GitHub stars won’t pay your rent • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#161

Post by swat535 » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 8:36 PM UTC

goostavos wrote: post #112

swat535 wrote: post #101

Am I the only one who is confused by all the recent uproar in open source? I think open source software should be created purely based on joy with no monetization expectation from the creators. On the other hand, people using the software should have no expectations either, they should be grateful for the gift they have received. I believe the spirit of OSS should be contribute if you want to, if not, that's also ok.…

Have you ever maintained a large open source project? It is so, so far removed from the pure "just creating for the sake of software" idea. It is a job. It can exhausting, frustrating, boring, tedious, etc... you trade your nights and weekends for... the creative spirit? The joy of creating? People talk about OSS like /r/choosingbeggers. "Why would I pay you for art? You should do it because it's your passion" To be…

I've never maintained a large OSS project, it's mind boggling to me that the community have somehow managed to push the maintainers towards burnout instead of being grateful for the free gift they are receiving.

Expecting the maintainer to keep pushing updates forever is insanity imo. It also rubs me the wrong way when maintainers demand monetary compensation I feel like this muddies the water. But maybe this is the reality we are living in now.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#162

Post by detaro » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

qrohlf wrote: post #133

I have been in an interesting similar situation with my Trianglify [1] library, and have made money off of it a few different ways: - Commercial licensing (the library is GPL) occasionally gets me a few bucks, but isn't a reliable source of income. - Consulting on custom integrations/tweaks has been slightly better, but in general it's a simple library that's well documented and easy to use, so there isn't much need…

> - Consulting on custom integrations/tweaks has been slightly better,

Interesting, can you share a bit more detail? Not asking for customer names or anything, but curious what kind of customer is interested in stuff like this enough to buy consulting for it)

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#163

Post by lone_haxx0r » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

[Unrelated]

> But the factory lector didn’t have Medium and Hacker News to tell him every single day that the radio is coming to take his job.

My thoughts: Who reads Medium everyday?

> Sizzy got 2352 upvotes on Product Hunt. It was the product of the day, the product of the week, and third product of the month.

My thoughts: Who uses Product Hunt? Who cares about Product Hunt upvotes?

Also, the other day, Korean Github users started complaining about some company "cheating" to get Github stars. My thought: who the hell cares about Github stars?

Am I the odd one here? This cult of the platform is kinda weird. I admit that I use Hacker News everyday, but in the end I don't care about it. If I lost my account tomorrow, I wouldn't care, If my comment gets downvoted to oblivion, I don't care.

(Congratulations to the post author on shipping a valuable product.)

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#164

Post by ElijahBenjamin » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

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Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#165

Post by manigandham » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 11:54 PM UTC

huffmsa wrote: post #54

jarfil wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero and several, respectively. It's still interesting to note that the Wikimedia Foundation is getting more cash in donations than it requires to operate. If it wasn't a non-profit, it would actually turn out a profit.

I don't know what their current cost structure is, but assuming they don't currently pay contributors in a meaningful amount, going for profit would mean they would probably have to, and COGS would go way way up. The current income probably wouldn't cover it.

Why would they have to? Contributors do so voluntarily. This is no different than Quora or Stackoverflow which are both for-profit and don't pay for content.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#166

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 14, 2019, 12:42 AM UTC

geddy wrote: post #107

RomanPushkin wrote: post #103

It won't pay rent directly, but there is one caveat. I have 5000 stars for all of my open source projects, and I have a salary way above average. I'd easily find a job with a better pay if I want to. So on average every star makes me at least $10/year when it comes to salary only.

With that logic, if I have only 1 star, then I make $my_whole_salary per star! I should aim to get 2 stars, that'd be a real life changer.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#167

Post by fulldecent2 » Wed, Aug 14, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

You're doing it wrong.

My top repo has ~5,000 stars and some contributors. It was fun, it lets you broadcast AM on a stock MacBook or iPhone. That's how I found Hacker News, it found me. Zero dollars. Virtual tip jar, zero tips. I got everything I wanted out of that project and more.

Next, I open sourced my research on vowel pronunciation / language learning. The same exact program sells on the App Store. For $10. Yes really. And the app links to the free repo, in case they want to check it out. This pays rent.

Next, I'm an expert on some blockchain topics. And specifically related to enterprise. If you're in that scene you might recognize me, I'm all over that (=all over GitHub). I put my phone number in a few choice places and qualified people call. This lands large contracts, no interview. This pays rent.

Google and Facebook regularly interview/hire directly from GitHub. No resume, direct interview request from GitHub. I don't work for Google any more, but these are opportunities to pay rent.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#168

Post by thekitze » Wed, Aug 14, 2019, 5:16 AM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #33

Anyone know the editor/(IDE theme) used in the product video and twitter post ?

Hey, author here. I'm using WebStorm with Material theme.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#169

Post by thekitze » Wed, Aug 14, 2019, 5:19 AM UTC

slang800 wrote: post #120

> Honestly, it felt kind of shitty to delete the repository and unpin the project from my profile. It is kind of shitty to do that. Why not just archive the repo and add a note to the README that you've turned it into non-free software? At least that way you don't break the main link to the project or remove all the content from the issue tracker. This is a project that other people have contributed work to, so it's…

The author here. If you look at the contributions, the only ones were a change to the readme, adding prettier and git hooks for linting, fixing typos, and few CSS one-liners. If the project had major contributions it would definitely be a shitty move.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#170

Post by raiyu » Wed, Aug 14, 2019, 6:35 AM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #41

So going from free to subscription based. How long do people think this subscription thing will last? "It's cheaper per month than one Starbucks coffee" stops working when you have to pay for 100+ Starbucks coffees per month... and then the subscription bubble will crash.

In some cases it works well, I would much rather pay a monthly subscription for Adobe PhotoShop then shell out hundreds of dollars up front for a license. Sure, in the long run I may end up paying more, but psychologically it feels like you are saving.

You are correct that as the number of subscriptions continues to proliferate we will at some point hit subscription saturation, but luckily, with most subscriptions it's as easy to unsubscribe as get started in the first place.

From an HR perspective, I'm sure organizations are already feeling this pain as they look at all of their different teams and the amount of money they are paying for subscriptions.