161–170 of 285 posts
I don't have a problem with this, but there is still the cost of living; and renumeration possibilities for time spent and invested into a given project.
Something should be done to improve the ecosystem situation here, even if the renumeration is low.
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All of them? Why are you on a platform open to accepting them in the first place? Are we talking about the same thing?
Yes, all of them if you want to. It's 100% up to you whether and how you deal with other people and their contributions, and it's completely orthogonal to being FLOSS or using a git hosting.
because you don’t have to “drive a hard line”, to do that,
you just draw it once (publish a no PR policy, don’t host on GH, etc),
and you shouldn’t be hearing from users.
I don't think this debate has an easy answer. Yes, not everything should be about money, but yes, we all need to make money to survive. I think we all agree the answer isn't, "No one should make any money writing software." I also think we can agree that the answer isn't, "you should charge money for every bit of software you write." So how do we decide which is which? I don't want to stop being a professional softwa…
wouldn't this apply everywhere? let's say agriculture. if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free? what about artists? it's not that their work even has a utility function...
I think plenty of artists would give away their work for free without second thoughts if they didn't have to make it pay their bills.
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Fwiw, that's just commercially packaged nostalgia which is mostly the good (and often materialistic) part and forgets absolutely of the rest. Our brains do that to us and I find it positive to have a nice fantasy world to escape to but definitely not to be mixed up with the reality of things.
OTOH being able to ride off into the bush with your mates and build tree houses and whatever and "be home when the street lights come on", have no phone, &c. was very different to the world we brought our kids up in.
So, if you can, be the change you want to see in the world. Although videogames and screens are a big culprit too, in my opinion.
> If software development is treated as a vehicle for self-exploration, rather than just a means to a financial end, this makes a lot more sense. From my experience, it also generally produces better software that doesn't come with user hostile (value extracting) actions or features because there's no expectation of a financial return. I strongly identify with all of this. I started programming computers when I was a…
> but I didn't like being a professional software developer for a huge tech company This feeling is probably shared by many lefties people. They love to work, they just don't like to be restricted/manipulated into working under a highly specified and standardized environment, especially when every bit of their performance is measured for competition. But I have grown to understand the environment of the "big tech" co…
There's a huge landscape of things in between these two options.
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.
I've regularly heard something similar said of consulting work, too. Many people new to the game worry about charging too much, because if a client is paying more then surely the pressure will be higher. Instead they end up experiencing the opposite: charging a higher rate tends to get them a better kind of client. I'm not sure what the exact lesson is here. Something about stingy people not being nice to work with,…
The name for this is the Veblen Effect [0], and it applies to all irrational market behaviour where people are actually happier with luxury goods the more they pay for them.
Funnily enough, I've seen some of the exact same clients brag about how cheaply they got something else. The lesson I've drawn is that they're mostly looking for approval, so they're equally interested in buying status as they are in getting real stuff done. It's a win/win if you deliver a great product that they can brag about, because they'll do the hard work of selling it to themselves for you.
A corollary of that psychology is that some, maybe even most people are never happy with stuff they paid market price for. They either think they could've gotten it cheaper, or they think they could have gotten more for their money. Paying market price makes them feel like a chump. But paying way more than market has to be justified to themselves first. It's simply too embarrassing to admit that they might have overpaid an arm and a leg. So as a contractor, pricing your work as either very cheap or very expensive, on the margins of the parabola, alleviates this vague sense of dissatisfaction from your clients' internal debate, and gives them the peace of mind that they're actually trying to buy.
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There are more than 2 ways to do OSS vs proprietary. You can do OSS and refuse all commits or even any comments, e.g. https://codeberg.org/y20k/escapepod/src/branch/master/CONTRI... Using GPL or MIT or whatever open or free license you prefer does not mean it's OK to get bullied. It's perfectly fine to not accept entitlement and still let others use or even build on your work, if you want to. You have the freedom to…
It's totally fine to turn off issues and pull requests, and refuse all contributions. The problem is many maintainers create undue responsibility for themselves with snide responses like "PR welcome" to every issue or request. When people show up with the patches after a response like that, I'd say that they are very much owed some of the maintaner's precious time.