Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

kitze.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 251 posts

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

#141

Post by nyanpasu64 »

rushikesh98 wrote: post #138
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a package I personally used was developed like this, I'd fork it and ask my distro maintainers to point their repo at my fork with less bugs.

Will you port all subsequent patches to the parent repo to your fork? And test them?

For simple patches on my end, I'd port them forwards. For complex patches, I might hard-fork development and find like-minded people to send patches to me instead of the original upstream. Or if the codebase or changes are too complex to work effectively with, I'd abandon the project and treat it as radioactive and failing to satisfy my requirements (or even be correct).

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

#142

Post by lelanthran »

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.

> But if I spend time grokking your code, fixing a bug and submitting a PR,

Wouldn't you first check the license and contributor agreement before doing such a thing, even on random FLOSS projects?

Unless they are not disclosing their policy in the contributor agreement or the license, I don't really see a problem here.

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

#143

Post by collaborative »

hrbf wrote: post #137

GitHub stars are a useless metric. It’s basically a bookmark count. If there was any correlation between them and donations, my combined projects of 35k+ stars should make me at least a couple of bucks each month. Instead, lifetime total of ~7 years is ~300 EUR, which includes donations to a NGO I forwarded, which account for most of it. Most people will not pay voluntarily for something they can get for free. That’s…

Sadly, it's now got to the point where people will downvote you for charging anything more than 0 and, if possible, they will write 1 star reviews in caps DON'T DOWNLOAD, IT'S NOT FREE!!

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

#144

Post by ilyt »

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…

> 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.

They were explicitly talking about PR for a bug, not unwanted feature.

Yeah, sure, there is occasionally low quality bug fix that's problematic issue (bug should be fix but the code to fix it is garbage and nobody wants it) but I think that's rarer problem

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

#145

Post by tralarpa »

heisenbit wrote: post #133
Gigachad wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you can get great conversations going, help struggling strangers get up and become pillars of their communities. Which sometimes requires deleting snarking comments, ban aggressive repeat rule offenders and deal with occasional personal attacks. Moderators have powers, use power and are often not at liberty to reveal all what went into their decisions. Moderation on any scale is however a team effort and is then s…

> deleting snarking comments, ban aggressive repeat rule offenders and deal with occasional personal attacks

Where is this mysterious subreddit, where such incredible, almost magical, things happen? Are we really talking about reddit here?

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

#147

Post by TAForObvReasons »

senko wrote: post #116

I've been harping for years to anyone who would listen, Open Source is not a business model [0]. If your motivation for doing open source is money, you're doing it wrong. You'll be much better off just getting a job (and GitHub stars can help with that!). We all know "build it and they will come" and "follow your passion and the money will follow" don't really work in the real world. You have to make something people…

It does work for the right sorts of projects [0]

> whether an OSS project lends itself to monetization is a really interesting and subtle question. rule of thumb, be at least two of these: big, boring (roughly correlates with "infrastructural" as @patio11 puts it), and lacking obvious substitutes

Many projects with high star counts fall into only one of those categories

[0]: https://twitter.com/colinhacks/status/1422222156340072456

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

#148

Post by leg100 »

No mention of the role and benefit of contributors to your open source project? I would have thought that is the main benefit: many hands make light work. Cathedral and the bazaar etc.

In the case of this chap sounds like it never got to that point, he was doing all the work. Seems like his impression of open source is a trade where you have a developer who displays his wares and offers them for free, and praise and donations roll in. Rather than a powerful operating model allowing software to develop that you could never hope to develop alone. Time/effort ratio is much reduced for everyone involved.

Question its viability by all means. It's a progressive and generous idea. Sad that it's not even considered in the article.

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

#149

Post by hrbf »

_wldu wrote: post #49

I have been thinking about closing my Github account and moving all my code to gitweb on one of my personal domains. I'm tired of the social/popularity contest aspect of Github and just want to write and publish code that I find interesting. I also want more control and I don't want my code used for AI research like co pilot. I thought about trying source hut, or something similar, but I feel it will end-up just like…

I have done exactly this, after being fed up with GitHub. Surprising no one, if you set out to build the “social media but for code”, that’s what you get.

I’m using a combination of cgit, Gitolite and Nginx. Once set up, it’s easy to use and rock solid. Gitolite configures through a Git repository. I’m not going back.

About 14 days ago, on a post about Gitea incorporating, I shared my writeup of the install in case you’re interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33341191

Regarding your GitHub account, I suggest to simply replace the content you moved with a notice to the new URL and then archiving the repo, making interaction impossible. Even if you’re looking at deleting everything, maybe keep the account itself around, it’s free and you may need it later.

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

#150

Post by ilyt »

thayne wrote: post #84
jcparkyn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. Sure, the maintainers have no obligation to review and merge other people's PRs. But when this also applies to genuine high-quality community contributions, I feel like there must be some negative side effects. I'm sure this model works well for an established project like Fody that's already quite highly polished, but I'd be pretty sad if all (or even a significant subset) of…

There's an important qualification on that page: > This process will depend on the issue quality, and the impact on the larger user base. So, if I understand correctly, they won't automatically close issues if you aren't a subscriber, but the bar for the quality to keep it open is probably significantly higher. I don't think that's a bad model. Although, I don' think it would scale well to every open source project h…

Depends on where the bar is set but as long as "A PR that fixes actual bug with nicely written code" passes I think that model is entirely fine (especially in modern era when it can bet mangled thru test suite via CI and merging it is near-zero effort for maintainer).

That's essentially someone helping your paid customers to have better product for free.

Post reply on HN