6 ms·

Not limited to software but modern society has a REALLY serious entitlement problem. (To the point where if I see a video on Reddit of someone screaming at a r

Not limited to software but modern society has a REALLY serious entitlement problem. (To the point where if I see a video on Reddit of someone screaming at a retail employee, it is not even surprising anymore.) I’ve had free and open projects for years, with evidence of thousands of users. Yet I could count on one hand the number of times anyone has bothered to thank me, much less donate. I do occasionally get E-mail requests for support but sadly at least half of them have had a complaining/entitled tone as if I am not doing every last bit of this for free. I have had zero offers to help with development, documentation, or really anything else. And interestingly, some of those E-mails have come from some pretty well-known large entities, be they government departments or large companies — organizations that should have more than enough resources to give a damn. Sadly, it is not better in the for-pay universe. After publishing apps, I have found that essentially no one will outright “pay once” for something anymore, no matter how cheap (leaving things at the insultingly-low price of $0.99 for weeks does nothing). Similarly, people usually will not contribute even a rating to help you out, much less a review. The E-mail/web info links on the store have never been used by anyone to reach me. And App Stores make it impossible to know who your customers even are, otherwise. So a silent relationship is maintained, where random unknown people update their apps over time, continuing to benefit and all I can assume is that they are still happy or something. So my conclusion after decades is this: you do the projects you like to do for your own benefit, and no one else’s. They are résumé builders so you have something to show when looking for a corporate job that actually pays. If anyone doesn’t like what you’ve built, you are 1000% allowed to ignore them. If someone happens to appreciate it, that is a bonus but not a certainty. And you must be prepared to receive no money at all from these projects, much less enough to live on.

pontus 6y ago
I think one of the problems is the interface through which we access these tools. I know when I walk into a Walmart that I'm dealing with a huge organization and if I accidentally break something while I'm walking through an aisle, I don't necessarily feel that bad. If instead I was walking around in a mom-and-pop store and broke something, I would apologize profusely and demand that I pay them for their troubles. When accessing open source projects, there's no visual trigger that makes me subconsciously distinguish between downloading tensor flow that's being developed by Google or some small personal project. It all looks the same. The same thing goes for music, graphics (e.g. iconography, fonts, ...), and even things like physical products on Amazon - it all feels the same.
- O_H_E 6y ago
  Very interesting take.
- roflc0ptic 6y ago
  I wonder how one rectifies this. I feel like small open source developers have conflicting incentives here. If an open source project was clearly prefaced with "While this is professional and fully featured, it's also the effort of one human working 10 hours a week on the weeks he doesn't have the kids", would you use it? Developers who want their open source projects used have incentive to make their project look serious and long term, and being a one man operation makes the thing have a large point of failure. You could imagine a "smallware" movement, e.g. some centralized body that certified that a particular piece of OSS was written by a single person/team (a.k.a. I set up a website and list anyone that asks), and brand their libraries accordingly - it would be an implicit appeal for funds. But have I just reinvented a bootleg apache software foundation?
  - ZWoz 6y ago
    My personal take, maybe not suitable for everyone. Don't use github. Github is that big faceless storefront. Use your own personal site, make it really simple. Now you don't have random "drive-throughs", who really don't care about your project, but are ready to give unsolicited advice. No point to have public issue tracker, when developers are known and small group. I like Drew DeVault projects, like sourcehut - doing things simple and off from big corp infra.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  The main difference between tensorflow and some small personal project is that the small personal project is likely to work
okareaman 6y ago
I was seriously thinking of contributing to open source this past week when I started going over all the articles I've read from open source authors about entitled users and wealthy companies that don't donate but make profits off the projects. It's beco0me clear to me that large corporations like Microsoft have jumped into open source whole heartedly in a big part because they get tons of free labor. Not only that, I had a bad experience contributing to an open source project in which the author snidely told me I should have searched the code base because the bug was fixed when it wasn't, closed my bug report out and denied my pull request. So it seems to me a negative deal situation on both fronts. I'm know there are great open source projects, but I'll need to be very selective about them.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  It pleases me when corporations use D to make money with, even if they don't contribute. After all, D is licensed to specifically allow this - I have no business complaining about it.
  - okareaman 6y ago
    That's what I meant when I said there were great open source projects like yours. Rust is another one. The energy, spirit of cooperation and welcoming community is a big plus for me. It would be nice if corporations kicked you a few bucks. For the life of me, I can't understand why the 100 millionaires and billionaires at the top of some of these corporations don't donate more.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      There are a number of generous corporations and individuals helping us out in various ways, including cash contributions to the D Foundation.
  - samatman 6y ago
    I imagine you would feel differently, if you were right at the threshold where doing a good job requires all your efforts, where people rely on your work, but where you can't pay your bills that way. A lot of good projects are getting stuck in that rut, and it behooves us to find ways to get them through it.
allenu 6y ago
I just released an app in Apple's app store a week ago and am seeing this attitude as well. I'm charging for it and don't provide a trial since I think it's worth the price for what you get (maybe even priced too low). A few people immediately ask if I'm planning on open sourcing it or else act disappointed that it's not open source/free. It's frustrating to work on something and have somebody just come along and say, "Hey, that looks nice. Could I get it for free?" I think it's akin to artists who get requests for free art. The people asking generally think that it takes zero effort to create the art and that they should be entitled to a drawing. It's also kind of amazing that someone will easily spend a few dollars on games (often upwards of $60-70) or food + drinks, but they see software as something that absolutely has to justify its $5 or $10 price tag.
- DenisM 6y ago
  It should not upset you any more than the rain outside. It's a force of nature, get a raincoat and go where you wanted to go.
- nurbl 6y ago
  I obviously don't know what your users were thinking, or even what your application does, but for my part I use open source stuff because that means I know if I become dependent on it, and the original author drops it (or goes in a direction I don't like) I have options. The price is pretty much orthogonal. Just saying it's not necessarily just about entitlement and getting stuff for free.
- watwut 6y ago
  Unless your app target gamers, comparing to how gamers spend is apples to oranges. Gamers brag about how much they spend and buy more then they can play. But that is specific subculture, majority of people are not behaving that way. Even majority of people who play games don't spend much money on them or have someone gift them.
- TheAceOfHearts 6y ago
  Source availability and pricing are orthogonal. The most famous example is Doom: it's open source but the game is shareware. Many people believe that modern software places too many unreasonable restrictions on end-users. I should be able to modify any of the software running on personal devices for my own purposes, at the very least. It's frustrating that I would typically have to use a disassembler instead of getting to directly tweak the source code. Going back to the artist example: it's akin to buying a poster which says that it must be placed on a wall facing a specific direction, at a specific height, with a specific axial tilt, and that it only be illuminated by natural sunlight. But I just want the poster because I really love a specific section. Once I get home, my scissors go to town on the poster, allowing me to only retain the parts I loved. Then I glue it to a circular sheet of metal and I hang it from the ceiling! I'm quite content to recognize the artist's work in crafting the poster and compensate him fairly. But find his list of restrictions on how it should be used to be utterly absurd, and since it's my poster I do whatever I want with it at home. Here's the thing: given all the restrictions which you place on your app, it absolutely has to justify its price tag because, even if they have the knowledge and skills to do so, the end-user can't fix the bugs you missed nor tweak it to suit their specific needs. Even if you manage to get 95% of the way there with your app, if that final 5% is really crucial and the end-user has no way of closing the gap, then it doesn't make much sense to invest one's limited capital on something that leaves their problem unresolved. I've bought open source software in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
DenisM 6y ago
In the past I've found that very low prices attract loud and obnoxious customers that complain left and right, while much higher prices attract very quiet customers who never complain. My conclusion is that when your software is new you price it low and sift through the feedback to get the gems. When the software matures you increase the price and enjoy the passive income. Another thing I've found helpful is to publish my email on the start page of the app, so it's impossible to miss. Again, this is something you can dial up and down depending on how much feedback you want at any point.
thesunny 6y ago
As a positive example, I was able to raise CAD $30,000 to add Android support to the Slate editor through a Kickstarter that was successful and most (maybe all?) the users were thankful: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunnyhirai/add-android-support-for-the-slate-wysiwyg-editor https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunnyhirai/add-android-... To put that into context, it was a lot of work to set it up (and message it properly) and there was no guarantee it would have worked. I think your conclusion that you should do this for your own benefit stands in either case. I believe in alignment of interests. All parties should get something positive out of a relationship.
jaymzcampbell 6y ago
I recently set up a pihole at home with the whole Covid situation and as soon as I noticed the donate link threw them £5 thinking "the least I can do is buy a London priced pub pint - I'm not exactly spending it elsewhere". I don't know why it's so different with software - I should really know better but even to this day my gut reaction is to, initially, balk at an app charging £5 - yet I'll walk into a pub (well, used to) and have no problem spending that and more on one beverage... I've since managed to snap out of that and will, if I think I'm going to enjoy it, spend the £1, £5, £20 or whatever it is within reason. This may be partly due to seeing in my day job customer feedback which in answer to "what would stop you using <essentially their business account + invoicing + tax reporting>?" - "if you charged me money". We basically run for businesses and even that cohort to a non-trivial proportion isn't prepared to spend (<£10 monthly) on software. We have other avenues and mechanisms to work work around that but it's a little demoralising when you see it so black and white. Makes me feel like I personally should at least be less inactive in my supporting of projects I like or just buying an app or subscriptions. I think the whole industry needs a reality check on how much "free" really costs.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I know a successful CEO who started a business making business software. He gives it away for free. But he also sells support contracts for it. He says 90% of the users just take the free version. The rest buy support contracts. Enough to have made him a wealthy man. The business model is essentially give away the razors, sell the blades. The only unhappy people are the ones who use the product but expect free support :-)
- allenu 6y ago
  I wonder how much of the software pricing side is people not seeing the person working on the software? Maybe we assume all this good software we use is built by some large corporation and so are more likely to not toss them some coin, whereas with buying a coffee or a beer, we actually interact with a human being. (That said, obviously they may themselves work for a big multi-national like Starbucks.) I wonder if we could ever get to the model where when you pay for an app or service, it's somehow clear that you're funding a individual or small team, to make it more personal.
onion2k 6y ago
Most people are living either in poverty conditions, or can see themselves living in poverty if anything goes wrong. Consequently people are understandably very reluctant to give up any of their precious limited resources. And yet, despite that, everyone is expected to get things done, to show they're interesting and creative, and to build social capital by being useful members of society. These antagonistic forces end up making many, many people very unhappy, and that comes over as entitlement. Society is broken. It might not be fixable.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Anyone who feels entitled to this or that is going to be very, very disappointed. And no, that isn't fixable.
- makecheck 6y ago
  When it comes to spending money, I can sympathize and I do not expect people to shell out cash that they don’t have. (Indeed, when working on a free software project I hope that occasionally it finds its way to someone that literally could not get it any other way.) On the other hand, 2-minute acts of appreciation (that cost practically nothing) are also extremely rare. Why should thank-you E-mails, app ratings, etc. come from a vanishingly small fraction of a user base, instead of almost everyone?
  - watwut 6y ago
    Because majority of people have no idea you want email with thanks and figures that best thing they can do is to not bother you. Like celebrities complain about people recognizing them all the time. Sending mails to strangers is awkward.
WalterBright 6y ago
This is par for the course with open source, and I knew that when I switched to doing all open source. On the other hand, it does attract collaborators, and D would not have been possible without the great people who have joined in an volunteered their time.
lallysingh 6y ago
Why go socialist when freemium doesn't raise your taxes? If advertisers would pay for tattoos, we probably wouldn't have to worry about healthcare anymore.
bonestamp2 6y ago
One of the problems with large companies using these free libraries and tools is that the people who are choosing to use these free resources are just developers themselves -- they usually have little power to allocate the much deserved resources to the shoulders that they're standing on. Because of this, there is a huge untapped opportunity to allocate resources better to pay open source contributors for their hard work. It would be useful if there was a github (or whatever) license type that required payment above a certain threshold. A student might get free use, but a commercial endeavor might pay a little or a lot depending on the value they're getting. Then, any libraries that you use with that license type would draw on the monthly deposit for your license level (more of your budget would go toward the libraries that you get more value from). For example, if your company pays $100/month, 50% of that may go to one library that provides a lot of value, while 1% might go to a library that provides less. Proper allocation would require the user to guage this, and it might be a little unfair but it's more fair than the 0% they're getting now. Any resource you're using would have to get at least 1% of your allocation. If you're only using two libraries and you don't allocate value manually, each library would automatically get 50% of your monthly budget. Repos could also choose to allocate a percentage of their draw to go toward bounties to resolve bugs, make improvements, etc. To help pay and incentivize others to contribute. Is there anything like this out there?
- nijave 6y ago
  At some point it becomes operationally risky for a company to freeload when they get to a certain size so you see things like enterprise support or hiring dedicated engineers to support the software. I think you will find examples of this at lots of large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon). Linux kernel is a good example here and key features like cgroups were started at Google
jokethrowaway 6y ago
You reached a very stoic conclusion. Love it. I believe that entitled people simply haven't reached your wisdom, yet. All the same, people have no fault on their own, they're just the product of this particular society. If we improve our society, the percentage of people who behave nicely will likely increase. And if we don't, well, at least we'll have a model not to follow on the road to bettering ourselves.
coward8675309 6y ago
Dear sir or madam, Thank you very much for your interest in ${PROJECT_NAME}; we’re so happy to hear you find it useful! We offer a variety of extended support options that provide customer support, prioritized bug fixes, and preferential scheduling features on our product roadmap. Below please find our pricing schedule along with links to our store: ... Regards, ${THE_MANAGEMENT}
WoodenChair 6y ago
I agree with you, but I also feel the entitlement problem goes both ways. Just because you choose to work on an open source project and it becomes popular, it does not mean you are entitled to be paid by the people who use it. If you ultimately want to be paid, don’t spend thousands of hours of your life working on something that has no guarantee of you being paid.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
belorn 6y ago
I would agree to most of those conclusions. If a project is created as a recreational activity, as something a person is doing because they enjoy programming and is filling a personal need, then that is the payment in itself. Recreational activities may be identical with professional activity in terms of code, and some people can turn an recreational project into their way of earning a living. If it however stop being recreational then forcing yourself to do it would just be working for free unless you convert into getting paid as an professional.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  I agree with you, I would argue that free software/open source developers are the ones who feel entitled to an income based sorely on the size of the audience they amass. Something of incredible value was lost when Free Software was corporatized into Open Source, and instead of "True believers", we had more open-source-as-marketing. I am a frequent user of libre software, and I do it without paying (how many have donated to VLC, yet directly or indirectly depend on it or FFMPEG? Even closed-source applications remotely related to video likely depend on it one way or another). I pay it pack by contributing to open projects and making them better - granted, I have a day job that gives me this flexibility. It would be a dark day (IMHO), if all open projects were to depend on the benevolence of F500s.
ganafagol 6y ago
So my conclusion after decades is this: you do the projects you like to do for your own benefit, and no one else’s. 100x this. If people only understood this right from day one, a lot of frustration would be saved. And with it all the expressed entitlement on which this frustration is built. You write some code because you need and want it, be it for your learning experience or to make a tool that you need or because to get paid for it. You open source something because you want to get the community engaged in it, to help you find or fix bugs or add features. Conflating these two is a recipe for frustration and the type of post that has prompted this article and the 500+ thread contributions, 90% of which demonstrate that they don't understand the difference either. Which is the real sad aspect here.
teddyh 6y ago
I agree with your conclusions, but I disagree with your choice of calling it “entitlement”. Software is a non-scarce, non-rivalrous good. Once you create it and give it away, you should have no further expectations. It’s a little bit like a live performance. Once you’ve performed, you can’t expect anything more coming from what people do based on watching your performance. Your pay, if you want to get paid, must be up front. I refer to an older comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746130
mbrodersen 6y ago
Of course people feel entitled to get your work for nothing when you give it away for nothing. People’s perception of value depends on how valuable it is (how much it cost). People do not have an entitlement problem. Open source programmers are the people with a serious entitlement problem. Of their own creation.

pontus 6y ago

I think one of the problems is the interface through which we access these tools. I know when I walk into a Walmart that I'm dealing with a huge organization and if I accidentally break something while I'm walking through an aisle, I don't necessarily feel that bad. If instead I was walking around in a mom-and-pop store and broke something, I would apologize profusely and demand that I pay them for their troubles. When accessing open source projects, there's no visual trigger that makes me subconsciously distinguish between downloading tensor flow that's being developed by Google or some small personal project. It all looks the same. The same thing goes for music, graphics (e.g. iconography, fonts, ...), and even things like physical products on Amazon - it all feels the same.

O_H_E 6y ago
Very interesting take.
roflc0ptic 6y ago
I wonder how one rectifies this. I feel like small open source developers have conflicting incentives here. If an open source project was clearly prefaced with "While this is professional and fully featured, it's also the effort of one human working 10 hours a week on the weeks he doesn't have the kids", would you use it? Developers who want their open source projects used have incentive to make their project look serious and long term, and being a one man operation makes the thing have a large point of failure. You could imagine a "smallware" movement, e.g. some centralized body that certified that a particular piece of OSS was written by a single person/team (a.k.a. I set up a website and list anyone that asks), and brand their libraries accordingly - it would be an implicit appeal for funds. But have I just reinvented a bootleg apache software foundation?
- ZWoz 6y ago
  My personal take, maybe not suitable for everyone. Don't use github. Github is that big faceless storefront. Use your own personal site, make it really simple. Now you don't have random "drive-throughs", who really don't care about your project, but are ready to give unsolicited advice. No point to have public issue tracker, when developers are known and small group. I like Drew DeVault projects, like sourcehut - doing things simple and off from big corp infra.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
The main difference between tensorflow and some small personal project is that the small personal project is likely to work

okareaman 6y ago

I was seriously thinking of contributing to open source this past week when I started going over all the articles I've read from open source authors about entitled users and wealthy companies that don't donate but make profits off the projects. It's beco0me clear to me that large corporations like Microsoft have jumped into open source whole heartedly in a big part because they get tons of free labor. Not only that, I had a bad experience contributing to an open source project in which the author snidely told me I should have searched the code base because the bug was fixed when it wasn't, closed my bug report out and denied my pull request. So it seems to me a negative deal situation on both fronts. I'm know there are great open source projects, but I'll need to be very selective about them.

WalterBright 6y ago
It pleases me when corporations use D to make money with, even if they don't contribute. After all, D is licensed to specifically allow this - I have no business complaining about it.
- okareaman 6y ago
  That's what I meant when I said there were great open source projects like yours. Rust is another one. The energy, spirit of cooperation and welcoming community is a big plus for me. It would be nice if corporations kicked you a few bucks. For the life of me, I can't understand why the 100 millionaires and billionaires at the top of some of these corporations don't donate more.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    There are a number of generous corporations and individuals helping us out in various ways, including cash contributions to the D Foundation.
- samatman 6y ago
  I imagine you would feel differently, if you were right at the threshold where doing a good job requires all your efforts, where people rely on your work, but where you can't pay your bills that way. A lot of good projects are getting stuck in that rut, and it behooves us to find ways to get them through it.

allenu 6y ago

I just released an app in Apple's app store a week ago and am seeing this attitude as well. I'm charging for it and don't provide a trial since I think it's worth the price for what you get (maybe even priced too low). A few people immediately ask if I'm planning on open sourcing it or else act disappointed that it's not open source/free. It's frustrating to work on something and have somebody just come along and say, "Hey, that looks nice. Could I get it for free?" I think it's akin to artists who get requests for free art. The people asking generally think that it takes zero effort to create the art and that they should be entitled to a drawing. It's also kind of amazing that someone will easily spend a few dollars on games (often upwards of $60-70) or food + drinks, but they see software as something that absolutely has to justify its $5 or $10 price tag.

DenisM 6y ago
It should not upset you any more than the rain outside. It's a force of nature, get a raincoat and go where you wanted to go.
nurbl 6y ago
I obviously don't know what your users were thinking, or even what your application does, but for my part I use open source stuff because that means I know if I become dependent on it, and the original author drops it (or goes in a direction I don't like) I have options. The price is pretty much orthogonal. Just saying it's not necessarily just about entitlement and getting stuff for free.
watwut 6y ago
Unless your app target gamers, comparing to how gamers spend is apples to oranges. Gamers brag about how much they spend and buy more then they can play. But that is specific subculture, majority of people are not behaving that way. Even majority of people who play games don't spend much money on them or have someone gift them.
TheAceOfHearts 6y ago
Source availability and pricing are orthogonal. The most famous example is Doom: it's open source but the game is shareware. Many people believe that modern software places too many unreasonable restrictions on end-users. I should be able to modify any of the software running on personal devices for my own purposes, at the very least. It's frustrating that I would typically have to use a disassembler instead of getting to directly tweak the source code. Going back to the artist example: it's akin to buying a poster which says that it must be placed on a wall facing a specific direction, at a specific height, with a specific axial tilt, and that it only be illuminated by natural sunlight. But I just want the poster because I really love a specific section. Once I get home, my scissors go to town on the poster, allowing me to only retain the parts I loved. Then I glue it to a circular sheet of metal and I hang it from the ceiling! I'm quite content to recognize the artist's work in crafting the poster and compensate him fairly. But find his list of restrictions on how it should be used to be utterly absurd, and since it's my poster I do whatever I want with it at home. Here's the thing: given all the restrictions which you place on your app, it absolutely has to justify its price tag because, even if they have the knowledge and skills to do so, the end-user can't fix the bugs you missed nor tweak it to suit their specific needs. Even if you manage to get 95% of the way there with your app, if that final 5% is really crucial and the end-user has no way of closing the gap, then it doesn't make much sense to invest one's limited capital on something that leaves their problem unresolved. I've bought open source software in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

DenisM 6y ago

In the past I've found that very low prices attract loud and obnoxious customers that complain left and right, while much higher prices attract very quiet customers who never complain. My conclusion is that when your software is new you price it low and sift through the feedback to get the gems. When the software matures you increase the price and enjoy the passive income. Another thing I've found helpful is to publish my email on the start page of the app, so it's impossible to miss. Again, this is something you can dial up and down depending on how much feedback you want at any point.

thesunny 6y ago

As a positive example, I was able to raise CAD $30,000 to add Android support to the Slate editor through a Kickstarter that was successful and most (maybe all?) the users were thankful: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunnyhirai/add-android-support-for-the-slate-wysiwyg-editor https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunnyhirai/add-android-... To put that into context, it was a lot of work to set it up (and message it properly) and there was no guarantee it would have worked. I think your conclusion that you should do this for your own benefit stands in either case. I believe in alignment of interests. All parties should get something positive out of a relationship.

jaymzcampbell 6y ago

I recently set up a pihole at home with the whole Covid situation and as soon as I noticed the donate link threw them £5 thinking "the least I can do is buy a London priced pub pint - I'm not exactly spending it elsewhere". I don't know why it's so different with software - I should really know better but even to this day my gut reaction is to, initially, balk at an app charging £5 - yet I'll walk into a pub (well, used to) and have no problem spending that and more on one beverage... I've since managed to snap out of that and will, if I think I'm going to enjoy it, spend the £1, £5, £20 or whatever it is within reason. This may be partly due to seeing in my day job customer feedback which in answer to "what would stop you using <essentially their business account + invoicing + tax reporting>?" - "if you charged me money". We basically run for businesses and even that cohort to a non-trivial proportion isn't prepared to spend (<£10 monthly) on software. We have other avenues and mechanisms to work work around that but it's a little demoralising when you see it so black and white. Makes me feel like I personally should at least be less inactive in my supporting of projects I like or just buying an app or subscriptions. I think the whole industry needs a reality check on how much "free" really costs.

WalterBright 6y ago
I know a successful CEO who started a business making business software. He gives it away for free. But he also sells support contracts for it. He says 90% of the users just take the free version. The rest buy support contracts. Enough to have made him a wealthy man. The business model is essentially give away the razors, sell the blades. The only unhappy people are the ones who use the product but expect free support :-)
allenu 6y ago
I wonder how much of the software pricing side is people not seeing the person working on the software? Maybe we assume all this good software we use is built by some large corporation and so are more likely to not toss them some coin, whereas with buying a coffee or a beer, we actually interact with a human being. (That said, obviously they may themselves work for a big multi-national like Starbucks.) I wonder if we could ever get to the model where when you pay for an app or service, it's somehow clear that you're funding a individual or small team, to make it more personal.

onion2k 6y ago

Most people are living either in poverty conditions, or can see themselves living in poverty if anything goes wrong. Consequently people are understandably very reluctant to give up any of their precious limited resources. And yet, despite that, everyone is expected to get things done, to show they're interesting and creative, and to build social capital by being useful members of society. These antagonistic forces end up making many, many people very unhappy, and that comes over as entitlement. Society is broken. It might not be fixable.

WalterBright 6y ago
Anyone who feels entitled to this or that is going to be very, very disappointed. And no, that isn't fixable.
makecheck 6y ago
When it comes to spending money, I can sympathize and I do not expect people to shell out cash that they don’t have. (Indeed, when working on a free software project I hope that occasionally it finds its way to someone that literally could not get it any other way.) On the other hand, 2-minute acts of appreciation (that cost practically nothing) are also extremely rare. Why should thank-you E-mails, app ratings, etc. come from a vanishingly small fraction of a user base, instead of almost everyone?
- watwut 6y ago
  Because majority of people have no idea you want email with thanks and figures that best thing they can do is to not bother you. Like celebrities complain about people recognizing them all the time. Sending mails to strangers is awkward.

WalterBright 6y ago

This is par for the course with open source, and I knew that when I switched to doing all open source. On the other hand, it does attract collaborators, and D would not have been possible without the great people who have joined in an volunteered their time.

lallysingh 6y ago

Why go socialist when freemium doesn't raise your taxes? If advertisers would pay for tattoos, we probably wouldn't have to worry about healthcare anymore.

bonestamp2 6y ago

One of the problems with large companies using these free libraries and tools is that the people who are choosing to use these free resources are just developers themselves -- they usually have little power to allocate the much deserved resources to the shoulders that they're standing on. Because of this, there is a huge untapped opportunity to allocate resources better to pay open source contributors for their hard work. It would be useful if there was a github (or whatever) license type that required payment above a certain threshold. A student might get free use, but a commercial endeavor might pay a little or a lot depending on the value they're getting. Then, any libraries that you use with that license type would draw on the monthly deposit for your license level (more of your budget would go toward the libraries that you get more value from). For example, if your company pays $100/month, 50% of that may go to one library that provides a lot of value, while 1% might go to a library that provides less. Proper allocation would require the user to guage this, and it might be a little unfair but it's more fair than the 0% they're getting now. Any resource you're using would have to get at least 1% of your allocation. If you're only using two libraries and you don't allocate value manually, each library would automatically get 50% of your monthly budget. Repos could also choose to allocate a percentage of their draw to go toward bounties to resolve bugs, make improvements, etc. To help pay and incentivize others to contribute. Is there anything like this out there?

nijave 6y ago
At some point it becomes operationally risky for a company to freeload when they get to a certain size so you see things like enterprise support or hiring dedicated engineers to support the software. I think you will find examples of this at lots of large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon). Linux kernel is a good example here and key features like cgroups were started at Google

jokethrowaway 6y ago

You reached a very stoic conclusion. Love it. I believe that entitled people simply haven't reached your wisdom, yet. All the same, people have no fault on their own, they're just the product of this particular society. If we improve our society, the percentage of people who behave nicely will likely increase. And if we don't, well, at least we'll have a model not to follow on the road to bettering ourselves.

coward8675309 6y ago

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WoodenChair 6y ago

I agree with you, but I also feel the entitlement problem goes both ways. Just because you choose to work on an open source project and it becomes popular, it does not mean you are entitled to be paid by the people who use it. If you ultimately want to be paid, don’t spend thousands of hours of your life working on something that has no guarantee of you being paid.

deleted 6y ago

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belorn 6y ago

I would agree to most of those conclusions. If a project is created as a recreational activity, as something a person is doing because they enjoy programming and is filling a personal need, then that is the payment in itself. Recreational activities may be identical with professional activity in terms of code, and some people can turn an recreational project into their way of earning a living. If it however stop being recreational then forcing yourself to do it would just be working for free unless you convert into getting paid as an professional.

sangnoir 6y ago
I agree with you, I would argue that free software/open source developers are the ones who feel entitled to an income based sorely on the size of the audience they amass. Something of incredible value was lost when Free Software was corporatized into Open Source, and instead of "True believers", we had more open-source-as-marketing. I am a frequent user of libre software, and I do it without paying (how many have donated to VLC, yet directly or indirectly depend on it or FFMPEG? Even closed-source applications remotely related to video likely depend on it one way or another). I pay it pack by contributing to open projects and making them better - granted, I have a day job that gives me this flexibility. It would be a dark day (IMHO), if all open projects were to depend on the benevolence of F500s.

ganafagol 6y ago

So my conclusion after decades is this: you do the projects you like to do for your own benefit, and no one else’s. 100x this. If people only understood this right from day one, a lot of frustration would be saved. And with it all the expressed entitlement on which this frustration is built. You write some code because you need and want it, be it for your learning experience or to make a tool that you need or because to get paid for it. You open source something because you want to get the community engaged in it, to help you find or fix bugs or add features. Conflating these two is a recipe for frustration and the type of post that has prompted this article and the 500+ thread contributions, 90% of which demonstrate that they don't understand the difference either. Which is the real sad aspect here.

teddyh 6y ago

I agree with your conclusions, but I disagree with your choice of calling it “entitlement”. Software is a non-scarce, non-rivalrous good. Once you create it and give it away, you should have no further expectations. It’s a little bit like a live performance. Once you’ve performed, you can’t expect anything more coming from what people do based on watching your performance. Your pay, if you want to get paid, must be up front. I refer to an older comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746130

mbrodersen 6y ago

Of course people feel entitled to get your work for nothing when you give it away for nothing. People’s perception of value depends on how valuable it is (how much it cost). People do not have an entitlement problem. Open source programmers are the people with a serious entitlement problem. Of their own creation.