The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
1–10 of 413 posts
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#2This is psychological problem you cannot solve by technological means. As a wee lad I actually made some pocket money from a GPL-licensed software I maintained. That part was surprisingly easy, the skill is highly valued. But I avoided making it a career, it all felt so overwhelming (how to balance fun, demands from customers and contributions???), inappropriate("you must not be doing money from GPL!!!!11"), weird (even harder to explain what I'm doing than typical IT job) and lonely.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#3The problem is that you ask for money on OSS. Companies use OSS because it is free. If you try to force them to contribute or pay money, there will always be someone who has more passion than you to do it for free. At this point, just pass on your OSS project that is highly demanded but you have no passion for.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#4It's not just open source, it's open everything. You either work for bigTech or you work for free. Entire generations of people have been conditioned to create content for free and behemoths monetize it. It feels like a 21st century Marx hasn't been born yet
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#5Why don't you pass over the maintainer role to some of the users of the project?
Or share the maintainer role with some other users. Just select one, two, or three people who seem to be responsible and give them all the necessary write access.
Or maybe configure the repo in a way that all PRs need at least two (or so) reviewers from a selected group of reviewers.
Then this would greatly reduce the effort on your side, and development should continue on its own.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#6I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's perfectly ok to charge folks for software and if you're OSS project isn't motivating you like it used to, it's perfectly ok to charge users for support/updates/bugfixes.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#7The annoying part in this debate is people spending their lives on a project and demanding to be paid for it.
Don’t do it! Who’s asking you to work on it?
I say this as a minor OSS developer who receives some donations. I love the money, but it would be pretty dumb for me to say they oughta pay me, because the only reason I work on it is addiction/compulsion/procrastination of real work.
If it bothered me that people use it for free, then I could just stop working on it and let it rot, just like lodash’ maintainer did for a few years. You always have the option.
I keep reading from project leaders like ESLint’s things like “if only they paid $1 each…” as if that made any economic sense at all. If they paid $1 each, you would not hand thousands let alone millions of users.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#8The problem is that you ask for money on OSS. Companies use OSS because it is free. If you try to force them to contribute or pay money, there will always be someone who has more passion than you to do it for free. At this point, just pass on your OSS project that is highly demanded but you have no passion for.
Do companies use open source because it's free?
Cost may be a component. But not the only component, and cost doesn't have to be binary. You can charge and still be less than the alternatives.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#9One of the problems I found with this is that actually taking donations is hard work.
I live in a country completely unsuited to making money from a hobby project on the side. To take donations I'd need to register as self-employed, and pay monthly for social security as long as I'm registered, even if I make no revenue whatsoever in that month. That's an absolutely awful idea for a project just getting started. I'd be losing a very appreciable amount of money, regularly. It'd take lots of effort to have enough support that I'm back to zero, and still not making anything. This is because this is a system made for plumbers, not for people doing rare jobs on the side which might some day grow into something serious.
Apparently the government sort of looks the other way until you start making minimum wage, but that's not a bet I'm comfortable making.
But finally, we (https://overte.org/overte_ev.html) managed. It took us a long time and a lot of effort to get a non-profit registered, and it absolutely required the participation of multiple knowledgeable people. This couldn't have been done as a lone wolf effort.
And after that hurdle of course you have to somehow get people to notice you exist, and convince them to donate. This is unfortunately a tough job for people whose main passion is software development and who threw all their effort into that. Going out there and figuring out how to advertise yourself and how to ask for money is a whole new skill to learn, and a big time and effort investment.
I highly suspect that the reason why libcurl shows up here every week or so is because Steinberg spends about as much time marketing it as writing code and it's clearly working. That project appears to be quite successful in getting donations.
Re: The Lack of Compensation in Open Source Software Is Unsustainable
#10There are many reasons for doing OSS. Perhaps the company you work for pays you to (the author mentions the many contributors to K8s at Red Hat et al). Perhaps you are building your resume, a student learning to program and interested in feedback, or you’ve built something for yourself and generously sharing with others, giving back to the community from which you in turn are getting valuable software. Or maybe it’s a passion project. Unless you are paid to, perhaps not even then, nothing obligates you to maintain the project, to offer free support. Consider a crude analogy: you are passionate about music, you practice, then start playing in the park (with or without your guitar case open accepting contributions). You’re good, people gather to listen to you. Perhaps a record producer will stop by and offer you a big contract. Unlikely. If you find you tire of playing in the park, it is taking away time from your job and your family, you are not obligated to continue playing…no matter how much your fans love your playing. And an essay “The Lack of Compensation in Busking is unsustainable” would be unlikely to gain you much sympathy.