Comment by Aurornis
4 months ago
Not personally, but twice in my career I’ve been part of interview loops with people who had created semi-famous open source projects. Projects that you’ve heard of if you read a lot of HN, but not so critical that you couldn’t think of another alternative if it disappeared.
Both of them expressed regret for not commercializing it. The weird part for me, as the interviewer, was hearing them imagine how wealthy they’d be if they had commercialized it instead of releasing it as open source, entirely neglecting the fact that the projects became popular because they were open source.
I imagine this is the thought process behind the various projects that try to go closed-source and commercial after a certain point.
The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
I can see why people have these fantasies. Huge businesses have been built on open source code bases.
Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
The place where I disagree with your take is that commercialization and open source popularity are not mutually exclusive at all. The FSF makes this quite clear: open source is 100% compatible with charging money for some kind of service or for the convenience of a binary or something like that.
Software freedom is really about availability of the source code and your right to modify and distribute your modifications, not free as in beer freedom.
Commercializing it doesn’t have to mean bleeding customers dry, it can be something where most people are not paying a dime and are enjoying a fully open source experience. I think nginx plus is a good example of that sort of model. I have never met anyone who pays for nginx but there’s some big companies with big company problems that do.
Another example is Discourse forums. You can pay for support and hosting.
> The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
‘Business owner’ in the sense of owning stock, sure.
Save 10–20% of your income. Invest it in index funds (we can argue about which particular indices). Work for a few decades. Retire wealthy.
Then bequeath that wealth to your heirs when you die, giving them a leg up on this whole process.
> Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
The employer takes the risk that the software will have no benefit at all. We get paid no matter what. I like that trade. I’ll invest in a diversified market index rather than my single program, thank you very much.
> The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
People working in finance or (in the year 2025) as AI researchers with fantastic signing bonuses for switching to Meta might want to disagree.
People working in finance aren't in a good place to disagree. They haven't escaped wage slavery, even if they technically have the ability to. The funny thing about really high paying jobs is that people tend to get so wrapped up in them they forget to free themselves from it.
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They may be making a big salary but that’s not really what I mean.
A large salary is still a salary.
A business owner is unconstructed by the market value of their labor.
>The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
Another way: marry someone rich. Understandable that it did not occur to you or most people here, because most here are likely to be the XY chromosomal variety.
> Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
There's plenty of companies that offer stock compensation. You may have to move to work for them, of course.
That said, the flat hourly fee may be a better deal. If you take a % of the profits, those profits may be negative!
I view stock compensation as not the same thing, especially when term sheets have become structured to minimize value to early employees.
Companies adjust their stock compensation plans to ensure they don’t exceed market rates of compensation.
A project can't be monetized without getting wide adoption, and it can't get wide adoption without a permissive license that precludes monetization :(
There's two models that solve this.
a) sell support contracts
b) have contributors sign copyright agreements, license the project as GPL/AGPL, and then sell commercial licenses for people who can't use that
c) Open core model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model
which seems to be by far the most common
No, they don’t.
Selling support contracts is actually hard.
GPL/AGPL preclude widespread adoption (these days) — the grandparent explicitly mentioned “permissive” licenses.
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It’s the difference between a project and a business.
They made an open project and let the community contribute to it and adopt it.
They wished it was a business, not a project. A business has support, sales, and higher expectations than the serve-yourself open source projects
If this were true no nonfree software would ever make money
I get pretty angry by those type of people.
„Open source and free*” asterisk for „until I get traction or VC money”.
That’s bait and switch and riding on community good will.
The dev cannot remove the older opensource versions, so the community is always free to fork those
But with this you create another bunch of people like the guy in original article.
Is free fork enough or people should get paid? Does that project owner hire some of people from community, what about ones left out?
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With enough social media, anything is possible
- Mullenweg, or some other hack
Society is bait and switch. You have to pay for rent and food/necessities or you’ll die/rot on the street while every politically illiterate person and the structures and institutions of society exclaim how amazing and freedom loving liberal democracy and capitalism is
Possibly also their way if boasting, eg, "look this thing I did is so great I could be rich off of it!" When they may mean it much less in the way of regret than "hey, I do very valuable work, you should hire me"