Hacker News Reader

Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

> c) there are people who devote their working lives to OSS without compensation, other people who write a few cute small libraries/tools but don't need the money

Serious question. If you are devoting your working life (that is, time that would otherwise be dedicated to remunerative work) to OSS without compensation, then by definition you probably don't need the money, right? Perhaps because you are already wealthy, or have a family that will support you. There's nothing wrong with this of course, many of us would contribute to OSS for free if we didn't have mortgages and families to pay for. It's basically like doing volunteer work after retirement.

Put another way, are there many people devoting their entire working lives to OSS with no other compensation or resources, essentially going bankrupt to write OSS? I'd imagine very few people are in that category, or if they are, can't sustain it for very long.

View on HN

I took a sabbatical from work in 2017 and devoted that time to creating an open source project which I felt was important to exist in the world. I am not wealthy, nor was anyone else supporting me; I had saved up enough to take a year off, and instead of travelling or learning the saxophone, I spent my time developing software that I released under GPL.

I guess because I was not living hand-to-mouth, I didn't "need" the money? But I wound up nearly going into debt, because it took another year to get a job after that--turns out that maintaining an open-source project is not an asset for employers but a liability. I had an offer from a HugeCo for decent money, but I turned it down because it would basically have precluded me from working further on this project which is only now starting to walk on its own.

It's not my entire working life, by any stretch, but those 2 years were 5% of it, and I figure that cost me $200k+ in "lost" wages. And that does not count all the "free" time I've spent since, fixing bugs and helping people use it, because I love the thing and I want other people to love it too. I'm glad I created it, it's very useful to me and other people who do data exploration in the terminal, but now I have to accept that I probably won't ever recover any significant amount of that value, because...people don't pay for open-source software.

May I ask, what project did you build?

Of course! It's VisiData (visidata.org). Thanks for asking, let me know if you find it useful too :)

Thank you for an AWESOME tool that I regret not finding a use case for yet :D

Well for starters you can just pipe json or shell commands into it. Try `ps -afx | vd -f fixed`.

> I guess because I was not living hand-to-mouth, I didn't "need" the money?

More that you made the conscious choice to work without pay for 2 years, and you and any dependents didn't starve or end up homeless in the process. That's something few people can do.

You asked "Put another way, are there many people devoting their entire working lives to OSS with no other compensation or resources, essentially going bankrupt to write OSS?" He answered, "I wound up nearly going into debt". There are different meanings of "bankrupt", but "out of money" is a reasonable definition to use in this situation.

Besides that, it's in extremely poor taste to marginalize someone's sacrifice of two years just because you think they're privileged. It's usually better to make much of someone's contributions than to minimize them.

> Besides that, it's in extremely poor taste to marginalize someone's sacrifice

I didn't marginalize it. I said the ability to do it is rare. Those are very different things.

I think it would be great to live in a society where people can do what GP did without going into debt, but that will require bigger structural changes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com