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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I agree, it's a common dynamic!

What it comes down to is that many people are conflicted about whether they want more users or not. They want the fame, but not the support hassle. So they promote the software and then release it as 0.1 and say it's unstable.

Instead, we should be clear: if you are a hobbyist-programmer, more users mostly means more problems. You might want more contributors (that can fun). But you don't really want more users who don't contribute back.

Setting expectations up front will help. If you don't want people to depend on you, don't put up a marketing page explaining why everyone should install and use your software. Make it easy to build, but don't publish binary releases.

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> You might want more contributors (that can fun). But you don't really want more users who don't contribute back.

IMO this is a huge problem for user facing applications (e.g. desktop applications like gimp). They have great appeal to fairly non-technical users which creates a huge support load and they often have complex internals which appears to repel many first time contributors. I know I've been watching projects like LMMS (a music creation environment) for years and it seems like a constant struggle to keep enough contributors such that the support load doesn't burn out everyone involved.

I don't know that avoiding marketing is the solution here since that just would mean that commercial alternatives would evolve quickly while the project would die off due to a lack of new contributors, though it might be one of the tools to change the contributor:support ratio.

If you can't decide beforehand if you can support an open source project or if you should go for a commercial product, I think a solution is to time-bomb the "Commons Clause" for a 3-5 year period, after which the software reverts to full open source, similar to the GPL Time bomb discussed some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459492

This way, the developers get paid fairly, for what they actually deliver, but they can't lock the users in. If the developer dies, goes bankrupt or falls into a predatory phase where it milks the product for cash without reinvesting sufficient back (Adobe), then the project can be salvaged as open source by those who use it. An even better option is to allow any commercial developer, after the 3 year period passes, the option to fork and develop it's own version with similar licensing conditions.

This will ensure a healthy, competitive environment where the software can be monetized traditionally, yet the 4 freedoms are (eventually) satisfied. As a user, this is what you care about above all else; you will pay the commercial license fee to get the bleeding edge product, knowing you are in a way "leasing to own" the software and you will be able to fork it in-house if the way you use it diverges from what the publisher will want in the future.

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