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Comment by zeckalpha | Hacker News Reader

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zeckalpha·

Why must everything make money?

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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

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

Because people have to eat.

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.

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...

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