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Comment by hrbf | Hacker News Reader

GitHub stars are a useless metric. It’s basically a bookmark count. If there was any correlation between them and donations, my combined projects of 35k+ stars should make me at least a couple of bucks each month.

Instead, lifetime total of ~7 years is ~300 EUR, which includes donations to a NGO I forwarded, which account for most of it.

Most people will not pay voluntarily for something they can get for free. That’s just how it is.

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Sadly, it's now got to the point where people will downvote you for charging anything more than 0 and, if possible, they will write 1 star reviews in caps DON'T DOWNLOAD, IT'S NOT FREE!!

You know, let them. Whatever I decide to share with the world, I do for reasons of giving back. If some grab, run and foul-mouth, that’s their issue.

The main idea of free culture is building on each other, not maximum extractive consumption. I believe the idea to be further ahead than our economic systems and accompanying incentives though.

I also am a fan of showing the other cheek but have to admit this does get me down from time to time .. makes me feel like a vending machine with no coin slots. Only hope is regulation of gate keepers at this point

well, most of the project use tens if not hundreds other project's open source code and also do not donate to them

What about those self-contained ones like mine?

Unless it's rigidly self-hosted compiler for your own language, I have a feeling it still depends on other projects a lot.

One of it is, in fact, a static document, basically just a very large README.md file chock full of information. It could be a book.

I don't think projects comparable to books can be at the same time comparable to software

I thought we were discussing GitHub stars' correlation (or lack thereof) to donations. I don't see how usefulness for many people should be limited to software only. Anyway, I've said what I wanted to say.

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