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

Side projects

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 243 posts

Re: Side projects

#31

Post by ant6n »

norswap wrote: post #24
hastly wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making everything virally GPL doesn't solve the problem of nobody paying for open source development. I actually think if everything out there was GPL'd, it would make it even more difficult to build businesses and make money from open source software, because you couldn't use open source in a proprietary project if you so chose. I think instead we need a set of incentives in which it's a terrible idea to use softwar…

What about dual licensing? People who don't pay get GPL, while those who pay get BSD/MIT?

If you make a dual license GPL/commercial product, how will any other people contribute? Wouldn't they have to agree that their contribution has GPL + whatever commercial licence the project maintainer sells to some company later?

Re: Side projects

#32

Post by davidw »

revorad wrote: post #30
antirez wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I've no good answer for your question, since I'm sponsored by Pivotal, but if we consider the percentage of open source software created, only a small percentage is sponsored. Many developers simply do it for free, as I did it in the first year of Redis developments, because I had an alternative stream of money to pay the bills. So, my point of view, is that the IT ecosystem is broken and IT companies a…

patio11 has a good suggestion in this article (see the last section "A Brief Meditation on OSS") - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementatio...

That still relies on the company, or people therein being not quite economically rational: free riding is cheaper. Unless of course everyone does it and the good in question is then underprovisioned. It is certainly worth a try, though!

Re: Side projects

#33

Post by davidw »

ant6n wrote: post #31
norswap wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about dual licensing? People who don't pay get GPL, while those who pay get BSD/MIT?

If you make a dual license GPL/commercial product, how will any other people contribute? Wouldn't they have to agree that their contribution has GPL + whatever commercial licence the project maintainer sells to some company later?

Exactly, they have to assign copyright to you/your company.

Re: Side projects

#34

Post by seiji »

revorad wrote: post #30
antirez wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I've no good answer for your question, since I'm sponsored by Pivotal, but if we consider the percentage of open source software created, only a small percentage is sponsored. Many developers simply do it for free, as I did it in the first year of Redis developments, because I had an alternative stream of money to pay the bills. So, my point of view, is that the IT ecosystem is broken and IT companies a…

patio11 has a good suggestion in this article (see the last section "A Brief Meditation on OSS") - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementatio...

Yeah, that's a great point, but due to the unique "sponsorship" arrangement of Redis, Redis isn't actually allowed to accept money from anybody else for anything.

It's a tradeoff between "stable" income and "potentially unlimited" income, and Redis is still in the "stable" column.

Re: Side projects

#35

Post by icebraining »

davidw wrote: post #33
ant6n wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make a dual license GPL/commercial product, how will any other people contribute? Wouldn't they have to agree that their contribution has GPL + whatever commercial licence the project maintainer sells to some company later?

Exactly, they have to assign copyright to you/your company.

No, they just need to give you a sub-licensable license. It might sound like the same, but it means they can still use their own work as they wish (and give out other licenses), unlike copyright assignment.

Re: Side projects

#36

Post by ihnorton »

pjmlp wrote: post #21
icebraining wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who likes the GPL and supports the idea that all software should be Free, the thing that bothers me about it is how "closed" it is to projects based on other Free licenses. GPL projects "take" from BSD/MIT/Apache/etc projects (in the form of libraries, supporting software, etc) and only give back with conditions they can't accept. You can say it's on them, for choosing the license they chose, they accepted…

No, because thanks to GPL the code is available. LLVM is a great project and brought the possibility of .NET/Java tooling to C and C++, but just check the amount of GPU shader drivers, Swift and some embedded compilers for examples of companies abusing BSD/MIT/Apache/etc projects.

On the other hand, consider the following: Emscripten, Numba, Julia, Rust, Pyston, Pure, Polly, Mono-LLVM, ghc -fllvm, Terra, ... and those are just the ones I can think of in a few seconds. Several of these have the potential for huge impact over the next decade, and nearly all of them would have been significantly less viable either using GCC tooling (due to license-driven architectural decisions) or building a backend from scratch.

LLVM is known for being rather ruthless with their API refactorings. This has the twin advantages of keeping the code quality very high, and giving people an extra incentive to contribute upstream (e.g. the PS4 compiler backend). I won't go so far as to say this is intentional, but it does represent a rather amusing way to discourage users from keeping everything in-house.

Re: Side projects

#37

Post by seiji »

famousactress wrote: post #14
antirez wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I've no good answer for your question, since I'm sponsored by Pivotal, but if we consider the percentage of open source software created, only a small percentage is sponsored. Many developers simply do it for free, as I did it in the first year of Redis developments, because I had an alternative stream of money to pay the bills. So, my point of view, is that the IT ecosystem is broken and IT companies a…

I've been broadly thinking about ways to take a bite out of this challenge. I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. As the company scales it has a massive effect on their culture. I visited New Belgium Brewing (makers of Fat Tire) for instance, and a huge number of their employees are so…

I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes.

Interesting approach, but I bet those companies also aren't high growth tech startups/companies. The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue. They aren't looking for new ways to pay for things they legally get for free.

My favorite example is Redis at Twitter: Twitter has over 30,000 Redis servers deployed around the world using a total of over 500 terabytes of RAM (half a petabyte!), and they certainly have no interesting in paying for Redis. If Redis were typical "commercial software" licensed per-core or per-other-shennigans, they'd be paying over $70 million per year for Redis.

(Redis is a unique position because the core dev team of Redis has always been small so it's easier to measure the direct exploitation involved versus other projects with thousands of amorphous developers like Linux or Hadoop or Apache.)

Many open source projects are essentially corporate welfare. We work, make products companies use to make money/become more efficient/grow faster, the companies use the software for free to get richer, then nobody contributes back any of the gains.

Re: Side projects

#38

Post by robotkilla »

binarymax wrote: post #2

I hope this question isn't too forward - but my main question is 'how did you afford to do this?' I have had plenty of fun little side projects (some finished some not), but my main project is my salaried position. Aside from being independently wealthy, how can one create and maintain a long term open source project as a full time job. Consulting on the side? Donations? Something else? P.S. Thanks for Redis :)

as someone who works on a lot of side projects: figure out where most of your free time goes and decide if you can sacrifice the hours you spend on those activities for side projects... and then actually do it.

I watch very little TV. I have only a couple of friends that I see every few months max. I don't go to meetups, I don't use social media and I don't play a lot of video games. I can hardly stand to see a day go by without creating something however small it might be.

I don't celebrate holidays and don't see family very often either. That helps a ton - I worked through Christmas and NYE last year while everyone else was partying... and then I switched to a side project on the weekend.

I also have a sleep schedule that makes most people cringe: go to sleep anywhere between 8:30 and 9:30pm, get up anywhere between 4:00am and 6:30am.

All that said, I think its incredibly important to switch off for days at a time every couple of weeks or months and break all the rules. Watch TV all day on a Friday or something.

Edit Sorry, I misread your question: "how can one create and maintain a long term open source project as a full time job"

That's something I have been working towards and haven't succeeded at yet. I'm leaving my comment up in case it helps anyone though.

Re: Side projects

#39

Post by hastly »

davidw wrote: post #32
revorad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

patio11 has a good suggestion in this article (see the last section "A Brief Meditation on OSS") - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementatio...

That still relies on the company, or people therein being not quite economically rational: free riding is cheaper. Unless of course everyone does it and the good in question is then underprovisioned. It is certainly worth a try, though!

The thing is, free riding isn't necessarily cheaper for anyone.

When you're depending on the software in question, it being underfunded might mean you're not getting the quality and features that would pay off in multiples for you. You could be sitting on a pile of bugs, or your dependency could be abandoned at your expense. These things happen all the time in open source land and it's a tragedy.

I'm not convinced that freeriding is really rational at all. I would however grant that it's both easy and lazy.

Re: Side projects

#40

Post by jgroszko »

hastly wrote: post #20
binarymax wrote: post #2

I hope this question isn't too forward - but my main question is 'how did you afford to do this?' I have had plenty of fun little side projects (some finished some not), but my main project is my salaried position. Aside from being independently wealthy, how can one create and maintain a long term open source project as a full time job. Consulting on the side? Donations? Something else? P.S. Thanks for Redis :)

Maybe we should turn our open source projects into businesses? At least make it clear we're open to taking money for extra features and/or support? I mean, I have a whole list of projects I would like to support in a meaningful way through a subscription for some service, but it seems finding a way to do this is itself a hoop to jump through. Even if I'm super benevolent maybe I'm not willing to do HR/accounting work…

It'd be interesting to see a more general software section for Patreon.com. Maybe patrons could get support, prioritized features, etc?
Post reply on HN