Comment by suyash
13 days ago
If your main motivation creating/maintaince a popular open source project was to make money then you don't really undersand the open source ethos.
13 days ago
If your main motivation creating/maintaince a popular open source project was to make money then you don't really undersand the open source ethos.
"eating is for the greedy", noted.
A little side project might grow and become a chore / untenable, especially with some from the community expecting handouts without respect.
Case in point, reticulum. Also Nolan Lawson has a very good block post on it.
I don't think your position is reasonable even if I believe you just want to say that writing open source shouldn't be a main source of the income). I think it's perfectly okay to be rewarded for time, skill, effort, and a software itself.
Of course it’s OK to be paid for your work; I don’t think anyone reasonable is saying otherwise. RMS even has no problem with it [0] (though he does take issue with the term open source, so there’s that).
Here’s my take on “the open source philosophy,” having benefited from it since the 90s. Note, I am not nearly as much of a zealot as RMS, and have no strong opinion on GPL vs BSD style licensing; use whichever meets your needs and future plans.
If I had needed to pay for a Linux distribution as a kid, it’s unlikely I would have been able to explore it.
If I was unable to figure out software behavior by studying its source code, I would have many unanswered questions today, and Debian’s vixie-cron would likely still have an obscure bug [1].
I, like practically all people in the tech industry, owe a great deal to people who have given their time to various projects. Some of those people make a living out of it (Daniel Stenberg, for example), but also still offer their software gratis. Therefore, I feel a moral obligation to do so in return.
0: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1019716
Even if motivation isn't about making money, people still need to eat, and deal with online toxicity.
it's not about the money. for large open source projects you need to allocate time to deal with the community. for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant.
most projects won't ever reach that level though.
> it's not about the money
OP sure makes it sound like it's about the money.
> for someone that just wants to put code out there that is very draining and unpleasant.
I never understood this. Then why publish the code in the first place? If the goal is to help others, then the decent thing would be to add documentation and support the people who care enough to use your project. This doesn't mean bending to all their wishes and doing work you don't enjoy, but a certain level of communication and collaboration is core to the idea of open source. Throwing some code over the fence and forgetting about it is only marginally better than releasing proprietary software. I can only interpret this behavior as self-serving for some reason (self-promotion, branding, etc.).
Most open source projects start small. The author writes code that solves some issue they have. Likely, someone else has the same problem and they would find the code useful. So it's published. For a while it's quiet, but one day a second user shows up and they like it. Maybe something isn't clear or they have a suggestion. That's reasonable and supporting one person doesn't take much.
Then the third user shows up. They have an odd edge case and the code isn't working. Fixing it will take some back and forth but it still can be done in a respectable amount of time. All is good. A few more users might show up, but most open source projects will maintain a small audience. Everyone is happy.
Sometimes, projects keep gaining popularity. Slowly at first, but the growth in interest is there. More bug reports, more discussions, more pull requests. The author didn't expect it. What was doable before takes more effort now. Even if the author adds contributors, they are now a project and a community manager. It requires different skills and a certain mindset. Not everyone is cut out for this. They might even handle a small community pretty well, but at a certain size it gets difficult.
The level of communication and collaboration required can only grow. Not everyone can deal with this and that's ok.
2 replies →
Ugh, no. Open source is "I made something cool, here, you can have it too", anything beyond that is your own expectations.
> I never understood this. Then why publish the code in the first place? If the goal is to help others, then the decent thing would be to add documentation and support the people who care enough to use your project.
Because these things take entirely different skill sets and the latter might be a huge burden for someone who is good at the former.
The person "throwing" the software has 0 obligation to any potential or actual users of said software. Just the act of making it available, even without any kind of license, is already benevolent. Anything further just continues to add to that benevolence, and nothing can take away from it, not even if they decide to push a malware-ridden update.
There is obligation to a given user only if it's explicitly specified in a license or some other communication to which the user is privy.
> support the people who care enough to use your project.
You make that sound like they are helping the developer. The help is going the other way, it seems to me.
Who gave you the right to "decent" things anyway ? Yeah it would be cool, but do you have any lega/social/moral right to it ? Absolutely not.
That collaboration goes both ways, or not as is often the case.
Isn't most (presumably the overwhelming majority) of opensource development is funded by for profit companies? That has been the case for quite a while too...