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GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

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Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#81

Post by fragmede »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #76

Really good writing on many of the challenges of launching your own application. Went through the same cycle, of first releasing an open source software that had donation support. Gathered an user base over many years, at max I was receiving maybe 500 - 800 USD in donations over a year, after working on the software like 3 years. Was really reluctant to make the software a commercial version, because I was limited in…

> "Don’t let anyone tell you how much you should charge for your work"

Feel free to ignore the choosingbeggars who are after freebies, but pricing is a dark art, and IMO when making the leap to charging money for things you've built, it seems way more common to undercharge, especially for apps like Sizzy made by perfectionists.

Patio11's article on SaaS app pricing: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#82

Post by balabaster »

kstenerud wrote: post #30

I'm closing in on 100 public, nontrivial, nonforked repos on github. Since github's inception, I've received a total of $200 in donations for my OSS stuff, 1 job from a company that uses a product of mine as the foundation of their business, and many job offers from people who are familiar with my work. I don't make money off OSS, and never have (at least not directly). But I just. can't. stop. I can't. I've tried su…

Your list would probably grow even faster... where are you based?

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#83

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

jarfil wrote: post #27
huffmsa wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many information sources do you currently pay for on a monthly basis? How many times have you actually clicked the "donate" button when Jimmy Wales asks you to?

Zero and several, respectively. It's still interesting to note that the Wikimedia Foundation is getting more cash in donations than it requires to operate. If it wasn't a non-profit, it would actually turn out a profit.

It does turn a profit. You can be a non-profit and still turn a profit. You just don’t get taxed for generating income the same way, since we assume the profits help the greater good; since, we as a people, (not greed)(ideally) deemed it to be so.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#84

Post by kpcyrd »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #23
dharma1 wrote: post #21

would be great if GitHub had some kind of patreon system built in, to make it very easy to do recurring donations. Especially for companies that use open source software for commercial activity, it would be great to have an automated way of paying each month and a culture for that, so that it's almost the default option. I know there are ways of doing this today, but if it's not super frictionless and integrated into…

I think they recently did. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637344/github-sponsors-...

Almost nobody has access to that though.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#85

Post by nostrebored »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #64
ghaff wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was, in fact, so difficult to define "commercial use" 10 years ago and nothing has changed, e.g. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/defining-non-commer... You can always release your software under the AGPL (which is an OSI-approved license)--which would effectively prohibit its use by cloud providers. Probably very few others will use it either but that's the tradeoff you make.

Careful with AGPL. It has yet to stand in court, and is actually the license mongodb has left behind in favour of their own SSPL because it turned out not strong enough, and not preventing eg. AWS to sell mongodb as a sevice without releasing any of their provisioning and monitoring sw (though I'm not sure AWS actually uses mongo or, like Azure with CosmosDB, a proprietary API-compatible product instead). The amount…

DocumentDB exposes the same api

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#86

Post by tannhaeuser »

ghaff wrote: post #66
tannhaeuser wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful with AGPL. It has yet to stand in court, and is actually the license mongodb has left behind in favour of their own SSPL because it turned out not strong enough, and not preventing eg. AWS to sell mongodb as a sevice without releasing any of their provisioning and monitoring sw (though I'm not sure AWS actually uses mongo or, like Azure with CosmosDB, a proprietary API-compatible product instead). The amount…

I don't really disagree. No one knows how "viral" (to use a loaded term) the AGPL is. But non-commercial is the same problem. I've chosen to be comfortable with using NC CC-licensed media for anything I'm not being directly compensated for. I won't use it if I'm being paid directly to give a talk or produce a marketing document but I will for a conference talk I'm giving for "free" even if it's a conference I'm atten…

I believe dual-licensed or freemium models aren't after contributions so much as they want to use OSS as a marketing instrument, or for being even considered. This is also the main criticism - that they use OSS networking effects to pull a bait-and-switch strategy. OTOH, the alternatives come with their own problems: that their incentive isn't aligned with their customer's. For example, Red Hat, easily the biggest and most successful OSS company (or at least it used to be before the IBM buyout), thrived on releasing a Linux which is (intentionally?) such a complex beast that you'll need a support contract anyway.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#87

Post by yoz-y »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #31
pjc50 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a bipolar market: in Android apps, hardly anyone pays upfront, so apps develop all sorts of weird post-hoc monetisation.

Maybe Apple and Google need to give in and let us have free time-limited trials? Nobody wants to go back to the 90s software "You have 22 of 30 days remaining" popups every time you start an app, but is what we have now any better?

On iOS you can already do it. Apple has added a way to sell in-app purchases that cost 0. Your application can use such a purchase to unlock features, and then re-lock them when your trial period expires. The purchase manifest guarantees the timestamps and that it was made only once. The user would then have to buy a "real" in-app purchase to unlock the features.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#88

Post by joeblau »

> when you give away something completely for free, people aren’t that motivated to pay for it.

I created gitingore.io about 8 years ago and it's almost at 5000 stars. I had nearly 100k MAU's and that was still not enough to survive. My customers included developers form top tech startups and major companies in the world but the product was free. I ended up selling it so I can re-focus on something more valuable.

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#89

Post by stared »

A lot of people bemoan that companies make hiring based on people's repos (and how it may be unfair for some demographics, types of character, focus, etc).

But (having a few non-forked repos with >200 stars, one >1k stars) it seems that it does not matter much. Basically, works as any volunteering work.

For bigger companies, it seemed that there was zero care if I have any GitHub project. (Typically there was not a single question relevant to these project.)

Re: GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

#90

Post by tannhaeuser »

scarface74 wrote: post #67
tannhaeuser wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful with AGPL. It has yet to stand in court, and is actually the license mongodb has left behind in favour of their own SSPL because it turned out not strong enough, and not preventing eg. AWS to sell mongodb as a sevice without releasing any of their provisioning and monitoring sw (though I'm not sure AWS actually uses mongo or, like Azure with CosmosDB, a proprietary API-compatible product instead). The amount…

AWS doesn’t sell Mongo as a service. They didn’t use any of Mongo’s code. They created a NoSql database with the same API.

Yeah thanks for the clarification.
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