We Should Expect To Pay For Small Open Source Projects

In some cases, I can imagine that users paying for open source software would be a nightmare situation for the developers.

For instance, whenever I'm the sole developer of a "type 0" OSS project, supporting users is typically the most difficult part. This is because, many times, the software is something that I wanted for my own needs, and those needs have been met.

The one saving grace I often have in those situations is that, as demanding as some users might be, at least it's not the potential shitstorm of a user who has paid for something and isn't completely satisfied.

I even think carefully about offering a vector for donations these days. Because inevitably, it will eventually lead to a difficult to parse email from a user who wants help right now, because they just donated $2.

This article uses the wrong framework to think about successful open source projects. It's not like the mobile app store ecosystem.

Successful projects, in terms of numbers of users and contributors, seem to happen in places where many people need something complex and pool their resources to all share in a better solution than any individual one could have been.

Putting the whole thing under economic norms, and encouraging communities to think in those terms is probably extraordinarily counter productive. There isn't enough money available to pay open source developers what they are worth in dollars. If open source operated under economic norms it wouldn't work, since it operates under social norms it does [1]. There is a reason that everyone here doesn't get paid to work on whatever cool fun they feel like working on.

A "type 0" project is a hobby project and your github account isn't there to get you paid. Open sourcing it is socially acceptable public charitable giving crossed with academic publishing.

The next step isn't consulting monetization models or aquisition/IPO. The next step is more contributors so that a team of motivated people can solve a complex problem, for everyone, once and for all (that's the ideal version anyway, about as likely as an IPO or aquisition). That might bring some money, maybe for some core peole but more important is that now everyone else, and especially those that contributed and have expertise, can go on and build/do that thing that this complex problem was stopping them from doing.

Looking at this as an progression from github project to aquisition and defining the stage of a project by revenue misses nearly every lesson learned from watching this strange new market succeed so spectacularly entirely because it is based on different norms and therefore attacks different problems.

[1] http://youtu.be/OdjlOgGVRVA

I'm not sure the author is well aware of the open source community. There is a large body of very large software projects that really only go in this "Type 0" but are nonetheless much bigger than little plugins. I seem to recall a project started by ... oh was it ... I believe it was someone from Finland ...

Anyway, I think this misses the spirit of the community. There's also this idea that I've heard Joel Spolsky talk about, such as once you introduce money, you change the situation drastically. Imagine an kernel module programmer building the module for the usual reasons, now say someone provided the programmer a method to pay some trivial amounts, like $5 or $10 ... Now, you introduce a very small amount of money and it can give the programmer a feeling of "this is a waste of time" because, say, someone working at MS doing a similar job is making much more money doing basically the same thing. This is not to say the programmer doesn't deserve or that making $20 is not better than $0 but it changes the dynamic in an odd way.

I read this over, as well as the original blog post about the grails plugins and am not sure I can really agree. Personally I've always looked at open source contributions as a hobby, and in the end I'm doing it in order to keep the source open and available for those who wish to learn off of it / utilize it somehow.

In fact I would presume that the reason people are not going to pay up front is that they assume the developer is doing it as a favor to the community, and that giving them money for it would break the philosophy of giving out of free will. The real issue though seems to be an overall lack of resources. A one man shop, even with the ability to work on their projects full time, still has a maximum output capacity. Without others to assist there is the chance they would get swarmed with bugs and feature requests leading to burn out.

I think that open source developers need to step back and consider the costs and benefits of their projects. Doing a large amount of projects by oneself without a good job to support on the side will lead to burnout, as we've seen here. It may feel like bestowing a great gift on the community, but if you burn out and halt all development where has that feeling of contribution gone?

Which begs the question of which is more valuable: financial contributions or code contributions?

Software engineering is one of the more well-paid professions available. And yet occasionally on Hacker News there seems to be somebody who doesn't feel they have quite enough money yet. Usually they manifest this by trying to top up their bank account with some underhanded Amazon referral link couched within a blog post. Today it's another "open source software should cost money" plea.

Last time I saw it manifested in this particular form, it was Zed Shaw's "Premium Branch Manifesto" (http://premium-branch.org/) in which he breathlessly warned of impending doom:

    > If this balance of power is not corrected I
    > fear FLOSS will actually die. 

I think it's kind of sad that so many people apparently don't see one of the main things I find so amazing about free software. We're a community of people who give stuff away to others for free often for no other reason than the fact that building it is fun enough in itself. This is simply not a thing on this kind of scale in most other professions, and I feel a little defensive when somebody says we should put a stop to it.

OK, devil's advocacy time here: why?

Is there some deep lack of new and exciting open source projects? I don't see it. Things are vibrant and exciting. New free stuff is appearing every week that is worth looking at. All the "big" projects, of course, are very well funded already, and projects continue to get funding (via diverse mechanisms) as they become "big".

We didn't need this for jquery or rails or pick-your-favorite-web-technology. We don't need it for the lower level stacks either.

I'm sure everyone would be happy to be paid for open source work. And some people want to work on open source but can't for financial reasons. But the only question here that matters is if enough people are willing to release their code without compensation. And clearly the answer is yes.

I'm really surprised that nobody is doing a kickstarter thing for open source.

tiers 0 to n-1: creating product/features

tier n: release as open source (community votes for license) on day 1

I mean in all honesty if I saw a link to some awesome fucking shit and I saw that it was $500 away from being open source, I'd probably do it. It would probably happen yearly or less, but honestly there are a lot of developers making big bucks and we all know how much certain tools could make our lives so much easier.

He misses out on another type of open source project: those supported by professionals as part of their day job, but that aren't directly related the core business of the company.

For example, at my current job we need plupload, or something like it. If it didn't exist, we would be forced to create and maintain something like it. There's no reason why we wouldn't release the code as open source and then continue maintaining it as necessary for our software. The company wins, and so does everyone else.

I'd prefer supporting its developers via Gittip or similar rather than having to deal with buying something to use it. That just puts a barrier on use. (If only they'd accept my money.)

Similarly, I'd rather share my open source project for free rather than spend my effort on selling it, and hope to get some support via other means.

I don't like barriers.

This conversation has been up for over 2 hours, and nobody has noted that this fails the Open Source Definition at item 1? You can verify that at http://opensource.org/osd.

More generally, when you sign a contract, or release something under a license, you should understand what you are doing, why you're doing it. If the legal agreement doesn't accomplish what you want, then don't do it. That goes whether you're a hobbyist, a business, are releasing open source for free, or are selling incredibly expensive per CPU licenses. In general, releasing software for free is not the best way to get paid for the act of writing it. That's common sense, and if that is a problem for you, then you really shouldn't be releasing your software as open source. But you have no grounds to complain that other people choose to.

So why do people release software as open source?

- Fun. It can be nice to say, "Here, look what I did!" Why not give it away for free?

- Learning. Participating in open source software is a good way to get feedback from experienced developers you could never learn from otherwise.

- Marketing. At the worst, you wind up with software to show people that has your name on it. At its best, an individual will wind up with a network of connections who can get you jobs that you like. Then for companies you get into dual licensing business models, ease of attracting developers, etc.

- Gratitude. A lot of developers gained a tremendous amount from using and reading other people's open source software, and feel like they are paying that gift forward.

- License requirement. Some open source software is only available under licenses that say you cannot restrict redistribution of your changes. (The GPL is an example.) Thus you can find that you can get a lot of what you're looking for already done, and the cost is reciprocity. (Hey, if you don't like the license, don't use the software...)

- Maintenance costs. Many companies find that they need something "almost the same as" something out there. But maintaining a fork over time gets expensive as you have to track future improvements, security advisories, and so on. But if you contribute your changes back into the project, then you avoid this cost. (Supporters of the BSD license prefer motivating people this way.)

- Reducing the price of complements. Customers often want to buy a solution, and have a price they are willing to pay. That solution will include multiple pieces of software. If you make other pieces of software cost less, then your piece can cost more. As a concrete example, for many years Oracle pushed customers towards Linux, and then charged a higher price to run on Linux than to run on Solaris.

...and so on and so forth. There are many valid reasons to give away open source software for everyone from individual hobbyists to big companies. But the fact that there are lots of reasons that lots of other people want to do it doesn't mean that it makes sense for you. If it doesn't make sense for you, then don't do it. But don't try to tell everyone else that they shouldn't do what they want to do for their own reasons..

I released several "Type 0" free and open source software in the past. And making people pay for using them, would be the worst I could have done. The software I release as FOSS, is basically stuff I would have coded anyway. But by releasing it for free and as open source, i got following in return:

* Feedback with ideas I wouldn't have come up with myself, that helped me to improve my software.

* Free testers, that reported bugs, I wouldn't have found myself.

* Free contributors, that sent me patches for features and bug fixes I would had to spend my own time on otherwise.

* A nice portfolio, future employers can look at, making it more likely that they hire me.

However making people pay for using my software, will reduce the number of people using my software, and so the number of people who will give feedback, report bugs, and contribute patches. Also people paying for something are less likely to contribute. They are more likely to expect that it is my job to make sure that the software behaves like they expect, since they are paying me for it. But 10-15$ per user, is much less money as I would save by releasing it for free, increasing the number of users/testers and their motivation to contribute.

At my current startup[1], this is exactly what we're trying to address. We built a marketplace for open-source projects, trying to add a business layer around open-source development, so that developers could work on it full time, and provide the level of support that people require.

Proprietary software companies like to point out that while FOSS might be free in distribution, the lack of support means that you pay for it in other ways - and to some extent that's very true. Very few open-source projects get to the point where they can sustain themselves while still giving out their main product for free.

I think developers should be able to sustain themselves working on open-source projects, even with relatively small adoption and scope, by treating it like a business. If you don't want to support it - give it for free, if you want to take it to the next level, start charging for distribution. The important thing in my opinion is getting as much quality and useful code out in the open.

[1] http://www.binpress.com

open source yeah.. but the real reason open source works out is because of the free licenses. Free as in beer and freedom.

If its not free, not everyone will use, test, expand it.

That shouldn't stop anybody from donating of course. But donating is not a _required_ payment. I personally donate to projects I like from time to time, expecting it covers the infrastructure costs, but never expecting it pays somebody to code for it.

I think the author simply wants to express his frustration, because some projects he likes died, or because he expected to get money/investors in his open source projects.

Guess what. All the big open source projects which started the movement were given away with NO expectation. THAT is what made open source successful. The free sharing of knowledge.

Gabriel Weinburg already tried to set this up (although more voluntarily) and you can read about it here http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/help-me-start-a-... and http://fosstithe.org/

The general idea was to tithe a certain portion of profits/revenue towards open source projects. Only a few accepted it though (myself included). Only two really seem to have made any contributions though (I would love to but not making any money yet).

I much rather get one or two corporations sponsoring my project than have each of my users pay $5, for the various reasons outlined in sibling threads. Or better yet, I wish there were government-level grants for this kind of work.

I've been thinking of seeking out sponsors for urllib3 (Python http library, core of Python Requests which recently broke 2 million downloads). After maintaining and enhancing the library since 2009 (with on/off contributors of varying quality), keeping the code quality high while not using the library myself[0] has been hard. Motivation to work on it has been hard to come by, but at the same time it's not as easy to give away to another maintainer as some of my other projects (workerpool and s3funnel have had very smooth transitions).

Getting some hours per month paid by a sponsor would definitely make some of these weekends easier to swallow, but I'm not sure which pricing model is best to pitch. Maybe offer to charge something like 1/2 of my normal hourly rate and let them dictate some feature/bug prioritization? Or maybe a tiered Kickstarter-like approach would be better?

Does anyone have experience with this?

--

[0] I love the library myself, but I haven't had any excuses to do http-related stuff lately.

I do like the idea of people habitually paying for FOSS, but I've wished for a while that there were more of an ecosystem of consulting companies around it. I know of companies that support specific software, but I'm thinking of a full-stack consulting shop: they go to a customer, figure out what they want, and then make whatever fixes they need to make that happen, from the kernel on up.

Maybe I'm just not seeing them, but other than Red Hat, I don't know of companies like that. I think they could make money for two reasons: first, people (especially businesses) are willing to pay for convenience, and second, they would be making money for collecting, configuring and modifying software, which means doing actual work. They could pretty easily make the case that if their customers didn't pay them, they would have to do the same work themselves.

The companies would have an advantage because, unlike a small IT department at a mid-sized company, they could afford to hire enough developers to have someone who really knew all of the software in a standard GNU/Linux system. And they could afford to hire those people because they would have lots of different contracts. They would have an advantage over proprietary software companies because they would have a huge amount of flexibility to modify the software they use.

Again, I think Red Hat does something like this, but we need a few different companies that compete with each other to really grow an ecosystem. I've been hoping that Canonical will turn into something like this (and I think they might hope that too). Having multiple vendors makes customers feel safer, because they can't be locked-in.

I think a lot of developers would want to work at a place like that, as long as they had any sort of reasonable division of labor between working on specific customer projects and maintaining software. Maybe you'd spend half of your time working directly on a project, and the other half refactoring the coreutils (or whatever). But that's really a business necessity, because if you didn't take the time to refactor, you'd never be able to help other customers in the future because the code would become a mess.

No. The number one quality of open source software is the extremely low friction. If I'm doing a project, I don't have to worry if I'm using three or 200 plugins/libraries/components, and I don't have to justify that I'm only using 1% of one of them, or that plugin Z is actually better than plugin Y, but uses library T that I've already paid for.

The main cost of commercial software licensing generally isn't the monetary cost, it's the friction leading to all these annoying tradeoff evaluations.

That said, I think "we", the collective group of people who makes money off the back of open source software projects, probably could be a lot better at throwing some money at developers of the software we use.

I disagree with this. It's not that someone has to pay the developers of what you refer to as Type 0 open source projects for the incentive to exist for them to maintain it; it's just that the developers have to have a reasonable expectation that some value will come to them as a result of of maintaining the project. Everyone values different things, but if money is the goal, I think developing popular software in the open is as good a way as any to attract a healthy financial offer from potential employers.

I am more than happy to pay but unless otherwise specified, I expect support for the product. I expect emails to be replied to and my problems addressed. Most of the open source projects I donate to, I have had a conversation with the developers beforehand and I know that if I ever had a problem, they would be more than happy to help. This ensures that I am paying for a piece of software that is going to be developed into the future and won't die one week out.

Having a culture who encourages financial support of open source projects is good for everyone. But forcing everyone to pay in order to use a project is not. I have about 20 of these projects in my requirements.txt and if I were living in a third-world country, I would have to pay an equivalent of one month of my salary if they all demanded payment.

The author missed community open source projects like PostgreSQL and Linux. They aren't looking for a buyout.

This is only a problem as long as peaple are expected to pay for food, rent and utilities. If we can "give away" FOSS, why can't they ?

Are we so much more evolved beyond greet then the rest of the planet ?

Here is my wish: a system that collect money from me (a few bucks a month, says), and spread that money to different projects according to how much I use/like them. That would be awesome.

What? Paying for open source? Isn't there a license for that already?

What paying $1 gives you is 'Attribution Assurance'. Nothing worse than a github fork in a way that removes attribution!

Somebody has to pay for it, but nobody is obligated to.

"by paying some small amounts as a required step, not voluntarily."

Open source but not free.

I agree that developers need to taken care and that not enough people chip in voluntarily but Open Source is associated with free. If I pay $5 and then give the 'open source code' to John and Jane, who will go after me?