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GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

kitze.io

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Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#151

Post by ilyt »

Aeolun wrote: post #42
robocat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the link: But it is MIT, can't I use it for free? Yes all projects are under MIT so the community backing honesty system can be ignored and Fody used for free. Do I need to be a Patron to contribute a Pull Request? Yes. Users must be a Patron to be a user of Fody. Contributing Pull Requests does not cancel this out. It may seem unfair to expect people both contribute PRs and also financially back this project. H…

> Many developers can afford $36 a year You realize that my dependency stack contains about 2500 dependencies right? If they all follow this model I’m looking at $90k/year just to contribute to a project.

So having 2500 deps would still cost a salary of one developer for a year.

I think most businesses could afford it

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#152

Post by ilyt »

ahepp wrote: post #126
pie_flavor wrote: post #20

I 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…

I think the part of this that's weird to me, is that non-paying users are able to open issues or pull requests at all. Something about it feels very passive aggressive. Why not just have the public facing project be a fork of a private, access protected project where bug tracking and PRs are handled, that only patrons can access? For some reason, saying "only patrons can access our development repo" seems perfectly r…

Yeah at that point just turn it off so people don't waste time (both them and yours) filling out bugs that will never get touched and just closed

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#153

Post by tanin »

tanin wrote: post #83

It won't, but I feel pretty damn good about my repo getting almost 900 stars ( https://github.com/tanin47/tip ). The github stars is quite useful to break into big tech as well. But the value of it probably stops there.

It has gone up to 901 stars. Thank you, kind strangers.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#154

Post by Arnavion »

lelanthran wrote: post #142
Arnavion wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR, Wouldn't you first check the license and contributor agreement before doing such a thing, even on random FLOSS projects? Unless they are not disclosing their policy in the contributor agreement or the license, I don't really see a problem here.

I do check the LICENSE and CONTRIBUTING files before I contribute. It is likely that I would have not contributed to such a project in the first place. It doesn't change my point, namely that a project where I cannot contribute fixes for bugs I encounter is one that I have no desire to use.

BTW, the reason I mention sending PRs for bugs I encounter is that, when I do encounter a bug I don't immediately file a GH issue and make it the maintainers' problem. Instead I act upon it just like the maintainer would, by checking the source to figure out why the bug is happening, `git blame` etc to see what commit added that code, whether the issue I'm encountering was already identified or discussed when that code was committed, and so on. So as a result of doing these things I often end up either knowing my issue is by design and that I was doing something wrong, or end up having enough knowledge to be able to construct a bugfix myself.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#155

Post by ilyt »

hrbf wrote: post #137

GitHub stars are a useless metric. It’s basically a bookmark count. If there was any correlation between them and donations, my combined projects of 35k+ stars should make me at least a couple of bucks each month. Instead, lifetime total of ~7 years is ~300 EUR, which includes donations to a NGO I forwarded, which account for most of it. Most people will not pay voluntarily for something they can get for free. That’s…

well, most of the project use tens if not hundreds other project's open source code and also do not donate to them

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#157

Post by ilyt »

karaterobot wrote: post #60
tomrod wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That convention is regional and, increasingly in the US, generational.

Wikipedia: > In the United States, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Pacific Island nations, and English-speaking Canada, the sign is written before the number ("$5"), even though the word is written or spoken after it ("five dollars", "cinco pesos"). In French-speaking Canada, exceptionally, the dollar symbol usually appears after the number, e.g., "5$". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign#…

I'd imagine people using currencies with symbol after number just do the same for dollar out of habit. Hell I have to fight to remember that stupid symbol is for some obsolete reason before the number.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#159

Post by ilyt »

nequo wrote: post #34
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #23

Classic mistake. FOSS is not about making money. In fact, it's antithetical to making money. Value extraction is the province of closed source/user hostile software, by nature.

A lot of people and companies are making money from Linux, including Linus Torvalds and many kernel hackers. Linux is GPL’d. I think it is hard to make the claim that making money is antithetical to FOSS.

I mean, if you look at amount of "paying users" vs "all users" it still checks out, just that at the economies of scale of Linux even 0.01% funding it is a ton of money.

FOSS is great for doing "common good" code that everyone uses and many sides want to push forward, but not exactly easy to monetize if you're just a dev doing a thing.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#160

Post by nomel »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #147
senko wrote: post #116

I'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…

It does work for the right sorts of projects [0] > whether an OSS project lends itself to monetization is a really interesting and subtle question. rule of thumb, be at least two of these: big, boring (roughly correlates with "infrastructural" as @patio11 puts it), and lacking obvious substitutes Many projects with high star counts fall into only one of those categories [0]: https://twitter.com/colinhacks/status/1422…

I would claim, while biting my lip, that python meets those. It had two paid developers in 2019 [1]:

https://discuss.python.org/t/official-list-of-core-developer...

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