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Comment by oinksoft | Hacker News Reader

a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers.

What if Linus said, "I have this great idea for a version control system, but I need the community to raise $100k to make it happen"? Of course he would never do that. The reason for making git was to give the kernel project what it needed for a version control system. Linus' time is at least an order of magnitude more valuable than Yahuda Katz' time. Just as git arguably makes the kernel project more successful, rails.app ought to make Rails more popular. Wide deployment of Linux in turn makes Linux developers' skills more valuable, just as wider deployment of Rails enriches Ruby developers.

c) ... Rails was designed to, and succeeds at, making companies great piles of money

d) OSS developers making money by it

That can be said for just about any popular open source project used in the business world.

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> Of course he would never do that.

Why? Maybe he was paid by the linux foundation during that time? Other sources of income? The gratuit "of course" is not clear to me.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you try to say, but: " rails.app ought to make Rails more popular [...] wider deployment of Rails enriches Ruby developers". Are you saying that Yehuda should not make money from his efforts, but the Ruby developers in turn can use the results naturally for their gain?

Why? Maybe he was paid by the linux foundation during that time? Other sources of income? The gratuit "of course" is not clear to me.

And Rails is sponsored by 37Signals. You'd be hard pressed to find very many large open source projects without commercial backing.

Are you saying that Yehuda should not make money from his efforts, but the Ruby developers in turn can use the results naturally for their gain?

That is generally how things work. Companies specializing in open source technologies have a business interest in their specialty software(s) becoming more popular. A core Rails developer will command the highest speaking and consulting fees.

I think the reservation many people have about all of this is that it feels backwards. Asking for sponsors is one thing, but making the open source project pay-to-play flies in the face of the spirit of FLOSS.

> but making the open source project pay-to-play flies in the face of the spirit of FLOSS

Ah, maybe I just do not agree with that spirit. The SBCL compiler fared well with Nikodemus Siivola's crowdfunding: http://random-state.net/log/3523852985.html

At the same time I do not get how this is a problem for people to accept wrt software, while it is the common suggestion to artists in copyright questions on HN: go crowdfunding!

What is "FLOSS"? Free/Open Source software? The fact that you can't even refer to it without an acronym that conflates two opposed philosophies suggests that maybe the "spirit of FLOSS" is less well-defined than you think it is.

In any event, it is better than Katz should work directly for people who are going to use his software than that he work for some giant company that incidentally finds it valuable to task him with something useful.

Free and open source are not opposing philosophies. Software cannot realistically be considered "free" without being open source.

No. You should consult Google, perhaps with a query including "vs".

... But software that is open source is not nessicarily free. Open source is a development model, free software is a religious movement

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