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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

#751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5: Don't release the code and sell your product. Taking pride in your work also means valueing it properly. - 95% chance you die poor. 4.999% chance you make a decent living out of it. 0.0001% chance Facebook buys it for enough money that you can buy your own island on Mars.

The problem here is that selling your closed source project requires a significantly distinct skill set from writing good code. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Venn diagram of a good project and being able to sell the project for a decent living is much smaller than 5%.

> The problem here is that selling your closed source project requires a significantly distinct skill set from writing good code.

Similar skill set as required to make money via open source code.

1. Write awesome code!!!111

2. ...

3. PROFIT!

isn't a business plan, regardless of whether you're writing open or closed code.

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

#752

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 recently set up a pihole at home with the whole Covid situation and as soon as I noticed the donate link threw them £5 thinking "the least I can do is buy a London priced pub pint - I'm not exactly spending it elsewhere". I don't know why it's so different with software - I should really know better but even to this day my gut reaction is to, initially, balk at an app charging £5 - yet I'll walk into a pub (well, used to) and have no problem spending that and more on one beverage... I've since managed to snap out of that and will, if I think I'm going to enjoy it, spend the £1, £5, £20 or whatever it is within reason.

This may be partly due to seeing in my day job customer feedback which in answer to "what would stop you using ?" - "if you charged me money". We basically run for businesses and even that cohort to a non-trivial proportion isn't prepared to spend (<£10 monthly) on software. We have other avenues and mechanisms to work work around that but it's a little demoralising when you see it so black and white. Makes me feel like I personally should at least be less inactive in my supporting of projects I like or just buying an app or subscriptions. I think the whole industry needs a reality check on how much "free" really costs.

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

#753

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…

Isn't the situation somewhat akin to what modern musicians face? i.e. very little money from selling music, but a lot of money from performances, merch, etc?

If I were hoping to make money off my OSS work, I would try to sell services related to the product. Consulting services, hosted instances, commercial forks, feature bounties, etc.

Complaining about compensation for OSS work is like musicians pining for the days where you could create an album and sit back while the money rolled in. You can vent your frustrations, but the world is what it is and complaining is only going to make you and your work less popular.

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

#754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are explaining how a person can deal with the world as it is. But if you think of yourself as a builder, then you really ought to know better than to accept the world as it is. Are there probably choices available to a skilled software developer where they could make more money than just working on something that they love and that provides value to the world? Sure. But why is that an acceptable world to live in?…

I am a pragmatist that is accustomed to the physical, mathematical and social constraints of the world. One big constraint is the average attention span of your target audience. Do you have time to care whether a guy designing/manufacturing that USB cable on your desk got compensated well? Or the one making your clothes? Or cleaning the corporate toilet? You know, unless you have sewed your shirt yourself, it was probably made a by a person in a less developed country earning about $1 per hour [0].

The thing is, we physically don't have time to look at every situation from every stakeholder's perspective. There are just not enough hours in the day. Like it or not, that's a pretty hard constraint and there's no better way around it than understanding marketing and product management.

So ultimately, it boils down to:

* Strategy A that gives you a 10% chance of outperforming your corporate salary and 90% chance of getting bored and getting back to your 9-to-5.

* Strategy B that gives you a 0.2% chance of changing the world, 49.9% chance of giving up and another 49.9% chance of seriously burning out and getting into depression. The actual world-changing chance is likely even lower. You can guesstimate it by dividing the number of Linus Tordvaldses by the number of Github users with 1 or more repository.

Mind you, strategy A requires a lot of trial-and-error while learning how to do business (and getting burned multiple times), while the strategy B is about just doing what you like do and hoping that it will somehow bring the desired outcome. So please, please, please, be honest with yourself about wanting to change the world vs. just wanting to keep is as a stress-free hobby vs getting face-in-the-mud while learning an orthogonal skillset.

[0] https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/sewing-machine-opera...

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

#755

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…

You're right, of course. But I am so, so tired of having to "sell" over and over just to have the value of my contributions recognized. And I think gp would agree.

The poster, marak, is a founder [0]. They definitely understand product-ization. Yet two weeks ago they suffered an apartment fire and have been struggling to keep a roof over their head [1].

I can definitely understand the kind of bitterness that comes out of going through something like that only to realize how little the fellow humans around you really value you. Realizing that for all the positive signals (such as "popularity") you received before, precious few are willing to actually put resources on the line for you.

So, I think gp and marak aren't coming from a place of misunderstanding the world as it is, but rather a depressing understanding of our world.

Imagine, if you can, a much different world. A world where helping or recognizing the efforts of others meaningfully didn't put you worse off. A world where your quality of life wasn't determined by your ability to take more than you give (or to have started off with enough resources that you can afford to give more than you take).

Once you really see what could be, I think it's difficult to suffer what is.

[0] https://twitter.com/marak

[1] "I lost all my stuff in an apartment fire and am barely staying unhomeless." https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

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

#756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been noticing more push back against the open source bargain lately. Open source is a niche. The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source. If they do, it’s simple bug fixes that they need for their paid jobs. The number of people creating and releasing significant open source projects is vanishingly small relative to the entire pool of developers. I think it was a mistake to tell entry-leve…

> The vast majority of developers don’t participate in open source. On the producing side, you mean.

I'd argue that including a package in your code is not participating. It's consuming, but not participating.

Football players participate in a football game. Fans consume that game.

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

#757
post #715
post #698

>Take this as an opportunity to send me a six figure yearly contract or fork the project and have someone else work on it. Oh yeah, for sure i would hire someone with that attitude.

Seriously, he should just inform people to send him feature requests and in return he'll send an quote estimation; no need to be petulant.

Yes! That's a good idea, feature and customization based Pricing. Just imagine Linus would be such a winy Rumpelstiltskin...well he is, but not a winy one ;)

BTW: Whats with the 211 others that help him?

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

#758

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…

Most people are living either in poverty conditions, or can see themselves living in poverty if anything goes wrong. Consequently people are understandably very reluctant to give up any of their precious limited resources. And yet, despite that, everyone is expected to get things done, to show they're interesting and creative, and to build social capital by being useful members of society. These antagonistic forces end up making many, many people very unhappy, and that comes over as entitlement.

Society is broken. It might not be fixable.

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

#759

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…

[flagged]

The ridiculous treadmill of people saying UBI is going to work despite all evidence to the contrary, apparently a long, long time..

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

#760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The ridiculous treadmill of people saying UBI is going to work despite all evidence to the contrary, apparently a long, long time..

You're right! Let's keep doing what we're doing. It's working great.
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