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I'm giving up on open source

nutjs.dev

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11–20 of 209 posts

Re: I'm giving up on open source

#11

Post by endominus »

"The lower your prices, the more entitled the user base you seem to draw." Not literally, perhaps, but with a wider net you do catch more of the louder, more annoying or insulting voices. I've seen this repeated too many times already (RIP FairEmail).

Is this simply an endemic issue in the software space? I can imagine a great deal of people thinking it's not worth it to financially support a project or plugin they rely on because "I could make that myself in a weekend if I wanted to" and using that rationalization to justify being rude to the project's maintainer. Or perhaps the true believers in open source think that people should feed themselves on ideology rather than bread. Is there something else going on?

Re: I'm giving up on open source

#12

Post by beanjuiceII »

Why do people get so bent out of shape over issues? I just ignore them on my repos, every once and awhile I may see if there's anything interesting.. But who cares what people demand, they can make them all day long but guess what.. You don't have to do anything about it! Open source has always been about scratching your itch and good luck to the next person if they can use what I made. Either way if you don't want to do open source that's great too! Good luck and thanks for the fish

Re: I'm giving up on open source

#15

Post by TillE »

I totally sympathize with not wanting to work on something that has become neither financially nor personally rewarding. I think the "early access" subscription model is a good, fair one, and I hope it succeeds.

> I also always believed that if you ever started a project that is valuable for companies, they would support you in return

But this just seems incredibly unrealistic. It's not remotely the norm for small open source libraries.

Omar Cornut, developer of Dear ImGui which is used by pretty much every AAA game studio, said he recently lost his biggest source of income. If he's having trouble getting stable sponsorship, I mean, good luck.

https://twitter.com/ocornut/status/1767233486996254928

Re: I'm giving up on open source

#16

Post by anbardoi »

I understand the sentiment for this article, but I disagree with the part about using open source mainly to avoid paying for software.

I use open source because I like having the ability to learn how it works. If I can't know how a program works, I can't have control over it. It is not my tool, I am its user.

I also just like learning how technology works in general, and non-free software is generally difficult to share the source code looking from the perspective of a company. Also in my experience, open source software is generally a more fun experience when using it. It gives me a sense of freedom in an increasingly restrictive world.

Re: I'm giving up on open source

#17

Post by hobs »

anbardoi wrote: post #16

I understand the sentiment for this article, but I disagree with the part about using open source mainly to avoid paying for software. I use open source because I like having the ability to learn how it works. If I can't know how a program works, I can't have control over it. It is not my tool , I am its user . I also just like learning how technology works in general, and non-free software is generally difficult to…

That's great for you, but its the reason that vast swathes of corporate folks use OSS, and they are terrible citizens of it as well.

Re: I'm giving up on open source

#18

Post by candiddevmike »

wetpaws wrote: post #4

>Same goes for companies. Nobody cares about you as long as everything is working smoothly, but as soon as they encounter a problem, guess who comes knocking on my door? Companies do not use libraries, devs do. Dev ability to pay for the libs is essentially zero, and even if you try to escalate it to management and purchase the license, this can easily take a year of few to approve.

Depends on the company. I know a lot of regulated companies that will happily pay for libs if it means they can "offload" the maintenance of them on whatever regulatory questionnaire they're filling out. For these companies, every dependency is either something they have to maintain or have a contractual relationship with the maintainer.

Re: I'm giving up on open source

#19

Post by 38 »

Yep. All my code is online, but if you want support, pay me. I put this in all my repos:

because of repeated abuse, I no longer offer free discussion of this software. so unless you have paid up front, do not:

post an issue, post a pull request, message me on Discord, email me

Re: I'm giving up on open source

#20

Post by unethical_ban »

zx8080 wrote: post #5

Summary: author feels bad as their expectations were distant from the reality. It's usually not very productive to blame reality, but each person has the right for almost anything.

Summary of your comment: You didn't RTFA.

edit: My point is, why be so harsh on someone learning a lesson about FOSS? It's like an old dad picking on their son for getting hurt when a girl dumps him. "Well son, that's life, silly".

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