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

Write some software, give it away for free

nonogra.ph

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 285 posts

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#191

Post by danieltanfh95 »

Really the problem boils down to:

“I don’t want to maintain a custom fork with my fix” - valid sure, if you are not sure if your fix is the best solution for it, and would like the general community to comment (i think the problem here is that iterating on a fork is generally difficult to discover and work on)

“I really want everyone to have the benefit of this fix” - Could be interpreted as wanting the "fame" of authorship or participation in a large open source repo, otherwise just sharing the fix and letting whoever needs it is enough tbrh.

“I don’t know what the fix is, but there is a bug here and the core team should fix it” - would be a user support issue.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#192

Post by tardedmeme »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #154
echelon wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention that "OSI open source" is basically sponsored and advocated by the firms that stand to benefit the most: hyperscalers that will embrace, extend, and encrust the thing you built with their monetization tendrils and leave you without a way to make money on it yourself. See: Redis, Elastic, etc. Not an ounce of AWS or GCP is open source, yet they'll happily spin up a managed version of your thing and make…

AGPLv3?

They'll find loopholes around that too, in time - they already found some, which led to the SSPL being created.

What you actually want is some kind of noncommercial clause: you can use my free shit as part of your free shit. If you want to make money off my shit, the rules change to "fuck you, pay me"

"But what if a company just wants to try it out?" well they can live within the already existing exception called "not telling me you're breaking my license". If I don't know about it I can't impose any penalties on you. Every good business already knows how and when they can break the law with impunity, and that's one of them.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#193

Post by bregma »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #163
criticalfault wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, it would, it does, they should and they often do. When they don't it tends to be because they're struggling to have their other needs fulfilled. 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.

Yes, I understand most artists would be glad if their landlords accepted "exposure" as rent.

Similarly most salespeople would gladly work commission-free if it meant more sales.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#194

Post by Double_a_92 »

morpheos137 wrote: post #128

i have never understood this idea applying to all sofware. sure general research level software should be free and open source. business logic or specific use cases should not. The law is free and open source. Lawyers will not draft you a contract for free. Medicine is free and open source. A doctor will not set your arm for free. FOSS is kind of the worst of both worlds. Unfunded or corporately funded amateurs give…

Most programming languages and tools are free and open source. Software developers will not code you an app for free.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#195

Post by nohell »

theteapot wrote: post #126
nohell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid other humans with security expertise to "soft audit" the program prior to release, which uncovered a variety of vulnerabilities which were patched. It's a courtesy to the users, especially self-hosters.

The report is kind of concerning to read, particularly having XSS in this kind of app. The report was not meant to be exhaustive and fixing those vulns isn't some kind of implicit tick of approval.

It's from October 2025, lots of issues have been fixed since then. At least you're more informed and can decide whether you'd like to use it accordingly. Compare that to most projects which are complete unknowns.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#196

Post by nohell »

mrandish wrote: post #120

Across the decades of my career in high-tech, I found that repeating the pattern of "Create something you're personally passionate about, then give it away" has directly led to quite remarkable success - not every time, but a surprising amount. Admittedly, I found this out accidentally, since at first it wasn't exactly by choice. It was just what ended up happening after all my original plans failed miserably :-) Whi…

I think part of the problem is there's too much collectivism, which makes dissent harder to do and deal with. This collectivism and excessive capitalism means Guy A sees Guy B making money by taking away features and charging for them, so Guy A does the same thing... on a massive scale. Then there's the people who come into open-source with the expectation of profit, get depressed when there is none, then feel vindicated when they sell out to VC or enshittify their projects and see more returns than their FOSS stuff.

Also, I like your comment so much I immortalized it in a Nonograph: https://nonogra.ph/na-ymlu-05-06-2026

Thanks for the long read!

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#197

Post by imhoguy »

rvz wrote: post #103

This is the reason why developers here are upset about AI. You can't have it both ways and 'open source' is now weaponized against them. AI will consume OSS software and anyone will be able to clone your closed-source app for free and open source it for 'the community' to avoid paying $1 to maintain it. One thing that is not free is hosting.

An one thing which isn't free is AI. Try to maintain moderately complex app with AI and not spend $ on tokens or GPUs.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#198

Post by echelon »

tardedmeme wrote: post #192
matheusmoreira wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGPLv3?

They'll find loopholes around that too, in time - they already found some, which led to the SSPL being created. What you actually want is some kind of noncommercial clause: you can use my free shit as part of your free shit. If you want to make money off my shit, the rules change to "fuck you, pay me" "But what if a company just wants to try it out?" well they can live within the already existing exception called "no…

This. It's that simple.

Companies shouldn't get your labor for free. Especially the big ones.

Trillion dollar companies don't deserve hand outs.

We should have figured this out twenty years ago.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#199

Post by nohell »

FailMore wrote: post #189

I've built side projects for years. My most recent one (also Markdown related [1]) is my first open source one and I've found it to be the most rewarding experience by far. So far I have 54 stars on GitHub and have had people emailing me mainly to thank me for the service, but some to ask for feature requests. Although I haven't had many ask for features / fixes, I find the "pushy-ness" of my users very useful as it…

I took a look at it and am considering copying some of the features I like to implement into Nonograph.

Funnily enough, I was sitting about 30 meters up in an old church bell tower late at night and wanted something that made the "Have Idea > Write Idea > Publish Idea" workflow super simple but also better than a pastebin and I've always hated how underscores in markdown result in italicized text, not underscored text. Yes every social media platform solves the workflow problems, but I don't want everything I write tied to a central identity; I want to be able to share single thoughts as links with people.

Nonograph doesn't have any tracking. Everything coming into the host is through two hops of reverse proxies or Tor before the request reaches me. That's also why its 300ms to load a plain html page until I find a better solution to hide the server location. The most tracking I'm doing is looking at `top` to make sure the resource usage is low. Avg. 3% CPU, 210mb MEM.

Re: Write some software, give it away for free

#200

Post by carlosjobim »

latexr wrote: post #55
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.

I’ve also done both, and I found both kinds of users in both situations. There have been cases on the commercial front where I just felt like giving customers their money back, even after years of having used the software, and told them to not come back. There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore. With open-source it’s much simpler to drive a hard line. My “favour…

> There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore.

Somebody paying for your product is very strong signal. You know that such a person represents real world use cases for your product, and that their issues and feature requests are based on real world problems. Otherwise the chances are low that they would be paying for the software.

So helping them with what they want could mean that you've just tipped the scale enough for hundreds or thousands of people to become new customers.

And of course you should give them their money back to get rid of them if they're any kind of headache. Or tell them that their requested feature will be in the next versions, which is a new purchase.

Post reply on HN