Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

kitze.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 251 posts

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

#161

Post by hrbf »

ilyt wrote: post #155
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

What about those self-contained ones like mine?

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

#162

Post by dzikimarian »

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…

Frankly I don't get purpose of this article. Guy wrote some software with clear expectation of money and released it for free. Fine - bad pick of distribution model - it happens.

Then he writes article, stating that you shouldn't be ashamed to ask for money. To whom it's directed? All OSS developers? Including developers of electron (one of his dependencies), which then has tens or hundreds of packages in its dependency tree? What would happen to his browser if they all wanted dollar/month for use?

If you want to code for money - do paid product. That's OK. No reason to build philosophy around being entitled to payment because you have github stars.

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

#163

Post by danwee »

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…

> I've been harping for years to anyone who would listen, Open Source is not a business model [0].

It's not a business model that usually works, but when it does, it's beautiful: you get to work on what you want, on your own terms and building something truly useful. You become a (tech) god, and you being paid for it. Respect and money. Isn't that what many of us dream about? That's the reason many people try to build something "cool" and publish it on GitHub... to see if they win the lottery. I have definitely tried, but perhaps I know beforehand that I have a 99.999% chance of failing.

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

#164

Post by Havoc »

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’d say “some” is more accurate than “ a lot”

The first name that came to your mind was Torvalds - hardly a random.

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

#165

Post by dzikimarian »

potency wrote: post #56
lawgimenez wrote: post #9

As moderator of Reddit, now I question myself why I am doing it for free.

Careful, if too many people start thinking like this reddit's entire business model built on free labor collapses.

Everybody is free to setup their own forum on phpBB or whatever, however they keep choosing reddit. Ever wondered why?

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

#166

Post by undergrowth54 »

dzikimarian wrote: post #162
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…

Frankly I don't get purpose of this article. Guy wrote some software with clear expectation of money and released it for free. Fine - bad pick of distribution model - it happens. Then he writes article, stating that you shouldn't be ashamed to ask for money. To whom it's directed? All OSS developers? Including developers of electron (one of his dependencies), which then has tens or hundreds of packages in its depende…

> To whom it’s directed?

It is directed towards a person who would write some software with clear expectation of money and release it for free.

It is directed towards himself.

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

#167

Post by ushakov »

danwee wrote: post #163
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…

> I've been harping for years to anyone who would listen, Open Source is not a business model [0]. It's not a business model that usually works, but when it does, it's beautiful: you get to work on what you want, on your own terms and building something truly useful. You become a (tech) god, and you being paid for it. Respect and money. Isn't that what many of us dream about? That's the reason many people try to buil…

> I have definitely tried, but perhaps I know beforehand that I have a 99.999% chance of failing.

You can greatly increase your chances if you also learn the business aspects of open-source, not just publishing code on GitHub

I learned the hard way, but you don't have to. Basic economics understanding goes a long way, along with business-oriented thinking and asking right questions at the beginning, eg. what extras can we offer that would save a lot of time/ generate more revenue. Once you can answer that, you're set to success

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

#168

Post by Gigachad »

heisenbit wrote: post #133
Gigachad wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit mods largely aren’t doing it for nothing. They are doing it for social power and the ability to control the conversation for communities. Just think about what it means to be top mod of a cities subreddit. You can trivially just delete conversations you don’t like.

Or you can get great conversations going, help struggling strangers get up and become pillars of their communities. Which sometimes requires deleting snarking comments, ban aggressive repeat rule offenders and deal with occasional personal attacks. Moderators have powers, use power and are often not at liberty to reveal all what went into their decisions. Moderation on any scale is however a team effort and is then s…

Subreddits thrive mostly based on their name. If a power tripping mod gets on top position of a good name, there is very little you can do. You can try to start an alternative but all new users will go to the other one.

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

#169

Post by gauddasa »

I still don't understand why some people want to make social work as a source of their income, while it should be the other way round. You may share some of your work which is source of your income with the society, or if that is not possible keep the two separated.

I carefully avoid using proprietary software (like having not touched Mac/Windows for 15 years) and personally believe that all forms of IP should be in public domain by default. Each step by a man, however small or giant, should be a step for the mankind. Why should you continue contributing to open source projects: The amount of carbon footprint saved by opensource projects is tremendous. Think of how much resources are saved if the opensource solutions that we rely on today were closed and proprietary that the same software solutions had to be recreated from scratch at each instance of deployment rather than simply duplicated.

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

#170

Post by NayamAmarshe »

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…

Are people really depending on Open Source for Economics?

Open Source is not a business model, and that should be obvious. It's a distribution model, which has nothing to do with economics. Sure, it may affect a few variables but marketing and sales strategy are what matter more.

Post reply on HN