Open source libraries, sell binaries. That is my philosophy
But where do you sell it? Somewhere like PrivJS or using individual contracts & Stripe etc?
GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
181–190 of 251 posts
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#182I'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…
For me one of the eye-opening posts was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7575210
"In a typical year the OpenSSL project receives about US$2000 in donations."
OpenSSL is one of the most known open source projects. It's like https://xkcd.com/2347/ There's little hope to achieve its level of success by doing open source. And even that project did not earn good money. So living from open source project just by writing code just is not a good idea. It's possible to run open source project as part of startup, I guess. But that's more about marketing than writing code.
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> deleting snarking comments, ban aggressive repeat rule offenders and deal with occasional personal attacks Where is this mysterious subreddit, where such incredible, almost magical, things happen? Are we really talking about reddit here?
/r/AskHistorians, /r/askscience, /r/science etc
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#184I 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…
> under the MIT license
This is a poor choice for a donation-driven project because it allows easy proprietization. It also does not protect from patents, tivoization and so on.
GPLv3 would be a better choice.
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless it's rigidly self-hosted compiler for your own language, I have a feeling it still depends on other projects a lot.
One of it is, in fact, a static document, basically just a very large README.md file chock full of information. It could be a book.
I don't think projects comparable to books can be at the same time comparable to software
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#186I'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?
To people asking "why not open source?" (iirc have asked this at least once myself) on every non-open-source project released. The answer can simply boil down that the dev(s) are looking to money off it.
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#187I 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.
I don't know enough about the resulting system, but this sounds quite silly and contra-productive. Issues often hint at important flaws. If the community is not open (Ha!) to outsiders notifying them of important flaws, then that is a recipe for bad software. Some people might go there and start asking for features, instead of describing issues (although even that can be valuable input), but in my experience people are more often reporting bugs or asking how to do something, because it is not well described in the docs, or the docs are not as visible as they should be, or probably many other good reasons. Closing ones door to these valuable inputs can only result in worse software.
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#188This post totally resonates, but wondering where the initial expectation came from : GH stars -> revenue ?
Open source can be a part of a business model, but cannot be the only foundation of a business model. It would amount to say 'self-serve won't pay for your rent' if you assume 'self-serve' is just putting your product out there, without marketing, or growth loops.
Some new OSS companies nailed the business model Plausible: https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas (never raised funds) Posthog: https://posthog.com/blog/open-source-business-models
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#189I'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.
People like Sindre Sorhus (https://sindresorhus.com) are, but I'd say survivorship bias comes into play here, he's more of an exception than a rule.
Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
#190I have been thinking about closing my Github account and moving all my code to gitweb on one of my personal domains. I'm tired of the social/popularity contest aspect of Github and just want to write and publish code that I find interesting. I also want more control and I don't want my code used for AI research like co pilot. I thought about trying source hut, or something similar, but I feel it will end-up just like…
I sometimes use github search to double-check if someone has worked on a problem before startin myself. Even when the repo is abandonned, it sometimes gives a good starting point. GitHub often tells me about repos I didn't find on search engines.
I'd say go for it, but the discoverability aspect is important. I also follow friends and sometimes find interesting projects through their stars.