Comment by SerCe
16 hours ago
Or don't. I've done both, published OSS projects and sold some software. The level of entitlement in some comments I received on the OSS side was pretty crazy at times. While with the paid software, all of the interactions I had were so much more constructive. YMMV, but willingness to pay is a great filter.
I’ve also done both, and I found both kinds of users in both situations. There have been cases on the commercial front where I just felt like giving customers their money back, even after years of having used the software, and told them to not come back. There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore. With open-source it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
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.
> There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore.
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.
> 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.
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.
My favourite is the advice I read from personal MBA. You send them to your competition :)
> it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
But driving that line is a cost: to you, your volunteers, or your tokens(?).
There’s no cost to me to stop an entitled disruptive user with zero positive contributions from destabilising the project. No cost to my volunteers either. The opposite is true in both cases; removing that user is a net benefit and I’ve done so in the past specifically to protect the experience of the volunteers.
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.
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A TV-presenter of a fairly popular TV-show with an audience in my country once told an anecdote that they wanted the admission for the audience to be free. But when the tickets were free, a lot less people showed up. When they changed the ticket to be the quite arbitrary amount of 7 EUR, suddenly the theater was full every time.
Back in my home town, we used to have free events all the time. Outdoor concerts, theatre, even indoor concerts and festivals.
They were almost always full to the brim.
Anecdotes are fun, but not much more than that.
Anecdote:
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.
Yeah. If it's free or cheap, people don't value the thing. It's something called "price sensitivity". Some things are expensive (luxury brands), and people want it for that reason alone (status symbol).
Yes, it is so true, people think free is junk and when they pay for something they automatically assign a value to it.
Context is king. A famous cello player playing on streets is valued less and is valued more when playing in a stadium. This is the typical framing phenomenon which psychology has discovered about humans. Even what colour we perceive changes based on surrounding context so not surprising.
We naturally go for scarce things first. A few examples of this:
- 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.
They've recently done up Norwich castle and it's better than ever. It's in the running for Museum of the Year!
"While with the paid software, all of the interactions I had were so much more constructive. YMMV, but willingness to pay is a great filter."
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.
I've regularly heard something similar said of consulting work, too. Many people new to the game worry about charging too much, because if a client is paying more then surely the pressure will be higher. Instead they end up experiencing the opposite: charging a higher rate tends to get them a better kind of client.
I'm not sure what the exact lesson is here. Something about stingy people not being nice to work with, perhaps?
Stingy people are indeed not nice to work with, which is why I raised my prices as a freelance coder through the roof about 20 years ago, usually pacing about triple the going market rate. But filtering out stingy people isn't the main factor in the phenomenon you're describing, because some of my happiest customers have been stingy people who capitulated to paying much more than they initially thought the work was worth. They tend to also be the ones who are most prone to congratulating themselves and bragging to their friends on springing for the most expensive option, and when they do, they invariably (even pathologically) need to assert to themselves and everyone else that they paid for "the best".
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
Value is relative. Effort-to-income ratios vary significantly between traders.
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.
It’s about the price subconsciously influencing the client’s evaluation of your competence.
I don't think it's subconscious at all. If, for instance, you contract something on fiverr for $5, you expect $5 of work. If you contract something for $1000 you expect $1000 of work. And the former's probably going to take a lot more feedback to get to where you want than the latter.
Basically, you get what you pay for. That's not always true, but it holds pretty reliably.
Not to mention that "OSI open source" is basically sponsored and advocated by the firms that stand to benefit the most: hyperscalers that will embrace, extend, and encrust the thing you built with their monetization tendrils and leave you without a way to make money on it yourself.
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.
AGPLv3?
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There are more than 2 ways to do OSS vs proprietary. You can do OSS and refuse all commits or even any comments, e.g. https://codeberg.org/y20k/escapepod/src/branch/master/CONTRI...
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.
It's totally fine to turn off issues and pull requests, and refuse all contributions. The problem is many maintainers create undue responsibility for themselves with snide responses like "PR welcome" to every issue or request. When people show up with the patches after a response like that, I'd say that they are very much owed some of the maintaner's precious time.
Agreed, if a patch is offered after being suggested then some reaction should take place, even if to clarify that currently there is not enough resource to accept/reject it and thus it might be better to temporarily rely on their own fork.
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I personally give away free software, and actually don't get bothered by comments as much. The catch? I write the software to fulfill my needs, and may or may not take anyone's suggestions at heart.
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.
I like the idea of creating a OSS project, and then build extra on top of it for selling.
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.
As someone who once had a popular open-source project. Opensource is just harder because you've to write code for <optics>. When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive. Despite what people here say, all these things have very little to do with the reliability of actual code.
Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.
thats interesting because for me its the opposite: working in a team boosted my code quality and cleanliness much more than something open source i did precisely because people on my team would be looking at it and reviewing it...
Do you not trust your teammates? LGTM click merge
> When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive
Your team cares though. Probably including yourself later. Maintaining proper commit history is always worth it.
I wanted to say "nonzero correlation with employability", but I've seen entitled GitHub issues from megacorporations too.
Agreed, which is why my stance on the matter at least on what I have control over, is either GPL/LGPL, or commercial license.
"Be entitled to whatever one is willing to give upstream" is my motto.
My experience is similar, but I remain more motivated to give away what I make than to ask people to pay for it.