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Comment by mkremer90 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'm not quite sure how I feel about this.

I have people that ask me to open-source my current side-project all the time (one that is paid), and I find it insanely disrespectful.

"Yes, let me just hand over the source code for my commercial product. How about not."

I'm not trying to sound greedy, but money speaks. If these companies want the software open sourced, they should be pitching in for the cost. If you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all.

EDIT: Perhaps this is a good place to drop the "challenge" I gave myself and invited other developers to join me a few months ago.

DEVELOPERS - I challenge you to spend some money TODAY:

https://mattkremer.com/developers-you-need-to-stop-being-so-...

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I'm not a developer, I'm a DevOps admin, so perhaps I don't understand as well as I would if I was a developer (blood, sweat, time, all that jazz).

I can see it being rude for people asking you to open source an ongoing concern side-project. But if your startup failed, your application didn't have any value in the marketplace (or you weren't able to execute).

As you said: "If you don't think something is worth money, you don't value it at all." If the market doesn't value it, and it failed, why would people pay to open source it?

You're completely correct in my opinion, but I'd like to add one crucial point:

If people are asking/begging for the tool to be open sourced, then they do indeed value it. Otherwise, why would they care if it just withered and died?

They may not have valued it as much as the product was charging for, but that's a different debate entirely. I'm assuming there was some discussion of commercial viability, lowering prices, etc. before they chose to shut down. (You pretty much said this part in your second paragraph, this is the "execution" part.)

>If people are asking/begging for the tool to be open sourced, then they do indeed value it. Otherwise, why would they care if it just withered and died?

If we are talking about a start up, what about current clients? Maybe your business could not be sustained by the number of clients you had, they do find value in but they can not by themselves sustain your business.

Yes it's totally allowed to sell a product under GPL, for example to give it only to the real customers who paid for it. Those are then free to share, but since they know how much it cost them, they may choose not to.

Some people value an open source product more than a proprietary one. Although in this case, the OP couldn't get enough funding to release it as open source.

If someone won't pay for a closed product, and won't pay to open it up, they don't value it at all.

This completely ignores customers without boatloads of cash laying around. I've worked in educational institutions where there is absolutely no budget to do something. However, people that are genuinely interested in accomplishing something will turn to open source.

They have time to contribute back through documentation, bug reports, and even bug fixes. The only thing they don't have is money. That doesn't mean they don't value the project.

If you're interested in seeing something open sourced and you have time but not money, consider offering to do some of the requisite cleanup work under NDA.

"If someone won't pay for a closed product, and won't pay to open it up, they don't value it at all."

There might be no/little value in the product but some probability of value in the source. For example, for a competitor there is possibly a lot of value in seeing the approaches the software took, the problems the developers ran into, etc. Key word: Possibly.

I'd personally just ask to interview the startup owner for 10 hours at say $200/hr but I know some people aren't great at extracting value from a face to face chat.

Ah yes, money is the only measure of value in the world...

It's a good thing my kids pay me to love them.

Note that I said, "They don't value it." That doesn't mean it doesn't have any value.

Value is not an objective property of a thing, so I don't see your point. Things have value by the virtue of them being valued, not solely because someone wants to spend money on it.

Actually there's an entire spectrum of pricing between paying enough to get the owner to agree to give the product or the source to you, and wanting it for free.

Price determination is always hard in business, but I'd like to think its a bit easier with software or SaaS products, as you have zero marginal cost (besides server time).

I believe we're in agreement then!

'The market' - which is actually not a useful catch-all way to describe a complex set of customs, traditions, power-plays, politics, and other relationships - may have undervalued something for all kinds of reasons.

Markets are not only not omniscient, they're remarkably easy to influence if you're one of the relatively few people who understand how to do effective marketing. (I'm not, but I've certainly experienced people who are.)

Ability-to-persuade usually trumps ability-to-deliver. Even in tech.

So what's the real value of a product/service?

With a failure like this, the lack-of-value may have been as much about the failure to upsell and market correctly as about a lack of practical usefulness.

Making people pay for something that they already get for free is hard. I have never paid for a piece of software. I have donated to a few open source projects and have contributed code to several too. Most of us developers are used to getting high quality open source software for free and being willing to contribute back to it for that reason. Being asked to pay for it instead just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If that model doesn't work for your software, fine, but that just means I'm not going to use your software.

Perhaps a better solution here would be to hand the code off to a trusted group of volunteers for clean up purposes.

I know this is going to seem like nitpicking, but most developers will never contribute to open source. Maybe most of the people you are immediately surrounded by do. But a lot of open source is written by a small subset of the population with an extremely long-tail of contributors that will never come close to giving back as much as they take.

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