How to pay your rent with your open source project

Just wanted to mention that I believe AGPL is sometimes considered with a dual-license scheme in the hope that enterprises buy the commercial license, or to avoid a situation where a commercial third party benefits from a piece of software disproportionally, or to the detriment of the project's funding (such as providing pure hosting), whether contributions are upstreamed or not. Not being able to express clearly what you're after - cash or code - makes AGPL suboptimal. It's a reality that software without funding and maintenance only goes into bitrot mode, so why not come out straight and sell potential customers maintenance and support? Clearly, the software licensing universe needs additional considerations today compared to the time when Affero/AGPL was conceived.

Yeah, that's a serious problem, and one similar to ones that artists and musicians face.

I've made a fair bit of art (paintings, drawings, sculptures) but except for one group exhibit in high school I've never bothered to exhibit it anywhere, sell it online, or show it to anyone apart from family members and a few friends (and even they haven't seen most of my art). It's just too much trouble. I'd like to make a living making art, and have considered creating an Etsy page or something, but have never gotten around to it. So I just keep making art for myself.

I also make music, and have kept that mostly to myself for the same reason. I've uploaded a fraction of it to Soundcloud, but I don't advertise it in any way, so even finding it on Soundcloud would be almost impossible for someone if they didn't search for specific keywords that I've tagged my music with. Mostly I don't bother even uploading it, though. It's too much trouble to record, edit, name, upload, provide metadata to Soundcloud and find an image to go with the track. So I just tend to keep the music to myself.

I've also written quite a bit of software over the years, and have open sourced some of it, and am a big believer in open source, but it's just too much trouble for me to package stuff nicely, write readmes for my software, and make sure the software is decoupled enough from my own environment to be useful/buildable for someone else, so a lot of it has just kind of rotted away on my hard drive for decades without anyone else even knowing of its existence. So I mostly just write this code for myself.

Some people go all out to promote their software, music, or art, but that's just not me. For me the joy is in the creation, and the rest is just not important enough.

Kudos to all those people who actually go to the trouble of open sourcing their code, release music to the public, or show their art. I know how much work just doing that can be, never mind trying to make a living at it.

That said, if you are willing to go to the trouble, there are successful open source projects which manage to make money that you could model your own projects on.

Example: I got a Eufy RoboVac 15C and I was in a homebridge-craze at the time I got it. So I found some code in python that was able to control the vacuum for the most part and so using that as my base I wrote a homebridge plugin in nodejs that would let you issue all the commands. Now homebridge on it's own is far from stable (IMHO, if it works for you then that's great but for me it would break every month or so randomly), then you throw Tuya into the mix, and a company that made some firmware changes to the vacuum and it's a house of cards.

I was proud of myself for getting it all to work but in practice I run the vacuum on a timer and never futz with controlling it directly. I really just wanted to prove I could do it. To get it to play nice with homebridge I had to publish it on npm (2 libraries, one general purpose nodejs lib to control the vacuum and one that was the homebridge plugin that used the lib).

Queue support requests... I easily spent 30+ hours trying to help people both on GH and over email (email was even harder for me to say no to). This was at a point where I wasn't even using homebridge at all, let alone the plugin.

Maybe I'm just an idiot for not deprecating the repo or putting up a message but I felt obligated to help and then when I procrastinated helping it would just be this background sense of shame for abandoning it. Thankfully someone else, who apparently does use it, stepped up to fix some of the things that broke and has taken over most of the support-related things (which reminds me, I need to see about transferring the repo over to them fully) but I think that's generally the exception and not the rule.

Bottom line publishing anything feels like I'm shackling myself to it which is not a feeling I like or enjoy which leads to me just putting less out there. Maybe I'm missing an obvious solution but I really don't like putting myself in that situation. I am 100% willing to hand over my work for free (as in, for projects that I have no intention of trying to monetize/purse) but I don't want to signup for future work. Is this just selfish or what?

I will consider offering consulting support.

I just wish there was an open source license that basically says "its free to use but if your company makes more than x billion of dollars in profit then you have to pay $x per month/year."