> there is a very heavy atmosphere in the open source community of excommunicating anyone who dares to ask for payment as heathens of the vilest order
I fully agree that forcing payment or using dual licensing is unfortunately heavily frowned upon. But a voluntary Patreon/donation option is perfectly acceptable to the same anti-payment people.
> Just to clarify, I am okay with paid software existing.
"Open source" does not mean "you are not allowed to demand money". For example Fritzing ask the user to pay for the download (see https://fritzing.org/download/). It just means that you don't have a monopoly on distribution or asking for money.
> I’m not against monetisation at all, we all have lives and need to pay our bills.
OK, I'm game. How should SourceForge monetize?
Just about everyone here is running ad blocking software, not that display ads pay much anymore. Not that anyone will tolerate seeing an ad for the free software they're downloading.
Should SourceForge charge a monthly fee to projects? To users? Perhaps SourceForge should arrange licensing deals to make white label SourceForge clones? Maybe they should just start doing consulting on the side?
> I would also expect that releasing this as a paid product, as opposed to open source, will actually reduce entitlement by users.
That is the very opposite of what I’d expect and have observed personally over the years. The folks who’ve paid a small amount are virtually always the most demanding and refunding them and asking them politely to go away just fuels their indignation further.
> OK let me take your projects and make money from them and not give you anything in return, not even credit.
This is one hundred percent okay with me and many other open source contributors. It's a no-strings-attached donation to mankind, and if someone else finds value in it, you don't complain, you cheer. Who needs attribution when people are actually _using_ something you made; you saved someone a good deal of time trying to write a solution themselves, perhaps.
I regularly donate to several free software projects (kde, gimp, vlc, firefox, and occasionally others) because they respect my freedom.
I strive to avoid proprietary products. If other developers want my money, I want my software freedoms. Those that provide them get money from me. I do understand this is not the norm behavior, and it is awful that it takes developers disrespecting the users of their software to have them pay for it. Just nobody sees the value in software freedom (and yes, even if you cannot write code you benefit from being able to pay any developer to fix your problems, and you can also pay auditors to inspect the code whereas with a proprietary product you are screwed).
> I understand that making a company pay for something free is a challenge.
I don't know how many times I've heard variants of this. "You can't monetize open source because companies won't pay for it." It's not that hard to get them to support the project if you sell something that's not available for free. It could be as simple as selling a special version of the documentation for $25. That's obviously not at the same level as dropping a $5000 donation, but it's more than zero, and it's a heck of a lot easier for an employee to ask them to pay $25 for a tool they need to do their work than to ask them to donate $5000.
> The culture that feels entitled to free support definitely needs to be rejected however.
I have unpubished every open-source package I put out there (small as they were) because of the incessant demands from people who were not paying me to do whatever they demanded of me. It was demeaning and demoralizing.
In the 80s/90s, I would have just tossed a tar-ball over the wall and say "good luck - feel free to use it, if it suites your needs), but in the age of github, all sorts of folk show up demanding that I do this that or the other, with no offer of payment. My response was: "Look! You have the source code. Do what you want to it to make it fit your needs better. You can even do a pull request.". They didn't want to do that - they just wanted me to work for them for free. I opted out of the entire situation by unpublishing all of my previously published works.
* None of the packages were significant. One was a Flask-based SaaS-in-a-Box thing with home screens, user accounts, log-in (auth), payments and various utilities. The other was an early Pixar-era ray-tracer (renderer) that was slow, but very extensible and capable of making pretty pictures of landscapes and other things like caustics.
> An open source project creates no obligation on the part of the developers.
I meant a subconscious obligation, not a legal one. When somebody gives you a gift, it puts pressure on you (subconscious and social) to reciprocate. You see it all the time with youtube streamers, who frequently cater their content to their subscribers wishes to keep them happy. And to clarify, the streamers don't do this because their users are unhappy or protesting. They do it because they feel a sense of obligation to give their subscribers what they want because the subscribers were generous enough to give the streamer money.
For whatever reason, this phenomenon is completely lacking in the open source community. Instead, the opposite seems to occur. OSS developers are actively hostile toward their users, both vocally and how they react to criticism that their software isn't user friendly or respectful of their user's time. Anybody who has spent hours trying to set up a piece of OSS and then made the mistake of asking the developer for help can attest to this.
> On the other hand, with open source, we have a different set of social conventions
Agreed. I'd like to see this particular convention change.
> Do you view it as ethical for someone to use open source software without payment?
Sure, assuming the license says it's ok. So I guess technically were talking about FOSS.
> Isn't that also getting something for nothing?
I didn't put this well before, but the problem isn't in getting something for nothing per se. The difference comes from the cost imposed on the other party involved. If I download your code, the cost we both pay rounds off to 0. But if you implement something for me, you pay a hefty cost in time while my cost remains 0. So all the value produced goes to me, and you get very close to nothing.
I see a problem with any situation where you end up worse off and I end up better off. This is the source of much open source project mortality. The core developer(s) give until they give out.
> Is it ethical for someone to ask a question on one of my blog posts without offering to pay me for my answer?
Depends. If they are profiting off of the response and all you get is the work of answering, then no. You will eventually get bitter and stop blogging unless you are some angelic person.
> The money is nothing compared to what I've made in my career
right, but thats not the case for everyone. you have been fortunate, but for many they cant even pay their bills with the tiny donations that come in. hence why the need arises for a license like this. to force people to either go away, or pay up.
as you've noticed, its not ideal. in a perfect world I would license my code without restriction, but I need to pay rent like everyone else.
>Why should the resources not come from the companies extracting the most cash value from open source?
This is easy to answer: Because most/all those open source writers explicitly said it's OK for the users of their software not to provide them cash for it. If I openly say you can use my stuff for free, and then later come and say you are morally obligated to pay me because you made huge profit from my stuff, then my integrity is compromised.
It's totally fine to say "I will no longer respond to support tickets for free", though.
>Still one can see how few people are willing to support FOSS developers, when looking at how much money they donate, or how quick someone comes up with a fork when money is asked for
Do you have any examples of forks being made due to someone asking for donations?
As for the problem of people getting paid to write open source software, I really don't think that the 'hiding the source code and selling binaries' method is the only viable option.
I also don't think people are unwilling to support FOSS developers, I think it's mainly a problem of convenience (as in payment) and exposure.
Things like Kickstarter helps a great deal here and I think this is a much untapped resource for funding FOSS development. One very successful venture was Openshot, an open source video editor (GPL licenced) which had a goal of $20.000 but which reached $45.000.
Granted we aren't in a situation where it's possible to make a full-time career out of developing open source software through Kickstarter style donations, but I think it's not such a big step as one might think.
I would happily pay a small sum each month for someone (or someone's) to work on FOSS software I use a lot, and I think a large number of people out there would do the same, atleast enough for someone to make a decent living out of it.
Again I believe the key aspect is to make the payment convenient/safe and of course have a way for projects to gain exposure.
Paying a small lump sum each month for continued free open source development of software you use/rely on for your work is in my book a much better long term solution than to pay a larger sum for the latest update of 'proprietary software X' where you are solely dependant on that provider and have to accept their conditions in terms of price/licencing not to mention the intrusive DRM mechanism which are a de facto part of proprietary software today.
Compare that to the FOSS situation where, given that the source code is open (and due to copyleft any forks will also remain open), you will never be locked-in to one provider and their whims even if you are totally dependant on that specific piece of software.
Anyway I'm not pretending that this is the 'perfect solution', but I dare say proprietary software certainly isn't (and I make a living off writing proprietary software and have for the past 8 years) and I think that a shift from relying on proprietary to instead relying on open source code is of great importance for many of the reasons RMS outlined. YMMV and all that.
>Whatever the case, developers are starting to believe that voluntary free open source contribution is for smucks.
In today's environment, it kind of is for shmucks. How many times have I seen the same tired FreeBSD copypasta about how FreeBSD powers netflix and playstation, and won't I please donate because netflix and sony are parasites who won't pony up the dough to keep FreeBSD solvent.
Why on earth would anyone directly subsidize these CEOs when they could get paid to do it instead?
> I'm not sure it's reasonable to separate the two.
One is a concern about freedom, the other is being a cheapskate. They're very different positions.
Plenty of people donate to FOSS projects or to associated organisations like the FSF and OSI, but it's a shame the numbers aren't higher by a few orders of magnitude.
Monetising Free and Open Source software is unfortunately not always easy, but it's not as if it never happens. Most Linux kernel contributions are from paid kernel developers, for instance. Some projects make money from paid support services (LibreOffice, RedHat), or offering a hosted deployment of the software (SourceHut).
> If I'm hoping that Amazon and Oracle and Facebook and Wal-Mart are going to pay $$$$$$$ to me and hundreds of my peers out of a sense of charity and generosity - doesn't that seem rather naive?
You're right that there's nothing to stop a major cloud provider from making easy money offering a managed service powered by FOSS, then giving little to nothing back to the project itself.
This is the reason mongoDB is unfortunately no longer using a FOSS licence.
>
You might not want to try to or know how to monetize the second option, but I'm not paying you a monthly fee for closed source software that you or your company are going to inevitably neglect/abandon/sell to someone who cares even less.
I am, sometimes it is just the best choice in an imperfect world. Of course I would prefer to pay for open source but no such offers exist.
>How to make a living creating apps for Linux, whether it be for the Desktop or the phones?
I want to phrase this with as much hostility as possible: Don't. Software cannot be owned or paid for and any attempt to normalize the opposite is cruel to anybody with a functioning brain. You cannot own a thought, or data, or bits or bytes, and much of the software you will no doubt use to create your premium software was made with this philosophy.
If you want to solicit donations that's very cool and there are people who will donate to you. But any attempt to abridge access to code without mandatory payment is not only ridiculous but purely unethical. (and no, I don't care how many HN points I lose by saying this)
>> [from the article] Many people view funding open source as a moral or ethical problem at its core: essentially, companies should pay for what they use (if a project accepts payment) because not doing so is exploitation. I sympathise with this perspective, but I believe a more helpful one is of economics and incentives, because we can reason about money more objectively and constructively this way.
I strongly agree with this sentiment. Many (although not all) Open Source authors feel aggrieved when their work is used by a for-profit-company, or when they work becomes a direct source of profit to another company. There's some group of developers who believe charging _consumers_ for Open Source programs is somehow unethical or unfair. There are some who believe and Open Source license forces user to "give something back".
This disconnect between "work" and "pay" is a somewhat foreign concept to (especially Western, and inexperienced) programmers - and so this disconnect, which is specifically built-into OSS licenses feels "wrong".
In this sense writing OSS is not for everyone. Lots of people take a lot of pleasure (and find personal significance) in writing code, and distributing it freely. Others need to be paid for their work, and for them a off-the-shelf OSS license may not be the best model.
For example a source-available model may be a good compromise - where the user has the ability to change and use, but not distribute.
I think though it's generally a good idea for programmers to figure out their goals, and what they need from a project. Then there will be a better license fit for that, and ultimately happier programmers in the bargain.
> If you don't like Debian, pick an open source distribution that is not backed by a business and begin sending the money you would've dumped into subscriptions as donations.
How is that as useful to you personally as a support subscription? You can't replace a support contract with wishful thinking and a donation.
It's great to support open source projects, but lets not mix concerns here.
I fully agree that forcing payment or using dual licensing is unfortunately heavily frowned upon. But a voluntary Patreon/donation option is perfectly acceptable to the same anti-payment people.
reply