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Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

Don't go into open source expecting anyone to pay you. It doesn't work like that. The reason your open source project is used by anyone is, to a great extent, because it's free and open source. If you charged money at the outset, there's zero reason to believe that anyone would use it. If others are making money or raising funds on the back of your work, there's zero expectation for them to even give you a token of appreciation.

Anecdote: A few of our open source projects (our largest is https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx ) have web-based demos ( http://oss.sheetjs.com/ ) which some people have copied, stripped license and attribution comments, changed the name, raised money, and then turned around and tried to shut us down. On the bright side, at least someone found it useful.

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This! realty_geek, do you know if any Rails dev houses took your project and used it to build sites for real estate clients for five- or six-figure contracts? And didn't pay you a penny? I'm sure that's happened quite a few times - I confess that I very rarely donate anything to the open-source projects I've used to make a living.

May I suggest that you be the one landing the contracts? Find real estate companies in your local area that have awful web sites and reach out to them for a coffee. Show them what you've done and sell the fact that they could hire the guy who has coded a site with his own hands rather than some scrub who knows how to click things in the WordPress back end. Yes, it's icky sales work, but if making money is your goal here, you'll get much farther than what you're doing now.

You are right, people could be using PropertyWebBuilder to earn good money without me knowing.

I think I must have communicated wrongly because most comments seem to suggest that I am sad or begging for money. I know open source won't make me rich. I earned very good money for many years and saved a ton. I'm not feeling sorry for myself or wanting to squeeze every penny from this project.

I would however like it to earn enough interest and money to keep it a sustainable long term project. Over the next few months I will do more to sell it directly to end users.

I'm also hoping some smart developers will be motivated to help me improved the code, design etc.

That anecdote is quite interesting. Any blog post where you might have shared the experience? I will surelly learn from it.

> Don't go into open source expecting anyone to pay you. It doesn't work like that.

It's changing a bit in the crypto space. Take a look at:

- https://gitcoin.co/

So gitcoin could be really revolutionary or it could be a total flop.

I had a lot of hope for BitHub, a simple tool for paying bitcoin per git commit. What seems different about gitcoin which might increasing its chances of success is that it seems to be focusing on building a community/marketplace.

Would be great if GitHub could add donate buttons to pages and issues and payout. No reason this has to be done with cryptocurrency.

[1] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/BitHub

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