6 ms·

We Love Writing Software So Much, We're Willing to Do It for Free

42 points by ohduran 2y ago

blitzar 2y ago
> The most common belief open source maintainers have is that offering something for free gives them the right to some of their users’ money. Opening line. No.
- lnxg33k1 2y ago
  I've never met any maintainer feeling entitled to their users' money, most commonly I've seen users feeling entitled to support, premium support and 247 support, and bespoke features, from open source maintainers, wtf is this guy talking about, just few weeks ago there were people from microsoft expecting priority fixes from ffmpeg for free
  - ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
    > I've never met any maintainer feeling entitled to their users' money Exactly. What I'd like to see more is: "There is a bug that $COMPANY wants fixed ASAP - how about you pay me or one of your employees for _that_?"
  - Ygg2 2y ago
    It's important to sometimes remind entitled people to the four Effs of FOSS. Fix it, Fund it, Fork it, Fuck off/Flee (in that order).
- michaelmrose 2y ago
  This line is so disconnected from reality I wonder if he's using a LLM to write blog posts.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    I think he just drank the capitalist cool-aid: everyhing is a financial transaction, nobody can ever do anything for reasons other than selfish financial interest.
Almondsetat 2y ago
Open source is a gift, and the implicit social contract with gifts is that you don't give them out expecting something in return and you don't complain about them if you are on the receiving end. If you cannot bare the GitHub issue page or pull requests, either disable them or ignore them. If you cannot bare collaboration in general, host your code as a .zip folder. If you have so much other stuff going on in your life, consider keeping the code to yourself altogether. If you feel frustrated by the fact that you could have made money from your code but didn't because you open sourced it, consider creating commercial projects.
- nextaccountic 2y ago
  Or just publish the code on Github (or whatever platform you like) and then not interact with it. Whoever wants to make improvements can just fork your code, it's literally a button away.
  - GuB-42 2y ago
    This, GitHub is convenient to store code online publicly, so is GitLab and others. You can just use the git repository and ignore everything else. For that, GitHub is free, and being git, you are not tied to a particular service, a "git clone" is all you need to migrate, you can even use several services at the same time, or self-host, online and offline.
- hackit2 2y ago
  When is a gift not a gift? If your not willing to have the other person shame you for your gift then you shouldn't be giving gifts. Gifts are given because you enjoy the act of giving not how the gift is perceived by another person, if that rubs you the wrong way you shouldn't be giving, it's as simple as that.
  - netdevnet 2y ago
    > If your not willing to have the other person shame you for your gift then you shouldn't be giving gifts. Not sure where you were raised but in the western world, shaming the gift giver is extremely rude and will definitely cost you your social reputation. The gift giver is considered to be right in being upset at being shamed
n4r9 2y ago
I'm not sure that I agree with a single line of this article. It's like the author views their entire world through a lens of financial transactions and can't understand why anyone else sees it differently.
- lelanthran 2y ago
  > It's like the author views their entire world through a lens of financial transactions Title of the blog: Money in Transit > and can't understand why anyone else sees it differently. I didn't get that impression at all. My take is that he's simply providing a view of OSS through the lens of financial transactions.
  - nextaccountic 2y ago
    > I didn't get that impression at all. My take is that he's simply providing a view of OSS through the lens of financial transactions. Which totally misses the point, since open source works as a gift economy [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
    - oblio 2y ago
      FOSS developers gift their tools, libraries, frameworks, applications, and corporations use them and then don't OSS their cloud control planes (AWS, Azure, GCP), UI frameworks (Apple), app stores (Apple, Google), etc, etc. Some give, others take. I guess that's how things work in gift economies in real life, too.
    - ellen364 2y ago
      Glad someone mentioned the gift economy. So much discussion around FOSS reminds me of ideas from gift economy. E.g. the extent to which a culture assumes a gift is part of gift exchange, with some expectation of reciprocity. Or the concept of “giving while keeping”. I think both ideas exist in copyleft licenses, but were lost in the more permissive MIT-style licenses. Sometimes I wonder if maintainers feel burned because they use more permissive licenses, which might be standard in their ecosystem, but unconsciously have a different gift culture.
_xiaz 2y ago
This article is filled with odd takes. > But, like most people, I’m not persuaded by those who release something into the world for free, and basically guilt trip people for it. Who guilt trips their users into donating to them? > To bring food to the table; that’s all you have to do. The key mistake is to confuse the sustainability of your hobby with your own. Free labor is inhumane, yes. But in the case of open source software, it is self-inflicted. > Do it at least to make your job easier. Let the FAANGs pretend they do it selflessly. Do you perhaps not love writing software as much as the title suggests? Is it inhumane for a cook to prepare a meal in his free time? Is it inhumane for a mechanic to change a friends oil? What's free labor about open source hobby projects?
- maccard 2y ago
  > Who guilt trips their users into donating to them? Many projects do [0][1][2]. This isn't even new, last time I downloaded ubuntu from canonical's website (before I used docker in anger), canonical had a "set this slider to 0 to download for free". [0] https://github.com/devlooped/moq/issues/1384 https://github.com/devlooped/moq/issues/1384 [1] https://devrant.com/rants/2535698/asking-for-donations-via-terminal-is-a-thing-programmer-thing https://devrant.com/rants/2535698/asking-for-donations-via-t... [2] https://snyk.io/blog/open-source-npm-packages-colors-faker/ https://snyk.io/blog/open-source-npm-packages-colors-faker/
benreesman 2y ago
I’m considering finding another line of work so that I can persue my lifelong passion around software without a bunch of godawful sociopaths turning the levers. I imagine I’d be only middling as a car salesman, but it would hopefully be enough to hack for the joy of it again on nights and weekends.
schneehertz 2y ago
Even after reading the entire article, I still don't understand what the author is trying to convey. In my personal opinion, open-source software is just like what the MIT license implies. By sharing the code I wrote, I give up all rights and also refuse to take on any obligations.
- staunton 2y ago
  > I give up all rights You don't give up rights. You allow others to use, modify, share (etc.) what you did according to the terms of the license. However, you could, e.g., at any time give it to someone else under a different license. Or use it yourself without care for the license terms.
maelito 2y ago
I'm currently building an open-source French alternative to Google/Apple Maps, https://cartes.app https://cartes.app. It's the most pleasant project I've worked on so far and I've already got plenty of interesting encouragements and calls. Already worth it. https://github.com/laem/cartes https://github.com/laem/cartes
- alwayseasy 2y ago
  Really cool project!
ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
> The most common belief open source maintainers have is that offering something for free gives them the right to some of their users’ money. Utter horse pucky. If there's a common misconception around corporate open source, it's the belief that it will reduce the maintenance burden by sharing it with volunteer contributors, or (for major projects at least) that releasing open source code will lead them to be in control of a standard, rather than (if they are lucky) having influence over one. But individual contributors have such differing motivations, I have no idea what the evidence base for that first line is. And it continues in that vein. So much [citation needed].
- rob74 2y ago
  What motivated that phrase is probably the plight of (non-corporate) open source maintainers who get very little money for a lot of work, while at the same time seeing billion-dollar companies that save a lot of money by using their software. The example of curl is maybe not the best: curl is a high profile tool, used literally everywhere, and at the same time (relatively) straightforward: it does one thing (with a lot of variants of course) and does it well, but it doesn't have as much of the "bit rot" maintenance burden that other projects have. So there are a lot of open source projects that are much more "thankless" than curl. Of course, no one forces the maintainers to give their work away for free, but then no one should be surprised if projects (even popular ones) are abandoned.
  - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
    > [...] the plight of (non-corporate) open source maintainers who get very little money for a lot of work, while at the same time seeing billion-dollar companies that save a lot of money by using their software. I don't dispute any of this -- it's really obviously a problem, particularly for certain "tent pole" projects where contributors have been horribly unrewarded. I just don't think you can get from there to the first sentence of that article, because the reality of those unrewarded developers is that most will carry on until they starve rather than feel they have "the right" to money.
udev4096 2y ago
Not sure if I agree with the whole article but for most people, open source is fun. That's it. That's the reason
mirzap 2y ago
> offering something for free gives them the right to some of their users’ money This article misses the entire point of the Open Source movement. OS maintainers owe nothing to their users and expect nothing in return. It's that simple. Nobody owes you a bug fix or a new feature that you and your company desperately need. Implement it yourself, then contribute back. That's how it's supposed to work. If you need a feature but don't want to implement it yourself, you should consider compensating a maintainer for their work. A maintainer does not owe you their time and operates on their own release or feature schedule. > guilt trip people for it This is a cynical misrepresentation. Most open-source developers know that monetizing their projects is nearly impossible. It’s about passion, not entitlement. > the goal is for it to be seen by others Visibility and career advancement can be beneficial, but they are often secondary. Many maintainers continue their work long after securing jobs, driven by their commitment to their projects and communities.
oblio 2y ago
> We Love Writing Software So Much, We're Willing to Do It for Free The title is right. People love writing software a lot. In my experience in this field, most don't love or even hate: 1. Fixing bugs, especially obscure ones. 2. Localizing. 3. Updating project dependencies. 4. Updating the project to follow the latest standards (security, internet, domain specific standards). 5. Doing especially the UI part, in a consistent way (consistent colors, spacing, workflows, the works). 6. Writing tests. 7. Setting up builds. 8. Setting up CI/CD pipelines. 9. Planning and roadmaps. I'd argue that writing software is basically cheap. The expensive part is everything else, which means you're a professional software developer, so basically a "software accountant" that has to dot every i and cross every t, and it's what makes software provide real value.
- changexd 2y ago
  I think it depends on people, there are people hate these and there are people love handling this and get paid or not get paid, it's the beauty of software imo, "cooperation", I may not be good enough to come up with big projects or architectures, but I can help out setting up tests or fix some minor bugs so the core developers can work on something more important.
  - oblio 2y ago
    It depends on people, that's why I said "most". And I stand by that. Software, and the world in general, has far more dreamers than dredgers.
asimovfan 2y ago
Free software is a heroic endeavor. This poor guy doesn't get it.
LastTrain 2y ago
“But, like most people” When you find yourself thinking this, you are probably wrong.
timvisee 2y ago
While I agree FOSS doesn't give you the right to users money. It is especially painful if (big) companies make big money with your free product.
mano78 2y ago
Just the right time. I’m travelling now to go and deploy a software system I wrote for a NGO, at their place, for free. I am anonymous here so I am not bragging or such: I know many people doing the same, it’s a form of voluntary work, it benefits them, I know how to do it, and I am having fun. Everyone wins.
Ezhik 2y ago
"Open source as a career enhancement" is a rather depressing take. I like computers and want to do more with them than just earn money. I want to call my silly code art. I want to have fun. I want to meet cool people. It's challenging to balance it with basic human needs for shelter and food, sometimes. Maybe the idealist in me believes that it's possible to make art while still putting food on the table?
- gunalx 2y ago
  In my opinion the best take here. I programm because it's fun. Sometimes I want to share what I used time on, for others to appreciate. But one also need money to live.
levlaz 2y ago
I’m very confused on how this poorly written and widely speculative article made it to the front page.
fbn79 2y ago
In my opinion open source software is usually not a ready to use product. More often is a library, a framework or a product prototype that need to be tailored, installed, configured, expanded and maintained by other developers do be useful and produce value. So I see it as just an agreement between developers to share efforts on build base software tools on which grow own private business. It we want to compare it to a traditional business is like a group of farmers that agree to share for free the best of seeds each one produce. So that everyone can grow a better harvest every year. So the business is not in the seeds and seeds producing, but in what you grow from that seeds.
pollies 2y ago
[dead]

42 points by ohduran 2y ago

> The most common belief open source maintainers have is that offering something for free gives them the right to some of their users’ money. Opening line. No.

lnxg33k1 2y ago
I've never met any maintainer feeling entitled to their users' money, most commonly I've seen users feeling entitled to support, premium support and 247 support, and bespoke features, from open source maintainers, wtf is this guy talking about, just few weeks ago there were people from microsoft expecting priority fixes from ffmpeg for free
- ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
  > I've never met any maintainer feeling entitled to their users' money Exactly. What I'd like to see more is: "There is a bug that $COMPANY wants fixed ASAP - how about you pay me or one of your employees for _that_?"
- Ygg2 2y ago
  It's important to sometimes remind entitled people to the four Effs of FOSS. Fix it, Fund it, Fork it, Fuck off/Flee (in that order).
michaelmrose 2y ago
This line is so disconnected from reality I wonder if he's using a LLM to write blog posts.
- andrepd 2y ago
  I think he just drank the capitalist cool-aid: everyhing is a financial transaction, nobody can ever do anything for reasons other than selfish financial interest.

Almondsetat 2y ago

Open source is a gift, and the implicit social contract with gifts is that you don't give them out expecting something in return and you don't complain about them if you are on the receiving end. If you cannot bare the GitHub issue page or pull requests, either disable them or ignore them. If you cannot bare collaboration in general, host your code as a .zip folder. If you have so much other stuff going on in your life, consider keeping the code to yourself altogether. If you feel frustrated by the fact that you could have made money from your code but didn't because you open sourced it, consider creating commercial projects.

nextaccountic 2y ago
Or just publish the code on Github (or whatever platform you like) and then not interact with it. Whoever wants to make improvements can just fork your code, it's literally a button away.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  This, GitHub is convenient to store code online publicly, so is GitLab and others. You can just use the git repository and ignore everything else. For that, GitHub is free, and being git, you are not tied to a particular service, a "git clone" is all you need to migrate, you can even use several services at the same time, or self-host, online and offline.
hackit2 2y ago
When is a gift not a gift? If your not willing to have the other person shame you for your gift then you shouldn't be giving gifts. Gifts are given because you enjoy the act of giving not how the gift is perceived by another person, if that rubs you the wrong way you shouldn't be giving, it's as simple as that.
- netdevnet 2y ago
  > If your not willing to have the other person shame you for your gift then you shouldn't be giving gifts. Not sure where you were raised but in the western world, shaming the gift giver is extremely rude and will definitely cost you your social reputation. The gift giver is considered to be right in being upset at being shamed

n4r9 2y ago

I'm not sure that I agree with a single line of this article. It's like the author views their entire world through a lens of financial transactions and can't understand why anyone else sees it differently.

lelanthran 2y ago
> It's like the author views their entire world through a lens of financial transactions Title of the blog: Money in Transit > and can't understand why anyone else sees it differently. I didn't get that impression at all. My take is that he's simply providing a view of OSS through the lens of financial transactions.
- nextaccountic 2y ago
  > I didn't get that impression at all. My take is that he's simply providing a view of OSS through the lens of financial transactions. Which totally misses the point, since open source works as a gift economy [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
  - oblio 2y ago
    FOSS developers gift their tools, libraries, frameworks, applications, and corporations use them and then don't OSS their cloud control planes (AWS, Azure, GCP), UI frameworks (Apple), app stores (Apple, Google), etc, etc. Some give, others take. I guess that's how things work in gift economies in real life, too.
  - ellen364 2y ago
    Glad someone mentioned the gift economy. So much discussion around FOSS reminds me of ideas from gift economy. E.g. the extent to which a culture assumes a gift is part of gift exchange, with some expectation of reciprocity. Or the concept of “giving while keeping”. I think both ideas exist in copyleft licenses, but were lost in the more permissive MIT-style licenses. Sometimes I wonder if maintainers feel burned because they use more permissive licenses, which might be standard in their ecosystem, but unconsciously have a different gift culture.

_xiaz 2y ago

This article is filled with odd takes. > But, like most people, I’m not persuaded by those who release something into the world for free, and basically guilt trip people for it. Who guilt trips their users into donating to them? > To bring food to the table; that’s all you have to do. The key mistake is to confuse the sustainability of your hobby with your own. Free labor is inhumane, yes. But in the case of open source software, it is self-inflicted. > Do it at least to make your job easier. Let the FAANGs pretend they do it selflessly. Do you perhaps not love writing software as much as the title suggests? Is it inhumane for a cook to prepare a meal in his free time? Is it inhumane for a mechanic to change a friends oil? What's free labor about open source hobby projects?

maccard 2y ago
> Who guilt trips their users into donating to them? Many projects do [0][1][2]. This isn't even new, last time I downloaded ubuntu from canonical's website (before I used docker in anger), canonical had a "set this slider to 0 to download for free". [0] https://github.com/devlooped/moq/issues/1384 https://github.com/devlooped/moq/issues/1384 [1] https://devrant.com/rants/2535698/asking-for-donations-via-terminal-is-a-thing-programmer-thing https://devrant.com/rants/2535698/asking-for-donations-via-t... [2] https://snyk.io/blog/open-source-npm-packages-colors-faker/ https://snyk.io/blog/open-source-npm-packages-colors-faker/

benreesman 2y ago

I’m considering finding another line of work so that I can persue my lifelong passion around software without a bunch of godawful sociopaths turning the levers. I imagine I’d be only middling as a car salesman, but it would hopefully be enough to hack for the joy of it again on nights and weekends.

schneehertz 2y ago

Even after reading the entire article, I still don't understand what the author is trying to convey. In my personal opinion, open-source software is just like what the MIT license implies. By sharing the code I wrote, I give up all rights and also refuse to take on any obligations.

staunton 2y ago
> I give up all rights You don't give up rights. You allow others to use, modify, share (etc.) what you did according to the terms of the license. However, you could, e.g., at any time give it to someone else under a different license. Or use it yourself without care for the license terms.

maelito 2y ago

I'm currently building an open-source French alternative to Google/Apple Maps, https://cartes.app https://cartes.app. It's the most pleasant project I've worked on so far and I've already got plenty of interesting encouragements and calls. Already worth it. https://github.com/laem/cartes https://github.com/laem/cartes

alwayseasy 2y ago
Really cool project!

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago

> The most common belief open source maintainers have is that offering something for free gives them the right to some of their users’ money. Utter horse pucky. If there's a common misconception around corporate open source, it's the belief that it will reduce the maintenance burden by sharing it with volunteer contributors, or (for major projects at least) that releasing open source code will lead them to be in control of a standard, rather than (if they are lucky) having influence over one. But individual contributors have such differing motivations, I have no idea what the evidence base for that first line is. And it continues in that vein. So much [citation needed].

rob74 2y ago
What motivated that phrase is probably the plight of (non-corporate) open source maintainers who get very little money for a lot of work, while at the same time seeing billion-dollar companies that save a lot of money by using their software. The example of curl is maybe not the best: curl is a high profile tool, used literally everywhere, and at the same time (relatively) straightforward: it does one thing (with a lot of variants of course) and does it well, but it doesn't have as much of the "bit rot" maintenance burden that other projects have. So there are a lot of open source projects that are much more "thankless" than curl. Of course, no one forces the maintainers to give their work away for free, but then no one should be surprised if projects (even popular ones) are abandoned.
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  > [...] the plight of (non-corporate) open source maintainers who get very little money for a lot of work, while at the same time seeing billion-dollar companies that save a lot of money by using their software. I don't dispute any of this -- it's really obviously a problem, particularly for certain "tent pole" projects where contributors have been horribly unrewarded. I just don't think you can get from there to the first sentence of that article, because the reality of those unrewarded developers is that most will carry on until they starve rather than feel they have "the right" to money.

udev4096 2y ago

Not sure if I agree with the whole article but for most people, open source is fun. That's it. That's the reason

mirzap 2y ago

> offering something for free gives them the right to some of their users’ money This article misses the entire point of the Open Source movement. OS maintainers owe nothing to their users and expect nothing in return. It's that simple. Nobody owes you a bug fix or a new feature that you and your company desperately need. Implement it yourself, then contribute back. That's how it's supposed to work. If you need a feature but don't want to implement it yourself, you should consider compensating a maintainer for their work. A maintainer does not owe you their time and operates on their own release or feature schedule. > guilt trip people for it This is a cynical misrepresentation. Most open-source developers know that monetizing their projects is nearly impossible. It’s about passion, not entitlement. > the goal is for it to be seen by others Visibility and career advancement can be beneficial, but they are often secondary. Many maintainers continue their work long after securing jobs, driven by their commitment to their projects and communities.

oblio 2y ago

> We Love Writing Software So Much, We're Willing to Do It for Free The title is right. People love writing software a lot. In my experience in this field, most don't love or even hate: 1. Fixing bugs, especially obscure ones. 2. Localizing. 3. Updating project dependencies. 4. Updating the project to follow the latest standards (security, internet, domain specific standards). 5. Doing especially the UI part, in a consistent way (consistent colors, spacing, workflows, the works). 6. Writing tests. 7. Setting up builds. 8. Setting up CI/CD pipelines. 9. Planning and roadmaps. I'd argue that writing software is basically cheap. The expensive part is everything else, which means you're a professional software developer, so basically a "software accountant" that has to dot every i and cross every t, and it's what makes software provide real value.

changexd 2y ago
I think it depends on people, there are people hate these and there are people love handling this and get paid or not get paid, it's the beauty of software imo, "cooperation", I may not be good enough to come up with big projects or architectures, but I can help out setting up tests or fix some minor bugs so the core developers can work on something more important.
- oblio 2y ago
  It depends on people, that's why I said "most". And I stand by that. Software, and the world in general, has far more dreamers than dredgers.

asimovfan 2y ago

Free software is a heroic endeavor. This poor guy doesn't get it.

LastTrain 2y ago

“But, like most people” When you find yourself thinking this, you are probably wrong.

timvisee 2y ago

While I agree FOSS doesn't give you the right to users money. It is especially painful if (big) companies make big money with your free product.

mano78 2y ago

Just the right time. I’m travelling now to go and deploy a software system I wrote for a NGO, at their place, for free. I am anonymous here so I am not bragging or such: I know many people doing the same, it’s a form of voluntary work, it benefits them, I know how to do it, and I am having fun. Everyone wins.

Ezhik 2y ago

"Open source as a career enhancement" is a rather depressing take. I like computers and want to do more with them than just earn money. I want to call my silly code art. I want to have fun. I want to meet cool people. It's challenging to balance it with basic human needs for shelter and food, sometimes. Maybe the idealist in me believes that it's possible to make art while still putting food on the table?

gunalx 2y ago
In my opinion the best take here. I programm because it's fun. Sometimes I want to share what I used time on, for others to appreciate. But one also need money to live.

levlaz 2y ago

I’m very confused on how this poorly written and widely speculative article made it to the front page.

fbn79 2y ago

In my opinion open source software is usually not a ready to use product. More often is a library, a framework or a product prototype that need to be tailored, installed, configured, expanded and maintained by other developers do be useful and produce value. So I see it as just an agreement between developers to share efforts on build base software tools on which grow own private business. It we want to compare it to a traditional business is like a group of farmers that agree to share for free the best of seeds each one produce. So that everyone can grow a better harvest every year. So the business is not in the seeds and seeds producing, but in what you grow from that seeds.

pollies 2y ago

[dead]