Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

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Something that is sometimes seen as a "marketing" type thing is documentation. However, good documentation is a clear indicator of a better project, if only because it makes it qualitatively easier to implement. I'm going to choose the project with the clear, attractive, well written guide and api docs over the project where I have to dig through pull requests to find method names.

Worse are the projects that actually expect you to look at the tests as the only form of docs. This indicates that the author does not care about whether you have an easy time using the project, and that it was only written for their own amusement.

A well done project website shows that the author wants you to have an easy time working with the code, and is "putting out a welcome mat".

Compare mercury: https://github.com/Raynos/mercury with vue: http://vuejs.org/.

mercury is likely the "better" framework, with it's reactive approach, but in vue, there is attention to detail and documentation through and through. So vue is inevitably what I recommend to backend developers or others who just want to get something done.

I don't use Vue.js (I use React), but I agree that the project is extremely well-documented and beginner-friendly.

The project also has 3400 stars on Github, so the lead dev is gaining some significant popularity. Furthermore, a number of for-profit businesses are almost certainly using the framework in production, as a key part of their websites (Optimizely is cited on their web site as using it in production, but I'm positive there are others).

And yet, for all his efforts, the developer is given $5.00 a month on his prominently displayed Gratispay account: https://gratipay.com/yyx990803/

$5.00. A single Starbucks cappuccino. A month.

When I see things like this, it makes me despair of ever making a decent living doing open source software (I have some semi-popular projects, but nowhere near the level of Vue.js).

In the end, it also makes me wonder if open source development isn't devaluing the software profession in terms of compensation and prestige. If seems like if people don't pay for something, they just don't respect it, regardless of how useful, well-documented, and well-designed it may be.

I love open source, but every time I see a super popular project with only a few dollars of total donations, or hear the lead dev of a open source project used by massive companies around the world tell me he's barely making a living, part of me dies inside.

This isn't unique to software; the lowered barriers to creation has meant that the value of almost everything has dropped to the point of worthlessness. While you may not be able to make a living from your open source software through donations, you can certainly make a living by providing support to businesses or assisting with integrations/migrations. We are seeing a shift towards a service-oriented industry, rather than a product-oriented industry, and I expect the rate at which this transformation is taking place to drastically increase in the near future.

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