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Comment by nagonago | Hacker News Reader

When I got a Macbook many years ago, I was surprised how often little utility software like this cost money. I was just so used to the abundance of open source and freeware in the Windows/Linux world.

No judgement either way, I get that developers want to be compensated for their time. I just always found the difference in culture curious. I guess it's because if you're willing to spend the extra premium for Apple products, you're probably also willing to spend a little extra premium on the software too.

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> I get that developers want to be compensated for their time.

Depends. If you build software for others then of course you should be paid. But if you build sth for youself, to scratch you own itch, isn't that already compensation? Why try to milk that cow to for such a mini tool that just took a few weekends to build? (The author said that.) If everybody had followed that philosophy then the whole OSS ecosystem wouldn't exist. Time to pay back to the community and open source such a project.

The Mac way is much better. Users get high quality software for a fair price, and talented indie developers get compensated for their work and skills.

Meanwhile I guess FOSS communists can continue to enjoy working for free programming crucial net infrastructure for companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft.

> FOSS communists

That's a solid combination of ideas. If anybody is forming a group of FOSS comrades - count me in!

Pick any FOSS project and you will be right at home.

But you won't have time for much merry-making with your friends: An important manager at Meta just submitted a bug report to your open source project which needs to get taken care of urgently and for free by you. Quarterly reports are quickly approaching, so get on it comrade! Don't make him wait!

Consider it done!

There is a lot of work post launch in customer support, fixing security issues, keeping code up to date, and fixing bugs.

The author wrote explicitly that they want to be compensated because they spent weekends writing the thing.

Any customer support that has to do with payments and license checks doesn't count.

Once you have a community of interested folks then fixing security issues and keeping things up to date is much easier. If there isn't enough interest then there isn't much of a monetizeable customer base anyway. It's self-regulating.

I just make an open source version https://github.com/nagisa77/OpenBoringBar

This worked well.

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