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Comment by peutetre | Hacker News Reader

> selling to developers (who are some of the most difficult buyers to convenience to pay).

All of whom, strangely, expect to be paid for their work.

I dislike this implication that developers are greedy when the real tension is commercial interests vs mutually beneficial communal interests. Of course everyone expects to get paid, but developers love community projects and protect them fiercely because there's no natural force that can. It's all up to the people themselves.

Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude. I think most people aren't. As far as being stingy goes, I believe I have paid more for software so far than most people will in their entire life time by probably multiples and I'm happy to continue to do so, and I will also be on every thread about a CLA rug-pull as well, because BS is BS, no two ways about it.

> Sure, some minority of people are just greedy and rude.

You're conflating 2 different things together. I don't think most people are rude. I think most people are greedy.

They are two things but they are not vastly unrelated. In this context the rudeness would mostly come from entitlement which is definitely related to (and still distinct from) being "greedy".

As far as "most people are greedy" goes, that really comes down to how you quantify "greed" and I really think we're better off agreeing to disagree on this point.

Given amount of open source available for free I can easily say your statement is totally wrong.

We expect to get paid for satisfying someone else's requirements. We do not expect to get paid to scratch our own itches.

That is exactly the point, those using the free tools expect to be paid, while feeling entitled about those free tools capabilities and zero monetary contributions.

Huge majority of OSS developers (especially for big projects) are paid for their opensource work too.

I don't think so. If you're saying that in big projects (e.g. Linux) most developers are paid, sure, but those projects are a drop in the ocean of open source projects. I doubt very much that there are more paid than unpaid OSS developers but neither of us are bringing numbers.

The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report (https://explore.tidelift.com/2024-survey) disagrees. And that is probably the most comprehensive one that actually favors large projects, because of Tidelift business model.

> The portion of respondents who reported they are unpaid hobbyists remains at 60 percent, the same as in last year's survey.

Only 12% checked "I'm a semi-professional maintainer, and earn most of my income from maintaining projects." 24% checked "some of my income from maintaining projects"

The site keeps shoving a data colleciton popup in my face so I can't read it - what's the sample/methodology for a "maintainer" here? Do they normalize against the usage of their output projects at all?

Are those projects the size of Jetbrains IDEs - e.g. Linux kernel, ffmpeg, VIM, Emacs, etc. ?

Doing charity work does not mean you don't expect to be paid for your regular work. Also, a lot of companies do pay devs to work on open source projects.

Open source isn't charity - just like playing non-professional sports isn't charity: the vast majority of participants see it as a hobby or social activity. A minority get paid, and a minority of the minority "break even", but vast majority are playing in self-organized leagues and pick up games, which are in no shape or form charities (even if the public can watch for free as a side-effect).

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