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- Hacker News
- A lot of comments can't help but mention the constant looming threat of potentially permanent destitution that pervades our society. It's increasingly hard to understand the position of people who think that this is a feature, excepting of course those very few with the resources to use that pressure rather than be driven by itby advael
- I resonate with this blog post a lot.
I think there is something to be said for monetizing ones' hobbies, but I've recently been taking some forays into this world of "build something amazing and give it away for free" as well. I recently took a very big experimental plunge in this path, and I'm curious how well it will work out for me.
Open-source state-of-the-art Magic: The Gathering card identification pipeline:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHieOcmC7Dw
I used to do this kind of image recognition for a living, but I've been out of the business for a little while now. I had some ideas for a different approach from what I've done in the past and decided to code it up. This version is far better than anything else I've ever done -- especially for scanning against busy backgrounds or with occlusions, and also for noticing fine differences between otherwise difficult-to-distinguish printings.
I didn't have any interested customers waiting for this, so -- much like the OP -- decided to create an experiment and release it open source. I'm not opposed to having paths to monetize it (for people who want to license it for closed-source commercial projects), but I'm not trying to commercialize it so much as I would love to see how far we can take it with open-source.
I don't know which path I should take with this.
The biggest downside is that I feel like I've had a hard time getting people to be as interested in this project as I would have expected -- I believe this truly is the best identification software available (I've built some benchmarks to test it [0]), and maybe the market is just a bit flooded for such things (?), but I suspect that one very strong problem is that if you don't charge for something, then there is a perceived lack of value.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have more interest in this project if I _weren't_ trying to give it away.
For me, that's been the most negative aspect about releasing this for free so far.
by HanClinto - I started out in the BBS and demoscene of the 90s. The glory days of computing in my opinion, because of the technical innovation (people were making magic with 7mhz processors) and how the community arranged itself. e.g, some ANSI artists in the artpack scene went on to become legit artists, but nobody was sitting around grinding ANSIs to make millions or raise capital. I think about that era in my own open source work today, I just work on what I enjoy and find interesting and whatever happens happens as long as I can pay the bills.by kw3b
- If I was going to write something for free, it would some weird itch-scratching thing for Plan 9 or something, it wouldn't be something most people would ever want.
Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.
FOSS has delivered some great software, it's also demonetised a lot of areas where software developers could be earning a living. I don't think software developers should feel any need to give away their efforts than any other professional should.
FOSS has created pricing race to the bottom in software, and taken away financial incentive for improvement, it's not a 100% net positive.
by gt0 - I got burned with an attitude like this: unexpectedly, people who had downloaded my open source tool for free started expecting support. Some of them sent pretty unfriendly emails.by fxtentacle
- I've built side projects for years. My most recent one (also Markdown related [1]) is my first open source one and I've found it to be the most rewarding experience by far. So far I have 54 stars on GitHub and have had people emailing me mainly to thank me for the service, but some to ask for feature requests. Although I haven't had many ask for features / fixes, I find the "pushy-ness" of my users very useful as it helps me know what to implement next. This is doubly true as the cost of implementing is economically and cognitively lower than it was before AI was around. I'm pretty happy to build the features my users want, and it's great to see that some proportion of people exposed to the tool use it on a weekly/daily basis [2].
[1] https://sdocs.dev, discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
by FailMore - I don't think this debate has an easy answer. Yes, not everything should be about money, but yes, we all need to make money to survive.
I think we all agree the answer isn't, "No one should make any money writing software." I also think we can agree that the answer isn't, "you should charge money for every bit of software you write."
So how do we decide which is which?
I don't want to stop being a professional software developer. I have loved being able to support myself and my family by doing my favorite activity. It has let me enjoy going to work every day for over 20 years.
I also don't think I should charge for random code work that I do for fun, though. I am not trying to monetize every minute of my day... but I do want to monetize enough of it that I can pay my mortgage, buy food, save for my retirement, and have some fun along the way.
I don't know exactly where I am going with this, but it is my gut reaction when I see a post about how horrible it is to make money off of writing software. It has to be more nuanced than that.
by cortesoft - Or don't. I've done both, published OSS projects and sold some software. The level of entitlement in some comments I received on the OSS side was pretty crazy at times. While with the paid software, all of the interactions I had were so much more constructive. YMMV, but willingness to pay is a great filter.by SerCe