from Hacker News

Dear Open Source: let’s do a better job of asking for money

by andygrunwald on 2/28/23, 8:43 PM with 9 comments

  • by thenerdhead on 3/1/23, 11:24 AM

    I personally see the models completely different.

    One is free redistribution, which is an open source project.

    The other is a SaaS product, which is closed source. (Pro examples, priority queue, email support, etc)

    You can build a SaaS around your OSS, but do not call it asking for money. You are more or less changing from a project to a product model. People happen to pay for perceived valued products more often than sponsoring projects.

  • by hgs3 on 3/1/23, 2:19 AM

    Rather than releasing under the MIT license, I'm wondering if the authors had considered duel licensing their code under a strong copyleft license, like the GPL, and selling closed-source licenses? I'm considering doing this in addition to paid support and feature requests as mentioned in the blog.

  • by grrdotcloud on 3/1/23, 4:44 AM

    Curious about this topic.

    Would it be possible to submit an issue with a bounty attached? I find a bug, I don't know the code base well enough, I escrow $20 and attach it to my bug report.

    Someone fixes the bug, they get 80%, and the project it's 20%.

    This would directly contribute positive outcomes to contributors and projects.

  • by quectophoton on 3/1/23, 8:06 AM

    I'm all for developers getting paid, but the thing with monetizing an open source project is:

    If someone pays for your project, does the money belong exclusively to you as the project creator?

    If the answer is "yes", you're literally making money off the effort of others without compensating them[1]; if the answer is "no":

    * How do you decide how much should go to everyone else?

    * Do you pay some percentage of what you earn to your dependencies? Only direct dependencies? When do you stop considering something a dependency (e.g. if you use a Linux distribution, do you donate to their maintainers as well)?

    * Do you pay maintainers of your project?

    * If you're not working actively in the project, but some devs are maintaining it, do you still get paid as the author? Or does "your share" go entirely to the maintainers?

    * If some dev contributes one time, but it turns out to be a real important feature that becomes "core" because of how useful it turns out to be, do you pay them? Only once, or some part of your earnings?

    * If someone forks your project, and you merge code from that fork, do you pay the author of the fork?

    I'm not arguing for or against either position. I do what keeps my conscience clean.

    I'm just trying to raise some questions that always come to my mind when the author of an open source project tries to get donations, or when they complain about others profiting off their project without donating anything[2].

    [1] [2]: Notice the similarity between these two situations.