe their family). Many plumbers are true craftsmen and take pride helping solve peoples problems, but we don't expect free plumbing. On the other hand, once you write the code, the logic is complete, its closeness to an equation makes it feel like selling algebra homework.
More importantly though, baked goods get eaten, and pipes aren't assumed to suddenly become load bearing. I think a lot of developers hesitate to sell software they aren't prepared to support professionally. Toy projects then sometimes gain a community and grow organically. It's at this stage I feel we need a better path to funding without a lot of the capture that can occur.
It would be cool if we could "farmers marketize" software though. Come together to taste some exotic and local varieties. Maybe meet the local shops, pay for some overpriced TUI gizmo or a hash function with a weird pattern.
Sorry went into fantasy land there. This is obviously not the solution to the broader OSS funding issue, but it's a cute dream where maybe some people make a buck.
I think the bigger solution would have more opportunities for people outside of academia to get small grants to work on their projects. More foundations supporting the core technology and development that the tech world depends on now, and prospectively in the future.
Until then the options were we pay for software, we pirate it, or reach out to 30 day demos, freeware, shareware, public domain, which might come with source code or not.
Ironically, what is happening with many nowadays is a return to those days, with code available licenses, or open core.
You were onto something with this but then got sidetracked.
The fundamental difference is that software (digital product) is cannot be given away and cannot be consumed, it can only be copied. Any other non-digital product, a bread loaf, a pipe, for someone else to use it, you have to give it away. You must not own the bread anymore so that the other person owns and uses it. Not the same with software since you never give away software, you give a free copy that costs nothing. Both you, the creator and the user now have a copy of the same thing and can use it indefinitely (this is the second difference, it is not consumed)
This is the fundamental difference that "disrupts" the classic capitalist economic flow. The proof of this disruption can be found in the continously changing pricing strategy of digital products and software, since companies are trying to adjust a fundamentally different product onto classical economic transactions.
The solution is a communist economy, where money won't be a transaction wall for product exchange and one's well being (as opposed to having to make money to live by)
While I find speculating about different models besides capitalism a good exercise, I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.
> I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.
Wholy incompatible? By no means, this industry is making tons of money. Surely it is compatible.
I think of it more like a handbreak. Yhe current capitalist societal structure is putting a hard limit to our potential as a society to fully leverege these technologies to better our lives. Open source is just a glimpse of what can be accomplished when money doesn't get in the way of our work exchange. And imagine what our humanity could have achieved if 1000x people did open source without having money issues.
Do you have some kind of right to other people's creative output now? This greed after what other people have seems to be completely boundless.
Yes, the devil is in the details. I just don't think it is unreasonable to be troubled by people wanting to be rich.
30% of the food eaten on the planet by people today is grown thanks to a German scientist who invented a way to extract fertilizer from air. He is directly responsible for the ability of billions of people to live and survive. What would be his fair compensation?
My point is that it isn't unreasonable to think it is troublesome to want to be rich.
Personally, I think there is some appropriate compromise between "people should take as much as they can for themselves, however much they can negotiate" and "people should never take more than the poorest person". So no, I don't think everyone should get the exact same share as everyone else, but I also don't think anyone should take a million times as much as the average person.
But if you just look at money as what it is - a simple means of exchange, then charging money doesn't need to be some sort of parasitic or exploitative profit-maximization thing. It's simply a means for people to be able to support themselves while doing something they enjoy, without having to rely on the wholly unreliable and potentially undignified behaviors in relying on donations.
This is all further compounded by governments making it difficult for people to transfer money between themselves openly + anonymously online, let alone on a global level. Actually selling things has some pretty significant hurdles to overcome. Easing global anonymous transactions would greatly lower the pain involved in selling stuff 'ethically'. Of course there's already one tech that had the potential for this, but hasn't yet quite lived up to its potential.
let's say agriculture. if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?
what about artists? it's not that their work even has a utility function...
I think plenty of artists would give away their work for free without second thoughts if they didn't have to make it pay their bills.
Similarly most salespeople would gladly work commission-free if it meant more sales.
Now, no, of course not.
Originally though, yes this is how many human economies worked. Surplus was shared in a gift economy.
It's just the superior FOSS way.
Recent developments have made me feel a form of guilt that's new to me. As though we've all had it too good for too long. Which is probably at least in part due to working for organisations that only care about the bottom line.
In short; all of this boils down to capitalism being simultaneously a drive and a drain on society.
[1] https://sdocs.dev, discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
Funnily enough, I was sitting about 30 meters up in an old church bell tower late at night and wanted something that made the "Have Idea > Write Idea > Publish Idea" workflow super simple but also better than a pastebin and I've always hated how underscores in markdown result in italicized text, not underscored text. Yes every social media platform solves the workflow problems, but I don't want everything I write tied to a central identity; I want to be able to share single thoughts as links with people.
Nonograph doesn't have any tracking. Everything coming into the host is through two hops of reverse proxies or Tor before the request reaches me. That's also why its 300ms to load a plain html page until I find a better solution to hide the server location. The most tracking I'm doing is looking at `top` to make sure the resource usage is low. Avg. 3% CPU, 210mb MEM.
At first all engagement is exciting and validating. You work nights and weekends to please people you’ve never met, sure that one good turn deserves another.
Then you get your first jerk, then your second, then your third, while your father is in the hospital. You feel pressure to ship a feature you never wanted. Your issue tracker is demoralizing. You get a PR! Maybe someone is coming to your rescue. It sucks. Now you need to figure out how to respond. You’re alone. Your passion project has become your albatross.
Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.
FOSS has delivered some great software, it's also demonetised a lot of areas where software developers could be earning a living. I don't think software developers should feel any need to give away their efforts than any other professional should.
FOSS has created pricing race to the bottom in software, and taken away financial incentive for improvement, it's not a 100% net positive.
Just because we’ve spent he last 30 years running Linux and not worrying about the nonsense in the wider computer world doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do the same for he next 30 years
The era of the hacker, the ethos of free software, it’s mostly over. In the 80s and 90s people could get jobs and write software on the side, Just for fun.
Today it’s all about side hustles.
Pong is a placeholder for all software, there.
Anything one person could do, has been done over and over. Except things that only Fabrice Bellard could do, progress now needs a team of people and a longer time horizon and a large budget. nobody is satisfied with Pong anymore and if they are they already have as much Pong as they need.
We’re already in Vernor Vinge’s age of programmer-archaeologists.
I think the better analogy here would be to tidy the public park for free. It's about doing something for other people, being generous, making the world better with your genrousity. I think that in itself is something worthwile to try.
The cross-pollination between the hackers / college coders / warez pirates / digital artists was real. A lot of big company CEOs got their start in those days.
It was mostly just about exploring and connection, and as the BBS scene faded to irc chats (efnet, freenode, etc), that whole mixed-scene kept growing for quite awhile.
Now everything is for sale.
That's the thing I miss the most about the scene, the cross-pollination. You'd distro a pack and learn something about a whole other scene, or help somebody mod their board and they'd become co-sysop of yours. That whole era is definitely why I wound up becoming a programmer.
If you like that one, you'd probably dig this. I feel like this is one of the best demos of all time from both a technical point of view plus storytelling. Dropped back in 2019. Warms my heart.
The Black Lotus - Eon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc
It's mostly rose tinted glasses.
There were some amazing feats. But it was slow and frustrating. Like you wouldn't believe how long things took.
In the 90s most technical documentation was in actual physical books. If you wanted to learn something you had to order and buy the book (and Amazon wasn't a thing everywhere!), and it would take weeks or months to arrive. Or you did inter-library loans (which were amazing but also took weeks).
Or you relied on magazines which had a publication cycle. Writing actual physical letters about a program that was written out in the magazine was a thing.
When I got internet access in the mid-90s I remember emailing someone to ask about mirrors of their documentation project because I didn't want to use up their bandwidth.
I'd never ever want to go back. Bring on the future!
No, we really did lose something along the way.
Did you ever use Window 3.1? Or any windows software?
Are you forgetting the multiple crashes per day? Or the incessant playing with system.cfg to get MSDOS drivers to work?
And Linux was only better because it didn't do much.
The only hardware damage software has ever caused was some 1994 Linux driver for a Trident video card getting a frequency wrong and frying a monitor.
> churned out by companies whose decisions are made solely by how much profit they can squeeze out no matter if the quality tanks.
As opposed to 1990's Microsoft or IBM?
I think in general things in computing were better when the nerds were still running the show. One the MBAs and bean counters got involved it's all gone downhill. Feels like the golden age of computers and the internet are well behind us at this point.
I am a 90s kid and I watch things like Stranger Things and feel nostalgia for a simpler time even though I wasn't even alive in the 80s.
Our brains do that to us and I find it positive to have a nice fantasy world to escape to but definitely not to be mixed up with the reality of things.
So, if you can, be the change you want to see in the world. Although videogames and screens are a big culprit too, in my opinion.
The AI grindslop today is infuriating but I mostly ignore it and do my own open source thing. I quit my job last year to work on open source full time because I felt like I had no choice, there was a project in my mind I'd go down with the ship with. If I wind up in the permanent underclass because it fails, 90s me would think not selling out was pretty l33t.
I think there is something to be said for monetizing ones' hobbies, but I've recently been taking some forays into this world of "build something amazing and give it away for free" as well. I recently took a very big experimental plunge in this path, and I'm curious how well it will work out for me.
Open-source state-of-the-art Magic: The Gathering card identification pipeline:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHieOcmC7Dw
I used to do this kind of image recognition for a living, but I've been out of the business for a little while now. I had some ideas for a different approach from what I've done in the past and decided to code it up. This version is far better than anything else I've ever done -- especially for scanning against busy backgrounds or with occlusions, and also for noticing fine differences between otherwise difficult-to-distinguish printings.
I didn't have any interested customers waiting for this, so -- much like the OP -- decided to create an experiment and release it open source. I'm not opposed to having paths to monetize it (for people who want to license it for closed-source commercial projects), but I'm not trying to commercialize it so much as I would love to see how far we can take it with open-source.
I don't know which path I should take with this.
The biggest downside is that I feel like I've had a hard time getting people to be as interested in this project as I would have expected -- I believe this truly is the best identification software available (I've built some benchmarks to test it [0]), and maybe the market is just a bit flooded for such things (?), but I suspect that one very strong problem is that if you don't charge for something, then there is a perceived lack of value.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have more interest in this project if I _weren't_ trying to give it away.
For me, that's been the most negative aspect about releasing this for free so far.
Well if you want to use the scanner for something useful, you can run the web version here: https://hanclinto.github.io/CollectorVision/
No install -- scan your cards with your phone or desktop (downloads the weights in WASM -- runs 100% local -- the only web request it makes is to look up card names and prices online -- no image data ever leaves your machine), export the list as CSV, take your cards to your friendly local game store, and expect to receive 50-75% of TCG-low for your cards. This app currently only displays TCG Market, so probably about 50% of this price is what you could realistically expect.
> Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
Yes -- and part of this might be that this would have been much more amazing several years ago, but by now -- most marketplaces (I used to do work for some of the big ones) have their own recognition tools. If they aren't actively looking to replace their current software, many companies would rather stick with what's currently working "good enough" than expend effort to migrate to something with only incremental benefit that is difficult to quantify. It's possible that would happen, but it's a tricky sales call to make.
I might just be imagining things, but I'm also picturing what one of those sales calls might look like, and it feels like I've opened the kimono a bit. The cat's out of the bag. There's no mystery or allure behind it anymore, and I feel like that puts me on the back foot somehow -- almost like I've played my strongest cards (hah!) first and have nothing left. By being open-source from the beginning (and talking freely about my architecture and what makes my solution different), there's very little sales-pitch build-up. Maybe it's just a part of the problem of how I'm presenting it, but I think people (especially the big houses) are probably just-as (or more) inclined to silently learn from me and improve their own scanners than try to use / build-upon what I've provided.
It's funny -- that angle is almost more about raising expectations and forcing the big houses to improve their own tech and catch up to open-source, more than getting anyone to adopt my solution in particular.
Am I okay with that? Absolutely -- I made that decision when I open-sourced it. I feel like the tech has been stagnating for several years, and I want to increase the quality of scanners across the board. I want to be the rising tide that lifts all boats.
That's one of the strongest arguments in favor of open-sourcing it (it would be very difficult for a closed-source product to have that same effect), and I remain hopeful for that long-term.
https://hanclinto.github.io/CollectorVision/
It's still super rough (doesn't support foil-toggling yet, still some issues with double-sided cards, crashing on some iPhones), but overall the rough structure is there -- it can create lists and export as CSV.
If you have feedback or feature requests for your needs, please leave them on Github and I'll get to them as soon as I can. I'd love to hear more user feedback!
The point was not to sell them, but the community around the hobby. I usually asked for only a little more than the cost of materials.
And that is also how I've approached open source software: It's a community first. In my first decade of using Linux, it was a movement. I got in it to build us a better future of computing, together.
Now, instead of worrying about sales, I get to feel good about giving something back to the FOSS community that has given me so much.
I recognize that it is a position of privilege to be able to dedicate so much of my time to a project that gives me nothing financially... and in fact costs me money to produce. No shade at all to people who are not so lucky and need to sell what they make.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's what I'm working on. Feature-wise it's come a long way since the last HN post about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46619391
And if you're not interested, that's OK, because I'm not trying to sell you anything!
Sure, make money from software. I did. But when you have enough and it's time to give back, open source it.
This is where I'm at. I'm one of the few Gen-Z with enough to live on comfortably + safety net, so I give back.
Edit: took a look, neat stuff you're doing!
I strongly identify with all of this. I started programming computers when I was about 7, so now I've been doing it for decades.
I sort of accidentally made it a career for a few years, because I was really good at it, but I didn't like being a professional software developer for a huge tech company.
I still like writing code though, and view it primarily as a means for exploration, figuring out how things work and explaining and systematizing them for myself and for others.
This feeling is probably shared by many lefties people. They love to work, they just don't like to be restricted/manipulated into working under a highly specified and standardized environment, especially when every bit of their performance is measured for competition.
But I have grown to understand the environment of the "big tech" companies. It is hard to manage a project as it expands, and the result of human work is hard to predict, so often there's two ways to choose: 1) only hire people who's "on the same channel", highly talented "rock star" programmer, or 2) regulate everything to the detail, and "filter out" (a.k.a. firing) those who's incapable of fitting. Both are brutal, but effective and cheap to implement at scale.
If you don't like to work for big companies, maybe try start one of your own. But then of course you'll have to find some kind of financial support, maybe it's from "value extracting", but maybe it's something else.
BTW, I don't think "value extracting" == "user hostile". A lot of people go overboard with their religious beliefs, thinking rich is bad. But your time on this Earth is limited, and this is the only adventure you'll ever have. Thus your labor must be fairly compensated, so you can continue your journey a bit more freely. Otherwise it's a zero-sum game, more you "give out", less chance for yourself. How can you be so sure that other people would utilize their time better than you?
Selling your produce for financial isn't "user hostile". It will be if you're predatory, but it won't be if you're being fair.
At one (Intel from 2010-2015), I was on the hardware and manufacturing side. I was one of the hamsters keeping the Moore's Law Treadmill spinning. It was a great place to work. Almost without exception, my colleagues and managers were smart, well-intentioned, hard-working, good communicators, conscientious. We were "extracting value" as you put it, but we were doing rational and systematic things to produce great products: lower energy consumption, more capabilities, and more reliable with each new generation of semiconductor process.
At the other (Amazon 2020-2024), I was working on cloud service software. The internal processes were a mess, and the quality of the products--particularly in terms of reliability and documentation--was frankly horrible. AWS seemed to be coasting on its existing near-monopoly status in a lot of areas. With a few exceptions, I found the managers to be terrible. It was difficult to develop new things and to advance career-wise, and everything got tangled up in internal politics and poor communication even though Amazon claims to be averse to such things unlike "legacy" companies.
There's a huge landscape of things in between these two options.
I've been writing software for ~35 years, have taken exactly one course in CS (graduate machine learning while getting my PhD in physics), and did it professionally for about 5 years… that said, "writing software" has been a big part of other jobs I've had, even if not the headline description.
Can someone expand on this? I've given software away free and it didn't cost me anything.
It's a courtesy to the users, especially self-hosters.
BUT - I'm capable to tinker with my car a bit, to service and repair my bike, to bake a bread - BUT I'm not visiting mechanic shops, bike service shops and bakeries in my city telling owners that they should work for free and give away results of their work.
If you demand remuneration for all your work, then it's only fair for you to also pay for every single piece of software you ever use. If OTOH you're willing to trade some of your time and effort for the time and effort someone else spent on the software you enjoy for free, then you might appreciate that a financial transaction is not required for value to be created in the world. What is required is fair collaboration.
Most of my life has been financed by closed source products I developed on my own to fill a real need and others had it too. Had I given them away, the best I could have hoped for was what, a job offer?
Contrarily, open source can be easily observed to take resources in the form of created capital (ip) for less than full value or no value from the arguably more needy (individuals) and gives them to the not-needy-at-all (business).
To see a millennial generations person write about developing software that you want or need, and then let other people run that software.
I know these words aren't allowed on HN, but this idea was originally known as the "free software movement".
The idea is that individuals and institutions than need or want certain software, develop the software, and then share it, binary and source.
You add to this the concept of "copyleft", which requires that any change to the software, that is distributed, must also be shared with others, and you have the GPL license.
Businesses, schools, agencies, need email, browsers, accounting, instead of paying for these, what if the people who need them develop than, and share the results?
> it really does turn your passion from something that you actively seek out because you enjoy it, to something that you seek out because you want to meet a quota or turn a profit. You're always chasing the next quarter or the next thousand customers.
Those changes in motivation that came from monetizing the software are exactly what happens to "free software" that transitions to "open source". Developed for profit, not for use.
Again, it's really really encouraging to see a thinking person rediscover this concept.
I create my side projects in the first place because I like to prove to myself that it is possible to do mad stuff in the browser - like a screen recorder with canvas composition, teleprompter, live annotations and talking-head overlay[1]. Or an SVG-inspired image filter builder for local batch application to images (still a WIP but almost there)[2].
It doesn't cost me any money to host the results, so: why not?
The Ruby on Rails foundation brings in a million per year: https://rubyonrails.org/foundation
The Linux foundation is funded at around $250m / year from a quick Google search
I'm arguing that the current climate of "vibe code a startup a day" is unsustainable, terrible, and should NOT be the thing people strive for. Instead of appeasing VC firms, that energy can be better spent on passion projects or contributing to other open-source projects like KDE / Linux / GrapheneOS / etc..
I'm not sure the starving artist is an ideal to strive for, either. Surely there's a middle ground?
Obsidian's model seems fair: https://obsidian.md/pricing
JetBrains' lifetime "subscription" which gets locked at the version you paid for seems fair to me
I don't see why you can't work on something you're passionate about and make money from it. For those of us not retired, the money is essential to make it sustainable.
The problem is the inverse. I want to make a living by working on Free/Libre software, but the users who stand the most to benefit from it won't open up their wallets because they think there will always be some other magic fairy hobbyist hacker who will put up with their gritty work and give it all for free.
I think we collectively get stuck in this false dichotomy: either we have only hobby/artisinal/grain fed/community-owned activities done by people out of love and we have to accept (expect, even) inferior-quality products due to the limited resources, or we submit to big corporations for everything we can not compromise and need the latest/most powerful/shiniest product that money can buy.
AI will consume OSS software and anyone will be able to clone your closed-source app for free and open source it for 'the community' to avoid paying $1 to maintain it.
One thing that is not free is hosting.
...because right now no one is hiring _anybody_ who isn't a super duper senior 100x dev. The whole world of tech is facing a generational collapse. We need to pull a rabbit out of hat soon or we're all screwed.
No one is hiring because IT hit peak of usefulness. I delete more apps from my phone than install every month. I don't need more services. My rusty car is enough, no need for more touch interfaces.
A whole range of content can be posted that can make you liable that you want it or not... from product keys, to internal documents, ...
I'll just say this, I love the spirit but this is ballsy. It's just going to be used as another user-paste space.
It's mirrored to other servers running the software, plus there's entire separate instances beyond my control, and Tor-only instances. If one goes down, it will pop up somewhere else.
I didn't mean in terms of 'seriousness' I meant in terms of liability.
Having terms saying "do what you want, not my problem" isn't a good strategy.
“I don’t want to maintain a custom fork with my fix” - valid sure, if you are not sure if your fix is the best solution for it, and would like the general community to comment (i think the problem here is that iterating on a fork is generally difficult to discover and work on)
“I really want everyone to have the benefit of this fix” - Could be interpreted as wanting the "fame" of authorship or participation in a large open source repo, otherwise just sharing the fix and letting whoever needs it is enough tbrh.
“I don’t know what the fix is, but there is a bug here and the core team should fix it” - would be a user support issue.
A free software can have good things like there could be a lot of users which is good learning experience on how to deal with it. If you are already experienced, then it would not be as much valuable.
There is also argument that paid software is better. I can't say that it wrong. With less people using it, and the developer has fund to run the service on good machine does make a difference.
I don't think there a right answer to free or paid. Just do it the way that align with your goal.
A. Either it will remain obscure and not see any real use
B. (Less likely) It will get abused to hell before it is shutdown.
Claims of removing violating content “immediately” seem unrealistic under decent usage, unless that $600 can grow unbounded.
I was always afraid of some sort of implied level of support or quality from something that I charge money for, but maybe I'm overthinking it.
I feel like if I release it for free then there can be no expectations.
My hobby projects were created mainly to serve a need for myself or a close friend, or to create an opportunity to develop my skills, hopefully both at once.
I am speaking about this all from a pre-LLM world and mind, so I realize that LLMs can change this somewhat.
A RasPi would be an upgrade!
Also, Nonograph doesn't store or serve any media, just html and markdown.
None of these run ads or make any money so I'm going to share them guiltlessly:
https://calories.508.dev just a simple average calorie tracker over months. I couldn't find anything like this online or on the app store.
https://travelcards.508.dev Generate printable cards with localized allergies or whatever for trips. Apparently a lot of our wedding guests like this. https://github.com/508-dev/travel-cards
http://stuff4friends.508.dev A stuff library for your friends to borrow stuff you aren't using. I'm most excited about this one right now because I have so much stuff, and my friends seem to be enjoying borrowing random stuff they wouldn't have just because they can see it and know it's all being tracked. https://github.com/508-dev/friend-library
it's not that i don't have any interesting ideas, it's that it's just not fun enough to chase digital dreams anymore. why build my own text editor on top of my own vt100 abstractions if i'm never gonna use it? i may get around to building a kitchen inventory app or even just using the prototype i have now, but that's only going to be useful if i'm cooking for a crowd and not just me.
I have already written a few tools for myself that I use in my homelab, and I plan to give them away. I've made stuff that, a few years ago, had I developed from the ground up, I would be far more interested in monetizing. But why bother now that I know that anyone with a coding agent can make a copy of it in an afternoon?
Seems fair enough, similar to self hosted software that offers managed hosting for a price, or you can try to run the docker containers on your own or whatever. I do a bit of both, self host the non critical stuff, pay for the critical stuff.
I don't get why this is such an issue. You can just ignore these people if you don't want to interact with them. You shouldn't take bug reports or support requests personally.
I don't have a problem with this, but there is still the cost of living; and renumeration possibilities for time spent and invested into a given project.
Something should be done to improve the ecosystem situation here, even if the renumeration is low.
I want my hobby project to be my job, because I don’t want to work for someone else. I want creative control, freedom to explore and ship ideas, and financial stability.
The only way to get there, that I can see, is to charge for my work.
What is not free is my time, my attention, and support. I don't know how open source maintainers do it but I can't imagine doing it for free.
A long time ago, I wrote a small MS-DOS program that I gave away for free. Last I heard someone as of 2 or 3 years ago someone was still using it. It was a .com program.
As a solo indie-dev, writing free software (as in you don't need to pay anything) is fine, but I usually do not make the project (entirely) open source due to the added churn & maintenance.
In my experience, setting expectations early in my apps ("I'm a solo indie dev", "this is a free app", "you can reach out to me through email but don't expect super quick responses") helped reduce entitled users and - quite the opposite - people were super happy to get replies from me solving their problems.
[0] Blog post about it: https://sxp.studio/blog/spite-apps-the-latte-larrys-of-apps
That's the state of not paying money for software.
Right now it can be used as a great tool or analyzing data. Feedback is appreciated but not expected. I try to respond to bug fixes and feature requests in a timely manner, but I am not required to do that.
If it catches on, I might charge something like $10 for an individual lifetime license. Businesses might be on some kind of subscription.
Enjoy my free, goofy puzzle game
This is very different from: I see an ongoing demand for X, and thus I work to provide a product that supplies X. In this case, naturally, I will not want to give it away for free, even if it is software.
but have no idea how to get any compensation
i just do it because i use these tools and like to share it
Generally speaking it just works.
Why not Ubuntu?
Do you mind describing why?
Also, you can append .md to the end of any page (except /) to get the markdown from disk as raw text.
What matters is: billionaires and capital have full control, and increasingly more, of everything in our lifes. Throwing tantrums won't help either. What you need to do as a programmer is to get involved in social movements and politics and fight to change the world and to effectively shape the social adoption of new technologies.
Truth is most programmers were always mediocre. And most acted like they were superior to others - not strange with the high pays and utter success of ideology. Glad that's about to end.
If your imagination was ripped completely already, all I can say is: rip. You have the option to cry for the next years, and complain online, like a child, or you can step up your game - and make it multiplayer instead of this sad sad singleplayer.
Current society is devastating both the planet and crushing our souls. According to the most popular topic on HN of the last few days, most users from this bubble can't even talk to other people (calling them "strangers"). Sorry to say, but fuck your FOSS or your expert software - this is utter failure as humans. If we can't fix that, among other things, we're absolutely doomed.
One question : what would be, solely according to you, the best policies to get "us" out of this mess ? Tax wealth ? Nuke inheritance ? Something else ?
I'm from the Global South, and most people here are from the North, so to answer your question I'll have to be a little bit vague: I'm a communist [0].
0: Good introduction if anyone needs it: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m...
Every country that ever aspired to communism had people who were at the top and people who were at the bottom, far more so than free market countries.
How many of the famous names you can think of that changed the modern world started off from old money? A lot of these things come from new money private investors or government incentives and grants, or they just bootstrapped themselves and grew organically.
It might be fair to say that we should do more to preserve inexpensive rural life as a viable alternative to many people, because a lot of people born in cities today may more realistically be better suited to the pace and burden of rural life.
Alternatively, we should renormalize people living together in larger numbers the way they did in the 1800s and early 1900s (though not to the same extreme). Individualism is expensive, but many people preserve a more individualistic lifestyle even if their personal finances don't easily support it and then they blame everything outside of their life rather than their own choices.
There, fixed the biggest complaints people have with open-source.
Don't post an email address, don't have a contact form. Do you really think people are going to identify a bug you weren't already aware of? Is that possibility really worth the angry attacks from entitled worms and millipedes? I don't think so.
While I agree with OP about not always turning hobby or passion projects into businesses, I also realize some HNers may be closer to where I started, as a broke teenager with no degree, no job and no skills, than where I am today, recently retired and looking back on a fairly notable career as an 'accidental' serial tech entrepreneur. So, if you really need the money and/or hate your day job, why shouldn't you try to monetize any project you can? After all, these days everyone's got a side hustle (and 'passive income' was the success-porn meme before that).
Honestly, if you really need to, then go for the money but if you can afford to not go for every dollar early on in an emerging niche, sometimes playing the longer game can work out better. And not only financially, but in other ways like personal development, valuable relationships, practical experience and industry insight. And even in cases where your investment of time and energy doesn't appear to pay off in any tangible way, not turning it into a side hustle can preserve the sense of joy and personal satisfaction you get from it. And the older I get, the more I appreciate just how rare and fleeting that innate joy can be.
So at the end of the day, even if it doesn't go anywhere, not monetizing a passion project costs you maybe a few hundred dollars? I don't really count all the hours because, let's be real, if you're counting hours (instead of hiding them from yourself) it's not really a passion project. And in terms of effort and energy, I've always found doing stuff that feeds my soul tends to renew more than it consumes. So, full disclosure: N=1... but, over the years, most of the things I was unhealthily obsessed about to the extent I poured myself into them with wild abandon - ended up working out extremely well, despite usually having little apparent financial upside at the start. And, being obsessed, I rarely ever paused long enough to worry how much money I would make. To be fair, the 'big win' didn't always come right away but... too often to just be random, it would happen within a couple years - and more than once in life-changing amounts.
To be clear, I don't think there's anything metaphysical or 'woo' about this pattern. It just seems to activate disparate things which each nudge my cumulative odds toward positive outcomes. One unexpected factor was how people responded so strongly to what I was doing because they saw my 'non-mercenary' passion. So much so, that nowadays I tell young entrepreneurs "If you create enough value for people around a real and interesting problem, you won't be able to stop them throwing money at you" by which I mean, over-achieve on creating uniquely transformative value first and if you do that well enough, collecting the money gets a lot easier.
There's also an interesting filter effect around emerging passion niches which are outside the mainstream. In the early days of a new thing, most people don't 'get it' but when you impulsively leap into it because YOU can't stop thinking about it every waking moment (and not because TechCrunch said VCs are funding it), then if you have a sharp eye and good instincts, that can put you near ground zero of the next 'next big thing' before the funding cycle starts.
Sometimes the most valuable part of being on the ground floor in the early days is it attracts others who are smart and have good instincts about cool new things. And in the early days, new communities are still small enough that high-quality individual contributions get noticed by everyone - especially when passionately inspired and freely given. Just look at the careers of the random teens who squandered any hope of dating or sports in high school to waste thousands hours on the demo scene in the 90s. While I wasn't part of the demo scene, I was attracted to a couple similar ground zero tech niches in the 90s and it's spooky how many people I met back 'in the day' because we were all doing 'the best' stuff out of the few hundred people on Earth doing this stuff at all, were people who've gone on to become founders of well-known startups, senior fellows at Google or to invent some fundamental part of what's in my pocket right now. And none of the "cool things" my teenage daughter is impressed I was involved in creating before she was born are things I pursued with a monetization plan or after careful analysis of the TAM (to be honest, I'd already done two startup exits and was a week from my first IPO when I had to ask one of my investment bankers what "TAM" stood for).
The obvious counter-argument is "Cool story, boomer... sadly, the days when a tech nerd could succeed by running toward whatever new thing seemed cool and then naively giving away their time and talent are long gone." And maybe that's true. But today doesn't really feel different. Back then a lot of nice, more experienced people warned me I was wasting my time and talent or that I was being taken advantage of. They were wisely monetizing their time and talent toward a carefully laid plan while I was off experimenting with stuff that didn't even work yet, making toys no one would pay for and spending long nights helping people who couldn't pay me just because I thought the thing we were making was super-cool. While the wise and prudent people with a plan got paid for every single hour - somehow I ended up with generational wealth and most of them didn't. Yeah, maybe it's survivorship bias and in an alternate universe, some other version of me did just waste his time, get taken advantage of and end up nowhere. But here's the thing. Even if I ended up scraping a workaday living together for my whole career and retired after a series of "almost made it" products with nothing but a half-funded 401k, - I still wouldn't trade it. The amazing people and experiences I had and all the joy from creating new things that so inspired me I literally couldn't sleep at night was still worth doing even without the big payday at the end. And maybe that's the difference between fake passion and the real thing.
So I guess, my story is only for the crazy fools and dreamers that old Apple ad was talking to. If what I wrote kind of resonates with you but you also worry about being a chump and taken advantage of - know that there's a version of this story where following your passions and giving stuff away, at least for a little while in the early days of a new thing, ends up working out stupidly well - as long as you're smart, do great work and, of course, actually take care of the business end when the ground floor turns into a skyscraper. Now you just need to decide if you're living in the universe you were made for.
Also, I like your comment so much I immortalized it in a Nonograph: https://nonogra.ph/na-ymlu-05-06-2026
Thanks for the long read!
"I don't have enough confidence in this thing to sell it", or "there might be something wrong with it and I don't want to be on the emotional hook" with actual customers to worry about it. It's not necessarily those things, but those doubts can exist.
There's also a subtle rejection of patent risk in open source, as if you are less encumbered with the stress around having to research what might step on some company's toes. Companies can solve some of that risk with professional liability insurance.
Realistically, I think a lot of people just don't want to run a company, getting committed to something they can't drop at a moment's notice, or they don't know where to start and it's easier to build reputation rather than dollars. It's more complicated than not doing it in many cases, and less complicated than not doing in other cases.
The other side of your argument is that almost none of the big things got into your pocket without some company trying to run a business which gave them the capital to direct that capital towards change. The number of examples of open source or free things that wouldn't exist today if they didn't sit on top of the foundation of a business making money is huge. The world would suck more.
Let me frame it like this. Let's say there is a non-profit organization. The mission is X. They are mildly successful at their mission. They believe in it, they're passionate. It's mostly local, mostly volunteer, the amount of time dedicated to it by all is constrained, budgets are constrained. Demographics mean the people who were naturally interested in the mission are fading off and younger people aren't as captivated by the non-profit.
Meanwhile, some company who has excess capital yet believed in a similar mission achieved 9x the success in that same non-profit motivation, because they could direct the energies they've gathered towards a purpose.
It doesn't have to be an emotional or moral struggle between whether people should be low energy potential and poor, but idealistically purposed, or high energy potential and rich, but lacking in any sort of philosophy as to what goodness is.
We went through too many years of communism in the world that paints dollar bills as having evil fangs on them and I think it rubbed off a little on the internet and some open source communities.
Fundamentally, it comes down to logic. Many things rely on someone else's money to become a success or catch on. In terms of sustainability, in many ways that applies to software as well. If some idea can economically sustain the personal investment into itself, it might grow to reach its potential in a way some weekend warrior project does not after it gets discarded.
At the same time, it is nice and liberating to simply do something fun and interesting, to put it out there like the demo scene or like when bit torrent dropped or some new compression algorithm. When those kinds of things excite you, it makes you want others to feel that way too. It just depends what you're after.
My “favourites” are the ones threatening to abandon the tool, despite having never made a single positive contribution. On open-source that’s an easy laugh and a “good riddance”. On commercial cases it’s more frustrating and nuanced.
I disagree willingness to pay is that meaningful of a filter, in the cases I experienced. And it’s getting worse; many people are getting too impatient and act like everyone works for them specifically and only their needs matter.
Somebody paying for your product is very strong signal. You know that such a person represents real world use cases for your product, and that their issues and feature requests are based on real world problems. Otherwise the chances are low that they would be paying for the software.
So helping them with what they want could mean that you've just tipped the scale enough for hundreds or thousands of people to become new customers.
And of course you should give them their money back to get rid of them if they're any kind of headache. Or tell them that their requested feature will be in the next versions, which is a new purchase.
Sure, if the request is reasonable and sensical. I entertain those and even help them formulate the request better if needed. That’s true of both commercial and open-source.
But I’m more talking about the users who demand features. Those who say the tool needs to have whatever idea they just thought of 2 minutes ago, despite no one else ever having asked for it and it not really making sense. Those users who only think of themselves and suggest features which require fundamental changes which would modify the behaviour for everyone, or the feature is in itself contradictory and there’s no way it could work.
> Those who say the tool needs to have whatever idea they just thought of 2 minutes ago, despite no one else ever having asked for it and it not really making sense.
If no one is bothered enough by the lack of the feature to mention it, then the software doesn’t need it. And you’re ignoring the “and it not really making sense” part. If a feature is well-reasoned and makes sense in scope, I always consider it.
If you have users who aren't paying you, there is no reason at all to pay any heed to what they say.
But driving that line is a cost: to you, your volunteers, or your tokens(?).
As for tokens, there have been exactly zero cases where someone has submitted LLM code to one of my repos that has been up to my standards and I have accepted it. Yes, I can say that with certainty. If I wanted LLM code I’d ask for it myself, having an intermediary in that process is worse than useless.
Having to spend time reviewing a PR or issue is “no cost”?
I’m not convinced yet.
> As for tokens
I did not mean LLM contributions…I meant using AI tools to automate the reviews of contributions and users you seem to think cost no time or attention, but I do..
You can choose to
Or you can choose to ignore them
Why are you on a platform open to accepting them in the first place?
Are we talking about the same thing?
Git hosting provides discoverability and the ability to fork repositories. Everything else is an optional feature.
because you don’t have to “drive a hard line”, to do that,
you just draw it once (publish a no PR policy, don’t host on GH, etc),
and you shouldn’t be hearing from users.
So, reviewing them.
Which takes time/focus.
(I still get bug tracker emails for the kernel from before 2010!)
They were almost always full to the brim.
Anecdotes are fun, but not much more than that.
With a less famous artist price is perceived as a signal. So if it is free, people would think that the show is not worth bothering.
A long time ago I was helping a friend with her hand-made candles stall at a craft fair. A particular thpe of candle wasn't selling - so we talked about it and she reduced the price of each candle. But they still weren't selling. So we talked about it some more, and she priced them at 3x the original price. They all sold.
I can think of several reasons for that. It would be nice to know for sure which was the right one (or if there’s a combination).
E.g. Maybe being free, people reserved the tickets but then didn’t show up. Or if you didn’t have to reserve, people only went on a whim. Or they always assumed they would all be reserved in advance so didn’t bother to try.
I suspect that when you pay for an event you’re more likely to make a concerted effort to attend lest you “lose the money”.
- I'm not particularly into castles, but I've visited a fair few while travelling. I lived in Norwich for 10 years, home to one of the finest Norman castles in the country. Did I visit? Did I heck.
- When your favourite film was on TV you'd watch it every time. Then when you got it on DVD you'd never watch it again.
- Give a dog some miscellaneous leftovers and notice how they prioritise ingestion.
Not sure it's really the same entitlement phenomenon the GP was talking about, though.
I'm not sure what the exact lesson is here. Something about stingy people not being nice to work with, perhaps?
The name for this is the Veblen Effect [0], and it applies to all irrational market behaviour where people are actually happier with luxury goods the more they pay for them.
Funnily enough, I've seen some of the exact same clients brag about how cheaply they got something else. The lesson I've drawn is that they're mostly looking for approval, so they're equally interested in buying status as they are in getting real stuff done. It's a win/win if you deliver a great product that they can brag about, because they'll do the hard work of selling it to themselves for you.
A corollary of that psychology is that some, maybe even most people are never happy with stuff they paid market price for. They either think they could've gotten it cheaper, or they think they could have gotten more for their money. Paying market price makes them feel like a chump. But paying way more than market has to be justified to themselves first. It's simply too embarrassing to admit that they might have overpaid an arm and a leg. So as a contractor, pricing your work as either very cheap or very expensive, on the margins of the parabola, alleviates this vague sense of dissatisfaction from your clients' internal debate, and gives them the peace of mind that they're actually trying to buy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
The pragmatic accept that work ≠ value, some do so permanently. But someone newly aware of this may deem it unfair, and react with totally disproportionate demands, some do so permanently.
Then you come across those who already benefit greatly from the imbalance, yet still make disproportionate demands. These tend to be good at it, subtle, strategic. Which may explain why they end up on the benefiting side.
Broadly, you find three types: the greedy, the balanced, and the generous pragmatic.
The greedy exploits relativity. The balanced respects it. The generous navigates it without resentment. Whether consciously or not.
See: Redis, Elastic, etc.
Not an ounce of AWS or GCP is open source, yet they'll happily spin up a managed version of your thing and make hundreds of millions without cutting you in.
We need new licenses that are more "shareware" like. That permit individuals, but slap big trillion dollar companies.
"Fair source", "Fair code", the defold license, etc. are all pretty good.
In the age of LLMs and entitled users, I must be selfish and cannot release my work as free software any more. The best of all worlds, for me, is to provide source code along with binaries to paying customers.
What you actually want is some kind of noncommercial clause: you can use my free shit as part of your free shit. If you want to make money off my shit, the rules change to "fuck you, pay me"
"But what if a company just wants to try it out?" well they can live within the already existing exception called "not telling me you're breaking my license". If I don't know about it I can't impose any penalties on you. Every good business already knows how and when they can break the law with impunity, and that's one of them.
Companies shouldn't get your labor for free. Especially the big ones.
Trillion dollar companies don't deserve hand outs.
We should have figured this out twenty years ago.
> No, this begging is particularly different because it capitalizes on the good will of open source developers. Microsoft, Apple, and Google are standing on the internet in their trillion dollar business suits with a sign that reads "Starving and homeless. Any free labor will help." They aren't holding people up at gun point. Rather they hold out their Rolex encrusted hand and beg, plead, and shame open source developers until they get free labor.
> Once they get this free labor they rarely give credit. They're ungrateful beggars that take their donated work hours, jump in their Teslas, and ride off to make more trillions proclaiming, "Haha! That open source idiot just gave me 10 hours of free labor. What a loser."
In my experience charging too little is one of the biggest mistake to do when starting.
Basically, you get what you pay for. That's not always true, but it holds pretty reliably.
Using GPL or MIT or whatever open or free license you prefer does not mean it's OK to get bullied.
It's perfectly fine to not accept entitlement and still let others use or even build on your work, if you want to.
You have the freedom to shape the interactions you want even if nobody else does it this way.
I'd say it comes off as more of a challenge than a suggestion. "I don't care, do it yourself if you care so much". Most people just go away when they get told that. Some people actually rise up to the challenge.
> even if to clarify that currently there is not enough resource to accept/reject it
That's fine if clarified beforehand. The CONTRIBUTING.md from the above comment is an excellent example. It clearly communicates the maintainer's stance.
If it's coming from someone who previously "welcomed PRs", that sort of reply is extremely rude. Learning and modifying someone else's project is a major undertaking, and it's very disrespectful when maintainers don't match that effort, especially when they invited it upon themselves.
If they are so inclined, they can fork it and patch it. It's out there after all. As long as they obey the terms of the license I put forth, it's all fair.
Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.
Your team cares though. Probably including yourself later. Maintaining proper commit history is always worth it.
The OSS part ensured that even if I went full Sam Altman, the user will still have an absolute baseline they can fallback on. And given how lazy I am, the OSS is often basically 70% of the project. This also has the benefit that the significant part of the code can be audited for security/etc, sometimes even for free.
That's in line with my experience on both consulting and selling software. The more they pay, the easier and reasonable they are to work with.
Years ago, I put out some free software and there were a lot of users who seemed to be on a power trip to show me who is the boss. I assumed they were some lonely guys in a basement who had nothing else going on, so they best they could come up with is to beat up an author of the only software they can afford.
"Be entitled to whatever one is willing to give upstream" is my motto.