Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sheetjs | Hacker News Reader

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Your interpretation is far from the original point "There's nothing wrong with open source as long as you are honest to yourself regarding the intentions." If you're entering OSS to make money, it's incumbent upon you to find a business model.

Many open source developers start with intentions like "advancing the state of the art" and over time become disappointed because others build businesses and profit off of their creations. The intention at the onset wasn't to make money, and continued investment of time and money into OSS should be weighed against the original intention.

We are elated when we find others using open source SheetJS libraries and code in their profitable business applications. Others may regret and wish they didn't open source, but you don't know how things would have played out if you didn't open source. The yardstick we apply to our open source contributions is whether we're advancing the state of the art, since that's why we entered the space in the first place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886481 is a similar comment that probably better reflects the opinion expressed here.

(note: we ended up developing paid offerings after conversations with @patio11 and others. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementati... discusses these points)

> There's nothing wrong with open source as long as you are honest to yourself regarding the intentions.

My takeaway from your bullet points is more specific – that you shouldn't bother with open source unless you want to advance the state of the art while being perpetually unpaid and unrecognized, which I can not agree with in any way.

> Many open source developers start with intentions like "advancing the state of the art" and over time become disappointed because others build businesses and profit off of their creations.

I just don't buy this distinction of starving artists vs commercial enterprises. Especially as the project grows in scope, complexity, and popularity you might need to spend more time on it to keep it in good shape, and time does not come for free.

While you might have been willing to spend 10 hours a week on it for free, the now-grown project would really benefit from you working on it full time, but that's not feasible to you, so you turn to monetizing it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to both advance the state of the art and to be paid for it.

It's not about being disappointed with others making money off of your project, it's about ensuring sustainable development of your project.

If OSS projects weren't funded by a chance of money or fame, we'd have much less such projects available to us, especially significant ones, because not everyone who currently contributes to OSS can afford to or even wants to work full time for no pay. I don't know why that would be a desirable outcome to anyone.

There's a better way to frame this: Do you think an open source project creates a perpetual obligation? Even if many other developers depend on your project, are you forced to continue or can you walk away? If you assume you can walk away, you can then ask whether it makes sense to stop working on a project. And that answer requires a bit of introspection, being "honest to yourself regarding the intentions".

"advancing the state of the art" is fundamentally different from "money" and "fame" insofar as the latter involve social effects that you have less direct control over. To make money, someone else has to pay you for something.

What obligation? That's forced labor.

Why should someone be forced to walk away from a project that became popular if there is an option to monetize it to support its growth?

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