Hacker News Reader

Comment by noncoml | Hacker News Reader

There are TONS of people out there writing code and opening the source. These people don’t do it for company sponsorship or money or to improve their CV. They do it purely for the pleasure of someone else using it.

It’s just that only a very tiny fraction becomes popular. That’s when the problems start. Some may see their software being adopted by millions and may start feeling envious of those that make money using it.

Maybe unpopular opinion here, but I don’t see why they should get sponsored by a company. They made the software open source for a reason, and others used it based on the terms it was licensed. No foul play here.

On the other hand it’s well within their rights to ask for money to continue supporting it and developing it. Just because they made something open source in the past doesn’t mean they signed up to be forced to support and develop it indefinitely.

View on HN

I agree with you. If you chose a license you regret, its kind of just your fault. Why would you pick MIT license for example, if you didn't want to allow free commercial use?

If you "make it free" and choose a very relaxed and unencumbered license to encourage adoption of your project and make it more popular. And then you do get popular, and start thinking people should now pay you, it seems like a bit of a lure. There are often alternative open source or closed source solutions. Yours might have reached this popularity not because it is the best, but because it is a good one that is also free and unencumbered.

And now like you said, you're free to change the license for all new code to something else, make it paid, closed, or any other restrictions. And that's fine.

That said, this is about licenses and having companies use your stuff and renumeration and all that.

I think a bigger issue, one that is justified, is the toxic interactions you might need to deal with if your open source project becomes big. People can act really entitled, when you don't owe them nothing. And I find it kind of weird how people will actually act more entitled to something that is offered to them free and open source, than if it was something they'd been paying for. Which kind of baffles me why that is.

> If you chose a license you regret, its kind of just your fault

Agree. The only possible exception I can think of it if you make major contributions to an existing project, and of course use the licence they chose. Even then though, you've voluntarily agreed to those licence terms.

> They do it purely for the pleasure of someone else using it.

Exactly! I've been open sourcing all my projects, often even under MIT or similar, and hope that one day it will be useful to someone!

I even sit down for sometimes hours to write documentation, comment my code, make it maintainable. It gives me a certain joy to make it all neat and tidy, just in case someone ever comes across it (which might or might not ever happen, but if it does, it'll be nice!).

> I even sit down for sometimes hours to write documentation, comment my code, make it maintainable. It gives me a certain joy to make it all neat and tidy, just in case someone ever comes across it (which might or might not ever happen, but if it does, it'll be nice!).

I've been doing that for so long, that it is completely habitual.

My stuff is generally not popular. I'm my own best customer, but I write (and document) everything I do (even the one-offs), as if they will be a corporate legacy.

One of my projects (a fairly massive one, actually) became something a lot bigger. It is now being maintained by a skilled and energetic team. They don't always do things the way that I would have, and that's a good thing. The project is thriving.

The best thing I did for it, was step away, after developing it -alone- for ten years.

One option is of course to get a job in one of those companies that is a user of your project. You get to work on your and possibly other similar projects, and the company gets an employee they already in advance know is going to be skilled and relevant. If your code is very useful for some, it ought to be possible to harness its popularity to offset some of the potential negative side effects.

This is pretty backwards in spirit. If you own the code, there is no reason to let any corporation use you like that. Just change the license to something anti-corporate if you started with too permissive one, it'll make it apply to all the new commits and force such corporations to pay for commercial license or stop using it. If you think they are willing to hire you to work on your project, they are even more willing to just pay for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com