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Comment by Eji1700 | Hacker News Reader

I've always found the diehard linux/FOSS crowd naive and abrasive simply because it seems to totally ignore reality. If you're good at coding, and you enjoy coding, you probably want to do it for a living.

Not as a second job, not as a side project, and certainly not as a charity case that just flat out will not sustain you.

There are precious few things that have the adoption and support linux has, and a lot of that is very much a "right place, right time" thing. The fact that I've seen plenty straight up vilify a coder for daring to want to, you know, make enough to support a library full time has always struck me as self destructive. I'm sure many great coders have given up and moved on to paid projects doing boiler plate because inventing new stuff gets you chewed up and spit out by the community if you monetize.

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It's turtles all the way down. Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story. But then you reach a pit of disillusionment where you realize that you relied on free software more than your own work, and probably ran up quite the karmic deficit selling whatever product you made. Maybe you decide that you don't care, but you have to reason with it somehow.

I think a lot of people lash out at the entrepreneurial spirit because a business venture inherently necessitates risk. Your audience is not going to reward high-risk plays, and if your business proposition threatens their use-case enough then they'll probably protest. That train of logic isn't "diehard linux/FOSS" in my mind but more just holding someone to their own standards. Making a living out of coding is one thing, but turning your passion project into a business is another. If simple abrasive comments are what made them quit Open Source, I can't imagine how long they'd last trying to sell people a Javascript library.

> Selling your library sounds like a great deal if your B2B sales don't dry up and the investors buy into your story.

What "investors"?!? As a single developer, you need a computer and an Internet connection. Where do the six-(or seven-, or eight-)figure amounts of Venture Capital investment come in?

> But then you reach a pit of disillusionment where you realize that you relied on free software more than your own work, and probably ran up quite the karmic deficit selling whatever product you made.

That's what the LGPL is for: Even if you release your actual product only under a commercial license, you can help improve the tools you use, to pay back your karma to the community that enables you to do the whole thing in the first place.

(Disclaimer: This is the only way I can see being able to both make a living as a one-man software development company and participate in / contribute to FOSS... But I haven't taken the leap of faith, put my living where my mouth is. (Yet.) So this could all be hot air.)

none of the "fathers of opensource" had a problem with people coding for money, and it was always presented as a choice to donate code to the commonweal. And they knew how to handle and put constraints on people who were rude and asked too much, LART them or send a clue by four. But it's "you", the people who demand snowflake "codes of conduct", who don't know how to handle the negative energy and then you wind up exhausted and depressed and flailing. I'm not criticizing anybody or the way you/they want things to be, I just think you are mischaracterizing the past because you don't understand the social contract.

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