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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Furthermore, looking at almost 26k GitHub stars for this repository, if only about 14% of the people who this resource is useful for, sponsored me with a one time amount of a single Euro, I could order a new machine that probably lasted me another eight years. It's not something I'd expect, nor think I should. It's entirely my issue.

It's unseemly that people have to beg like this. I would be happy to pay a small annual Github subscription if it were distributed back to repo maintainers. Same thing with all the 'buy me a coffee' tags and now the 'buy me a slice of pizza' ones. Instead of funding useful bodies of work with meaningful micro-grants you have projects competing to provide people with better cups to rattle.

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This kind of knowledge has historically been shared for free. We are not entitled to it, as much as the author is not entitled to compensation.

At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion, I’ll say this: asking for donations is great, complaining that people are “leeching” your CC-licensed content, not so much. If you don’t have the bandwidth to maintain a project, just stop. Humanity will be fine.

This move to monetize everything is a huge step backwards (or forwards into the abyss…).

Meanwhile, Dwarf Fortress made a new release, is selling it for $30, and everyone is rushing just to give the developer $30 because they want to support them.

> have all those ppl been playing free DF for 25 years and just waiting for an opportunity to pay $30?

> Yes

* times 50 pages

https://steamcommunity.com/app/975370/discussions/0/37093075...

Something about selling tools to developers just brings out the worst of "bah, I could build that in a weekend so it's not worth anything so I'm not going to pay for it"-ness.

That is amazing!

The flipside would be if the author put it on steam, had barely any sales, and then started complaining about how people leeched on his work for 25 years.

It is well over 100 pages now.

It’s mind-blowing that the 8th wonder of humanity, the open-source software in general, which runs the entire world, reached other planets and has even taken off from them (the helicopter on Mars ran Linux), has been a giant cooperation and donated for free by its owners. It far outdid the previous wonders and yet, it’s immaterial.

It’s a stretch to call Linux donated imo. A ton of work is paid and the companies only “donate” because the license requires them too

The GPL doesn't require anyone to contribute back to the upstream project, only contribute forward to downstream users, who may or may not care about source code and even if they do, may or may not bother to publish the code they receive, and even if they do, they/others may or may not try to contribute that code back upstream. It is only a culture of contributing back upstream and more importantly the costs of forking vs merging that leads to upstream contributions. Of course the GPL and copyleft are a big part of forming that culture, but not all of it.

It's not only culture, it's also mutually beneficial, the cost of maintaining a forked version of the kernel is not worth it. Meanwhile working on a patch and publishing it upstream is relatively easy "fire-and-forget", the patch is there, other people will use it and contribute back.

Companies still have a ton of private code that never makes its way into the open source world.

I mentioned the forking cost too, my main point though is the license doesn't require people to upstream their stuff.

This move to monetize everything is a huge step backwards

The guy can't afford to replace his 10 year old laptop, meantime rents and profits are at an all-time high. Seems like there's a few segments missing in the virtuous circle.

Or it’s hyperbole and there are many reasons the guy has a 10 year old laptop. People donating a euro for a list of commands is unlikely when 10 euros gives them a billion hours a month on Netflix.

The marginal value of these commands is really, really low when you start comparing it to all the stuff that people could spend.

Most everyone has high rents and old laptops.

Author here. I don't expect people to pay me for anything. My main motivation was (and still is) to just give back, since I profit from free information and software created by others as well. I fully expect this temporary increase in traffic to net exactly what it has netted before: almost nothing. And you know what? I'm fine with that. Donations are not the reason this little project exists.

What I am is struggling to make ends meet for some time. A new laptop is near the bottom of my priorities right now. Money will run out around the beginning of February. It makes me sad to read cynical comments like this. That's all I have to say.

Thanks for putting the list together, the commands have really helped me.

I hope your fortune turns and you soon find a job.

The offputting thing to me was the faulty logic of 14% of people starred donated. That’s a phenomenal donation rate that’s unprecedented. So it’s like prefacing my work with “if money rained on my front yard” or something along those lines.

And I don’t like the discussion that guilts people who don’t donate. I donate to projects on GitHub. Not much and not to yours. But it’s something. But I contribute in other ways and would like to discourage nagging people (not by you as your preamble comment was pretty benign) who don’t donate.

I think the author doesn't get GitHub stars. They don't mean "I use this and like it", they are simply bookmarks. A way to find something interesting again. I don't think I actively use anything I starred. Or am I the odd one out?

I use it the same way - "oh this is interesting and I may want to use this later" presses star button

This is what bookmarking in your browser is for. Not here for whines about convenience, if the maintainer can see it then you're sending a signal.

People place way too much importance on github stars.

I will continue "bookmarking with stars" and not using half the things I star :)

presses star button, never read it again

This is a misunderstanding but it is far from unusual. For one, the JavaScript package ecosystem is incredibly vain and is absolutely obsessed with these sorts of deeply flawed measurements of popularity.

That's pretty much what GitHub Sponsors is.

Except it's targeted to whomever I feel like sponsoring. Maybe an additional way could be distribution of a general sponsorship fund based on the number of stars or another measure of merit/popularity? I've sponsored individual projects on GitHub before, but would prefer this way.

Yes, that's my point. It's another market, and while markets have a lot of utility they also tend towards bimodal distributions which disproportionately reward a very successful and visible participants while disproportionately exploiting a much larger group. A pure market system has higher entropy than one which features some redistribution.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0001432.pdf

I think in France we had some interesting propositions for press funding based on this idea.

Everyone paid a tax each year and gets token that they can attribute to the media they want. The fund are redistributed according to the tokens.

I don't really like the idea of an automated measurement of merit / popularity. Let users decide and choose few projects they want to sponsor each year. Maybe show the current number of sponsor so big projects don't get all the votes.

If something like this is going to be based on number of stars, imagine how this will turn the current "give us a star on github" to.

a game just like amazon reviews. if there's a system that can generate money that is able to be gamed, it will be. star ratings on git hub will become next to useless as it will no longer be used for anything other than monetization.

And Marx and Engles philosophy :D

The university system is a mechanism to fund public goods. The problem is the professors are judged according to their production of novel knowledge, and maintaining useful software does not produce novel knowledge. We should endow chairs of "open-source professors", who are judged according to their production/maintenance of useful software, in order to re-use the infrastructure of the university system to fund this other type of public good.

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