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Many folks on HN are the exact sorts of people who have lived the thankless popular-enough-to-be-an-unpaid-job solo OSS maintainer dream, so I wonder if you fee

Many folks on HN are the exact sorts of people who have lived the thankless popular-enough-to-be-an-unpaid-job solo OSS maintainer dream, so I wonder if you feel as annoyed by the tone of this post as I do. I truly don't understand how the same folks that champion accessibility and humane ideals while humble bragging about working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online can throw so much shade on people who are urgently trying to figure out a way to get paid, often just to keep the projects that they created alive so that these people can continue to use them for free. I don't know if it's entitlement, projection or just wanting to have it both ways, but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming instead of being shitty about people doing their best to find a forever home before their burnout finally kicks in.

pjmlp 6mo ago
The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well. I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis. Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
- trinix912 6mo ago
  That is true, but nowadays most paid projects end up being perpetual subscriptions. Which I kind of get, as on-going maintenance still costs, but it used to be that you paid for a tool once and only paid again if you wanted/needed an updated version. I'd gladly pay $15-$60 for a tool once (and again if I needed an update) but $10-$15 per month for 20 different things (that I will only use occasionally) is just out of reach for me financially and I live in a "rich" first-world country.
  - pjmlp 6mo ago
    How do you imagine it used to be when everything was commercial? On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because. Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
    - classified 6mo ago
      > Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy. I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place. I don't see how people not using the software while still not becoming customers is a fix to anything.
      - pjmlp 6mo ago
        Subscriptions look cheaper for many folks. As for being able to afford them, yes it cuts people out, many of whom would pirated anyway. Digital stores, API keys, and SaaS seem to be doing alright
        PaulHoule 6mo ago
        Subscriptions can be cheaper in some ways and more expensive than others. Adobe Creative Suite used to require a one time eye-watering payment and very few people could afford to keep it up to date, you might skip several upgrades before buying the next one if you did at all. CC's monthly payment makes it easy to enter. You are paying more in the long term than if you bought one version of it, but less than you'd pay if you kept your subscription up -- so somebody could make the case that it is more expensive than it used to be or less expensive than it used to be.
    - senko 6mo ago
      > Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy. If you're trying to make people cheer for the pirates, you're succeeding.
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  Neither side can have it both ways, but there's way too much whining about people not paying. Want people to pay for your tools? Don't offer them for free. This is related to my usual point here, that if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training, that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy. Proprietary software is fine. Lying about it and using good ideals as marketing strategy is not. That applies as much to "released as MIT so it be useful to many, then unreleased because author realized it might end up in training data of some LLMs (and in so doing, actually become useful to many people)" software, as it does to blogs and all the whining about AI denying them credit (and pre-AI, search engines, except then the developer community was on side of search and not free-but-with-ads/credit publishers). > Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so. That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step starting a real multi-party relationship, much distinct from just looking at a webpage or playing with code locally, and the poster being a student or younger. I too strongly favored MIT over everything when I was a kid. Didn't have money to pay for anything, and GPL was complicated and my slightly older colleagues (with probably more business sense than I) didn't like it.
  - PaulHoule 6mo ago
    So much of people's thinking today makes no sense to me. Since 2010 there has been an increasing tendency for the likes of Google and Facebook to drain an increasing fraction out of the value out of the web. Around 2012 I had a site that was expensive to host and bleeding money and looking for ways to salvage it and realized that there were many crawlers that were hitting my site hard, harder than Google, and almost all of them, like Chinese webcrawlers, were sending me 0 traffic and making 0 value for me. So I cut them off. Bing was practically in that category, sending barely detectable traffic, but I wanted to support some competition for Google. As I saw it a few years ago a bunch of people were apoplectic about OpenAI all of a sudden and I'm like, boy they are asleep at the switch, boy are they running in a herd, boy are they slamming on the breaks the next day after they crash their car. I mean like 10 years before that my wife was furious at me because I ran up a balance on our HELOC because of Google trouble.
- peteforde 6mo ago
  I agree with you in spirit. I also think back to that moment a few years ago where everyone suddenly realized that OpenSSL was being developed almost entirely by one dude with very, very little funding. Fundamental building blocks of modern society that might fail because some poor guy worked himself to death in obscurity because he didn't know how to better ask for help. We should all be haunted by this and consciously urge our employers to be part of the solution and not the problem. That tangent aside, part of the big problem with paying for tooling is that the tooling itself is typically built on tooling and libraries that are also built on libraries and tooling.... all the way down. To generalize, many of those libraries farthest back in the chain are the least likely to get the sort of funding someone who, eg. writes a wrapper around ffmpeg or whatever might get. I don't claim to have the solution, but I feel like this topic is the tech equivalent of not worrying about global warming.
  - pjmlp 6mo ago
    If you open an old Byte or Dr Dobbs magazine, it will be full of ads from companies whose business was utility libraries.
    - peteforde 6mo ago
      Wait, are you saying that all of my VBXs are likely unsupported at this point?
      - pjmlp 6mo ago
        Yeah, should have migrated to VB.NET by now. Dev Express, Sync Fusion, Component Source,.... are still around.
slopinthebag 6mo ago
Idk if it's fair to characterise someone helping build a "community-driven directory to help people discover and connect with grassroots organizations, clubs, activist groups, and community initiatives" as "working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online". It's akin to complaining that pro-bono work devalues the profession of law. It feels like there is entitlement on both sides. People who do OSS work feel entitled to financial benefits, despite explicitly choosing to give their work away for free. And people who consume open source software feel entitled to unpaid labor in perpetuity. It kind of sucks on both ends. Rich Hickey wrote an essay titled "Open Source is Not About You" [0], where he states "As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation." This is true. Unequivocally. What is also true is that OSS is also not about the contributors. They aren't owed anything by the consumers. They aren't entitled to any compensation, and they aren't entitled to others putting effort into making their contributions sustainable, helping them make a living wage, or alleviating burnout. We're all adults here, we can stop working on something if it's causing us pain or suffering. And we can freely fork a project if it's going in a direction we don't agree. That is the nature of open source. It's just a licensing model, which only exists because of certain laws. Otherwise, it's just a decision on what is public and private. Nothing more. So if a project isn't going in the direction you want? Shut up and fork it. Not getting paid for your work? Find a way to monetise it or move on. Don't whine about either of these things on the internet. 0: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9 https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
- b3lvedere 6mo ago
  I agree with Rich Hickey in that. I use Debian a lot, but i am fully aware i am not entitled to any sort of free support when things don’t go i want them to go. I get what i pay for. If i want things to go my way i will have to make the effort myself. By investing time and/or money.
- peteforde 6mo ago
  You make some excellent points, but what I think your perspective lacks is empathy. This stuff is so complicated. If someone starts working on a project in college and 3-4 years later it blows up, they might now have a young family to consider. The person working on this thing that people love is no longer the same person who started it. In other words: life happened. Perspectives change. It's also kind of pointless to deny human nature and we should at least try to assume best intentions; it's one thing to say all of the Rich Hickey stuff, and you might even believe it at the beginning of a project. X years later when someone raises $20M to build a company around the best parts of what you did and often forgets to mention you in the origin story... I suspect that would mess with you, and all of that stuff about entitlement would start to feel a bit thin. I don't begrudge people for those emotions, because it's not my place to do so and I see myself in their imperfect-ness. Ultimately, I am optimistic that we will continue to establish better and better ways to create sustainable projects with maintainers that are compensated for their efforts.
cheschire 6mo ago
> I truly don't understand how the same folks… Why do you think it’s the same folks? People tend to be louder when they don’t agree with something, and many topics will divide a community mostly in half. The end result is that you will more than likely hear complaints and subtle digs/insults no matter what happens.
brennanbrown 6mo ago
I want Zach to be paid, 11ty is my favourite SSG. I think the way Font Awesome is going about this is unwise. I contribute to the Open Collective of 11ty (as I state in my post). I don't know how that can be misread.
sublinear 6mo ago
> I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming I know you don't want to hear the obvious, but making your passion your paycheck is a one-way ticket to burnout. Even your heroes are still human. The passion is the magic, and keeping it going requires contrast with something else as a day job. You really don't want to know the pain of losing both because they're one and the same. Burnout is not inevitable nor inherent to age or experience. It's actually the opposite if you set proper boundaries and get a grip. That said, what's the deal with this topic coming up over and over? Is it just coming from young people too afraid of the broader working world, or is it something more sinister? Is this opinion being propagated by bad actors trying to take advantage of young people wanting to work this way (the "rockstar" delusion)?
- peteforde 6mo ago
  You make some excellent points. Especially wrt how the fastest way to hate what you love is to rely upon it to pay the bills. That said, I do feel as though you're presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy. There's lots of people who have figured out how to build something sustainable that blurs the line between occupation and enjoyment. We only tend to pathologize when talking about folks who haven't figured out how to make what they created into a flywheel. The real trick is to figure out a viable structure to fund a lot more projects. Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction. Things really are better for builders than they were 20 years ago. That should be celebrated. Yet, I think it's very likely that there's something just as disruptive (in a positive way) for OSS and makers in general as, for example, OnlyFans was for adult content that we just haven't stumbled on yet. So when I implore the person who wrote the OP to focus on solutions, this is broadly what I was hoping for.
  - sublinear 6mo ago
    > presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy I respectfully, but very strongly disagree. There is nothing good that comes from corrupting someone's passion project by attaching strings to it. > Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction I would take a huge step back from that statement and have a harder think, but that's just me.
joenot443 6mo ago
> but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage What are some ways that one might do this?
- peteforde 6mo ago
  Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy and GitHub Sponsors are all very recent inventions. Heck, Youtube being a viable career is an incredibly recent invention. What I'm saying is that I doubt that any of these are the last word on the topic. Look at how OnlyFans shook up the adult content world, and I don't think that they saw it coming. I am optimistic that something equally paradigm shifting could occur for makers and OSS maintainers, even if I don't claim to have a vision for how it would work at the moment.
rglover 6mo ago
Low-agency people who've never produced any work of consequence have no frame of reference for what it takes, and therefore, don't give a shit about what it takes to do it (and keep it going amidst their entitlement, indifference, and dismissals). OSS is just a toxic world burdened by a perpetual war between passive aggression and ego, neither of which will ever "put down their swords."

pjmlp 6mo ago

The ultimate entitlement is refusing to pay for tooling, while expecting to be getting a paid job as well. I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis. Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.

trinix912 6mo ago
That is true, but nowadays most paid projects end up being perpetual subscriptions. Which I kind of get, as on-going maintenance still costs, but it used to be that you paid for a tool once and only paid again if you wanted/needed an updated version. I'd gladly pay $15-$60 for a tool once (and again if I needed an update) but $10-$15 per month for 20 different things (that I will only use occasionally) is just out of reach for me financially and I live in a "rich" first-world country.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  How do you imagine it used to be when everything was commercial? On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because. Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
  - classified 6mo ago
    > Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy. I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place. I don't see how people not using the software while still not becoming customers is a fix to anything.
    - pjmlp 6mo ago
      Subscriptions look cheaper for many folks. As for being able to afford them, yes it cuts people out, many of whom would pirated anyway. Digital stores, API keys, and SaaS seem to be doing alright
      - PaulHoule 6mo ago
        Subscriptions can be cheaper in some ways and more expensive than others. Adobe Creative Suite used to require a one time eye-watering payment and very few people could afford to keep it up to date, you might skip several upgrades before buying the next one if you did at all. CC's monthly payment makes it easy to enter. You are paying more in the long term than if you bought one version of it, but less than you'd pay if you kept your subscription up -- so somebody could make the case that it is more expensive than it used to be or less expensive than it used to be.
  - senko 6mo ago
    > Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy. If you're trying to make people cheer for the pirates, you're succeeding.
TeMPOraL 6mo ago
Neither side can have it both ways, but there's way too much whining about people not paying. Want people to pay for your tools? Don't offer them for free. This is related to my usual point here, that if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training, that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy. Proprietary software is fine. Lying about it and using good ideals as marketing strategy is not. That applies as much to "released as MIT so it be useful to many, then unreleased because author realized it might end up in training data of some LLMs (and in so doing, actually become useful to many people)" software, as it does to blogs and all the whining about AI denying them credit (and pre-AI, search engines, except then the developer community was on side of search and not free-but-with-ads/credit publishers). > Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so. That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step starting a real multi-party relationship, much distinct from just looking at a webpage or playing with code locally, and the poster being a student or younger. I too strongly favored MIT over everything when I was a kid. Didn't have money to pay for anything, and GPL was complicated and my slightly older colleagues (with probably more business sense than I) didn't like it.
- PaulHoule 6mo ago
  So much of people's thinking today makes no sense to me. Since 2010 there has been an increasing tendency for the likes of Google and Facebook to drain an increasing fraction out of the value out of the web. Around 2012 I had a site that was expensive to host and bleeding money and looking for ways to salvage it and realized that there were many crawlers that were hitting my site hard, harder than Google, and almost all of them, like Chinese webcrawlers, were sending me 0 traffic and making 0 value for me. So I cut them off. Bing was practically in that category, sending barely detectable traffic, but I wanted to support some competition for Google. As I saw it a few years ago a bunch of people were apoplectic about OpenAI all of a sudden and I'm like, boy they are asleep at the switch, boy are they running in a herd, boy are they slamming on the breaks the next day after they crash their car. I mean like 10 years before that my wife was furious at me because I ran up a balance on our HELOC because of Google trouble.
peteforde 6mo ago
I agree with you in spirit. I also think back to that moment a few years ago where everyone suddenly realized that OpenSSL was being developed almost entirely by one dude with very, very little funding. Fundamental building blocks of modern society that might fail because some poor guy worked himself to death in obscurity because he didn't know how to better ask for help. We should all be haunted by this and consciously urge our employers to be part of the solution and not the problem. That tangent aside, part of the big problem with paying for tooling is that the tooling itself is typically built on tooling and libraries that are also built on libraries and tooling.... all the way down. To generalize, many of those libraries farthest back in the chain are the least likely to get the sort of funding someone who, eg. writes a wrapper around ffmpeg or whatever might get. I don't claim to have the solution, but I feel like this topic is the tech equivalent of not worrying about global warming.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  If you open an old Byte or Dr Dobbs magazine, it will be full of ads from companies whose business was utility libraries.
  - peteforde 6mo ago
    Wait, are you saying that all of my VBXs are likely unsupported at this point?
    - pjmlp 6mo ago
      Yeah, should have migrated to VB.NET by now. Dev Express, Sync Fusion, Component Source,.... are still around.

slopinthebag 6mo ago

Idk if it's fair to characterise someone helping build a "community-driven directory to help people discover and connect with grassroots organizations, clubs, activist groups, and community initiatives" as "working for $5/hour to help get local businesses online". It's akin to complaining that pro-bono work devalues the profession of law. It feels like there is entitlement on both sides. People who do OSS work feel entitled to financial benefits, despite explicitly choosing to give their work away for free. And people who consume open source software feel entitled to unpaid labor in perpetuity. It kind of sucks on both ends. Rich Hickey wrote an essay titled "Open Source is Not About You" [0], where he states "As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation." This is true. Unequivocally. What is also true is that OSS is also not about the contributors. They aren't owed anything by the consumers. They aren't entitled to any compensation, and they aren't entitled to others putting effort into making their contributions sustainable, helping them make a living wage, or alleviating burnout. We're all adults here, we can stop working on something if it's causing us pain or suffering. And we can freely fork a project if it's going in a direction we don't agree. That is the nature of open source. It's just a licensing model, which only exists because of certain laws. Otherwise, it's just a decision on what is public and private. Nothing more. So if a project isn't going in the direction you want? Shut up and fork it. Not getting paid for your work? Find a way to monetise it or move on. Don't whine about either of these things on the internet. 0: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9 https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

b3lvedere 6mo ago
I agree with Rich Hickey in that. I use Debian a lot, but i am fully aware i am not entitled to any sort of free support when things don’t go i want them to go. I get what i pay for. If i want things to go my way i will have to make the effort myself. By investing time and/or money.
peteforde 6mo ago
You make some excellent points, but what I think your perspective lacks is empathy. This stuff is so complicated. If someone starts working on a project in college and 3-4 years later it blows up, they might now have a young family to consider. The person working on this thing that people love is no longer the same person who started it. In other words: life happened. Perspectives change. It's also kind of pointless to deny human nature and we should at least try to assume best intentions; it's one thing to say all of the Rich Hickey stuff, and you might even believe it at the beginning of a project. X years later when someone raises $20M to build a company around the best parts of what you did and often forgets to mention you in the origin story... I suspect that would mess with you, and all of that stuff about entitlement would start to feel a bit thin. I don't begrudge people for those emotions, because it's not my place to do so and I see myself in their imperfect-ness. Ultimately, I am optimistic that we will continue to establish better and better ways to create sustainable projects with maintainers that are compensated for their efforts.

cheschire 6mo ago

> I truly don't understand how the same folks… Why do you think it’s the same folks? People tend to be louder when they don’t agree with something, and many topics will divide a community mostly in half. The end result is that you will more than likely hear complaints and subtle digs/insults no matter what happens.

brennanbrown 6mo ago

I want Zach to be paid, 11ty is my favourite SSG. I think the way Font Awesome is going about this is unwise. I contribute to the Open Collective of 11ty (as I state in my post). I don't know how that can be misread.

sublinear 6mo ago

> I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage to keep the magic coming I know you don't want to hear the obvious, but making your passion your paycheck is a one-way ticket to burnout. Even your heroes are still human. The passion is the magic, and keeping it going requires contrast with something else as a day job. You really don't want to know the pain of losing both because they're one and the same. Burnout is not inevitable nor inherent to age or experience. It's actually the opposite if you set proper boundaries and get a grip. That said, what's the deal with this topic coming up over and over? Is it just coming from young people too afraid of the broader working world, or is it something more sinister? Is this opinion being propagated by bad actors trying to take advantage of young people wanting to work this way (the "rockstar" delusion)?

peteforde 6mo ago
You make some excellent points. Especially wrt how the fastest way to hate what you love is to rely upon it to pay the bills. That said, I do feel as though you're presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy. There's lots of people who have figured out how to build something sustainable that blurs the line between occupation and enjoyment. We only tend to pathologize when talking about folks who haven't figured out how to make what they created into a flywheel. The real trick is to figure out a viable structure to fund a lot more projects. Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction. Things really are better for builders than they were 20 years ago. That should be celebrated. Yet, I think it's very likely that there's something just as disruptive (in a positive way) for OSS and makers in general as, for example, OnlyFans was for adult content that we just haven't stumbled on yet. So when I implore the person who wrote the OP to focus on solutions, this is broadly what I was hoping for.
- sublinear 6mo ago
  > presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy I respectfully, but very strongly disagree. There is nothing good that comes from corrupting someone's passion project by attaching strings to it. > Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction I would take a huge step back from that statement and have a harder think, but that's just me.

joenot443 6mo ago

> but I wish they would channel their frustrations into helping to find a sustainable model for OSS creators to make a living wage What are some ways that one might do this?

peteforde 6mo ago
Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy and GitHub Sponsors are all very recent inventions. Heck, Youtube being a viable career is an incredibly recent invention. What I'm saying is that I doubt that any of these are the last word on the topic. Look at how OnlyFans shook up the adult content world, and I don't think that they saw it coming. I am optimistic that something equally paradigm shifting could occur for makers and OSS maintainers, even if I don't claim to have a vision for how it would work at the moment.

rglover 6mo ago

Low-agency people who've never produced any work of consequence have no frame of reference for what it takes, and therefore, don't give a shit about what it takes to do it (and keep it going amidst their entitlement, indifference, and dismissals). OSS is just a toxic world burdened by a perpetual war between passive aggression and ego, neither of which will ever "put down their swords."