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No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

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Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#721

Post by networkimprov »

john_moscow wrote: post #675
jgilias wrote: post #163

So you've made something cool and it's time to release it. These seem to be the options at hand: 1. Release under a permissive license (MIT, BSD) and: - Have everyone and their grandma use it. - Die poor 2. Release under a copyleft license (GPL) and: - No company is going to use or contribute to it, unless they can somehow clearly separate it from what they see as their intellectual property. Or just hide it where no…

That's because you need to understand the difference between a project and a product. If you want your product to succeed, it must target decision-makers with a budget to buy your license, and it must make enough difference to them to justify the costs. Most software libraries aren't products. They target other software developers who are not responsible for allocating funds. Furthermore, if there wasn't a library, m…

> Most software libraries aren't products

This is the rationale for https://tidelift.com

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#722

Post by makecheck »

Not limited to software but modern society has a REALLY serious entitlement problem. (To the point where if I see a video on Reddit of someone screaming at a retail employee, it is not even surprising anymore.)

I’ve had free and open projects for years, with evidence of thousands of users. Yet I could count on one hand the number of times anyone has bothered to thank me, much less donate. I do occasionally get E-mail requests for support but sadly at least half of them have had a complaining/entitled tone as if I am not doing every last bit of this for free. I have had zero offers to help with development, documentation, or really anything else. And interestingly, some of those E-mails have come from some pretty well-known large entities, be they government departments or large companies — organizations that should have more than enough resources to give a damn.

Sadly, it is not better in the for-pay universe. After publishing apps, I have found that essentially no one will outright “pay once” for something anymore, no matter how cheap (leaving things at the insultingly-low price of $0.99 for weeks does nothing). Similarly, people usually will not contribute even a rating to help you out, much less a review. The E-mail/web info links on the store have never been used by anyone to reach me. And App Stores make it impossible to know who your customers even are, otherwise. So a silent relationship is maintained, where random unknown people update their apps over time, continuing to benefit and all I can assume is that they are still happy or something.

So my conclusion after decades is this: you do the projects you like to do for your own benefit, and no one else’s. They are résumé builders so you have something to show when looking for a corporate job that actually pays. If anyone doesn’t like what you’ve built, you are 1000% allowed to ignore them. If someone happens to appreciate it, that is a bonus but not a certainty. And you must be prepared to receive no money at all from these projects, much less enough to live on.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#724

Post by monoideism »

vslira wrote: post #566
jgilias wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it a SaaS!

Already done: https://bytepack.io By the same team behind Elixir/Phoenix no less

They're talking sales and marketing, not software packaging and delivery (which most software devs can do just fine).

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#725

Post by pontus »

makecheck wrote: post #722

Not limited to software but modern society has a REALLY serious entitlement problem. (To the point where if I see a video on Reddit of someone screaming at a retail employee, it is not even surprising anymore.) I’ve had free and open projects for years, with evidence of thousands of users. Yet I could count on one hand the number of times anyone has bothered to thank me, much less donate. I do occasionally get E-mail…

I think one of the problems is the interface through which we access these tools. I know when I walk into a Walmart that I'm dealing with a huge organization and if I accidentally break something while I'm walking through an aisle, I don't necessarily feel that bad. If instead I was walking around in a mom-and-pop store and broke something, I would apologize profusely and demand that I pay them for their troubles.

When accessing open source projects, there's no visual trigger that makes me subconsciously distinguish between downloading tensor flow that's being developed by Google or some small personal project. It all looks the same.

The same thing goes for music, graphics (e.g. iconography, fonts, ...), and even things like physical products on Amazon - it all feels the same.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#726

Post by smithza »

jgilias wrote: post #163

So you've made something cool and it's time to release it. These seem to be the options at hand: 1. Release under a permissive license (MIT, BSD) and: - Have everyone and their grandma use it. - Die poor 2. Release under a copyleft license (GPL) and: - No company is going to use or contribute to it, unless they can somehow clearly separate it from what they see as their intellectual property. Or just hide it where no…

Think of Red Hat employees. Most of them are paid to contribute continually to Open Source (linux kernel, numerous libraries, etc), then they sell product and support licenses. The problem is that few developers are helping to maintain Open Source libraries. In what universe is it feasible for an large Open Source project maintainer to make a living without patrons?? For-profit orgs should be the driver for maintaining Open Source.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#727

Post by jlbnjmn »

andrey_utkin wrote: post #486
gkoberger wrote: post #31

I think this is fair for him to do, and well within his rights. He’s clearly frustrated. I wish there was a better way for open source projects to solicit donations. It’s hard to get your boss to pay for software; it’s extra hard when you get no additional value. I feel like open source would have more luck if Issues could have attached bounties. I may not think to donate to faker.js, however as someone with access t…

> it’s extra hard when you get no additional value. I believe this, the identification and the articulation of additional value, is the problem with FOSS sustainability, and it's urgent that we resolve that. I hope I am onto something with the idea of crowdfunding specific commitments, as I have sketched there: https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd917... The mental model behind this is quite simpl…

> I am keen to help others to adopt this approach, so everybody is most welcome to reach out to me with any questions.

I'll take you up on this.

How far have you gotten? What surprises have you uncovered?

Are you blogging or tweeting the project?

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#728

Post by treis »

nineplay wrote: post #710
oakesm9 wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the developer behind the macOS package manager Homebrew https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

Sheesh I'd forgotten - he's right, everyone does use that tool. He backed off on a bit but the point still remains, I'm sure he's a better engineer than half of google. I wonder if they asked Pike and Thompson to invert a binary tree. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

I'm not so sure. By his own admission homebrew is not that great a piece of software. There's a lot more that goes into popularity than being good. Being first, marketing and network effects are as or more important than being good.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#729

Post by okareaman »

makecheck wrote: post #722

Not limited to software but modern society has a REALLY serious entitlement problem. (To the point where if I see a video on Reddit of someone screaming at a retail employee, it is not even surprising anymore.) I’ve had free and open projects for years, with evidence of thousands of users. Yet I could count on one hand the number of times anyone has bothered to thank me, much less donate. I do occasionally get E-mail…

I was seriously thinking of contributing to open source this past week when I started going over all the articles I've read from open source authors about entitled users and wealthy companies that don't donate but make profits off the projects. It's beco0me clear to me that large corporations like Microsoft have jumped into open source whole heartedly in a big part because they get tons of free labor. Not only that, I had a bad experience contributing to an open source project in which the author snidely told me I should have searched the code base because the bug was fixed when it wasn't, closed my bug report out and denied my pull request. So it seems to me a negative deal situation on both fronts. I'm know there are great open source projects, but I'll need to be very selective about them.

Re: No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This

#730

Post by treis »

jiofih wrote: post #693
treis wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>meant you’re wrong about Redis. It was in a unique position for a long time, if you pulled it out there would be nothing to really replace it. You haven't really said where I was wrong. >RedisLabs does charge for redis (extensions, and support) and seems to be doing pretty damn well for the matter. Charging for extras is not the same thing as charging for the product.

Here: > The problem with this is that Redis isn't used because it is particularly good. It's used because everyone else uses it.

Ok, and why do you think most people use Redis? Is it (1) they did a careful evaluation of the options and selected Redis because it was best or (2) everyone knows you use Redis if you need an in memory cache?
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