Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThinkBeat | Hacker News Reader

The "open source model" is good for far more than launching your career.

You can contribue, create, participate, enjoy open source your entire life.

Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is about making the most money.

With commercial/proprietary products, value is usually created by establishing a win-win situation: You as a customer buy something, because its value is above the price you pay for it. Pricing then essentially is about finding out what customers believe the value actually is. As long as this works, this is not a net zero, but a real win for both sides.

It appears to me as if open source tends to break this mechanism. The "customer" gets something that benefits them enormously. Meanwhile the project developers and maintainers sometimes struggle to make a living or earn amounts that seem to be out of touch with what one could earn in a comparable proprietary model. This is how it becomes a win-lose.

With certain open-source licenses, there's also a lack of incentive for giving back. Companies can often simply build proprietary solutions on top of the work of others without ever returning any reward (be it in the form of money or contributions).

It would really be great if there was a way to get the best of both worlds. I am afraid a lot of open-source software will not be produced anymore if the model isn't sustainable for developers and maintainers.

Just doing it for fun is surely feasible for some projects, but the bigger ones need full attention I'm afraid which they can't get without proper funding.

I'm talking about projects that are beyond the "oh, neat project" phase and living in the "why doesn't your project work with XYZ??" phase. Money is required for when you need to handle tech support, handle multiple versions with backported security patches, and other professional software practices that no one would want to do for fun.

As this article clearly states, it's _not_ good for making even a bit of money, let alone the most.

Do they not have to pay rent in other countries??

The parent was mentioning telling entrepreneurs this advice, who are interested in starting a business and making money.

"Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is about making the most money."

It's not. But you will only really ever get to work on what you want when you are making enough money to quit your day job.

Contributing to open source can be a great experience. It can also be very taxing, especially when you have a family/other obligations outside of work.

This is where strong welfare systems have value in that it gives one the freedom to pursue this kind of thing without having to worry about health insurance and so forth.

However, those welfare systems then force other people to subsidize someone else working on something that, by definition, doesn’t contribute economic value that exceeds the cost of producing it. It’s an inefficient allocation of resources. Meaning money going to support someone building a “thing” nobody values instead of going to support a thing people do value. And by “value,” I mean willingness to pay for it. Free money in the form of welfare so someone could work on a hobby that may have no value is paid for by people who are creating value.

Should I get free healthcare and free food and free rent if I have a passion for making a widget that nobody is willing to pay for? Should I be able to spend my days walking in the woods while a barber spends his days cutting hair for money — money that is taxed to pay for someone to spend their day walking in the woods?

To be clear, welfare is valuable as a safety net, but it shouldn’t be a safety harness. If you are disabled or lost your job, definitely welfare is important. But welfare to support some guy writing a new JavaScript library nobody is willing to pay for? That’s ridiculous. Society needs people to build roads, cook food, and cut hair. If society rewarded people for sitting around doing nothing, then who would do those jobs? If people weren’t doing those jobs, who would pay the taxes for all the people that would decide to simply walk in the woods all day?

We would all like the freedom to pursue “this sort of thing,” however, what happens when everyone pursues “this sort of thing?” Who is going to pay for it? The guy hauling freight isn’t going to take too kindly to be paying for people to do nothing.

People should be able to do whatever they want, but it crosses the line of reason when other people are literally forced to pay for it.

Of course this will be an unpopular opinion here because there is an entitlement mentality that would suggest that someone’s latest JavaScript library should be tax subsidized. However, try making that case to a freight hauler who pays the taxes. Make that case to the restaurant owner that she should pay higher taxes so someone else can sit at home writing browser plugins or painting cute rocks with animal faces that nobody wants to buy.

"by definition, doesn’t contribute economic value that exceeds the cost of producing it"

You mean it doesn't capture the value. It may indeed contribute huge value without capturing it.

Exactly. The whole response ignores the existence of consumer surplus. We can see the silliness by applying to the actual examples - since core-js brings in $16204 and is used by 2442712, by such definition it only contributes $0.006 in economic value to each user. Would any of them accept 1 cent - or even a full dollar! - in exchange for not using core-js?

Wait, how do you know it won't contribute economic value?

Maybe it doesn't do so today, but it may very well do so tomorrow. New projects need investment. When somebody spends their time on pursuing an endeavour that they think will have economical impact, then I don't see any issue with supporting them by at least not letting them sleep on the street and suffer from not having access to proper health care.

There seem to be plenty of open-source projects that are used by many people, but aren't rewarded in a way proportional to that. So one could also argue the other way around: Why should society allow for companies making money off people who then are supposed to get financial support from all of us?

"Should I get free healthcare and free food and free rent if I have a passion for making a widget that nobody is willing to pay for?"

Yes. Because if your widget is open or bits of it can be recombined into other things, one of THOSE things might be amazing.

You are assuming great stuff comes from great creators, and that ain't natural. Read up on the Genetic Algorithm, and a-life. It is hugely important to produce a class of superfluous creators making pointless things many of which will fizzle out uselessly, but become part of the genetic soup from which more elegant, counterintuitive things will emerge.

You CANNOT have just only 'excellent, worth-money products that stand alone' as your genetic soup. It produces stagnation, local maximums, and the end of progress.

We have seen this soup of uselessness and lots of indulged, well-off people tinkering away on passion projects, able to just burn money on whatever they pleased without concern for whether it was marketable.

It was called 'Silicon Valley'. There was this thing called the Altair. Quite a story really. This is not in any way hypothetical.

if you could make money doing the same thing would you do it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com