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Write some software, give it away for free

nonogra.ph

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Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#71

Post by Retr0id »

nohell wrote: post #4
kw3b wrote: post #3

I started out in the BBS and demoscene of the 90s. The glory days of computing in my opinion, because of the technical innovation (people were making magic with 7mhz processors) and how the community arranged itself. e.g, some ANSI artists in the artpack scene went on to become legit artists, but nobody was sitting around grinding ANSIs to make millions or raise capital. I think about that era in my own open source w…

I wasn't alive in the 90s, and barely was in the 00s. I look at others writings about those early days, and compare it to today, then get a weird feeling of wanting to experience the "good ol' days" before python scripts made in 10 minutes by an AI and sold to investors as "vendor lock-in" was the thing to strive for.

Don't worry, the future will be worse and you'll be nostalgic for the good ol' 20s.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#72

Post by interpol_p »

To repurpose a quote from Walt Disney, I don’t make software to make money, I make money to make more software.

I want my hobby project to be my job, because I don’t want to work for someone else. I want creative control, freedom to explore and ship ideas, and financial stability.

The only way to get there, that I can see, is to charge for my work.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#73

Post by keyle »

I love the attitude, but this particular service in 2026 is a little risky.

A whole range of content can be posted that can make you liable that you want it or not... from product keys, to internal documents, ...

I'll just say this, I love the spirit but this is ballsy. It's just going to be used as another user-paste space.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#75

Post by faangguyindia »

SerCe wrote: post #37

Or don't. I've done both, published OSS projects and sold some software. The level of entitlement in some comments I received on the OSS side was pretty crazy at times. While with the paid software, all of the interactions I had were so much more constructive. YMMV, but willingness to pay is a great filter.

As someone who once had a popular open-source project. Opensource is just harder because you've to write code for . When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive. Despite what people here say, all these things have very little to do with the reliability of actual code.

Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#77

Post by palata »

fxtentacle wrote: post #28

I got burned with an attitude like this: unexpectedly, people who had downloaded my open source tool for free started expecting support. Some of them sent pretty unfriendly emails.

I literally got bullied by people who called themselves "the community" because they weren't happy with my copyleft license and the fact that I wasn't implementing their feature requests for free.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#78

Post by didgetmaster »

I have taken a road somewhere between FOSS and paid software. I have a data management system that has been in a 'free open beta' for a few years now. Anyone can download it and try it for free.

Right now it can be used as a great tool or analyzing data. Feedback is appreciated but not expected. I try to respond to bug fixes and feature requests in a timely manner, but I am not required to do that.

If it catches on, I might charge something like $10 for an individual lifetime license. Businesses might be on some kind of subscription.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#80

Post by zx8080 »

gt0 wrote: post #54

If I was going to write something for free, it would some weird itch-scratching thing for Plan 9 or something, it wouldn't be something most people would ever want. Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free. FOSS has delivered some great software, it's also demonetised a lot of areas where software developers could be earning a living. I d…

Considering the strong opinion on this topic, OP is probably young enough to not remember (or know) the 80s and 90s with too few free options for personal computing and most of the software is proprietary and non-free (exactly as the OP states). While it fueled the traction of shareware, it was a very different epoch, and impossible today with strict controls from MS, Google and Apple on what app is allowed to run. It's easy to wish the world to be different, but it would be much harder to live in with the today reality of secureboot and AppStore controls.
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