4 ms·

As someone who worked on an Open Source project for years with no compensation, adding sustainable funding to it was very motivating. Money is a very weird thin

As someone who worked on an Open Source project for years with no compensation, adding sustainable funding to it was very motivating. Money is a very weird thing, but getting money for the continued existence of your work is fantastic validation and support. It's easy to work on things for free, but how do you know that people value them if they simply use them for free. Attaching money to a pursuit that was previously free can also act to greatly encourage the continued existence of the project in the face of burnout and uncertainty.

_delirium 13y ago
For me, it depends on the money, the project, and my financial situation. With a stable salary currently, I often find attempts to make money from my side projects more demotivating than motivating. If it's something I actually find interesting, it's a hobby. Maybe it's writing software, maybe it's editing Wikipedia, maybe it's writing essays. That feels like a good use of my time, and I get to decide if it is or not. But then if I try to find a way to make money at it? Now it turns into basically a job, where I need to figure out how to monetize it, and in all likelihood the hourly rate will end up depressingly low. So I'd rather just spend my hobby time as I choose and not worry about monetizing it. More subtly, I find that having monetization as a goal of a side project can creep in in a lot of ways that aren't really beneficial to the project. Take even just writing something. Sometimes I'm frustrated by the information available online on a subject, and want to spend a bit on writing something to set the record straight. Sometimes this makes sense to publish myself. Other times it makes sense to write or improve a Wikipedia article. This is an interesting tradeoff, because it's basically trading likely many more views (therefore likely more impact) if I write it on Wikipedia, versus more control and authorial credit if I post it myself. From a monetization perspective, writing on Wikipedia is rarely the optimal choice; but from the perspective of getting the information out there, it sometimes is.

_delirium 13y ago

For me, it depends on the money, the project, and my financial situation. With a stable salary currently, I often find attempts to make money from my side projects more demotivating than motivating. If it's something I actually find interesting, it's a hobby. Maybe it's writing software, maybe it's editing Wikipedia, maybe it's writing essays. That feels like a good use of my time, and I get to decide if it is or not. But then if I try to find a way to make money at it? Now it turns into basically a job, where I need to figure out how to monetize it, and in all likelihood the hourly rate will end up depressingly low. So I'd rather just spend my hobby time as I choose and not worry about monetizing it. More subtly, I find that having monetization as a goal of a side project can creep in in a lot of ways that aren't really beneficial to the project. Take even just writing something. Sometimes I'm frustrated by the information available online on a subject, and want to spend a bit on writing something to set the record straight. Sometimes this makes sense to publish myself. Other times it makes sense to write or improve a Wikipedia article. This is an interesting tradeoff, because it's basically trading likely many more views (therefore likely more impact) if I write it on Wikipedia, versus more control and authorial credit if I post it myself. From a monetization perspective, writing on Wikipedia is rarely the optimal choice; but from the perspective of getting the information out there, it sometimes is.