221–230 of 287 posts
"Profit" is a strange and ambiguous term here. I've been running an open source, libre project for closing in on 24 years now, and generating revenue from it for about 17 years. There's never been any "profit", but there has been revenue. I regard profit as what's left of the revenue after you pay the people who work on the project and any expenses, which is the way most corporations and accountants would view it. Th…
You might also have "management profit," a catch-all term for unstandard & unregulated metrics. For example, A business graduates from "cash accounting" for tax and investor purposes... but it's still useful for the old management to track the old definition of profit. Maybe because habits. Maybe because it tracks cash flow or is useful some other way.
It's one of those pomo problems. The SEC, IRS or bank manager will not stand for "SEC Profit." They want "real" profit. It's like a naive local politician demanding to know what the hospital "really" cost the contractor.
Anyway.... like the SEC, IRS and such... author is using terms from their own perspective. When they say "Open Source does not win by being cheaper," "open source" specifically refers to an open source business modeled after MongoDB or similar. So yes, investors, growth goals and such are implied.
He clarifies himself on this point and there's no real point taking it into semantic growling.
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TFA said: > To be clear, I’m talking about open-source projects that compete with popular paid solutions. [ ... ] > Excluding non-profit projects that are sponsored by donations or parent organizations, a typical open-source business needs profit to be the ultimate north star. So, I think you've somewhat misinterpreted the space the author thinks they are referring to. Ardour is a small project in terms of man-power…
Hi Paul, I've been a long time user of Ardour and would love to send some bread your way, but I'm absolutely allergic to Paypal, is there a way for EU users to send you funds directly via SEPA or something like that?
We explain why we use PayPal over here: https://ardour.org/faq.html#why-paypal
People complain a lot about PayPal (especially on HN), but I have yet to see a viable alternative especially given (a) my status as a US citizen (which makes it harder to bank elsewhere (b) micropayment fee structure (PayPal is unique in offering something that makes $1 payments somewhat viable (saving around $0.25 per transaction, and there are LOT of them). The other well-known payment processors do not have the footprint nor the features that PayPal offers.
Win what? TFA is published on a platform owned by Microsoft. - - - - I always thought that the whole point of computers and software was to make machines to do the scut work so we could all take a break and explore the universe Star Trek-style. You don't win by making money, you win by obviating the need for money at all. Science has delivered technology and wealth (it's not evenly distributed, of course, but that's…
> You don't win by making money, you win by obviating the need for money at all. Yes, a post-scarcity society would be very nice indeed. That's why we need a total abundance of free and open source software not owned by corporations. If we don't make this software, we'll be subjected to their dystopian artificial scarcity where they charge you for nothing and create economies where there ought to be none.
We made the software already, is my point. We have the technology. It's just a matter of getting the word out, and logistics. The computers can solve the logistics. (This is Bucky Fuller's idea: the World Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Game )
We're not subjected to artificial scarcity now except by choice.
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Are you in the US? Do you report that revenue as personal income on your taxes? If yes, then I think it’s fair to call it profit (since you’re also presumably deducting expenses).
Yes, sole proprietor, all revenue reported as personal income ... hence I consider it income . It would be profit if I was organized as an LLC that agreed to pay me $X/year and took in $(X+Y) in revenue.
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Hi Paul, I've been a long time user of Ardour and would love to send some bread your way, but I'm absolutely allergic to Paypal, is there a way for EU users to send you funds directly via SEPA or something like that?
Sorry, there's no way for us to interface with SEPA at this time. It would not be that hard to setup a way to just receive money via SEPA (probably using Wise's multicurrency account system), but integrating it into the rest of our payment system would be gigantic, because of the totally different interaction model inherent in SEPA-based transactions (i.e. a bank would have to notify us of a payment). While I'd love…
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> Also, as is typical for things linked from HN, this whole article seems very web-y and SaaS-y. There are other kinds of open source projects, believe it or not. You mean the rest of computing...
However little that is. What isn't implicitly a SaaS these days anyway? :/
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Your wages are not profit by any definition I've seen. You arrived at an employment contract with your employer. The contract is an exchange of value: your labor for some of their money. If you are being paid more than the price your employer could otherwise obtain your labor for, then I suppose you could call some of that profit. But that is rather unlikely. Your employer is buying your labor, and is almost certainl…
It's certainly profitable to me to be employed, I get money. It's one way you can "profit" from an activity. You can also profit via other things, but it's a wider meaning of "profit" than the financial one. And people do enrich themselves via that method.
We would profit by focusing on what the author of TFA actually meant.
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I presume you pay yourself, so you rely on profit. The profit is nullified in the books but in practice it's no different than using the profit for dividends.
This runs counter to every definition of profit I've ever read.