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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

What an even-handed article that acts as essentially a how-to guide on running an OSS product.

I have always held the notion that Open Source Is Not A Business Model; just because you build it does not mean that you are entitled to money, especially if you willingly give it out for free.

Just like any startup, you must find product market fit and generate revenue. It's heartening to see the same philosophy in OSS as well. Treat it like any other commercial product, not as something special.

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While I agree in principle, reliance of big companies to critical projects while not helping them, and in tons of cases not even trying to help them, is not unheard of. And to be clear even in this case the maintainers are not entitled to anything, but: * trying to commercialise something, they would not be entitled to anything either * this would often be in the best interest of everybody to help those projects

Yep. Lots of companies - probably most companies - do nothing to support the opensource projects they depend on. Honestly I think most business people would be horrified if they understood how much their business depends on the volunteer labor of strangers. How many Fortune 500 companies depend on the work of a random hippy in NZ who lives in a houseboat? And the article is right - the funniest part is that you need him more than he needs you.

Plenty of non-opensource developers also have no idea how to act on GitHub. Some people are great. But I’ve also gotten more than my share of entitled “drop everything and fix this now” issues opened over the years. “It’s causing an outage!”. It’s like I’m a wayward junior engineer who needs to be brought in line. Do you appreciate my work or not, idiots? You can’t have it both ways. It’s kind of surreal.

For me, I would have no problem paying for open source software, and have a few times. The problem is I have to have an invoice I can submit to corporate accounting to an actual business entity. I can not "donate" company funds to some random person on the internet.

Many open source projects only have donations based funding, no way for be to download an actual software product that I am invoiced and pay for.

Package the binaries and sell them to me, I will happily pay with company money...

As someone who sold shareware a long time ago, and had to invoice companies now and then, there is some overhead to getting yourself setup to invoice, look like an actual business, and accept payments made out to a business. There are services these days so it's not that expensive or hard. But it's something I see a random software developer not wanting to deal with for the odd small payment. There are also approved vendor lists, etc.

I wonder why there aren't any open source software publishers. Like game publishers, they would take the open source software, package it up, submit invoices, take money, distribute binaries, provide rudimentary support for installation and system issues, and ideally pay 30-70% to the dev. Seems like a pretty reasonable business model, if there actually are businesses who are willing to pay for properly packaged software.

https://codecodeship.com/

They do exist.

> reliance of big companies to critical projects while not helping them, and in tons of cases not even trying to help them, is not unheard of.

The fact is that if those critical projects folded, the big companies would just take over the software 90% of the time - which is supposed to be a positive feature of open source. The other 10% of the time, the reason the software was profitable for the big company is because people were working on it for free.

Maybe the solution is to stop writing all of this corporate software for free, or at least AGPL it.

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