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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

> I have a lot of sympathy for this viewpoint, but I also ask that we try to remind ourselves. We are asking for professionalism from hobby projects.

Nobody is asking for professional quality standards from hobby projects. At best, they are asking for hobby projects to advertise themselves as such, and not as "this is a library for [x] that you can use in your stuff with the expectations of [maintenance/performance/compatibility/etc.]."

Resume-driven development seems to cause people to oversell their hobby projects as software that is ready to have external users.

> If you want a mature protobuf implementation you should probably buy one

No software is ever developed this way. For some reason, libraries are always free. Approximately nobody will buy paid libraries.

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> At best, they are asking for hobby projects to advertise themselves as such

That's also work. You don't get to ask the hobby programmer to do your work of vetting serious/maintained projects for you. As the professional with a job, you have to do that. If some rando on GitHub writes in their readme that it's maintained, but lies. You're the idiot for believing him. He's probably 12 years old, and you're supposedly a professional.

> No software is ever developed this way.

That's just inaccurate. In my day job we pay for at least 3-4 3rd party libraries that we either have support contracts on or that were developed for us along with a support contract. Besides those there's also the myriad of software products, databases, editors, Prometheus, grafana, that we pay for.

Software people really underestimate how much business guys are willing to pay for having somebody to call. It's not "infinitely scalable" in the way VC's love, but it's definitely a huge business opportunity.

To add to this, in the gamedev space there are a bunch of middleware libraries that are commonly paid for: fmod/wwise, multiplayer networking sdks, etc.

Thinking about this a bit more, it seems that the reason there isn't a good way to sell licenses to software libraries generally is license enforcement. Unity and Unreal have a licensing system built-in that they enforce against gamedevs. Normal server software has no such thing.

That means the only threat you have as a producer of code (once the code is handed over) is the threat of withdrawing service. That means the only ways to sell licenses are:

* Build your own licensing service (or offer SaaS)

* Sell the code for a high price upfront

* Sell service contracts

> For some reason, libraries are always free. Approximately nobody will buy paid libraries.

I suspect this is in no small part because figuring out a licensing (edit: pricing!) model that is both appealing to consumers and sustainable for authors is damn near impossible.

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