Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

news.ycombinator.com

281–290 of 318 posts

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#281
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA, any non-shady organization will send you a 1099- report of how much income you generated. You're supposed to submit that form when you do your taxes, which is kind of dumb, because a copy of the 1099 was already sent to the IRS. USA tax filing is not efficient for reasons... gives Intuit the stink eye

But the IRS isn't aware of what deductions you have and what credits you qualify for until you tell them. This completely changes your tax liability. When you actually understand the system , it makes sense why it is the way it is.

But what are those based on? Do you really need to reenter/recalculate them each year?

Countries like Estonia prefill the tax filing and they say somewhere above 90% of people don't need to make any changes when they file. Most people file within the first day and get their rebate within less than a week. If you had no significant changes (eg opened foreign bank accounts or sjmjlsr) you likely have no need to change anything. There's little fraud possible as data gathered is good and even less mistakes are possible. No one spends a day on their taxes and few need tla tax advisor for regular filing. This is increasingly common across at least Europe but sadly in few countries does it reach such sophistication yet.

Are you sure the US system works that well?

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#282
post #57

I've been working on VideoLAN (VLC, x264, other...) for most of my professional life. For a long time, I had other jobs, working at startups around video, and doing VLC at nights and weekends and holidays. And now, I built a couple of companies around Open Source multimedia, where we do consulting, integration, custom development around software, applications development, licensing, support and so on. Those companies…

Man, VLC, you and the 25 FTE you created in a sustainable way are much more impressive to me than any Uber, Facebook or other hockey stick growth giant. You folks rock, and thanks for that

Agreed - and we don't do enough to support groups like this.

I would totally by VLC branded swag. Coffee cup, underwear, "I supported VLC and all I got was this t-shirt"... etc... Or maybe stuff more on brand, like bluetooth ear buds or something?

Lots of good will to be had by such a giant fan-base.

EDIT: Looks like they're already thinking about that. Hope they launch before xmas!

http://www.videolan.org/goodies.html#clothing

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#283

I asked Richard Stallman this question: His answer was: Live cheaply. Eric S. Raymond answer was: Be independently wealthy. I have tried to reach billionaire philanthropists (Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Dean Kamen, Warren Buffet, and others) with the idea that there are very talented people around who have brilliant ideas (say for instance another Newton or Mozart) but are not financially independent to afford to work…

I was at a lunch years ago where some former Microsoft executive was present. Really wealthy guy and now doing some sort of policy advocacy or something. This was around the time of the Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL and he was talking about the need to improve software security by creating some committees or something[0]. I suggested to him that since OpenSSL was already widely used and operating with very few employees…

Exactly. That tax-deductible donation needs to go to their own foundation, so they can spend the money in a way of their choosing and also gain prestige for banquet hob-nobbing.

It's not that they don't want to do good - it's that they want to maximize the value from the good they do.

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#284

I asked Richard Stallman this question: His answer was: Live cheaply. Eric S. Raymond answer was: Be independently wealthy. I have tried to reach billionaire philanthropists (Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Dean Kamen, Warren Buffet, and others) with the idea that there are very talented people around who have brilliant ideas (say for instance another Newton or Mozart) but are not financially independent to afford to work…

There is the MacArthur Foundation with its "Genius Award." Richard Stallman was one of the Fellows in its 1990 class. If I recall correctly, the award was for $100K a year for 5 years, no strings attached. https://www.macfound.org/fellows/412/

one winner per year.... yeah, that's not a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#285

I’m responsible for a few repos, probably the most famous one being github.com/stretchr/testify. My solution is that as much as I love open source and the community I’m in, I do not let it get in the way of work and family. I’ll only contribute when I have spare time. Unless I were to be paid for it.

As someone who uses testify at work and at home on personal projects, I just want to say Thanks for a great tool.

Happy to help :)

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#286
post #78

I'm working on an open-source web analytics tool over at https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible . It's currently bringing in $800/mo and growing pretty fast. The code is all MIT license and we're working to make it easier to self-host. I make money through providing a hosted version of the product. It's a similar model to Sentry or Gitlab. Open-source does not have to be libraries and frameworks, there are g…

I like the look of this! I have a couple low-traffic sites I'd like to have analytics for, but I refuse to use cookies or otherwise do anything requiring a GDPR notice.

Features I'd like to see:

1. Search terms from referrers, or anything else that will help me focus for SEO type stuff.

2. Much more detail on the Device section. It's material to my design choices whether I have a lot of people on 4" smartphones or 13" tablets and so on. Right now I would have to capture that info separately.

3. More specific geolocation data: drill down at least to the state/major-metro level if possible. Or explain up-front why it's not possible.

I think the starting price is low enough, and gating it by page views is nice, so I'll probably give it a shot when I do my little redesign.

If I ever got to the point of needing the second-tier plan, though, I'd probably want more info than you're providing. Your prices are low enough I could imagine doing both (keeping Plausible and building my own) but it seems like a missed opportunity.

Best of luck with it!

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#287

I’m responsible for a few repos, probably the most famous one being github.com/stretchr/testify. My solution is that as much as I love open source and the community I’m in, I do not let it get in the way of work and family. I’ll only contribute when I have spare time. Unless I were to be paid for it.

Just want to say: thank you for testify!

I don't get to write as much Go code as I'd like, but whenever I do, testify is my first stop on GoDoc (just to refresh my memory in the assertion names).

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#288

Many years ago I created some very widely used libraries in the Perl ecosystem, DateTime.pm (first release in 2003, 3,774 transitive dependents, https://metacpan.org/release/DateTime ) and Log::Dispatch (first release in 1999, 1,043 transitive, https://metacpan.org/release/Log-Dispatch ). I've also created or contributed to dozens of other packages in the Perl ecosystem, some of them very widely used, including at pl…

> So that's a long-winded way of saying that I don't sustain myself on open source. This is a pretty common story. Companies rarely make an effort to support individual developers. They will support language/project foundations, but that money isn't going to be directly divvied up among library developers for the language. Thats interesting, is anyone aware of a language/software community where that does happen?

To clarify a bit, what happens with Perl is that The Perl Foundation funds the community in various ways. I'm a TPF board member, so I have a pretty good idea of what we do.

We fund a number of long-running grants for the Perl 5 and Rakudo/MoarVM language cores. We also have a smaller grants program for one-off projects, which have included things like documentation work for core & libraries, funding of work on existing libraries, and infrastructure projects for the community (websites, etc.).

We also work on marketing the languages by doing things like having a table at FOSDEM and other conferences, etc. And of course, we provide an organization to back up conferences and other events, to do things like carry an even insurance policy, help with Standards of Conduct, and lots of other background activities.

This is all good stuff, and I'm glad we do it. I don't think we could announce a plan to just give money to everyone who uploaded to CPAN. For one thing, that's thousands of people, so we could maybe give them a dollar or ten each. For another, the value of each person's contribution is obviously hugely different. I can't see how any community foundation could do this without causing more problems than it solves, even if the foundation had the funding to do it at any sort of scale.

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#289
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is giving 25 people bread, water and shelter and most of all a job they enjoy not impressive?

Because, as soon as I wanted to raise money from VC to grow the business, it was very difficult to get anything. And we have a lot of research and projects, that we never get released, and other people use the tech, rewrap it and get the $$ :)

You bring unique expertise to your clients that noone else can match. In these VC convos and elsewhere, consider focusing on your strengths rather than pointing out how others are reaping rewards for your work. The fact that others get $$ for wrapping your work and advertising it can be viewed as a positive thing; it's a contribution to society even if you don't get a cut of every transaction. Of course you want some cut, and more would help you grow. You yourself probably have a better bead on avenues where open source or VLC is likely to succeed than anyone.

VC funding, I hear, is more about the people than the ideas. It can also be cliquish. It might be worth asking a friend who's received such funding for some constructive criticism on your approach. If you don't have one, make one.

Re: Ask HN: Dear open source devs how do you sustain yourself

#290
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 years ago I was on a date with a wonderful young lady. We had a picnic and I brought my (at the time) very modern projector to watch a movie, projected on a bedsheet in the woods. Windows Media Player refused to play the DVD. No internet access at all. I thought I had failed...until I remembered that I had installed VLC. Opened the VTS.VOB on the DVD directly and boom, the video started and played back without a s…

How did you power the projector? Did you drag a generator into the forest too?

I had a car, as others suggested.
Post reply on HN