Hacker News Reader

Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

I looked all over Textuals website and I have no idea how they make money. Donations? Consulting?

https://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/post/from-open-source-...

> Additionally, I would work on a cloud service using both those projects which at some point would become a business.

> Now this was a good plan. The money from GitHub sponsors which I had previously been donating to charity would take the sting out of not having an income for a while. While far from a salary (where I live), at around $1000 a month it would help pay a few bills.

> I have far more confidence in that vision now that I have raised seed funding. Predicated on that cloud service, I have enough funding to hire a few developers to work on it with me. Last month I was an unemployed code monkey, today I am a Founder / CEO of Textualize. Go figure.

Good find! Getting seed funding to try and monetize a bunch of MIT libraries using a "cloud service". Wild. Wonder if OP was always 100% dedicated to FOSS for 503 days or if they worked on the "cloud service"...

I think the eventual plan might be this? https://textual.textualize.io/blog/2023/09/06/what-is-textua...

Ads in TUIs are an underdeveloped market, I suppose.

Why must everything make money?

Usually people don't have enough savings to dedicate themselves full time to a non money making project.

if the project pays them, it works

Because people have to eat.

Why do you not work for free?

Contributing to OSS is a hobby, not a job. You explicitly work for free on purpose. Whether or not you’re able to pay your bills is unrelated to the OSS contribution, it’s very clear that you’re not going to get paid for writing code that you’re giving away for free.

You only had to read the title to know that the author of the post was paid for 503 days to work on OSS. It was literally his job.

An example of one person being employed and contributing to open source as part of his job is not a refutation of the statement. You don’t have to read anything to know that, just use logic.

To provide a counter-example you’d need to reference an open-source project that makes money selling the source code which, hopefully obviously, doesn’t exist, by definition

Hello, early 1990s! We miss you!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/24/who_writes_open_sourc...

It's called capitalism.

If you have money to gift, I can take it if you don't mind and than I can help myself and others to work for free on FOSS.

It doesn't need to make anybody rich, but it should support its development in a fashion where the authors aren't worse off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com