"GitHub stars won't pay your rent" No. But they'll give me the satisfaction my day job never will.
Assuming there is a day job as alternative.
GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
111–120 of 251 posts
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#112I continue to think that the best model is the one adopted by Fody.NET[0]. It's open-source, on GitHub, under the MIT license, developed in the open, and with a voluntary OpenCollective. And if you open an issue or pull request and you're not on the OpenCollective, it's usually immediately closed, by policy. The result is a system that is paid enough to be excellent, excellent enough for most users not to need suppor…
Thanks for pointing this out, I've never heard about this model before. Sounds quite reasonable to me. The only problem I see is if they treat all requests equally. I'd be concerned if security related PR get cancelled because the submitter is not subscribed. From my understanding they do pre-screen submissions before cancelling so that shouldn't be the case (at the price of creating some overhead for them).
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work in a semiconductor industry before. My earnings this year is 25% of what I used to earn 8 years back (literally, not adjusted for inflation). However, this is still more than enough to pay my bills ;)
Keep it up, I am a fan of your ebooks. What were you doing in the semi industry, out of curiosity? ASIC design related ? (Looking at your username)
Thanks for the feedback :)
I was part of a team responsible for design and verification of DSP (digital signal processing) chips. ASIC part of the username refers to both "application-specific integrated circuit" and my college friend circle.
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#114As moderator of Reddit, now I question myself why I am doing it for free.
Because of the power you have over other people? Why else would one become a moderator on an Internet forum.
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#115I continue to think that the best model is the one adopted by Fody.NET[0]. It's open-source, on GitHub, under the MIT license, developed in the open, and with a voluntary OpenCollective. And if you open an issue or pull request and you're not on the OpenCollective, it's usually immediately closed, by policy. The result is a system that is paid enough to be excellent, excellent enough for most users not to need suppor…
Isn't it Open Collective that was on the front page recently being used by casinos for money laundering or some other weird scam?
re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33529742
(Had not heard of OpenCollective before yesterday so intrigued to see it come up twice)
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#116I've been harping for years to anyone who would listen, Open Source is not a business model [0].
If your motivation for doing open source is money, you're doing it wrong. You'll be much better off just getting a job (and GitHub stars can help with that!).
We all know "build it and they will come" and "follow your passion and the money will follow" don't really work in the real world. You have to make something people want and convince those people it's in their best interest to pay you.
Open source can be a part of a larger strategy to earn a living (consulting, customizations/open core, relicensing, books/talks/seminars, etc), but yeah, GitHub stars aren't money.
[0] https://blog.senko.net/open-source-is-not-a-business-model
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#117I continue to think that the best model is the one adopted by Fody.NET[0]. It's open-source, on GitHub, under the MIT license, developed in the open, and with a voluntary OpenCollective. And if you open an issue or pull request and you're not on the OpenCollective, it's usually immediately closed, by policy. The result is a system that is paid enough to be excellent, excellent enough for most users not to need suppor…
>And if you open an issue or pull request and you're not on the OpenCollective, it's usually immediately closed, by policy. Issues I can understand. But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and you reject it because you want me to pay you first, I'm dropping your software without a second thought.
I can understand too, but I won't even dig into your code when I need to pay you first. Shouldn't you pay me too for opening the pull-request, because "I did your work"?
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#118As moderator of Reddit, now I question myself why I am doing it for free.
Because of the power you have over other people? Why else would one become a moderator on an Internet forum.
I’ve been a mod for less than 3 months, someone just needs help moderating. Not sure if I agree about power, majority of users in our sub are kids and they can get wild if not moderated.
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Issues I can understand. But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and it gets rejected because I also need to pay, I'm dropping your library without a second thought. You have a point. On the other hand, considerable part of maintainers burnout comes from arguing with well-meaning strangers that come with PRs that are (usually) useful, but don't fit the established codebase well. By…
Yes, I'm sure it makes sense for them to have this perspective. And it also makes sense to me that if I'm not going to get the bugs I encounter fixed, even if I make the effort to fix them myself, then my effort is better spent on a project where that will happen. Their loss.
I don’t pr unless it will be obviously taken without first opening an issue. This prevents me wasting time testing and writing code.
If someone is going to just close these questions, then I will drop them as it’s not open source I want to be a part of.
I am okay with paying for software. not okay with paying to find out my feature request will get denied
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how I feel about this one. Sure, the maintainers have no obligation to review and merge other people's PRs. But when this also applies to genuine high-quality community contributions, I feel like there must be some negative side effects. I'm sure this model works well for an established project like Fody that's already quite highly polished, but I'd be pretty sad if all (or even a significant subset) of…
I like it personally. Free to use, pay for support. The distribution of something already made is free. Supporting, understanding your issue, developing a fix and releasing it…all of that takes a real person’s time. As a contractor, you learn very quickly that people will ask for anything if it doesn’t cost them anything. There are a lot of people happy to take advantage of you if you let them. I like seeing a good m…
I totally agree for things that would normally be described as support (e.g. feature requests or low quality bug reports), but a lot of things aren't that.
Personally, if I submit a bug report or PR to an OSS project (which admittedly doesn't happen very often), it's almost always because I think the time I've spent investigating the bug/feature could benefit other users of the project.
For my use cases, it's generally much faster and easier (at least in the short term) to just fork a project and make whatever change I need locally, than to wait for it to go through review/merge/release in the original project.
Another commenter has pointed out that they make exceptions for certain types of contributions though, which I guess would help with this.