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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

I've been harping for years to anyone who would listen, Open Source is not a business model [0].

If your motivation for doing open source is money, you're doing it wrong. You'll be much better off just getting a job (and GitHub stars can help with that!).

We all know "build it and they will come" and "follow your passion and the money will follow" don't really work in the real world. You have to make something people want and convince those people it's in their best interest to pay you.

Open source can be a part of a larger strategy to earn a living (consulting, customizations/open core, relicensing, books/talks/seminars, etc), but yeah, GitHub stars aren't money.

[0] https://blog.senko.net/open-source-is-not-a-business-model

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Frankly I don't get purpose of this article. Guy wrote some software with clear expectation of money and released it for free. Fine - bad pick of distribution model - it happens.

Then he writes article, stating that you shouldn't be ashamed to ask for money. To whom it's directed? All OSS developers? Including developers of electron (one of his dependencies), which then has tens or hundreds of packages in its dependency tree? What would happen to his browser if they all wanted dollar/month for use?

If you want to code for money - do paid product. That's OK. No reason to build philosophy around being entitled to payment because you have github stars.

> To whom it’s directed?

It is directed towards a person who would write some software with clear expectation of money and release it for free.

It is directed towards himself.

>To whom it's directed?

To people asking "why not open source?" (iirc have asked this at least once myself) on every non-open-source project released. The answer can simply boil down that the dev(s) are looking to money off it.

He wasn't saying just because you have GitHub stars you should get paid. He's encouraging open source developers to be proud of their work and not be shy about setting up a method for getting paid.

It's meandering unedited text. Calling it an article is a big stretch.

Yeah it's worse to give something out good for free and then make lots of awkward attempts thereafter to monetize, essentially diluting or screwing up what was previously good in a belated attempt to collect compensation. I see this with big sites too; thinking glassdoor and coursera, maybe even facebook falls in this category. In which my initial impressions were positive but at some point these free apps became free-ish and annoying.

Of important note-- open source doesn't necessarily mean free. You can still require paid licenses for eg; commercial use but still provide the source code/allow modification.

As someone, who has experience in building and selling open-source businesses, I cannot agree more

Open-source can be a great selling point and a growth driver, but it won't replace all the other parts of running a business, such as marketing, sales and most importantly, a functioning, profitable business model

If you need some advice, feel free to e-mail me

I will take a look at your open-source project and tell you how it can be turned into a business

This times a million. I'm not sure when people started thinking that everything they do outside of office hours should have a paid return, but open source is meant to be something you do to help others, if you feel like doing it. It's basically just giving back to the community after creating something interesting for your own purposes.

Does that mean it can't help you get opportunities that can make you money? No of course not. It can look good on a CV, boost your name reputation online, get you a speaking gig or a spot at a conference, etc.

But it won't necessarily do that, and you shouldn't expect a return in 99.9% of cases. It's like expecting that your video game mods are going to become your career. In theory it could happen, but it 99% of cases it won't, and that's perfectly fine. It's something you do because you enjoy it.

Hard disagree and flip it back to the freedoms of the user of the software. OSS is about giving the people using software the freedom to inspect and modify the code to the system they use, full stop. The developers have always had the ability and right to sell it or earn from making it. That people think it is developer servitude and virtuously giving it away is incorrect. It may happen, but it is def not a requirement

I guess I should mention that there's nothing wrong with selling an open source product, or selling services related to it. And it can work for sure, especially if you market it correctly.

The thing to note is that:

1. If you're sticking your code up on GitHub or whatever, you shouldn't really expect to make money from that alone. People will use it, and the majority of them won't do much more to support the project that give it a star.

2. If you do sell an open source product, other people can compete with you by selling the same code to their users/customers too.

I've always been a proponent of open-sourcing libraries and smaller apps that aren't a core part of one's business. I don't do that much to be honest, I file issues and feature requests and on occasion, will form/fix/pr back upstream.

IMO is about scratching one's own itch first. That said, I'm not good at running a business, and have little motivation to do so. I like what I do, I'm paid pretty well to do it. In the end, that means I'll probably never be a multi-millionaire. If I didn't work for others, I do have a couple projects I'd like to work on, biggest of which would be one that has been tread so many times before.

In the end, it's a mix. Some are completely altruistic with their free time. Others are paid to work on floss as it brings recognition to a corporation, or scratches their own itches, collectively, but doesn't bring direct revenue. And some do want to be Entreprenurial, those are the ones that should think twice about fully open sourcing their core product(s).

Open source the tools and adjacent products, don't necessarily open source your business.

Are people really depending on Open Source for Economics?

Open Source is not a business model, and that should be obvious. It's a distribution model, which has nothing to do with economics. Sure, it may affect a few variables but marketing and sales strategy are what matter more.

>Are people really depending on Open Source for Economics?

No, but it often seems like people argue as though it should be sufficient. There are lots of people who argue that things should be open sourced who in their arguments elide the point about how will people survive working on things for free.

People like Sindre Sorhus (https://sindresorhus.com) are, but I'd say survivorship bias comes into play here, he's more of an exception than a rule.

it's not a distribution model either, you can distribute binaries the same way, and they are not open source unless they're GPL, copyleft, etc.

It's a source code license.

You could say it's a source code distribution model, as the name suggests.

For me one of the eye-opening posts was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7575210

"In a typical year the OpenSSL project receives about US$2000 in donations."

OpenSSL is one of the most known open source projects. It's like https://xkcd.com/2347/ There's little hope to achieve its level of success by doing open source. And even that project did not earn good money. So living from open source project just by writing code just is not a good idea. It's possible to run open source project as part of startup, I guess. But that's more about marketing than writing code.

Only 2k in donations, but they offer paid support.

https://www.openssl.org/support/contracts.html

I think One Republic wrote a song about this very topic of GitHub: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hT_nvWreIhg

But in all seriousness, Open Source is a gift economy, and collectively produces better and more stable codebsses for the planet, and allows more innovation and wealth creation than closed, proprieraty systems.

Compare Wikipedia to Britannica.

Compare Science to Alchemy.

> I've been harping for years to anyone who would listen, Open Source is not a business model [0].

It's not a business model that usually works, but when it does, it's beautiful: you get to work on what you want, on your own terms and building something truly useful. You become a (tech) god, and you being paid for it. Respect and money. Isn't that what many of us dream about? That's the reason many people try to build something "cool" and publish it on GitHub... to see if they win the lottery. I have definitely tried, but perhaps I know beforehand that I have a 99.999% chance of failing.

> I have definitely tried, but perhaps I know beforehand that I have a 99.999% chance of failing.

You can greatly increase your chances if you also learn the business aspects of open-source, not just publishing code on GitHub

I learned the hard way, but you don't have to. Basic economics understanding goes a long way, along with business-oriented thinking and asking right questions at the beginning, eg. what extras can we offer that would save a lot of time/ generate more revenue. Once you can answer that, you're set to success

It does work for the right sorts of projects [0]

> whether an OSS project lends itself to monetization is a really interesting and subtle question. rule of thumb, be at least two of these: big, boring (roughly correlates with "infrastructural" as @patio11 puts it), and lacking obvious substitutes

Many projects with high star counts fall into only one of those categories

[0]: https://twitter.com/colinhacks/status/1422222156340072456

I would claim, while biting my lip, that python meets those. It had two paid developers in 2019 [1]:

https://discuss.python.org/t/official-list-of-core-developer...

I've been harping for years to anyone who would listen, Open Source is not a business model [0].

But it is, in that, your business would not exist without it.

Open Source asks so little in return. Get trillions of lines of code for free, just give a few back please.

This is akin, to a trucking business paying gas tax. A large corp might save hundreds of billions on software cost, so why not release a million worth for free?

Yes, I get it. A single product, the entire revenue stream, you need cash, I get it.

But regardless, I had to make this point.

Who really knows but is it possibly no different from people who want to support themselves by playing an instrument? Or any other artistic pursuit? It would be interesting to see numbers, but I'm sure there are some out there who do make it off of open source software. They are just the exception.

> We all know "build it and they will come" and "follow your passion and the money will follow" don't really work in the real world.

I'm not sure we all know that!

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