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

GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

kitze.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 251 posts

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#61

Post by jmoss20 »

slavik81 wrote: post #39
_carbyau_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading of it on their page was that they are free to ignore your bug report unless you donate to them. You didn't pay? Well, that's just, like, your bug report, man... Essentially it boils down to: you cared enough to submit a bug report? Then you should also care enough to donate.

> they are free to ignore your bug report That is true of any open source project.

It's a UX thing. The "auto-close" behavior makes the policy obvious.

And presumably the maintainers are not bound in any way to not re-open an especially good/important bug. It just makes makes non-patron support opt-in, instead of opt-out.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#62

Post by asicsp »

xwdv wrote: post #38
asicsp wrote: post #29

I put up a donation link (before GitHub sponsors was introduced) on a repo that had 5k+ stars. Got just one recurring donation (about $1 a month). This wasn't a s/w tool though (tutorials for CLI text processing). Later, I switched to creating books out of such tutorials. I gave them away for free during launch weeks (but readers could still pay if they wish) and this model worked so well that selling programming ebo…

Is the income more than what you would get in a normal software engineering job?

I used to work in a semiconductor industry before. My earnings this year is 25% of what I used to earn 8 years back (literally, not adjusted for inflation). However, this is still more than enough to pay my bills ;)

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#63

Post by nirui »

asicsp wrote: post #29

I put up a donation link (before GitHub sponsors was introduced) on a repo that had 5k+ stars. Got just one recurring donation (about $1 a month). This wasn't a s/w tool though (tutorials for CLI text processing). Later, I switched to creating books out of such tutorials. I gave them away for free during launch weeks (but readers could still pay if they wish) and this model worked so well that selling programming ebo…

It sounded bad, but how much donations that you'll receive don't actually always link to star counts. Stars on GitHub is more like "how many people added this project to their bookmark" than anything else.

That said, as how things goes, there are "high value" projects as well as "low value" ones. If you want to make money out of your open source project, target those "high value" use cases might help. Some fields just don't make a lot's of money even if you tried really hard.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#64

Post by viraptor »

Aeolun wrote: post #42
robocat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the link: But it is MIT, can't I use it for free? Yes all projects are under MIT so the community backing honesty system can be ignored and Fody used for free. Do I need to be a Patron to contribute a Pull Request? Yes. Users must be a Patron to be a user of Fody. Contributing Pull Requests does not cancel this out. It may seem unfair to expect people both contribute PRs and also financially back this project. H…

> Many developers can afford $36 a year You realize that my dependency stack contains about 2500 dependencies right? If they all follow this model I’m looking at $90k/year just to contribute to a project.

You're not going to contribute to all 2500 them though. Definitely not in the same year for the duration of the whole year.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#65

Post by jongjong »

pie_flavor wrote: post #20

I continue to think that the best model is the one adopted by Fody.NET[0]. It's open-source, on GitHub, under the MIT license, developed in the open, and with a voluntary OpenCollective. And if you open an issue or pull request and you're not on the OpenCollective, it's usually immediately closed, by policy. The result is a system that is paid enough to be excellent, excellent enough for most users not to need suppor…

It doesn't work if the project hasn't had any new issues in a while. There is no incentive to be part of the OpenCollective if the project is completed and has no bugs.

I've been struggling with this issue with my project. It's a completed project, no scope creep, no bugs, just occasional update once every 6 months or so. The docs are complete and detailed so nobody needs extra help; no one will pay for support

At the same time, I know for a fact that if the project was buggy or had gaps in the documentation, nobody would use it; they would use an alternative solution from a big corporation.

The level of competition is so intense that there is no room for profit, no room for missing documentation and no room for bugs on my end. Competing products are backed by a big name brand tech corporations; so they can have bugs and gaps in the documentation and users will forgive them.

Branding is extremely powerful. Once people trust a brand name, they will ignore reality. If you don't have a brand name, you need to be 10x better to be perceived as the same quality.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#66

Post by _wldu »

mylons wrote: post #50
_wldu wrote: post #49

I have been thinking about closing my Github account and moving all my code to gitweb on one of my personal domains. I'm tired of the social/popularity contest aspect of Github and just want to write and publish code that I find interesting. I also want more control and I don't want my code used for AI research like co pilot. I thought about trying source hut, or something similar, but I feel it will end-up just like…

how does another platform help you evade copilot? wouldn’t a “lower” platform have to pursue legal routes that are very unpalatable for those lacking deep pockets and legal expertise?

Anyone may purchase a domain name from a registrar (such as 'example.com'). That is not a 'lower platform'. It's just a domain name. Sure, it's not as popular as 'github.com' but in every other way (in the DNS) it is equal. And unlike github.com, you have full control of that domain and its DNS records.

There are no unique legal issues with regard to buying a domain name and writing and publishing source code on that domain. Using 'github.com' to host your source code does not give you more legal rights or protections. Copyright is copyright and a license is a license no matter where you publish it.

You should not be afraid to buy a domain, write source code and publish it there. It's not illegal to do that and you are not at more risk (although these big central social platforms would like for you to believe that).

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#67

Post by viraptor »

zaik wrote: post #47
xwdv wrote: post #40

Imagine for a moment though, if GitHub stars could pay your rent. Imagine a corporation spends money on an experiment where they purchase some luxury units of a fancy apartment building, and then rent was decided based on GitHub stars. You must collect a certain number of GitHub stars each month to satisfy rent or you get evicted. I wonder what kind of projects would come out of this.

A method to artificially pump up the GitHub star count will be found, but little useful software will be made.

Also the distribution of stars is... weird. I've got a repo with 24k stars (which is still enough for top 500 on github) which took minimal effort and no maintenance - definitely lower than a lot of large software projects which deserve lots of money. Like, I'm next to pipenv and vagrant and making any money distribution based on that would be absurd.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#68

Post by nyanpasu64 »

robocat wrote: post #37
jcparkyn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how I feel about this one. Sure, the maintainers have no obligation to review and merge other people's PRs. But when this also applies to genuine high-quality community contributions, I feel like there must be some negative side effects. I'm sure this model works well for an established project like Fody that's already quite highly polished, but I'd be pretty sad if all (or even a significant subset) of…

From the link: But it is MIT, can't I use it for free? Yes all projects are under MIT so the community backing honesty system can be ignored and Fody used for free. Do I need to be a Patron to contribute a Pull Request? Yes. Users must be a Patron to be a user of Fody. Contributing Pull Requests does not cancel this out. It may seem unfair to expect people both contribute PRs and also financially back this project. H…

If a package I personally used was developed like this, I'd fork it and ask my distro maintainers to point their repo at my fork with less bugs.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#69

Post by thomastjeffery »

jmoss20 wrote: post #57
Aeolun wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many developers can afford $36 a year You realize that my dependency stack contains about 2500 dependencies right? If they all follow this model I’m looking at $90k/year just to contribute to a project.

? What contribution are you imagining that involves a PR to all 2500 projects?

Applying this business model to every project they use.

Re: GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)

#70

Post by GRiMe2D »

Aeolun wrote: post #42
robocat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the link: But it is MIT, can't I use it for free? Yes all projects are under MIT so the community backing honesty system can be ignored and Fody used for free. Do I need to be a Patron to contribute a Pull Request? Yes. Users must be a Patron to be a user of Fody. Contributing Pull Requests does not cancel this out. It may seem unfair to expect people both contribute PRs and also financially back this project. H…

> Many developers can afford $36 a year You realize that my dependency stack contains about 2500 dependencies right? If they all follow this model I’m looking at $90k/year just to contribute to a project.

If we got subscription to dependencies, we would get only 3 or 5 deps, only required app to run. No more `is-array` like deps. Adding a new one would be deeply thought and reviewed.
Post reply on HN