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It's heartbreaking to see people who scrape websites and make 60k in a weekend project while opensource maintainers for projects used by thousands of companies

• naveen_ 7y ago
  Sorry, what do you mean?!
  • nif2ee 7y ago
    I mean, unlike theoretically preached by old billionaires and millionaires trying to trick the public and rewrite their own history, making money is usually at odds with creating real value. It's usually about marketing, PR and gaming the system.
    • DoreenMichele 7y ago
      I'm generally sympathetic to your stated frustration, but it's a little more complicated than that.
    • malshe 7y ago
      I am well aware that on HN marketing is looked down upon but marketing is about creating and delivering value to customers. If someone is doing that better than others and getting paid a lot for that, there is nothing wrong with it.
      • ben509 7y ago
        Part of it is a big chunk of the HN crowd hasn't been in business, and part of it is that marketing is an ethical mess. And HN is engineer heavy, so we see how a product comes from raw materials and is built into a thing you can use, and see how those roles are adding value. It's easy to understand that a cut diamond is worth more than a raw diamond. But a product also has more value if it's on a shelf in a store than sitting in a warehouse, thus a person driving a delivery truck is adding value. And the mutual gain from the transaction is realized when questions are answered and the transaction is settled, so the cashier is adding value. Bringing it back to marketing, the transaction can't even begin until the customers are aware of the product and understand that it meets a need they have, so the marketer is adding value by enabling that to happen. But I've got no proof beyond the observation that people get paid to do these things, and it could be that some or all of these jobs really are redundant. Anyone can settle the debate empirically by starting a business that doesn't rely on them, though.
        • buckminster 7y ago
          > Anyone can settle the debate empirically by starting a business that doesn't rely on them, though Advertising might be a zero-sum game. Or even net negative. Yet a business without it will likely fail if other businesses use it. In other words, if advertising adds value like Mafia protection adds value then the empirical test proves nothing.
        • malshe 7y ago
          > Bringing it back to marketing, the transaction can't even begin until the customers are aware of the product and understand that it meets a need they have, so the marketer is adding value by enabling that to happen. This is reducing marketing to advertising. Advertising is a subset of marketing. Marketing research may begin even before a product exists.
          • ben509 7y ago
            That's fair, I was trying to keep it simple to explain my train of thought better.
• spottybanana 7y ago
  Creating value and capturing value are different things. If you start doing open source, you shouldn't except money. If you want money, you should do something that people usually pay for. It is common knowledge that open source can be very difficult to monetize. If you are smart enough to program good software you should be able to understand also that. Also if you can program good quality open source software, it shouldn't be difficult to switch to the "evil capitalistic" side and code some software with an actual business model. It is best to work on open source at the point where you have enough savings so you don't need the money. Creating open source with the exception of monetization is just stupid - sometimes it happens but usually not, and that should be excepted.
  • geofft 7y ago
    Sure, for an individual, what you say is exactly the correct approach. But for society, does it benefit us to pay people to work on scraping websites more than on OSS infrastructure? (One argument is yes because that's how the money flows, but why?) How do we as society fund OSS infrastructure and prevent people who would be good at it from leaving to seek money?