Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 185 posts

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#131

Post by bad_user »

Just a note — open source doesn't mean free of charge. I think you can make a business from open source, even as a one person operation.

Off the top of my head: Newsblur, Bitwarden and Standard Notes, services I pay for, for one because I like to support open source, but also because I'm not in the mood of hosting them myself. I'm also evaluating Wallabag.

These examples are of web apps that require hosting, self hosting is a pain, so I prefer to just pay for it. And I did give up on 1Password for Bitwarden, because I'd rather support open source stuff, in spite of the former being superior.

---

The author's article is however correct in saying that donations don't work. I too have thousands of stars collected on GitHub and I barely got donations for hosting the documentation websites.

In order to make money:

1. you have to ask for it

2. people need to get some value out of that payment and this means creating scarcity

With the online services I mentioned, what I'm paying for is the hosting and I'm happy to do it.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#132

Post by adonese »

Open source for me personally and my company was more of a marketing advantage. We work in fintech and the culture there is that the code will always be closed source (like there’s no way it can be remotely open!). When we (the engineers) suggested that we should open source our whole system (make the whole development open source), the marketing team were so pissed and they just couldn’t imagine what benefits an open source will offer.

A few months later, our project is well known by major banks here and it became clear that my startup excels in software. The first thing we say when discussing with a client our offer is that the whole system is free and open source and they can copy-paste it without our help. And that turned out to be very great as many of our customers had vendor-locks before.

The thing I’m actively developing our core business in Github and quite happy with its evolution. It received a small amount of stars (like 9 or something), but I really didn’t expect any stars nor direct users contribution anyway. And it helped us a lot in building our reputation as a FOSS startup and it will also contribute to my teams resume.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#133

Post by qrohlf »

I have been in an interesting similar situation with my Trianglify [1] library, and have made money off of it a few different ways:

- Commercial licensing (the library is GPL) occasionally gets me a few bucks, but isn't a reliable source of income.

- Consulting on custom integrations/tweaks has been slightly better, but in general it's a simple library that's well documented and easy to use, so there isn't much need for this.

It became pretty obvious after I launched the project that my primary audience wasn't developers who could consume a JS library, it was designers. I wound up building a productized UI [2], and I've been experimenting with

- making money via donations (abysmal)

- ethical non-tracking advertising (low conversion rate, people hit the tool to accomplish a task, not click ads)

- and lately, paid functionality (so far, this has been the most successful approach)

I think that the skillset for developing a good and useful piece of OSS and the skillset for monetizing it are almost completely orthogonal - it would be really great if there was a way to make decent income off an open-source project without building a flashy website, learning basic marketing, getting in bed with advertising companies, etc etc. Unfortunately, the above seems to be what the market cares about.

[1] https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify [2] https://trianglify.io

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#134

Post by [deleted] »

strenholme wrote: post #79

Been there. Done that. Pretty much every open source developer hits a point where they realize that even very popular open source projects don’t keep food on the table. 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 a…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#136

Post by brabel »

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…

I'm in a similar position... almost every week I have an idea for a new project I really want to start, and every other week I actually do :D

It's just what I like to do... but one day, I do want to start my own company out of one of these projects... I know one of them is being used by a large train company in Europe and a local government in the US (because they wrote to me asking for help with issues! so government-y, write an email instead of opening a GH issue). But unfortunately it's not a project I currently have interest in working on (it's like 5 years old, uses tech I haven't used basically since then)...

But my reason for wanting to start a company is just so I have freedom to work for myself, not feel like a slave sometimes (well paid one, but still!) more than anything else.

I admire the OP for doing that and even getting his girlfriend and another developer on board! Good on him!

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#137

Post by yakubin »

Two gold quotes from the article:

#1

I started working on the landing page, but ended up working on a React library for making landing pages (maybe I’ll release it one sunny day)

#2

Or imagine entering a supermarket and starting to yell at the cashier “WHAT?! THIS MILK IS 3$? DO YOU KNOW THAT ON THE OTHER END OF TOWN I CAN GET THIS FOR 2.5$? I CAN EVEN BUY MY OWN COW, RAISE IT, MILK IT EVERY DAY, AND DRINK MILK FOR FREE!11!”.

I died. :D

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#138

Post by mettamage »

strenholme wrote: post #79

Been there. Done that. Pretty much every open source developer hits a point where they realize that even very popular open source projects don’t keep food on the table. 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 a…

> 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.

You mean 2001? The dot-com bubble happened then, yet you write about 2010 which could be a recession year in some countries from 2008?

I do think you mean 2001, not entirely sure though.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#139

Post by bitwize »

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…

Shine on you crazy diamond. You're one of the good ones, and people like you keep open source vibrant and interesting.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#140

Post by freshbagels »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #65

GitHub stars will pay your rent if you sell out the hype to a VC instead of building a real company. I can definitely name a few startups that have almost no product, certainly not technically challenging or particularly well built ones, but they've made many millions in VC funding solely from GH star hype.This industry is a bit of a joke that way, but it works.

Do you mind naming these startups?
Post reply on HN