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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> I've been giving less and less attention to PiVPN, and the desire to keep up with it is no longer what it once was.

I wonder if financial/monetary incentive would change this. I don't think it would personally (because putting a value on your free time/mental load/time you can spend with your loved ones doing something else away from the PC is precious)

On the flip side... $500/mo? $1k/mo? $5k/mo? I'm sure most projects that go "defunct" open-source-free-no-financial-incentive-thanklessly-help-build-something could probably find "motivated maintainers" for $3k/mo on average? Internationally?

Is the "capitalist" answer "this repo and all of its efforts are not worth $3k/mo to the open market"?

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A lot of these projects are made in people's leisure time, without profitability, for other fellow geeks, and the users also uses them in their hobbies. And as fellow geeks, we are more likely to be financially poised to be on the other side of the equation: getting paid to write code, rather than being able to pay a developer's wage, at least not in the long term, not in any maintainable manner. Can you afford to pay yourself 3k/month to maintain such a project, without any profitability, just for a hobby?

Agreed. Also often the gap between what people will pay for a hobby project and what money is being made at a tech company by the people who have the hobby is vast. Sometimes there are contractual restrictions on taking money from other jobs simultaneously that complicate it.

You could probably get someone, but would you get someone good (competent, trustworthy, etc)?

Perhaps Jia Tan is looking for a new gig.

>You could probably get someone, but would you get someone good (competent, trustworthy, etc)?

The same could be asked of people who work on open projects for free, could it not?

Is a financial reward (or lack of such reward), in and of itself, some sort of implicit indicator of the quality of the person putting forth the effort?

> Is a financial reward (or lack of such reward), in and of itself, some sort of implicit indicator of the quality of the person putting forth the effort?

It is an implicit indicator of how much that person cares about the project.

Perhaps so.

I don't think we need to make a study of it to be sure that GitHub and Sourceforge are rife with free software ("free" in terms of beer, and in libre, and also in compensation) in various states of incompletion, haphazard execution, and sheer abandonment.

I mean: The open-source community has certainly produced a ton of excellent software for free, but it has also produced (and published) a lot of false starts, loose ends, broken or forgotten code, and unfinished or unpolished work.

Open-source volunteerism is awesome, but it isn't all ponies and rainbows.

Perhaps the author(s) of some of these things might care more about finishing and maintaining them if their ongoing efforts were producing a meaningful amount of money as a reward.

> Perhaps the author(s) of some of these things might care more about finishing and maintaining them if their ongoing efforts were producing a meaningful amount of money as a reward.

Have you looked at the average state of commercial software lately?

Yes, it seems to be much worse than it used to be in (pick a timeframe that relates to your own rose-tinted "back in the day"), but some of it is excellent.

Does any of this somehow mean that a financial incentive must make free (beer and libre) software worse?

If so, why and how?

It does not to follow, for me, that rewarding software authors with money must make things worse.

I've personally put a fair amount of money into various tip jars for free software authors who create stuff that is important to me. There is no part of me that thinks that me doing this somehow disincentivizes them from continuing to do outstanding work.

Maybe not quality of the person, but quality of the job done, absolutely.

When working for free on my hobby projects, I do my absolute best. Now try to pay me $3.50 per hour for similar work (strictly +Infinity% more than before!), I'll probably flat out refuse / won't focus on it as much.

Who will pay? For sure there are developers willing to take care of it if they are payed, but who is willing to pay them?

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