Hacker News Reader

Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

When talking about GitHub stars and money, it's important to understand the other side of the equation.

A useful free and open source project garners GitHub stars and general recognition because it is useful, but also because it is free. The stars are the social compensation in this case. The free nature of the software is essential to that relationship.

View on HN

The ‘free’ part in ‘free and open source software’ refers to the freedom given to the user of the software to read, modify and distribute the software that is provided to them [1]. It refers to that freedom and is independently of the price that obtaining the software has. Free doesn’t mean it has no price, creators can profit from it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

In the philosophical sense, sure. But given the context of this conversation, the fact that you don’t have to pay to use GitHub projects is absolutely relevant to their success.

I agree with you on that, sure. I think being gratis overlaps with being free… I think?… Having free access to the software means being able to use it and distribute it. I guess profit comes most of the times from support or distribution of the software, or the binaries. I have read this post [1] on the topic referenced in the Wikipedia article I mentioned, I thought it was interesting.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2016-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com