Many folks on HN are the exact sorts of people who have lived the thankless popular-enough-to-be-an-unpaid-job solo OSS maintainer dream, so I wonder if you feel as annoyed by the tone of this post as I do.

I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who are urgently trying to figure out a way to get paid, often just to keep the projects that they created alive so that these people can continue to use them for free.

I don't know if it's entitlement, projection or just wanting to have it both ways, but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming instead of being shitty about people doing their best to find a forever home before their burnout finally kicks in.

▲

pjmlp 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well.

I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis.

Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.

▲

trinix912 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

That is true, but nowadays most paid projects end up being perpetual subscriptions. Which I kind of get, as on-going maintenance still costs, but it used to be that you paid for a tool once and only paid again if you wanted/needed an updated version. I'd gladly pay $15-$60 for a tool once (and again if I needed an update) but $10-$15 per month for 20 different things (that I will only use occasionally) is just out of reach for me financially and I live in a "rich" first-world country.

▲

PaulHoule 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Working for a SaaS company is the greatest thing if you are a software developer who doesn't care about business: even if you don't care about business the business cares about you!

There was an article in Byte magazine circa 1983 describing this dilemma: you release a successful 1.0 of a product, get a pulse of money, hold back some of it to develop 2.0, N months later version 2.0 competes with not only your competitors but with 1.0 in the minds of your most satisfied customers. Now if you're planning for N months and it is really N+M they have to scramble for money to pay your paycheck or release the product before it is ready or both. If you're laid off you could be one of the lucky ones because working under those conditions can be a living hell.

I'm glad I'm working on a service because even if a project I am working on is critical to acquiring and retaining customers it's not an automatic crisis that a project is a little late.

In the last 10 years or so SaaS seems like an investor-driven fad driven by the ease of putting a valuation on a consistent cashflow, but I think it is more basic than that.

That's not to say that the 'anti-consumer' concerns aren't real. Also with generative AI we are seeing that some things need to account for the resources they use. In the 2010s I was looking at a family of proto-AI businesses where my business partner and I were struggling with pricing, like we could not set an $X/month price such that (i) some users might not cost 10$X or 100$X a month to serve and (ii) that $X doesn't exceed the value the subscriber would get from the service for many users thus you don't make the sale. Yet we also liked the idea of stable revenue and boy all the software biz people and investors we talked to couldn't see past the "S, M, L, XL" subscription model.

▲

pjmlp 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How do you imagine it used to be when everything was commercial?

On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because.

Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.

▲

senko 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.

If you're trying to make people cheer for the pirates, you're succeeding.

▲

pjmlp 2 days ago | parent [-]

Some people will never pay, even if it was one euro, single payment.

▲

direwolf20 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah. Because they're 14 and don't have a credit card, or they don't have any money, or the price is completely unaffordable (looking at you, IDA) or they hate your software and wish your company would DIAF but are forced to use it for various reasons anyway.

You might as well be nice to the people who will give you money, so that they'll give you money. Being hostile to people who are trying to give you money is rarely a winning business strategy.

	▲	pjmlp 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		All good reasons, except when it comes from people that can afford Apple, feel entitled to get gratis stuff, never pay anything else, and then come to complain on HN that another project died.

▲

red_admiral 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Programs were distributed on stacks of diskettes, towards the end of that era on CD-ROMs. There was no licence server to phone home to on the internet.

You bought Borland C++ compiler, installed it and used it - you were free to buy the next version when it came out or not.

▲

pjmlp 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are plenty of programs where you can still do that, that gladly accept one time license payment.

However think on your own salary and how many copies you need to sell, at what price, per month, to receive the same monetary amount after taxes.

Add to it, the amount of new user acquisitions per month, to keep a sustainable salary level.

	▲	trinix912 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		You’re right about that. But now put the users in the equation. If you’re making and marketing a B2B tool, it’s fine. But for a B2C tool, that tool will have to be so good that people will be willing to keep paying an ongoing subscription. That means that you’re now also competing against other cheaper alternatives (OSS) and people’s other life expenses (including other subscriptions). It depends on the niche you’re targeting but I’d go as far as to say it might sometimes be better to sell 100 copies at once every now and then, than get 5-10 people who are willing to subscribe and might all cancel their subscriptions a few months later when some other subscription-based tool shows up. For most people it’s easier to justify a one-time $10 purchase than locking in a $10 monthly subscription. But I agree that there’s no universal solution and it depends on what tool you’re making and in what niche.

▲

classified 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.

I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place. I don't see how people not using the software while still not becoming customers is a fix to anything.

▲

pjmlp 2 days ago | parent [-]

Subscriptions look cheaper for many folks.

As for being able to afford them, yes it cuts people out, many of whom would pirated anyway.

Digital stores, API keys, and SaaS seem to be doing alright

	▲	PaulHoule 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Subscriptions can be cheaper in some ways and more expensive than others. Adobe Creative Suite used to require a one time eye-watering payment and very few people could afford to keep it up to date, you might skip several upgrades before buying the next one if you did at all. CC's monthly payment makes it easy to enter. You are paying more in the long term than if you bought one version of it, but less than you'd pay if you kept your subscription up -- so somebody could make the case that it is more expensive than it used to be or less expensive than it used to be.

▲

latexr 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.

Adobe tools are subscriptions and they get pirated all the time.

	▲	pjmlp 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		They do, as did Autocad with key locks, the point is to make it harder, as long as it runs locally, there is always a way.

▲

estimator7292 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"Rent-seeking is the only way to fix piracy" is an interesting take.

It seems to be going very well for video and music streaming services. Piracy is certainly nearly dead at this point and not at all at record-high levels.

	▲	pjmlp 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The sarcastic tone ignores that was much worse during Napster golden days.

▲

peteforde 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with you in spirit. I also think back to that moment a few years ago where everyone suddenly realized that OpenSSL was being developed almost entirely by one dude with very, very little funding. Fundamental building blocks of modern society that might fail because some poor guy worked himself to death in obscurity because he didn't know how to better ask for help. We should all be haunted by this and consciously urge our employers to be part of the solution and not the problem.

That tangent aside, part of the big problem with paying for tooling is that the tooling itself is typically built on tooling and libraries that are also built on libraries and tooling.... all the way down. To generalize, many of those libraries farthest back in the chain are the least likely to get the sort of funding someone who, eg. writes a wrapper around ffmpeg or whatever might get.

I don't claim to have the solution, but I feel like this topic is the tech equivalent of not worrying about global warming.

▲

pjmlp 2 days ago | parent [-]

If you open an old Byte or Dr Dobbs magazine, it will be full of ads from companies whose business was utility libraries.

▲

peteforde 2 days ago | parent [-]

Wait, are you saying that all of my VBXs are likely unsupported at this point?

	▲	pjmlp 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, should have migrated to VB.NET by now. Dev Express, Sync Fusion, Component Source,.... are still around.

▲

TeMPOraL 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Neither side can have it both ways, but there's way too much whining about people not paying.

Want people to pay for your tools? Don't offer them for free.

This is related to my usual point here, that if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training, that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy.

Proprietary software is fine. Lying about it and using good ideals as marketing strategy is not. That applies as much to "released as MIT so it be useful to many, then unreleased because author realized it might end up in training data of some LLMs (and in so doing, actually become useful to many people)" software, as it does to blogs and all the whining about AI denying them credit (and pre-AI, search engines, except then the developer community was on side of search and not free-but-with-ads/credit publishers).

> Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.

That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step starting a real multi-party relationship, much distinct from just looking at a webpage or playing with code locally, and the poster being a student or younger.

I too strongly favored MIT over everything when I was a kid. Didn't have money to pay for anything, and GPL was complicated and my slightly older colleagues (with probably more business sense than I) didn't like it.

	▲	PaulHoule 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		So much of people's thinking today makes no sense to me. Since 2010 there has been an increasing tendency for the likes of Google and Facebook to drain an increasing fraction out of the value out of the web. Around 2012 I had a site that was expensive to host and bleeding money and looking for ways to salvage it and realized that there were many crawlers that were hitting my site hard, harder than Google, and almost all of them, like Chinese webcrawlers, were sending me 0 traffic and making 0 value for me. So I cut them off. Bing was practically in that category, sending barely detectable traffic, but I wanted to support some competition for Google. As I saw it a few years ago a bunch of people were apoplectic about OpenAI all of a sudden and I'm like, boy they are asleep at the switch, boy are they running in a herd, boy are they slamming on the breaks the next day after they crash their car. I mean like 10 years before that my wife was furious at me because I ran up a balance on our HELOC because of Google trouble.
	▲	xigoi 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training Both the GPL and MIT licenses require attribution, so by publishing open-source software, developers are not consenting to LLM training.
	▲	evanelias 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it I would wager that an overwhelming majority of people who choose FOSS licenses do so without ever making any grandiose claims about the betterment of humanity. Yet upon any suggestion of a license change, if the project is popular, they get attacked for being a lying scheming rug-puller all the same. > that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy Why do you automatically assume they're a liar, and not just someone whose circumstances or opinions changed over time? Or just responding to changes in the competitive landscape or business cycle? If you release FOSS software, it seems your only socially acceptable options are to keep future versions FOSS forever, or abandon the project entirely if/when your circumstances no longer permit FOSS development. How is that state of affairs beneficial to anyone? > Proprietary software is fine. I agree, but our industry also has a vocal minority of open source purists, who treat anything using non-OSI-approved licenses as toxic waste -- even software using a quite generous source-available license. For B2C software, that situation is manageable: the purists simply won't touch the software, and will loudly pan it on forums like HN, but plenty of others will try it if it's useful. But for B2B software, it's more problematic, since there are enough open source purists out there that most tech companies employ at least a few, influencing corporate policy about acceptable licenses. If a new B2B software product has no OSI-approved FOSS edition at all, the purists tend to majorly tank adoption, which hugely impacts the business viability of the product. So if you're bootstrapping a new B2B infrastructure product that doesn't lend itself to SaaS, what license do you pick? If you go FOSS, you severely limit the economic viability of your own work. Or if you go non-FOSS, you severely limit adoption, which then has the same outcome. > That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step If it was just about money/payments, then non-OSI "source available" licenses would be far more popular, especially ones that allow the software to be used free/gratis for all situations that don't directly compete with the software creator. Yet instead the widespread attitude towards these licenses seems to be far more mixed. How do you explain that phenomenon?

▲

brennanbrown 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I want Zach to be paid, 11ty is my favourite SSG. I think the way Font Awesome is going about this is unwise. I contribute to the Open Collective of 11ty (as I state in my post). I don't know how that can be misread.

▲

slopinthebag 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Idk if it's fair to characterise someone helping build a "community-driven directory to help people discover and connect with grassroots organizations, clubs, activist groups, and community initiatives" as "working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online". It's akin to complaining that pro-bono work devalues the profession of law.

It feels like there is entitlement on both sides. People who do OSS work feel entitled to financial benefits, despite explicitly choosing to give their work away for free. And people who consume open source software feel entitled to unpaid labor in perpetuity. It kind of sucks on both ends.

Rich Hickey wrote an essay titled "Open Source is Not About You" [0], where he states "As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."

This is true. Unequivocally. What is also true is that OSS is also not about the contributors. They aren't owed anything by the consumers. They aren't entitled to any compensation, and they aren't entitled to others putting effort into making their contributions sustainable, helping them make a living wage, or alleviating burnout. We're all adults here, we can stop working on something if it's causing us pain or suffering. And we can freely fork a project if it's going in a direction we don't agree. That is the nature of open source. It's just a licensing model, which only exists because of certain laws. Otherwise, it's just a decision on what is public and private. Nothing more.

So if a project isn't going in the direction you want? Shut up and fork it. Not getting paid for your work? Find a way to monetise it or move on. Don't whine about either of these things on the internet.

0: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

▲

peteforde 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You make some excellent points, but what I think your perspective lacks is empathy. This stuff is so complicated.

If someone starts working on a project in college and 3-4 years later it blows up, they might now have a young family to consider. The person working on this thing that people love is no longer the same person who started it. In other words: life happened. Perspectives change.

It's also kind of pointless to deny human nature and we should at least try to assume best intentions; it's one thing to say all of the Rich Hickey stuff, and you might even believe it at the beginning of a project. X years later when someone raises $20M to build a company around the best parts of what you did and often forgets to mention you in the origin story... I suspect that would mess with you, and all of that stuff about entitlement would start to feel a bit thin. I don't begrudge people for those emotions, because it's not my place to do so and I see myself in their imperfect-ness.

Ultimately, I am optimistic that we will continue to establish better and better ways to create sustainable projects with maintainers that are compensated for their efforts.

▲

slopinthebag 2 days ago | parent [-]

Well, if you confronted me with an individual case of course I would feel empathy. That wouldn't change that I think they have incorrect ideas about open source, but I also wouldn't judge them either.

My point is more that people should try to have more realistic views about open source. People aren't obligated to credit your MIT licensed code (beyond the licence file) and you should be clear on that when you chose that licence. Heck, I've seen OSS maintainers outraged because someone forked their code, despite prominently crediting the source [0]. Some people consider that "bad form", in the same way people might consider monetising something previously open source to be "bad form". I think in both cases, people should just choose more appropriate licences. Can't have your cake and eat it too.

I think Hecrj put it well here:

> 'Me giving away more "free gifts" cannot ever be considered "competing" with someone else that is also giving away "free gifts". The only way for someone to conclude that is if the original gifts are not truly "free", but come with some "hidden" expectations attached to them.'

If you believe that there are expectations attached to your code, you should choose a licence congruent to those expectations. Trying to enforce that through culture is probably a bad idea and will lead to strife.

> Ultimately, I am optimistic that we will continue to establish better and better ways to create sustainable projects with maintainers that are compensated for their efforts.

Yes, I hope so too.

0: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/19296#issuecomment...

▲

peteforde a day ago | parent [-]

That link is a strong argument to support your position, no question. On this class of example, we have no disagreement. Those folks appear to have missed the seminar where they explain how this whole OSS thing works.

That said, I've said irrationally defensive things to people abusing my code when I'm tired and depressed, too. These are called passion projects for good reasons.

Where I would lodge disagreement is that I reject the notion that OSS is this pure, primeval mana which is made less righteous when people remember that they need money for rent. I don't think we should encourage people to see countless hours of volunteer effort as undeserving of financial support. I believe that OSS gets better when people are well compensated for contributing to it.

I respect the folks who are able to do it, but I resist the side-eye these folks often deliver when they hear someone is looking for a way to keep the lights on.

	▲	slopinthebag a day ago \| parent [-]
		I agree with all that

▲

b3lvedere 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree with Rich Hickey in that. I use Debian a lot, but i am fully aware i am not entitled to any sort of free support when things don’t go i want them to go. I get what i pay for. If i want things to go my way i will have to make the effort myself. By investing time and/or money.

▲

cheschire 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I truly don't understand how the same folks…

Why do you think it’s the same folks? People tend to be louder when they don’t agree with something, and many topics will divide a community mostly in half. The end result is that you will more than likely hear complaints and subtle digs/insults no matter what happens.

▲

sublinear 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming

I know you don't want to hear the obvious, but making your passion your paycheck is a one-way ticket to burnout. Even your heroes are still human.

The passion is the magic, and keeping it going requires contrast with something else as a day job. You really don't want to know the pain of losing both because they're one and the same. Burnout is not inevitable nor inherent to age or experience. It's actually the opposite if you set proper boundaries and get a grip.

That said, what's the deal with this topic coming up over and over? Is it just coming from young people too afraid of the broader working world, or is it something more sinister? Is this opinion being propagated by bad actors trying to take advantage of young people wanting to work this way (the "rockstar" delusion)?

▲

peteforde 2 days ago | parent [-]

You make some excellent points. Especially wrt how the fastest way to hate what you love is to rely upon it to pay the bills.

That said, I do feel as though you're presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy. There's lots of people who have figured out how to build something sustainable that blurs the line between occupation and enjoyment. We only tend to pathologize when talking about folks who haven't figured out how to make what they created into a flywheel.

The real trick is to figure out a viable structure to fund a lot more projects. Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction. Things really are better for builders than they were 20 years ago. That should be celebrated.

Yet, I think it's very likely that there's something just as disruptive (in a positive way) for OSS and makers in general as, for example, OnlyFans was for adult content that we just haven't stumbled on yet. So when I implore the person who wrote the OP to focus on solutions, this is broadly what I was hoping for.

▲

sublinear 2 days ago | parent [-]

> presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy

I respectfully, but very strongly disagree. There is nothing good that comes from corrupting someone's passion project by attaching strings to it.

> Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction

I would take a huge step back from that statement and have a harder think, but that's just me.

▲

peteforde a day ago | parent [-]

You're saying that you fundamentally object to people figuring out how to make something that they created sustainable?

I clearly don't feel this way, but I'm earnestly curious to hear why you do!

▲

sublinear a day ago | parent [-]

Making something sustainable is a different problem and a different set of skills.

I have nothing against anyone who wants to do both. I'm just saying some variant of what I'm thinking has to be why it's not as popular as you want or expect.

Something else worth considering is that people can actually be much better at (and better off) doing things they're not so passionate about.

This isn't just about devs being precious about their feelings or capacity to work. It's about control. Corrupting the direction of the project was my original point and where most of my disagreement comes from.

I would not expect most workers in any field to be so naive. The amount of convincing and money it usually takes to get someone to give up control is necessarily greater than what it was originally worth to that person. More often than not, creative people are also sophisticated enough to see that they may not fully appreciate the meaning of their project longer term right now, and the default answer has to be "no" possibly forever.

Someone asking a creative person to give even an inch of control is the one in need, not the other way around. They have to be on the creative person's level to get anywhere. Even just simple collaboration or discussion can be difficult if they don't feel it's fair. This is a very tall order and at that point they might as well stop begging and manipulating and just do it themselves.

That's what makes open source so great. Go ahead and fork it, but you're not getting the passion or skill or vision as part of the deal.

At some point you have to take a step back and wonder what you thought you were buying by giving the creator any money. This is where it falls apart.

Again, this isn't even stubbornness or selfishness. Negotiation is a skill that only gets tougher the more value is at stake. Most devs can make enough money just fine doing something else and still maintain full control. This is almost exactly why the jobs that pay the best are some of the most meaningless. Nobody is fighting for control over that stuff.

They already have it all just by being themselves. They are the stewards of true value keeping the world from becoming a hellhole foolishly and singularly concerned with money. In other words, if they didn't know something you don't, you wouldn't be offering them money (and only money). :-)

	▲	peteforde 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's really fascinating, thanks. You've given me lots to think about. I spend a lot of time thinking about the different structures associated with patronage. I remember that at one point David Bowie released a public offering of shares in his future value. If memory serves, the outcomes were mediocre but not a loss. I actually think that this is kind of awesome. To me, the key detail is modest returns. Every asset class is volatile but our society has taken a really hard turn towards celebrating rent seeking. If someone has capital and can be convinced to give someone the financial leverage that they need to, for example, buy a truck instead of becoming the employee of a guy who bought a fleet of trucks with someone else's money, that's a formula for raising a lot of people up through middle class ranks. Now, some people would take that advance and go to Vegas and do the least responsible thing, for sure. But I'm into giving people the benefit of doubt when possible. I don't think we really disagree so much as I'm holding optimism that there are still big ideas and techniques that we haven't thought of, yet. I am guided by a confidence that we are more likely to succeed when we don't assume that things need to work in a certain way.

▲

rglover 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Low-agency people who've never produced any work of consequence have no frame of reference for what it takes, and therefore, don't give a shit about what it takes to do it (and keep it going amidst their entitlement, indifference, and dismissals).

OSS is just a toxic world burdened by a perpetual war between passive aggression and ego, neither of which will ever "put down their swords."

▲

joenot443 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage

What are some ways that one might do this?

	▲	peteforde 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy and GitHub Sponsors are all very recent inventions. Heck, Youtube being a viable career is an incredibly recent invention. What I'm saying is that I doubt that any of these are the last word on the topic. Look at how OnlyFans shook up the adult content world, and I don't think that they saw it coming. I am optimistic that something equally paradigm shifting could occur for makers and OSS maintainers, even if I don't claim to have a vision for how it would work at the moment.