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GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

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Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#92

Post by wincy »

huffmsa wrote: post #5
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #2

Here’s the catch: when you give away something completely for free, people aren’t that motivated to pay for it. It's worse than that, people don't value it very highly if it's free.

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?

The question “what kind of car does Jimmy Wales drive?” Popped into my head after reading this. Is it ok if he drives a Tesla from profiting off Wikipedia? What about a super car? Would anyone care?

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#93

Post by tannhaeuser »

icebraining wrote: post #78
tannhaeuser wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful with AGPL. It has yet to stand in court, and is actually the license mongodb has left behind in favour of their own SSPL because it turned out not strong enough, and not preventing eg. AWS to sell mongodb as a sevice without releasing any of their provisioning and monitoring sw (though I'm not sure AWS actually uses mongo or, like Azure with CosmosDB, a proprietary API-compatible product instead). The amount…

I don't get the concern; if the AGPL is invalid, then the software user is even more screwed: they have no license to use it at all. Wining such a dispute would be a pyrrhic victory.

That's an interpretation a court might not agree with. We don't really know until cases are brought up in all relevant jurisdictions.

Edit: and another question alltogether is whether it's going to work well against FAANG with nearly unlimited cash to employ hordes of lawyers

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#94

Post by dharma1 »

dagw wrote: post #77
dharma1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, love it. Look forward to seeing it rolled out - it looks like you can only sponsor individuals for now, would be great to be able to sponsor projects

it looks like you can only sponsor individuals for now 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.

it does actually look like you can sponsor projects too already, but the payments are not handled by github in those instances, it just links off to another patreon style provider - for example https://github.com/react-spring/react-spring.

I think managing the direction and budgets of open source projects that have many contributors in a fair, effective way is a really interesting problem. There are some blockchain DAO projects where this is handled by voting. Each participant's vote could be weighted by different things - contribution activity, seniority within the project, more traditional board/council structure, whatever. The voting results can also be automatically executed.

Or you could pre-determine and automate how funds will be paid out to contributors - ie. bounties for new features/fixing bugs

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#95

Post by stanmancan »

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…

Have you tried charging for commercial licenses? They can be the exact same as whatever you license it as now, but with a price tag. Relatively speaking it’s very hard for a company to donate money, but very easy to buy things. I know you said it’s not about the money, but if you -do- want to make more from it, maybe give it a try.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#99

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

yboris wrote: post #96

I'd love to see more people donating to charity. With my software, it's MIT open source, but pre-packaged it's pay what you want ($3.50 minimum) and $3.50 of every purchase goes to my favorite charity: Against Malaria Foundation. https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Vim pulls in over €60k/yr, and has generated more than €1m during its lifetime, for ICCF Holland.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#100

Post by icebraining »

z3t4 wrote: post #29
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…

It depends on the sales model. If people instantly see the value of the product, like in this case, people will come. But if they do not see the value, you have to manually sell it to them, which is a lot of work. For example if you invent a new programming language, even if it's revolutionary, it will still be a lot of grunt work teaching people how to use it, pitching it, explaining how it's better then current lan…

> the most popular web frameworks are from Google and Facebook

Curiously, that's mostly not the case on the backend - Django, RoR, Express, were all created by individuals or small companies.

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