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Comment by 0dmethz | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. "Sorry, but I don't work for free, consider sponsoring the project" should be a perfectly legitimate reason to reject a request on an open source project.

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The reason that response is so rare is that people forgot the origin of open source. Once I solve my problem, it costs me nothing to give you the solution.

If you just want me to solve your problem when I don't also have it, you need to compensate me for my time.

I think (some)people forget that that particular piece of software saves them money and/or time and think they are entitled to it (somehow). They forget that nobody owes them anything and should be grateful for the fact it's FOSS in the first place.

Respectfully, this is not the origin of open source.

The origin of open source is the ideal that "users should be able to see - and modify - the code that is running on their machines."

The "it costs me nothing" has also also proven to be false, because there's a pretty sizable overhead to open sourcing and maintaining an open source project, especially once it becomes popular. If there was no overhead, you wouldn't see articles like the "Pay Me or Fork This" post from earlier this morning.

I always understood that as a later Richard Stallman-esque take on it.

Transparency would have just been assumed by the first people to do OSS because they'd be the ones loading the programs.

It's worth reading into the history of OSS. There was a bit of sharing going on in the early 70's, but it was all being locked down before Richard Stallman and his contemporaries created the modern OSS movement via the GNU project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

The term "free software" predates "open source" by many years. Stallman started work on free software (the movement and the code) many, many years before Eric S Raymond coined the term "open source".

It's about the sharing of code, whatever label you put on it. Terminology usually lags behind practice.

The terms "free software" and "open source" were created very deliberately to express different values. The conflict between those values has been the source of a lot of contention in the past. Nowadays there's less of that, probably because as the industry grows, the proportion of developers who are old enough to remember this stuff is going down.

No, you could always share your code, "Open" source adds nothing to that.

"Free" software is about preventing technology lock-in. As in "I'll share with you but only if you agree to share with me."

Sure, but what's a reasonable price to offer? $1? $10? $100? At what point does it not make sense for the end-user to sponsor a FOSS project in order to bring it up to feature parity with a proprietary equivalent if it costs more to pay for the feature than just buying the proprietary version?

To use a real-world example, I used to use a program called Tag&Rename for managing my mp3 metadata for years.[0] It had a method of scraping Amazon for album info, which I loved. When I switched to Linux, I switched over to EasyTag[1], which is a fine program, although I still find T&R still easier to use, and I miss the Amazon integration.

I would be willing to pay up to $30 to get Amazon scraping into EasyTag, because I believe in the long-term benefits of well-supported FOSS software. But beyond that, it's hard to justify, because I could just as easily pay $30 and run T&R under Wine/in a VM.

[0] http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/EasyTAG

It's basically a market question. Either side should be able to make an offer and you either agree on a mutually beneficial price or not.

I don't understand this post.

It's worth $30 to you, so offer some amount above $0 and below $30. If the core developer won't do it for less than $30, find someone who will, or use a different tool, or live with the deficiency.

This is literally how all other markets work, or are supposed to work. Imagine having a completely unrelated market in which you are totally free to negotiate, and then complaining that it's too hard to settle on a price.

I think what AdmiralAsshat means is: There's a gigantic gap between typical market prices for retail computer software and the hourly wage of computer programmers

When you buy a $70 AAA game, you pay what, 1/100,000 of the development cost? 1/1,000,000?

So when you try to directly fund the development of almost anything, it's gonna seem real expensive, because you're paying 100% of the cost when you're used to paying 0.001%.

The right price is the developer's consultant rate * number of hours it takes.

If you are the only person in the world that needs it, you should pay the full rate. If others have the same need, you call can share the price.

It's astounding how people are susceptible to taking things personally and generally being browbeaten. Kudos to the faker.js dev for coming to this conclusion, but it's wild to me that this wasn't their default position from day 1.

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