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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

An open source project does not, and cannot, in itself, make money (EDIT: Except if your project is very well-known; then you can solicit donations.). Something which makes money must, at most, be an affiliated activity. If I sell guided hiking tours, can I claim that the mountain makes money?

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Why can't it? I played a game (shapez) which is open source. If you like, you can clone the repo, build it locally, and play it for free. But if you, like me, would happily pay $10 to avoid working out another JS build process, you can buy a copy on Steam. The developer seems to be doing fairly well.

I agree and its like selling foss binaries. My question is what stops a cloner from stealing your work? We’ve seen it on App Store over and over the attack of the clones and that is without access to your source code…

Brand recognition, enforced by trademarks. You can't stop people from publishing your work under a different name, but they could have cloned it anyways. Or alternatively being in a niche nobody pays attention to.

The kinds of projects you can do solo are often trivial to clone because what makes you unique won't be raw manpower invested.

Well, nothing - in theory. You can, of course, license your code in such a way that you can at least send a cease and desist to a cloner, but that's really only useful in jurisdictions which would enforce it.

But for the example of shapez, there's a lot of added value that's not in the source code. The creator is active in the shapez discord, and there are also paid DLCs on Steam which aren't open source. So there are at least some ways to monetize and make your community loyal that are still compatible with open source.

In that case, the business is running a program build consultancy (with a monopoly, no less). Once you look at it this way, you can see the perverse incentives pop out.

The only real perverse incentive I can think of is that one might deliberately make the build process extra complicated to encourage people to part with their $10. The game in question is by a solo indie dev afaik, so that seems a bit unlikely in this case.

I think "program build consultancy" is an overly cynical way to look at this particular situation. I was more than happy to pay the $10 to support the guy and not have to muck with an Electron build. /shrug

>can I claim that the mountain makes money?

Sure? I feel like it wouldn't be unusual semantically to see a sentence like "the Foobar mountain brings in eleventy zillion dollars in tourism per year".

Yes, but thinking this way does not help you in envisaging more activities which could bring in more money.

In this case, thinking of it as “mountain-related” income shadows the fact that your business is actually tourism, an insight which could lead you to invest in other, non-mountain-related but tourism-benefiting projects.

>An open source project does not, and cannot, make money.

Why not? What if you collect large donations?

Wikimedia makes a lot of money (for itself) even with all the open-source-non-affiliated activities removed.

You could say that it’s the fundraising which makes the money, but I must admit that this is a weak argument at best. So I guess that you’re right, you can finance a FOSS project by donations. But this only works for both very useful and very public projects, like Wikipedia.

If I sell courses about Windows, can I claim that Windows makes money?

Your comparison is incorrect because you wrote a program whereas the guide didn't set up the trail or build infrastructure to hike on the mountains

If you build a mountain and then sell guided tours for your mountain, can you claim that your mountain makes money?

No, I would argue that the guided tours make money, not the mountain itself.

Right, but if you didn't build the mountain there would be no tours.

After the mountain is built, the mountain must be considered a sunk cost. The mountain now exists, and you must move forward from there, independently of who built it and why. And then your business is a simple tour guide business.

Well if you weren't keeping the public trails clean and maintained, you couldn't offer those tours.

I agree, but you are now effectively operating a mountain-cleaning company. This is not, I would argue, making money off the mountain as one would normally interpret the phrase.

I think we both see the fundamental misalignment of incentives. The company's job is not to maintain the mountain or the trails, and once it begins flourishing, it'll always be tempting to cut those branches because they're silly to spend so much effort on.

It's a very helpful metaphor though, thanks for that. Free software is doing a ton, but there is a lot of space left unepxlored for economical reasons, surprisingly. I've seen projects refusing to document their code or clean up their APIs, leaving a high barrier to entry just to keep the consultancy running. Then there's the fact that infrastructure is never sexy, and then the whole xkcd #2347 problem where the entire world relies on one destitute retired person in their dacha to keep their lights on with a key library that everyone uses quietly.

Makes me think if there could ever be a model that implements micropayments for software library usage, a little like lambda calls or like pay-by-article models for newspapers. But the reason why that isn't feasible may be the same reason why hiking trails aren't toll roads.

Thank you for understanding my point in the spirit in which it was offered.

Yes most people are not as precise about semantics as some HN readers and would understand what you mean.

People can and do pay money for FOSS code, even though not everyone does.

That sounds like semantics.

They are not saying "prohibit free access" here.

I think it’s an important distinction. Many people want to work on free software, but also have bills. So they think “How can I make money from doing this?”, which leads them down to a very limited set of options¹:

• https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html.en

• https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

But these are not the only means to make money! To return to my mountain analogy, you could easily imagine many ways to profit from the mere existence of a mountain. You could, as I wrote, give guided tours, but you could also build water slides, build an observatory at the highest peak, or mine the mountain for precious minerals. All these have some risk, of course, of damaging the mountain itself, but they are all money-making schemes which would not occur to anyone wanting to somehow profit off the mountain exactly as it is.

Therefore, calling it “making money from FOSS” is simplistic and limits your own thinking.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30293290

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