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GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

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Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#101

Post by Arnavion »

pie_flavor wrote: post #20

I 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.

Issues I can understand. But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and you reject it because you want me to pay you first, I'm dropping your software without a second thought.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#102

Post by Gigachad »

potency wrote: post #56
lawgimenez wrote: post #9

As moderator of Reddit, now I question myself why I am doing it for free.

Careful, if too many people start thinking like this reddit's entire business model built on free labor collapses.

Reddit mods largely aren’t doing it for nothing. They are doing it for social power and the ability to control the conversation for communities.

Just think about what it means to be top mod of a cities subreddit. You can trivially just delete conversations you don’t like.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#103

Post by [deleted] »

bruce511 wrote: post #94
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logical conclusion of everyone taking the model of "pay me to review patches or read your issues" is fragmentation. Instead of a vibrant ecosystem where people collaborate on patches and the project grows, the issues and solutions remain internalized in private forks. Is that a better outcome? From the time/money standpoint it's great, and it may make the project more sustainable since there are fewer issues and…

You have articulated well the trade-off between "project first" and "business first". From a user point of view, project first is the only thing that matters. There is an instinctive resistance to anything that gets in the way. On the other hand users generally don't care about the project authors getting paid or not. From the author side, getting paid is often a goal. If that means limiting the community to paying u…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#105

Post by [deleted] »

Arnavion wrote: post #101
pie_flavor wrote: post #20

I 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. Issues I can understand. But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and you reject it because you want me to pay you first, I'm dropping your software without a second thought.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#106

Post by e-_pusher »

asicsp wrote: post #62
xwdv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the income more than what you would get in a normal software engineering job?

I used to work in a semiconductor industry before. My earnings this year is 25% of what I used to earn 8 years back (literally, not adjusted for inflation). However, this is still more than enough to pay my bills ;)

Keep it up, I am a fan of your ebooks. What were you doing in the semi industry, out of curiosity? ASIC design related ? (Looking at your username)

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#107

Post by krasin »

Arnavion wrote: post #101
pie_flavor wrote: post #20

I 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. Issues I can understand. But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and you reject it because you want me to pay you first, I'm dropping your software without a second thought.

>Issues I can understand. But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and it gets rejected because I also need to pay, I'm dropping your library without a second thought.

You have a point. On the other hand, considerable part of maintainers burnout comes from arguing with well-meaning strangers that come with PRs that are (usually) useful, but don't fit the established codebase well. By only accepting PRs from members of a collective, the amount of drama is reduced.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#108

Post by asim »

Can confirm. Have many GitHub stars. They can't pay your bills. Converting stars to money is an interesting process. And not asking for donations, that doesn't work except for the top 0.001% of projects. You have to find a large company that wants support and will pay you the equivalent of a salary as a consulting fee. That's a starting point. If you're more ambitious than that you can try sell the same deal to other companies, personal experience says it's really hard. If you're more ambitious than that you can build a product on top of the open source project or sell an open core version. Also very hard. Then there's the whole VC funded route, I did that. It's a whole other thing not worth discussing here.

Open source sustainability is hard. I do think it comes down to the goals of the project lead and what level of financing it will require to sustain that. I have yet to see anything outside of company sponsorship or VC funding that makes it work. These individual donations don't scale. And even the odd $1k/month on patreon isn't enough. Let's face it, people working on open source are no less skilled than FANG employees, maybe even more so if producing code that's directly consumed. Open source should pay far better but I get the feeling it's still like free saas services on the internet. Each has a nuanced monetization path.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#109

Post by pjmlp »

Aeolun wrote: post #42
robocat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the link: But it is MIT, can't I use it for free? Yes all projects are under MIT so the community backing honesty system can be ignored and Fody used for free. Do I need to be a Patron to contribute a Pull Request? Yes. Users must be a Patron to be a user of Fody. Contributing Pull Requests does not cancel this out. It may seem unfair to expect people both contribute PRs and also financially back this project. H…

> Many developers can afford $36 a year You realize that my dependency stack contains about 2500 dependencies right? If they all follow this model I’m looking at $90k/year just to contribute to a project.

Maybe that would put a stop at importing stuff like left pad.

Dependency management has gotten off the rails.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#110

Post by Arnavion »

krasin wrote: post #107
Arnavion wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And if you open an issue or pull request and you're not on the OpenCollective, it's usually immediately closed, by policy. Issues I can understand. But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and you reject it because you want me to pay you first, I'm dropping your software without a second thought.

>Issues I can understand. But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR, and it gets rejected because I also need to pay, I'm dropping your library without a second thought. You have a point. On the other hand, considerable part of maintainers burnout comes from arguing with well-meaning strangers that come with PRs that are (usually) useful, but don't fit the established codebase well. By…

Yes, I'm sure it makes sense for them to have this perspective. And it also makes sense to me that if I'm not going to get the bugs I encounter fixed, even if I make the effort to fix them myself, then my effort is better spent on a project where that will happen. Their loss.
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