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The perils of mixing open source and money

david.heinemeierhansson.com

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Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#31

Post by _delirium »

forsaken wrote: post #8

As someone who worked on an Open Source project for years with no compensation, adding sustainable funding to it was very motivating. Money is a very weird thing, but getting money for the continued existence of your work is fantastic validation and support. It's easy to work on things for free, but how do you know that people value them if they simply use them for free. Attaching money to a pursuit that was previous…

For me, it depends on the money, the project, and my financial situation. With a stable salary currently, I often find attempts to make money from my side projects more demotivating than motivating. If it's something I actually find interesting, it's a hobby. Maybe it's writing software, maybe it's editing Wikipedia, maybe it's writing essays. That feels like a good use of my time, and I get to decide if it is or not. But then if I try to find a way to make money at it? Now it turns into basically a job, where I need to figure out how to monetize it, and in all likelihood the hourly rate will end up depressingly low. So I'd rather just spend my hobby time as I choose and not worry about monetizing it.

More subtly, I find that having monetization as a goal of a side project can creep in in a lot of ways that aren't really beneficial to the project. Take even just writing something. Sometimes I'm frustrated by the information available online on a subject, and want to spend a bit on writing something to set the record straight. Sometimes this makes sense to publish myself. Other times it makes sense to write or improve a Wikipedia article. This is an interesting tradeoff, because it's basically trading likely many more views (therefore likely more impact) if I write it on Wikipedia, versus more control and authorial credit if I post it myself. From a monetization perspective, writing on Wikipedia is rarely the optimal choice; but from the perspective of getting the information out there, it sometimes is.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#32

Post by chrismonsanto »

hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support.

OpenSSH might count, from the rant on their homepage:

Please take note of our Who uses it page, which list just some of the vendors who incorporate OpenSSH into their own products -- as a critically important security / access feature -- instead of writing their own SSH implementation or purchasing one from another vendor. This list specifically includes companies like Cisco, Juniper, Apple, Red Hat, and Novell; but probably includes almost all router, switch or unix-like operating system vendors. In the 10 years since the inception of the OpenSSH project, these companies have contributed not even a dime of thanks in support of the OpenSSH project (despite numerous requests).

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#33

Post by general_failure »

avenger123 wrote: post #23

It's an open marketplace. The project still has to have merit to be funded via Kickstarter or similar venues. The best use of this strategy has been integration of South into Django itself. The funding for this went above and beyond what was expected as everyone released the immense value of getting this work done. Also, I don't believe anyone is getting rich doing this. In the case of South, there was a genuine requ…

Rails did not have the backing of 37 signals. It was created by dhh in his spare time.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#34

Post by [deleted] »

larrys wrote: post #21
dhh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're forgetting that Rails was created for free, in my spare time, while I was being paid $30/hour working for 37signals and other US clients on a variety of projects. But that's even besides the point. Companies letting their employees use company time contributing to OSS has been great. As the first sentence of the article points to, I'm talking about projects raising money directly from the community.

"First of all, it's tempting to cash in on goodwill earned." The way I see it what you have done is way better. And this strategy is really what people should be doing as opposed to simply cashing in goodwill: "Take Ruby on Rails. More than 3,000 people have committed man-decades, maybe even man-centuries, of work for free. Buying all that effort at market rates would have been hundreds of millions of dollars. Who wo…

[deleted]

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#35

Post by freshhawk »

I've made the same argument before as well. Also thinking of the great overview of market/social norms in Predictably Irrational. It consistently gets ignored when talking about trying to inject money into open source.

Now I read a well written article on HN about exactly the question of how to encourage open source without ruining the exact thing that makes it work and think "Hey, there will be at least a bit of an interesting discussion in the comments. Maybe some new ideas about how to retain social norms while encouraging more open source work".

So was the point hard to understand and I only think it was clear because I'm on the same page? Why are there barely any comments on point, and the majority seem to just have wilfully ignored it and written whatever was on their mind concerning the author, open source and money in general?

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#36

Post by avenger123 »

general_failure wrote: post #33
avenger123 wrote: post #23

It's an open marketplace. The project still has to have merit to be funded via Kickstarter or similar venues. The best use of this strategy has been integration of South into Django itself. The funding for this went above and beyond what was expected as everyone released the immense value of getting this work done. Also, I don't believe anyone is getting rich doing this. In the case of South, there was a genuine requ…

Rails did not have the backing of 37 signals. It was created by dhh in his spare time.

I do understand that. But once it was created, it has been used by 37Signals and to some extent driven by their requirements and ongoing support. At this point, it doesn't matter but in the early releases it likely made a difference.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#37

Post by kordless »

hacknat wrote: post #17
dhh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're forgetting that Rails was created for free, in my spare time, while I was being paid $30/hour working for 37signals and other US clients on a variety of projects. But that's even besides the point. Companies letting their employees use company time contributing to OSS has been great. As the first sentence of the article points to, I'm talking about projects raising money directly from the community.

My point is that this is, in and of itself, fundraising. Edit Also, I don't want to minimize the effort it took for you to create Rails, build momentum behind it, and get other people excited about it. What if Kickstarter, et al is just a new medium to help empower other people to do what you did?

Based on his comment, my imoression is that David wrote Rails because he neeeed Rails for the job, not because a client needed Rails written for them. There's a difference between those two things.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#38

Post by erikb »

I feel what you write is all correct. I would never worry about this influence of money, though. The thing is, if you take off the fluffy pink glasses, which hurts and takes a long time going step by step, you'll see that open source is about money since pretty much forever. Yes there are a lot of people doing some effort for free. But they are not the major influence. Major influence means Linux, Mozilla, Canonical, hack even things like GitHub etc. It simply wouldn't work in this dimension without money. Thus even though all your points are correct and already happening out there, there is still a booming open source world and there are still people having fun.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#39

Post by atmosx »

hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

Actually I think it's the other way around: Institutions benefited enormously from open source software. They saw the chance to get rid of proprietary systems and use the force of the community and they took it because it was PROFITABLE for them to do so!

Why did IBM, Google, etc. Choose Linux as a platform? Out of courtesy? :-)

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#40

Post by Permit »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #32
hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support. OpenSSH might count, from the rant on their homepage: Please take note of our Who uses it page, which list just some of the vendors who incorporate OpenSSH into their own products -- as a critically important security / access feature -- instead of writing their own S…

While the mentioned companies don't donate, others do. Including Mozilla/GoDaddy with $10,000 a piece.
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