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How to pay your rent with your open source project

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Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#111

Post by wtracy »

barrkel wrote: post #50
Milank wrote: post #43

Most of the people writing OSS do it for fun/side project/to solve a problem, not for the money. Problems come if that peace of software gets popular, they get a lot of bug reports, improvement suggestions/requests, emails, noise in general. And a person who wrote the software has a full time job, so the time available for OSS is limited. That person is probably well paid in it's current job, so the OSS has a long wa…

Most people who write OSS do it as employees for companies for whom OSS is a strategic asset.

Most projects that get serious traction are written by employees of companies who treat OSS as a strategic asset.

That doesn't say anything about the number of people who write OSS.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#112

Post by starkd »

wishinghand wrote: post #109
pmoriarty wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"those people are pure engineers, that don't know/are not interested in business, marketing, making a product out of their software, etc.. practically anything besides coding" 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, s…

I'm envious a bit. The hard parts for you are the easiest parts for me. Uploading to Soundcloud is too easy, and sometimes I put stuff on there that's kind of embarrassing. Etsy page creation, Soundcloud metadata, readable READMEs... I wish those were my hardest problems.

I think a lot of developers feel that just getting it to work is the hard part. Once that happens, the rest should fall into place. So when you finally get something that's good and works, it comes as a shocker that its only about 50% of the way there.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#113

Post by penagwin »

joshstrange wrote: post #106
Milank wrote: post #43

Most of the people writing OSS do it for fun/side project/to solve a problem, not for the money. Problems come if that peace of software gets popular, they get a lot of bug reports, improvement suggestions/requests, emails, noise in general. And a person who wrote the software has a full time job, so the time available for OSS is limited. That person is probably well paid in it's current job, so the OSS has a long wa…

I have considered open sourcing projects before but decided against it due to not wanting to support it. I have a hard problem saying no or ignoring people and so little side-projects or proof-of-concepts that I have open sourced turned into more of a pain that they were worth. 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 contr…

Please, please, please still release your source if you don't mind! Especially for "random hacks" like a home brew bridge!

You have no idea how many tiny repos I have used for reference with those types of projects! In many cases your code might be the only working example.

You can put a big disclaimer in it, declare it a PoC, and just ignore issues if you'd like - the code doesn't even have to still be working, it's still cool and helpful!

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#114

Post by mhh__ »

victor106 wrote: post #108
victor106 wrote: post #84

I asked this on HN a few days back. I open sourced a library and its become heavily used by some of the largest enterprises who make lot of money using that library as one of many. It takes a lot of my time to keep it updated so I would like to be compensated some how for the time it takes me away from my family Even though its used by small and medium businesses I would like only the largest businesses to pay for it…

Thanks for all the suggestions. 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."

If you offer GPL/Commercial dual licensing then that basically is the case because large companies generally don't have lawyer-approval for GPL in their codebases (not always but as a rule of thumb they don't like the GPL).

I think the aforementioned model is the best one for the longevity of an open source project - If you want to use my work for free, then give something back to the project (your changes) but if you don't want to do that then please support it financially.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#115

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

victor106 wrote: post #84

I asked this on HN a few days back. I open sourced a library and its become heavily used by some of the largest enterprises who make lot of money using that library as one of many. It takes a lot of my time to keep it updated so I would like to be compensated some how for the time it takes me away from my family Even though its used by small and medium businesses I would like only the largest businesses to pay for it…

CKEditor (https://ckeditor.com/) releases their product using the GPL license. Most large business avoid the GPL since they don't want to release their own code in accordance with the GPL. CKSource, the company that releases CKEditor, sells commercial licences to those companies, and will issue free licenses to GPL-incompatible open source projects. https://ckeditor.com/pricing/

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#116

Post by Tijdreiziger »

penagwin wrote: post #113
joshstrange wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have considered open sourcing projects before but decided against it due to not wanting to support it. I have a hard problem saying no or ignoring people and so little side-projects or proof-of-concepts that I have open sourced turned into more of a pain that they were worth. 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 contr…

Please, please, please still release your source if you don't mind! Especially for "random hacks" like a home brew bridge! You have no idea how many tiny repos I have used for reference with those types of projects! In many cases your code might be the only working example. You can put a big disclaimer in it, declare it a PoC, and just ignore issues if you'd like - the code doesn't even have to still be working, it's…

If it's just a small script you can throw it up on GitHub Gist. People can still leave comments there, but you might feel less obligated to spend your time on those than if you see "[x] open issues" on your project.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#117

Post by mhh__ »

axegon_ wrote: post #41

Sadly the article neglects the single biggest problem in open source: very few people, or companies for that matter, are actively willing to contribute in any way, whether it be contributing with code or financially supporting a project. Even big and popular open source projects are most often self-funded and it's people dedicating their own resources and spare time to support them. All of the things in the article a…

That's not always true. Turning an open source project into a stable business is difficult, but making a bit of money on the side isn't if you do something important and do it well. If you make the best breakfast in the morning people will come; If your library is the solution for (say) embedding python in COBOL and businesses use it, chances are they won't mind being able to pay for support. The first customer is the hardest to get but even relatively niche programming languages can have hundred dollar bug/feature bounties.

Slightly unrelated: I think the best way to encourage people to contribute is to have a well documented, time-specified, friendly path for contributors.

For example: (I won't name the project) I recently made a PR to a (definitely well known on HN) programming language's library and there was a fairly counterintuitive CI failure. A bunch of people turned up to provide completely useless advice that I had already tried, and promptly disappeared - it's now one of a 200 hundred ish PR queue that is largely full of things that people have wanted to work on but can't because the maintainers (as well as being busy) are dancing around doing a new thing every day rather than deciding whether to close or merge.

PR-hell is a situation where a process obviously helps, like in corporate projects (Look at how Microsoft deal with GitHub issues for example) where someone will actually go through and decide.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#118

Post by victor106 »

mhh__ wrote: post #114
victor106 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for all the suggestions. 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."

If you offer GPL/Commercial dual licensing then that basically is the case because large companies generally don't have lawyer-approval for GPL in their codebases (not always but as a rule of thumb they don't like the GPL). I think the aforementioned model is the best one for the longevity of an open source project - If you want to use my work for free, then give something back to the project (your changes) but if yo…

Exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks so much.

I hope this is beneficial for others in the same boat as me.

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#119

Post by soamv »

Milank wrote: post #43

Most of the people writing OSS do it for fun/side project/to solve a problem, not for the money. Problems come if that peace of software gets popular, they get a lot of bug reports, improvement suggestions/requests, emails, noise in general. And a person who wrote the software has a full time job, so the time available for OSS is limited. That person is probably well paid in it's current job, so the OSS has a long wa…

> Most of the people writing OSS do it for fun/side project/to solve a problem, not for the money.

Not to pick on you personally, but this sort of assertion is often thrown around with no data.

It's not even clear to me that it's one or the other. For me personally it was always a mixture of both -- there's a lot of fun but I wouldn't do it without the money. But that's kinda true for my non-OSS engineering work, too!

> pure engineers

I see what you're saying, but I think there is an element of "making a product" that goes into almost any new OSS project; there is an attraction of exploring the product space from a fresh start that is part of the motivation of many many new open source projects.

(Also I think the notion that a "pure engineer" doesn't care about all those things is just wrong, but that's a whole other conversation.)

Re: How to pay your rent with your open source project

#120

Post by stubish »

victor106 wrote: post #84

I asked this on HN a few days back. I open sourced a library and its become heavily used by some of the largest enterprises who make lot of money using that library as one of many. It takes a lot of my time to keep it updated so I would like to be compensated some how for the time it takes me away from my family Even though its used by small and medium businesses I would like only the largest businesses to pay for it…

You might have some luck with Tidelift (https://tidelift.com/about/lifter). I get pizza money every month for a long time top-20 (by download count) Python package, which isn't much, but I never expected anything so fine.
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