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> I've been giving less and less attention to PiVPN, and the desire to keep up with it is no longer what it once was. I wonder if financial/monetary incentive

> I've been giving less and less attention to PiVPN, and the desire to keep up with it is no longer what it once was. I wonder if financial/monetary incentive would change this. I don't think it would personally (because putting a value on your free time/mental load/time you can spend with your loved ones doing something else away from the PC is precious) On the flip side... $500/mo? $1k/mo? $5k/mo? I'm sure most projects that go "defunct" open-source-free-no-financial-incentive-thanklessly-help-build-something could probably find "motivated maintainers" for $3k/mo on average? Internationally? Is the "capitalist" answer "this repo and all of its efforts are not worth $3k/mo to the open market"?

DeathArrow 3y ago
Who will pay? For sure there are developers willing to take care of it if they are payed, but who is willing to pay them?
powersnail 3y ago
A lot of these projects are made in people's leisure time, without profitability, for other fellow geeks, and the users also uses them in their hobbies. And as fellow geeks, we are more likely to be financially poised to be on the other side of the equation: getting paid to write code, rather than being able to pay a developer's wage, at least not in the long term, not in any maintainable manner. Can you afford to pay yourself 3k/month to maintain such a project, without any profitability, just for a hobby?
- ianlevesque 3y ago
  Agreed. Also often the gap between what people will pay for a hobby project and what money is being made at a tech company by the people who have the hobby is vast. Sometimes there are contractual restrictions on taking money from other jobs simultaneously that complicate it.
Nullabillity 3y ago
You could probably get someone, but would you get someone good (competent, trustworthy, etc)? Perhaps Jia Tan is looking for a new gig.
- ssl-3 3y ago
  >You could probably get someone, but would you get someone good (competent, trustworthy, etc)? The same could be asked of people who work on open projects for free, could it not? Is a financial reward (or lack of such reward), in and of itself, some sort of implicit indicator of the quality of the person putting forth the effort?
  - Nullabillity 3y ago
    > Is a financial reward (or lack of such reward), in and of itself, some sort of implicit indicator of the quality of the person putting forth the effort? It is an implicit indicator of how much that person cares about the project.
    - ssl-3 3y ago
      Perhaps so. I don't think we need to make a study of it to be sure that GitHub and Sourceforge are rife with free software ("free" in terms of beer, and in libre, and also in compensation) in various states of incompletion, haphazard execution, and sheer abandonment. I mean: The open-source community has certainly produced a ton of excellent software for free, but it has also produced (and published) a lot of false starts, loose ends, broken or forgotten code, and unfinished or unpolished work. Open-source volunteerism is awesome, but it isn't all ponies and rainbows. Perhaps the author(s) of some of these things might care more about finishing and maintaining them if their ongoing efforts were producing a meaningful amount of money as a reward.
      - Nullabillity 3y ago
        > Perhaps the author(s) of some of these things might care more about finishing and maintaining them if their ongoing efforts were producing a meaningful amount of money as a reward. Have you looked at the average state of commercial software lately?

DeathArrow 3y ago

Who will pay? For sure there are developers willing to take care of it if they are payed, but who is willing to pay them?

powersnail 3y ago

A lot of these projects are made in people's leisure time, without profitability, for other fellow geeks, and the users also uses them in their hobbies. And as fellow geeks, we are more likely to be financially poised to be on the other side of the equation: getting paid to write code, rather than being able to pay a developer's wage, at least not in the long term, not in any maintainable manner. Can you afford to pay yourself 3k/month to maintain such a project, without any profitability, just for a hobby?

ianlevesque 3y ago
Agreed. Also often the gap between what people will pay for a hobby project and what money is being made at a tech company by the people who have the hobby is vast. Sometimes there are contractual restrictions on taking money from other jobs simultaneously that complicate it.

Nullabillity 3y ago

You could probably get someone, but would you get someone good (competent, trustworthy, etc)? Perhaps Jia Tan is looking for a new gig.

ssl-3 3y ago
>You could probably get someone, but would you get someone good (competent, trustworthy, etc)? The same could be asked of people who work on open projects for free, could it not? Is a financial reward (or lack of such reward), in and of itself, some sort of implicit indicator of the quality of the person putting forth the effort?
- Nullabillity 3y ago
  > Is a financial reward (or lack of such reward), in and of itself, some sort of implicit indicator of the quality of the person putting forth the effort? It is an implicit indicator of how much that person cares about the project.
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    Perhaps so. I don't think we need to make a study of it to be sure that GitHub and Sourceforge are rife with free software ("free" in terms of beer, and in libre, and also in compensation) in various states of incompletion, haphazard execution, and sheer abandonment. I mean: The open-source community has certainly produced a ton of excellent software for free, but it has also produced (and published) a lot of false starts, loose ends, broken or forgotten code, and unfinished or unpolished work. Open-source volunteerism is awesome, but it isn't all ponies and rainbows. Perhaps the author(s) of some of these things might care more about finishing and maintaining them if their ongoing efforts were producing a meaningful amount of money as a reward.
    - Nullabillity 3y ago
      > Perhaps the author(s) of some of these things might care more about finishing and maintaining them if their ongoing efforts were producing a meaningful amount of money as a reward. Have you looked at the average state of commercial software lately?