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GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

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Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#51

Post by zrth »

jkoudys wrote: post #46
zrth wrote: post #32

Wondering what percentage of the donations the author forwarded to the library maintainers and authors that his product relies on..

10% sound fair? Split it 20 ways for each lib. I'm sure they'd all enjoy their 47 cents.

10% Sounds low. I can't judge for the product in question but for my programs, they are usually tiny blips standing on the shoulder of giants (libraries). So far i have never ask for money, if i'd do so i maybe would need to pass on 80% to not feel bad about it..

Not sure if you are cynical of sincere, either way, if the library devs get 47 cent from every donation driven program that relies on them, this could add up to some nice sum.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#53

Post by lexapro »

onion2k wrote: post #26

Lots of developers have an expectation of "Build it, they will come" as a route to market, and they end up disappointed. Selling a piece of software, regardless of whether or not you also give away the source, is really hard. Moving people from "I want this handy tool" to "I will pay for this handy tool" is the hardest part of sales no matter how amazing your app is. People who have relatively limited amounts of mone…

I think the same is true for (most) millionaires :)

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#54

Post by huffmsa »

jarfil wrote: post #27
huffmsa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many information sources do you currently pay for on a monthly basis? How many times have you actually clicked the "donate" button when Jimmy Wales asks you to?

Zero and several, respectively. It's still interesting to note that the Wikimedia Foundation is getting more cash in donations than it requires to operate. If it wasn't a non-profit, it would actually turn out a profit.

I don't know what their current cost structure is, but assuming they don't currently pay contributors in a meaningful amount, going for profit would mean they would probably have to, and COGS would go way way up. The current income probably wouldn't cover it.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#55

Post by tannhaeuser »

pjc50 wrote: post #20
tannhaeuser wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By giving it away for free only for personal rather than commercial use, as lots of software used to be in the last millenium? But of course what's going to happen is a certain F/OSS advocacy org will shout "this isn't F/OSS as it doesn't obey our no-purpose-limitation criterion" and you and your software will be treated as a pariah and avoided like the plague and even more than pure closed-source software.

Define "commercial use". It's not a clear bright line.

When you're doing it for money. It's not difficult at all IMHO. Note that the new-fangled, earlier discussed licenses mongodb and others are using are targetting the case where your business is hosting sw for your customers (like cloud providers do); commercial use is ok when you self-host the software.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#56

Post by johnday »

paulcarroty wrote: post #42
kstenerud wrote: post #30

I'm closing in on 100 public, nontrivial, nonforked repos on github. Since github's inception, I've received a total of $200 in donations for my OSS stuff, 1 job from a company that uses a product of mine as the foundation of their business, and many job offers from people who are familiar with my work. I don't make money off OSS, and never have (at least not directly). But I just. can't. stop. I can't. I've tried su…

> don't write OSS for money Why not? I'd prefer working with OSS for money over proprietary products.

I think they're saying don't write it because you want money, rather than don't write it in exchange for money.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#57

Post by tiborsaas »

skohan wrote: post #7
huffmsa wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking the other day, "If Wikipedia became a paid product, would I pay for it?" Really, what would happen if it became a for profit product? Would I pay for access to the greatest single repository of information the world has ever seen? Or would I shrug my shoulder and let Google tell me that I actually meant to query something else, and trust that the top placed link is really the best?

How would monetizing Wikipedia even work? That raise a lot of questions about fair compensation for the people creating content.

You mean monetized for access to the content content like spotify? Most creators get peanuts, some get barely enough and some get a huge chunk.

Wikipedia is already monetized, but not like most platforms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Finances

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#58

Post by nottorp »

jkoudys wrote: post #45
nottorp wrote: post #41

So going from free to subscription based. How long do people think this subscription thing will last? "It's cheaper per month than one Starbucks coffee" stops working when you have to pay for 100+ Starbucks coffees per month... and then the subscription bubble will crash.

It's not a bubble, it's a model for paying for things you value. People used to pay a lot for their TV, satellite dish, VHS tapes, all the space to store them, newspaper subscriptions, 3+ magazine subscriptions, phones (which were actually just phones), long distance calls, etc. We came in and replaced so much of that with software, which is still overall cheaper and much better if you pay for it.

Yeah but all the things you're listing are ongoing services.

Maybe the app in TFA is one too, it does need constant updating because the browser is a moving target right now.

However that doesn't go for the other 3 million productivity apps that want a subscription.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#59

Post by dharma1 »

krzkaczor wrote: post #24
dharma1 wrote: post #21

would be great if GitHub had some kind of patreon system built in, to make it very easy to do recurring donations. Especially for companies that use open source software for commercial activity, it would be great to have an automated way of paying each month and a culture for that, so that it's almost the default option. I know there are ways of doing this today, but if it's not super frictionless and integrated into…

Yes! I really hope that this is what Github Sponsors will end up being. They should make it trivial for businesses to spend each month X USD to split between open source projects that they rely on.

And on the flip side, it would be interesting to have better tools of distributing the funds collected in this way. Ie. how to best allocate the funds between the FOSS project participants/contributors.

Who decides where the funds get spent, how to automate some of it etc

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#60

Post by tannhaeuser »

ghaff wrote: post #44
tannhaeuser wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By giving it away for free only for personal rather than commercial use, as lots of software used to be in the last millenium? But of course what's going to happen is a certain F/OSS advocacy org will shout "this isn't F/OSS as it doesn't obey our no-purpose-limitation criterion" and you and your software will be treated as a pariah and avoided like the plague and even more than pure closed-source software.

Leave aside the ideology of restricted use in open source. What's commercial use? Creative Commons has been messing around with this question for something like decade and has never come to a resolution. So, sure, advocate for changes to the open source definition if you like. But there are reasons that a lot of people are resistant.

Idk what is so difficult about defining "commercial use". It is a concept even a child can understand. I acknowledge the goals others have for their licensing choices, and hold RMS in high esteem for his principled stance and achievements; I even release software under LGPL and other licenses. But I don't think OSI have an answer for the new software crisis where F/OSS developers are doing all the work, just to line the pockets of the three big cloud providers which obviously isn't sustainable. It also isn't in line with the ethics of eg the FSF to lock customers in to a walled garden built by F/OSS. In this sense, it's not me who brings up ideological arguments, but OSI who insist and hold-up their Open Source definition whenever someones dares to make a living with his/her work.
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