GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

Donating money is always incredibly tricky if you work at a larger company, especially if you get nothing in return. I can a buy a license or support contract easily, with a bit more effort I could probably sponsor a local FOSS meetup/event. But just giving someone $50 as a thanks for writing that software we rely on, is basically impossible unless I just pay it out of pocket.

> Selling a piece of software, regardless of whether or not you also give away the source, is really hard.

Completely agree, if 1% of your users give a crap that you've engineered magic to get XYZ working, you're lucky.

99% don't care, but they'll use your product if it comes up on Google's first page, if it has a decent social media presence and they're hooked from one of your posts/blogs about it.

If you're building a product right now, and you've not written various posts about "How ABC solves your XYZ problem", welcome to the low-user zone. Launching onto Product Hunt is not enough anymore. Get talking about you work, if you're genuinely proud of it.

I've noticed that the ones that got traction/stars/forks were entirely unexpected and started as one hour hackjobs (ex-mode for Atom, trim_patcher, 1st gen Xbox One controller kext, Matterfront) whereas the ones I just can't let go and pour genuine long term effort into are the ones getting zero stars/forks (ArchMac is like 12 years now and I'm still the sole user).

Not that I care, I'll just keep on scratching my own itches, and I learned a lot (and still do!) doing that.

I wonder if that will create some perverse incentives? Will people be as willing to contribute significantly to projects if they know the maintainer is making $1000s and they're getting nothing. Or will they instead rather try to start their own competing project in hopes of capturing some of that revenue.

However, what gives open source value is that a project with 10,000 Github stars looks very good on a resume. That doesn’t matter now, where pretty much any programmer can get a good job, but it will matter after the current economic expansion stops and we are in the next recession.

I got not one, but two job offers in the middle of 2010, during a very tough recession, because of my somewhat notable open source project. My open source project allowed me to keep my skills current while I was living in Mexico as an English teacher and professional translator.

To this day, in job interviews, it allows me to demonstrate I was still working on computers and with technology after the dot-com bubble crashed.

The important thing to keep in mind is that users are not customers until they pay for the code. If they don’t like the fact you won’t implement their favorite pet feature request, you can give them a full refund, which won’t cost you anything. Never let your users cause you stress.