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].
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.
I’ve also done both, and I found both kinds of users in both situations. There have been cases on the commercial front where I just felt like giving customers their money back, even after years of having used the software, and told them to not come back. There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore. With open-source it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
My “favourites” are the ones threatening to abandon the tool, despite having never made a single positive contribution. On open-source that’s an easy laugh and a “good riddance”. On commercial cases it’s more frustrating and nuanced.
I disagree willingness to pay is that meaningful of a filter, in the cases I experienced. And it’s getting worse; many people are getting too impatient and act like everyone works for them specifically and only their needs matter.
There’s no cost to me to stop an entitled disruptive user with zero positive contributions from destabilising the project. No cost to my volunteers either. The opposite is true in both cases; removing that user is a net benefit and I’ve done so in the past specifically to protect the experience of the volunteers.
As for tokens, there have been exactly zero cases where someone has submitted LLM code to one of my repos that has been up to my standards and I have accepted it. Yes, I can say that with certainty. If I wanted LLM code I’d ask for it myself, having an intermediary in that process is worse than useless.
> There’s no cost to me to stop an entitled disruptive user with zero positive contributions from destabilising the project.
Having to spend time reviewing a PR or issue is “no cost”?
I’m not convinced yet.
> As for tokens
I did not mean LLM contributions…I meant using AI tools to automate the reviews of contributions and users you seem to think cost no time or attention, but I do..
Yes, all of them if you want to. It's 100% up to you whether and how you deal with other people and their contributions, and it's completely orthogonal to being FLOSS or using a git hosting.
That's just one way to do it. Even if you let them send you PRs or whatever, you can still act on them or not depending on how they behave, your available resources, health, mood or just whim. You don't owe anyone anything and "creating a community around a project" is not a goal you have to be striving for regardless of whether you take contributions or provide some user support or not.
A TV-presenter of a fairly popular TV-show with an audience in my country once told an anecdote that they wanted the admission for the audience to be free. But when the tickets were free, a lot less people showed up. When they changed the ticket to be the quite arbitrary amount of 7 EUR, suddenly the theater was full every time.
Context is king. A famous cello player playing on streets is valued less and is valued more when playing in a stadium. This is the typical framing phenomenon which psychology has discovered about humans. Even what colour we perceive changes based on surrounding context so not surprising.
We naturally go for scarce things first. A few examples of this:
- I'm not particularly into castles, but I've visited a fair few while travelling. I lived in Norwich for 10 years, home to one of the finest Norman castles in the country. Did I visit? Did I heck.
- When your favourite film was on TV you'd watch it every time. Then when you got it on DVD you'd never watch it again.
- Give a dog some miscellaneous leftovers and notice how they prioritise ingestion.
Not sure it's really the same entitlement phenomenon the GP was talking about, though.
I've regularly heard something similar said of consulting work, too. Many people new to the game worry about charging too much, because if a client is paying more then surely the pressure will be higher. Instead they end up experiencing the opposite: charging a higher rate tends to get them a better kind of client.
I'm not sure what the exact lesson is here. Something about stingy people not being nice to work with, perhaps?
Stingy people are indeed not nice to work with, which is why I raised my prices as a freelance coder through the roof about 20 years ago, usually pacing about triple the going market rate. But filtering out stingy people isn't the main factor in the phenomenon you're describing, because some of my happiest customers have been stingy people who capitulated to paying much more than they initially thought the work was worth. They tend to also be the ones who are most prone to congratulating themselves and bragging to their friends on springing for the most expensive option, and when they do, they invariably (even pathologically) need to assert to themselves and everyone else that they paid for "the best".
The name for this is the Veblen Effect [0], and it applies to all irrational market behaviour where people are actually happier with luxury goods the more they pay for them.
Funnily enough, I've seen some of the exact same clients brag about how cheaply they got something else. The lesson I've drawn is that they're mostly looking for approval, so they're equally interested in buying status as they are in getting real stuff done. It's a win/win if you deliver a great product that they can brag about, because they'll do the hard work of selling it to themselves for you.
A corollary of that psychology is that some, maybe even most people are never happy with stuff they paid market price for. They either think they could've gotten it cheaper, or they think they could have gotten more for their money. Paying market price makes them feel like a chump. But paying way more than market has to be justified to themselves first. It's simply too embarrassing to admit that they might have overpaid an arm and a leg. So as a contractor, pricing your work as either very cheap or very expensive, on the margins of the parabola, alleviates this vague sense of dissatisfaction from your clients' internal debate, and gives them the peace of mind that they're actually trying to buy.
Value is relative. Effort-to-income ratios vary significantly between traders.
The pragmatic accept that work ≠ value, some do so permanently. But someone newly aware of this may deem it unfair, and react with totally disproportionate demands, some do so permanently.
Then you come across those who already benefit greatly from the imbalance, yet still make disproportionate demands. These tend to be good at it, subtle, strategic. Which may explain why they end up on the benefiting side.
Broadly, you find three types: the greedy, the balanced, and the generous pragmatic.
The greedy exploits relativity. The balanced respects it. The generous navigates it without resentment. Whether consciously or not.
I don't think it's subconscious at all. If, for instance, you contract something on fiverr for $5, you expect $5 of work. If you contract something for $1000 you expect $1000 of work. And the former's probably going to take a lot more feedback to get to where you want than the latter.
Basically, you get what you pay for. That's not always true, but it holds pretty reliably.
Not to mention that "OSI open source" is basically sponsored and advocated by the firms that stand to benefit the most: hyperscalers that will embrace, extend, and encrust the thing you built with their monetization tendrils and leave you without a way to make money on it yourself.
See: Redis, Elastic, etc.
Not an ounce of AWS or GCP is open source, yet they'll happily spin up a managed version of your thing and make hundreds of millions without cutting you in.
We need new licenses that are more "shareware" like. That permit individuals, but slap big trillion dollar companies.
"Fair source", "Fair code", the defold license, etc. are all pretty good.
They'll find loopholes around that too, in time - they already found some, which led to the SSPL being created.
What you actually want is some kind of noncommercial clause: you can use my free shit as part of your free shit. If you want to make money off my shit, the rules change to "fuck you, pay me"
"But what if a company just wants to try it out?" well they can live within the already existing exception called "not telling me you're breaking my license". If I don't know about it I can't impose any penalties on you. Every good business already knows how and when they can break the law with impunity, and that's one of them.
It's totally fine to turn off issues and pull requests, and refuse all contributions. The problem is many maintainers create undue responsibility for themselves with snide responses like "PR welcome" to every issue or request. When people show up with the patches after a response like that, I'd say that they are very much owed some of the maintaner's precious time.
Agreed, if a patch is offered after being suggested then some reaction should take place, even if to clarify that currently there is not enough resource to accept/reject it and thus it might be better to temporarily rely on their own fork.
I'd say it comes off as more of a challenge than a suggestion. "I don't care, do it yourself if you care so much". Most people just go away when they get told that. Some people actually rise up to the challenge.
> even if to clarify that currently there is not enough resource to accept/reject it
That's fine if clarified beforehand. The CONTRIBUTING.md from the above comment is an excellent example. It clearly communicates the maintainer's stance.
If it's coming from someone who previously "welcomed PRs", that sort of reply is extremely rude. Learning and modifying someone else's project is a major undertaking, and it's very disrespectful when maintainers don't match that effort, especially when they invited it upon themselves.
I personally give away free software, and actually don't get bothered by comments as much. The catch? I write the software to fulfill my needs, and may or may not take anyone's suggestions at heart.
If they are so inclined, they can fork it and patch it. It's out there after all. As long as they obey the terms of the license I put forth, it's all fair.
I like the idea of creating a OSS project, and then build extra on top of it for selling.
The OSS part ensured that even if I went full Sam Altman, the user will still have an absolute baseline they can fallback on. And given how lazy I am, the OSS is often basically 70% of the project. This also has the benefit that the significant part of the code can be audited for security/etc, sometimes even for free.
As someone who once had a popular open-source project. Opensource is just harder because you've to write code for <optics>. When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive. Despite what people here say, all these things have very little to do with the reliability of actual code.
Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.
> When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive.
thats interesting because for me its the opposite: working in a team boosted my code quality and cleanliness much more than something open source i did precisely because people on my team would be looking at it and reviewing it...
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.
In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing. Many bakers love the craft but nobody expects free baked good (except maybe their family). Many plumbers are true craftsmen and take pride helping solve peoples problems, but we don't expect free plumbing. On the other hand, once you write the code, the logic is complete, its closeness to an equation makes it feel like selling algebra homework.
More importantly though, baked goods get eaten, and pipes aren't assumed to suddenly become load bearing. I think a lot of developers hesitate to sell software they aren't prepared to support professionally. Toy projects then sometimes gain a community and grow organically. It's at this stage I feel we need a better path to funding without a lot of the capture that can occur.
It would be cool if we could "farmers marketize" software though. Come together to taste some exotic and local varieties. Maybe meet the local shops, pay for some overpriced TUI gizmo or a hash function with a weird pattern.
Sorry went into fantasy land there. This is obviously not the solution to the broader OSS funding issue, but it's a cute dream where maybe some people make a buck.
I think the bigger solution would have more opportunities for people outside of academia to get small grants to work on their projects. More foundations supporting the core technology and development that the tech world depends on now, and prospectively in the future.
There is also a big difference between making money to live comfortably and make money to get filthy rich. Lots of people come to tech aiming for the second, so they won't make software so you can buy them a beer. They want to hit it big, and I think this is what smuggles perverse incentives in software development.
It's not horrible to make money from good software, but nowadays lots of the things people do to attract VCs are plain stupid. It's an attack on that, the ones who "ship startups in an afternoon" and seek to build a moat around basic features in the hope that some corpo will buy in and get trapped.
I think that thanks to the behavior of corporations a lot of people have a very unhealthy association with money. Corporations engage in a grossly unethical fashion to try to coercively exploit every single penny from people, and that's generally disgusting. I think that makes 'normal' people want to go in the exact opposite direction and you end up where we are in this discussion.
But if you just look at money as what it is - a simple means of exchange, then charging money doesn't need to be some sort of parasitic or exploitative profit-maximization thing. It's simply a means for people to be able to support themselves while doing something they enjoy, without having to rely on the wholly unreliable and potentially undignified behaviors in relying on donations.
This is all further compounded by governments making it difficult for people to transfer money between themselves openly + anonymously online, let alone on a global level. Actually selling things has some pretty significant hurdles to overcome. Easing global anonymous transactions would greatly lower the pain involved in selling stuff 'ethically'. Of course there's already one tech that had the potential for this, but hasn't yet quite lived up to its potential.
let's say agriculture. if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?
what about artists? it's not that their work even has a utility function...
If you've grown a ton of tomatoes, you're probably doing it for the express purpose of profiting from it. To dial back the scope to something more comparable, if I have 4-5 tomato plants, I'm going to have all the tomatoes I want and then some. In that case, yes, I'm absolutely going to give away some tomatoes so that other people can enjoy them (as opposed to them ending up in the compost bin).
As someone who's worked in UI/UX for 2 decades, I feel this too.
Recent developments have made me feel a form of guilt that's new to me. As though we've all had it too good for too long. Which is probably at least in part due to working for organisations that only care about the bottom line.
In short; all of this boils down to capitalism being simultaneously a drive and a drain on society.
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.
I literally got bullied by people who called themselves "the community" because they weren't happy with my copyleft license and the fact that I wasn't implementing their feature requests for free.
I don’t understand what the downside of this is. That’s hilarious for them to expect, and you’re free to ignore them, take their suggestion and work on it, help them.
Happened to me too! Guy posted asking kinda rudely whether I was going to fix a bug. Told him I'd be happy to accept a PR for a fix. Never got a PR (project has been dead for some years now - just lost interest).
I'm sympathetic to FOSS developers but struggle to understand this, maybe because it hasn't happened to me. But, why is this a mental drain? Is there not a simple solution? Reply with the license, "comes with no warranty," "you're free to fork," close issue and move on? I suppose in aggregate it could be draining.
The assholes outnumber the good ones, and it feels like all of humanity is transactional and extractive.
At first all engagement is exciting and validating. You work nights and weekends to please people you’ve never met, sure that one good turn deserves another.
Then you get your first jerk, then your second, then your third, while your father is in the hospital. You feel pressure to ship a feature you never wanted. Your issue tracker is demoralizing. You get a PR! Maybe someone is coming to your rescue. It sucks. Now you need to figure out how to respond. You’re alone. Your passion project has become your albatross.
“I don’t want to maintain a custom fork with my fix”
- valid sure, if you are not sure if your fix is the best solution for it, and would like the general community to comment (i think the problem here is that iterating on a fork is generally difficult to discover and work on)
“I really want everyone to have the benefit of this fix”
- Could be interpreted as wanting the "fame" of authorship or participation in a large open source repo, otherwise just sharing the fix and letting whoever needs it is enough tbrh.
“I don’t know what the fix is, but there is a bug here and the core team should fix it”
- would be a user support issue.
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.
Considering the strong opinion on this topic, OP is probably young enough to not remember (or know) the 80s and 90s with too few free options for personal computing and most of the software is proprietary and non-free (exactly as the OP states). While it fueled the traction of shareware, it was a very different epoch, and impossible today with strict controls from MS, Google and Apple on what app is allowed to run. It's easy to wish the world to be different, but it would be much harder to live in with the today reality of secureboot and AppStore controls.
It's possible to say we don't have personal colputers anymore, they are MS/Apple/Google's device now, as they decide what it is allowed to run and what isn't.
Yes, and becoming harder to use with UEFI removed S3 sleep (which MS pushed). I also expect banks and govts to force the requirement to have trusted platform (secureboot with some OS level stuff like in Android) to be able to log in from desktop, probably this or the next year. All "for your safety", sure. And for children's also.
Just because we’ve spent he last 30 years running Linux and not worrying about the nonsense in the wider computer world doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do the same for he next 30 years
The era of the hacker, the ethos of free software, it’s mostly over. In the 80s and 90s people could get jobs and write software on the side,
Just for fun.
its definitely a double edged sword. individual developers are generally screwed financially. if you can make something sass you might be able to monetise it but chances are theres a better free version floating around or that the majority of people just dont want to think about computers and will pay m$lop instead. you could sell your idea to investors i guess but thats heavy sales. should software dev even be a paid profession? with enough tools, automation would be within everyones reach, i think thats where we are headed in general.
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.
I wasn't alive in the 90s, and barely was in the 00s. I look at others writings about those early days, and compare it to today, then get a weird feeling of wanting to experience the "good ol' days" before python scripts made in 10 minutes by an AI and sold to investors as "vendor lock-in" was the thing to strive for.
There were some amazing feats. But it was slow and frustrating. Like you wouldn't believe how long things took.
In the 90s most technical documentation was in actual physical books. If you wanted to learn something you had to order and buy the book (and Amazon wasn't a thing everywhere!), and it would take weeks or months to arrive. Or you did inter-library loans (which were amazing but also took weeks).
Or you relied on magazines which had a publication cycle. Writing actual physical letters about a program that was written out in the magazine was a thing.
When I got internet access in the mid-90s I remember emailing someone to ask about mirrors of their documentation project because I didn't want to use up their bandwidth.
I'd never ever want to go back. Bring on the future!
Fwiw, that's just commercially packaged nostalgia which is mostly the good (and often materialistic) part and forgets absolutely of the rest.
Our brains do that to us and I find it positive to have a nice fantasy world to escape to but definitely not to be mixed up with the reality of things.
OTOH being able to ride off into the bush with your mates and build tree houses and whatever and "be home when the street lights come on", have no phone, &c. was very different to the world we brought our kids up in.
That's true but it doesn't have to be different. I know that in some countries (e.g. US) that's not often possible due to enforcement but that's not the case in other regions.
So, if you can, be the change you want to see in the world. Although videogames and screens are a big culprit too, in my opinion.
Yeah same, I'm older than you and I still yearn for the unix glory days of the 90's and early 2000's, when even Microsoft was just Micro$oft and not Microslop. I remember XP, for all its faults, was still a better experience than anything they put out and it had real charm as well.
I think in general things in computing were better when the nerds were still running the show. One the MBAs and bean counters got involved it's all gone downhill. Feels like the golden age of computers and the internet are well behind us at this point.
The one thing I take away from those early days is that we didn't really care what most people were doing. We figured most people were lamers, so whatever most people were doing was probably lame by definition. I guess if you want to kind of approximate the good ol' days, I'd ignore what most people are doing, work on what you want to work on, and if you think it's cool try to join or build a community around that.
The AI grindslop today is infuriating but I mostly ignore it and do my own open source thing. I quit my job last year to work on open source full time because I felt like I had no choice, there was a project in my mind I'd go down with the ship with. If I wind up in the permanent underclass because it fails, 90s me would think not selling out was pretty l33t.
This is awesome as hell, haven't seen that one yet. I love that cracktros/demos are still a thing. A cracktro a day keeps the slop away.
If you like that one, you'd probably dig this. I feel like this is one of the best demos of all time from both a technical point of view plus storytelling. Dropped back in 2019. Warms my heart.
I was a former (minor) member of groups like ACiD, iCE, CIA (though I never released with them).
The cross-pollination between the hackers / college coders / warez pirates / digital artists was real. A lot of big company CEOs got their start in those days.
It was mostly just about exploring and connection, and as the BBS scene faded to irc chats (efnet, freenode, etc), that whole mixed-scene kept growing for quite awhile.
Nice, I was in ACiD's orbit too, my BBS was a TOXiC Net affiliate before the scene wound down.
That's the thing I miss the most about the scene, the cross-pollination. You'd distro a pack and learn something about a whole other scene, or help somebody mod their board and they'd become co-sysop of yours. That whole era is definitely why I wound up becoming a programmer.
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:
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.
I don’t know how big the market is, but seems pretty commercial-friendly to this old magic player. I have a big box of cards from a few decades ago I’ve held onto. I’ve thought about selling them, but it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth. taking a pile of photos and having the ID and valuation automated could go a long way! Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
> it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth.
No install -- scan your cards with your phone or desktop (downloads the weights in WASM -- runs 100% local -- the only web request it makes is to look up card names and prices online -- no image data ever leaves your machine), export the list as CSV, take your cards to your friendly local game store, and expect to receive 50-75% of TCG-low for your cards. This app currently only displays TCG Market, so probably about 50% of this price is what you could realistically expect.
> Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
Yes -- and part of this might be that this would have been much more amazing several years ago, but by now -- most marketplaces (I used to do work for some of the big ones) have their own recognition tools. If they aren't actively looking to replace their current software, many companies would rather stick with what's currently working "good enough" than expend effort to migrate to something with only incremental benefit that is difficult to quantify. It's possible that would happen, but it's a tricky sales call to make.
I might just be imagining things, but I'm also picturing what one of those sales calls might look like, and it feels like I've opened the kimono a bit. The cat's out of the bag. There's no mystery or allure behind it anymore, and I feel like that puts me on the back foot somehow -- almost like I've played my strongest cards (hah!) first and have nothing left. By being open-source from the beginning (and talking freely about my architecture and what makes my solution different), there's very little sales-pitch build-up. Maybe it's just a part of the problem of how I'm presenting it, but I think people (especially the big houses) are probably just-as (or more) inclined to silently learn from me and improve their own scanners than try to use / build-upon what I've provided.
It's funny -- that angle is almost more about raising expectations and forcing the big houses to improve their own tech and catch up to open-source, more than getting anyone to adopt my solution in particular.
Am I okay with that? Absolutely -- I made that decision when I open-sourced it. I feel like the tech has been stagnating for several years, and I want to increase the quality of scanners across the board. I want to be the rising tide that lifts all boats.
That's one of the strongest arguments in favor of open-sourcing it (it would be very difficult for a closed-source product to have that same effect), and I remain hopeful for that long-term.
As a mtg player with an absurd amount of bulk, this is awesome! I think there is something to be said about the perceived lack of value, I appreciate greatly open source and even hold it to a higher value all things considered. Keep up the good fight :)
This is awesome. I’ve been interested in something like this for some time as I’ve been working on slowly indexing my mtg collection and selling cards I don’t want/need. Will be checking it out this weekend!
It's still super rough (doesn't support foil-toggling yet, still some issues with double-sided cards, crashing on some iPhones), but overall the rough structure is there -- it can create lists and export as CSV.
If you have feedback or feature requests for your needs, please leave them on Github and I'll get to them as soon as I can. I'd love to hear more user feedback!
I also running an open source software I developed for free. It's one of my hobby so it helps too. Issues or suggestions are no problems, I can choose what I want to fix or implement.
A free software can have good things like there could be a lot of users which is good learning experience on how to deal with it. If you are already experienced, then it would not be as much valuable.
There is also argument that paid software is better. I can't say that it wrong. With less people using it, and the developer has fund to run the service on good machine does make a difference.
I don't think there a right answer to free or paid. Just do it the way that align with your goal.
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 it
What disappoints me most is just how many people have been successfully disabused of so much hope, confidence, and imagination that they just accept our current reality as inevitable.
> If software development is treated as a vehicle for self-exploration, rather than just a means to a financial end, this makes a lot more sense. From my experience, it also generally produces better software that doesn't come with user hostile (value extracting) actions or features because there's no expectation of a financial return.
I strongly identify with all of this. I started programming computers when I was about 7, so now I've been doing it for decades.
I sort of accidentally made it a career for a few years, because I was really good at it, but I didn't like being a professional software developer for a huge tech company.
I still like writing code though, and view it primarily as a means for exploration, figuring out how things work and explaining and systematizing them for myself and for others.
> but I didn't like being a professional software developer for a huge tech company
This feeling is probably shared by many lefties people. They love to work, they just don't like to be restricted/manipulated into working under a highly specified and standardized environment, especially when every bit of their performance is measured for competition.
But I have grown to understand the environment of the "big tech" companies. It is hard to manage a project as it expands, and the result of human work is hard to predict, so often there's two ways to choose: 1) only hire people who's "on the same channel", highly talented "rock star" programmer, or 2) regulate everything to the detail, and "filter out" (a.k.a. firing) those who's incapable of fitting. Both are brutal, but effective and cheap to implement at scale.
If you don't like to work for big companies, maybe try start one of your own. But then of course you'll have to find some kind of financial support, maybe it's from "value extracting", but maybe it's something else.
BTW, I don't think "value extracting" == "user hostile". A lot of people go overboard with their religious beliefs, thinking rich is bad. But your time on this Earth is limited, and this is the only adventure you'll ever have. Thus your labor must be fairly compensated, so you can continue your journey a bit more freely. Otherwise it's a zero-sum game, more you "give out", less chance for yourself. How can you be so sure that other people would utilize their time better than you?
Selling your produce for financial isn't "user hostile". It will be if you're predatory, but it won't be if you're being fair.
I've returned (?) to the semiconductor industry, which is where I was working before I became a software developer at AWS and then at a scammy-but-VC-funded scientific computing startup.
I've been writing software for ~35 years, have taken exactly one course in CS (graduate machine learning while getting my PhD in physics), and did it professionally for about 5 years… that said, "writing software" has been a big part of other jobs I've had, even if not the headline description.
This post misses that the people selling their "I built" SaaS advertised as a hobby/passion-project are just marketing something as indie that they fully intended to get rich from the beginning. It was never even a hobby worth giving away for free, it was always an attempt at making an easy fortune because they bought into the dream that infra was selling.
This is a wonderful ideal. Like some ancient scientists and philosophers, they don't have many worries about money and can pursue pure passion. This also seems like a key source of social progress -- diverse purposes and paths of exploration.
I'm doing exactly this. I started out only intending to create something for myself. As it got better, I thought that other people might want to use it. I briefly considered trying to sell it, and pretty quickly realized that I didn't want to ruin something I was having fun with by turning it into a business.
Now, instead of worrying about sales, I get to feel good about giving something back to the FOSS community that has given me so much.
I recognize that it is a position of privilege to be able to dedicate so much of my time to a project that gives me nothing financially... and in fact costs me money to produce. No shade at all to people who are not so lucky and need to sell what they make.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's what I'm working on. Feature-wise it's come a long way since the last HN post about it.
Only if people do - "grow some grain and give it for free, manufacture some products and give it for free, provide some service and don't charge for it". If everyone does all of those as hobbies, then we are good.
Not at all. As a KDE Plasma user, I love and donate to open source.
I'm arguing that the current climate of "vibe code a startup a day" is unsustainable, terrible, and should NOT be the thing people strive for. Instead of appeasing VC firms, that energy can be better spent on passion projects or contributing to other open-source projects like KDE / Linux / GrapheneOS / etc..
They're different goals though. Someone selling software is doing it to put a roof over their heads and money in their retirement accounts. If you straight up replace that with working on passion projects and giving them away you get.. homeless people.
I'm not sure the starving artist is an ideal to strive for, either. Surely there's a middle ground?
JetBrains' lifetime "subscription" which gets locked at the version you paid for seems fair to me
I don't see why you can't work on something you're passionate about and make money from it. For those of us not retired, the money is essential to make it sustainable.
I just interviewed somebody who works for mac productivity app that has been around forever. For many years it worked as a simple one to two person operation and then they took some money and started to try and scale the business. But it is an idiosyncratic product that has a small number of highly passionate users. They tried to make it a platform. They tried to sell it in bulk. None of this makes sense for the product and the team responsible for it knows it will never work.
This kind of mentality is easy to have when you make 6 figures and don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. For the majority of the world, which makes a median of $10 USD per day, monetization is the only way they can do things they enjoy. There's no "hobbies" for most of humanity if its detached from survival.
This is simply not true. Majority of humanity isn’t starving and yes they have hobbies. Even better social life than westerners who believe they live in a utopia.
Even in these comments I keep hearing the same complaint: "when you do open source people come asking for support and complaining about your software"
I don't get why this is such an issue. You can just ignore these people if you don't want to interact with them. You shouldn't take bug reports or support requests personally.
This has always confounded me when presented as a first choice when developing something with value. I can't think of any other fields with so much practical value where all participants are practically shamed for not giving away something that is identical to their most commercially valuable skill.
Most of my life has been financed by closed source products I developed on my own to fill a real need and others had it too. Had I given them away, the best I could have hoped for was what, a job offer?
That's completely and absolutely fine, if you are millionaire and/or have other well paid job then.. well done, congratulations and enjoy your newly found hobby.
BUT - I'm capable to tinker with my car a bit, to service and repair my bike, to bake a bread - BUT I'm not visiting mechanic shops, bike service shops and bakeries in my city telling owners that they should work for free and give away results of their work.
And yet you have certainly used and enjoyed software published by others free of charge, and your employer, company or favorite service has relied on it. Your career may even be entirely dependent on it.
If you demand remuneration for all your work, then it's only fair for you to also pay for every single piece of software you ever use. If OTOH you're willing to trade some of your time and effort for the time and effort someone else spent on the software you enjoy for free, then you might appreciate that a financial transaction is not required for value to be created in the world. What is required is fair collaboration.
It's easy to have that view when giving away something not that many people are interested in. Once you're a platform full of media, entertainment and social connection you have to find a way to keep serving billions of users.
Great read, explains the issues I have with modern software well. As a matter of fact I am planning to release an App on the Google Playstore just so my mom can use it and has an easier time of installing it. The server is about 15€/month but I dont really care about the expenses. I just want her to have an easier time.
Pretty sure product keys are like a 1 on the scale of 0-to-10.
It's mirrored to other servers running the software, plus there's entire separate instances beyond my control, and Tor-only instances. If one goes down, it will pop up somewhere else.
I have taken a road somewhere between FOSS and paid software. I have a data management system that has been in a 'free open beta' for a few years now. Anyone can download it and try it for free.
Right now it can be used as a great tool or analyzing data. Feedback is appreciated but not expected. I try to respond to bug fixes and feature requests in a timely manner, but I am not required to do that.
If it catches on, I might charge something like $10 for an individual lifetime license. Businesses might be on some kind of subscription.
As this is FOSS, I don't see why you need the security review (by who, with what qualifications?). Any users can look at the source code and arrange their own reviews as they think necessary.
Getting an external review/audit done is a common courtesy of privacy-conscious projects. You're totally free to do your own audit, if you write a report and disclose responsibly, I'll pay you $100 or more in a cryptocurrency of your choice.
With AI it feels writing software that is open is less attractive. It's hard to trust OSS made recently b/c you can tell if someone knows what they're doing and even spent any time on quality. Also, often times people don't reach for software others make (unless it's boring and old stuff, in which case this advice doesn't apply.)
This is why I'm building free "spite apps" in homage to Larry David's spite stores [0]. The goal being to push back on enshitification of tech and dark patterns like mandatory subscriptions, ads and user data tracking.
As a solo indie-dev, writing free software (as in you don't need to pay anything) is fine, but I usually do not make the project (entirely) open source due to the added churn & maintenance.
In my experience, setting expectations early in my apps ("I'm a solo indie dev", "this is a free app", "you can reach out to me through email but don't expect super quick responses") helped reduce entitled users and - quite the opposite - people were super happy to get replies from me solving their problems.
Wish there was a way to send this to every mobile dev who thinks they can (and should) charge a subscription for their hobby app that provides a basic function
Remeber to include the link to your alternate ios app store that you somehow got Apple to allow on everyone's devices, where you don't charge every developer a subscription just to exist. Even Google is 99 44/100 of the way to the same thing.
This is something I hope agentic coding helps to solve. It really just takes a few people annoyed enough with this problem to go out and start churning out truly free stuff like this so that the cash-grab apps can die.
I have already written a few tools for myself that I use in my homelab, and I plan to give them away. I've made stuff that, a few years ago, had I developed from the ground up, I would be far more interested in monetizing. But why bother now that I know that anyone with a coding agent can make a copy of it in an afternoon?
I was thinking about this recently. I was gonna try an experiment where I make AGPL apps, release the source code ofc, but then published a 1-5$ version on the Google play store. There's the compiled version if you want, pay a couple bucks. If not, you're free to compile and sideload on your own.
Seems fair enough, similar to self hosted software that offers managed hosting for a price, or you can try to run the docker containers on your own or whatever. I do a bit of both, self host the non critical stuff, pay for the critical stuff.
Text selection should be working. It wasn't blocked. If it's still not working on the non-JS version (click "nojs" in the footer) would you mind making an issue?
Also, you can append .md to the end of any page (except /) to get the markdown from disk as raw text.
I always hoped that AI would enable people to take paid software and remake it so they could give it away for free. I started developing websites about 20 years ago back then apart from the big name software and Ide’s. Everything was free. Nowadays everything is a subscription.
I just did this for a MacOS+iOS universal app that lets you take quick notes - and keeps them in Markdown files on your Mac's filesystem (so agents can parse them)
CloudKit makes it easy - and you can send push notifications (all part of CloudKit, no push tokens or subscriptions to manage) to inform the "other" clients when there is new data to retrieve. Best to think about each task being an individual file in CloudKit.
I paid other humans with security expertise to "soft audit" the program prior to release, which uncovered a variety of vulnerabilities which were patched.
It's a courtesy to the users, especially self-hosters.
The report is kind of concerning to read, particularly having XSS in this kind of app. The report was not meant to be exhaustive and fixing those vulns isn't some kind of implicit tick of approval.
It's from October 2025, lots of issues have been fixed since then. At least you're more informed and can decide whether you'd like to use it accordingly. Compare that to most projects which are complete unknowns.
> Most projects don't need a team of 3+ engineers, they should stay hobby projects.
I don't have a problem with this, but there is still the cost of living; and renumeration possibilities for time spent and invested into a given project.
Something should be done to improve the ecosystem situation here, even if the renumeration is low.
This is the reason why developers here are upset about AI. You can't have it both ways and 'open source' is now weaponized against them.
AI will consume OSS software and anyone will be able to clone your closed-source app for free and open source it for 'the community' to avoid paying $1 to maintain it.
even better is to grow with your users, monetize ethically, and make a lot of money anyway simply by being very big and through other routes like enterprise
A long time ago, I wrote a small MS-DOS program that I gave away for free. Last I heard someone as of 2 or 3 years ago someone was still using it. It was a .com program.
To repurpose a quote from Walt Disney, I don’t make software to make money, I make money to make more software.
I want my hobby project to be my job, because I don’t want to work for someone else. I want creative control, freedom to explore and ship ideas, and financial stability.
The only way to get there, that I can see, is to charge for my work.
To see a millennial generations person write about developing software that you want or need, and then let other people run that software.
I know these words aren't allowed on HN, but this idea was originally known as the "free software movement".
The idea is that individuals and institutions than need or want certain software, develop the software, and then share it, binary and source.
You add to this the concept of "copyleft", which requires that any change to the software, that is distributed, must also be shared with others, and you have the GPL license.
Businesses, schools, agencies, need email, browsers, accounting, instead of paying for these, what if the people who need them develop than, and share the results?
> it really does turn your passion from something that you actively seek out because you enjoy it, to something that you seek out because you want to meet a quota or turn a profit. You're always chasing the next quarter or the next thousand customers.
Those changes in motivation that came from monetizing the software are exactly what happens to "free software" that transitions to "open source". Developed for profit, not for use.
Again, it's really really encouraging to see a thinking person rediscover this concept.
i have never understood this idea applying to all sofware. sure general research level software should be free and open source. business logic or specific use cases should not. The law is free and open source. Lawyers will not draft you a contract for free. Medicine is free and open source. A doctor will not set your arm for free. FOSS is kind of the worst of both worlds. Unfunded or corporately funded amateurs give away poorly executed sofware that should be standardized basic research while also creating a race to the bottom in specific applications. Locking out true innovation because the reward for monetization is not there. In other words FOSS acts like a non-profit monopolist: restricts production and quality by dumping free software on the market. Anyone who thinks linux is a paragon of quality needs some perspective, or that rust multi gig builds are efficient. essentially foss is the wikipedization of software.
Yes they will. There are doctors working pro-bono. The fact that you have accepted that you owe this world nothing is your own narrow worldview that you have to contend with just don’t pretend it’s a global fact.
I've been doing this at my co-op, just as a kind of, I don't know, break from capitalism or something? Or maybe to practice getting users before finding a monetizable project? Most are rinky dink derp projects to let co-op members play around with whatever stack, or to give potential members a project they can get a commit on (requirement to join), but some I think are kinda useful. Some I use every day, like the calorie one.
None of these run ads or make any money so I'm going to share them guiltlessly:
https://calories.508.dev just a simple average calorie tracker over months. I couldn't find anything like this online or on the app store.
http://stuff4friends.508.dev A stuff library for your friends to borrow stuff you aren't using. I'm most excited about this one right now because I have so much stuff, and my friends seem to be enjoying borrowing random stuff they wouldn't have just because they can see it and know it's all being tracked. https://github.com/508-dev/friend-library
Free software vs paid software - doesn't even matter right now.
What matters is: billionaires and capital have full control, and increasingly more, of everything in our lifes. Throwing tantrums won't help either. What you need to do as a programmer is to get involved in social movements and politics and fight to change the world and to effectively shape the social adoption of new technologies.
Truth is most programmers were always mediocre. And most acted like they were superior to others - not strange with the high pays and utter success of ideology. Glad that's about to end.
If your imagination was ripped completely already, all I can say is: rip. You have the option to cry for the next years, and complain online, like a child, or you can step up your game - and make it multiplayer instead of this sad sad singleplayer.
Current society is devastating both the planet and crushing our souls. According to the most popular topic on HN of the last few days, most users from this bubble can't even talk to other people (calling them "strangers"). Sorry to say, but fuck your FOSS or your expert software - this is utter failure as humans. If we can't fix that, among other things, we're absolutely doomed.
Across the decades of my career in high-tech, I found that repeating the pattern of "Create something you're personally passionate about, then give it away" has directly led to quite remarkable success - not every time, but a surprising amount. Admittedly, I found this out accidentally, since at first it wasn't exactly by choice. It was just what ended up happening after all my original plans failed miserably :-)
While I agree with OP about not always turning hobby or passion projects into businesses, I also realize some HNers may be closer to where I started, as a broke teenager with no degree, no job and no skills, than where I am today, recently retired and looking back on a fairly notable career as an 'accidental' serial tech entrepreneur. So, if you really need the money and/or hate your day job, why shouldn't you try to monetize any project you can? After all, these days everyone's got a side hustle (and 'passive income' was the success-porn meme before that).
Honestly, if you really need to, then go for the money but if you can afford to not go for every dollar early on in an emerging niche, sometimes playing the longer game can work out better. And not only financially, but in other ways like personal development, valuable relationships, practical experience and industry insight. And even in cases where your investment of time and energy doesn't appear to pay off in any tangible way, not turning it into a side hustle can preserve the sense of joy and personal satisfaction you get from it. And the older I get, the more I appreciate just how rare and fleeting that innate joy can be.
So at the end of the day, even if it doesn't go anywhere, not monetizing a passion project costs you maybe a few hundred dollars? I don't really count all the hours because, let's be real, if you're counting hours (instead of hiding them from yourself) it's not really a passion project. And in terms of effort and energy, I've always found doing stuff that feeds my soul tends to renew more than it consumes. So, full disclosure: N=1... but, over the years, most of the things I was unhealthily obsessed about to the extent I poured myself into them with wild abandon - ended up working out extremely well, despite usually having little apparent financial upside at the start. And, being obsessed, I rarely ever paused long enough to worry how much money I would make. To be fair, the 'big win' didn't always come right away but... too often to just be random, it would happen within a couple years - and more than once in life-changing amounts.
To be clear, I don't think there's anything metaphysical or 'woo' about this pattern. It just seems to activate disparate things which each nudge my cumulative odds toward positive outcomes. One unexpected factor was how people responded so strongly to what I was doing because they saw my 'non-mercenary' passion. So much so, that nowadays I tell young entrepreneurs "If you create enough value for people around a real and interesting problem, you won't be able to stop them throwing money at you" by which I mean, over-achieve on creating uniquely transformative value first and if you do that well enough, collecting the money gets a lot easier.
There's also an interesting filter effect around emerging passion niches which are outside the mainstream. In the early days of a new thing, most people don't 'get it' but when you impulsively leap into it because YOU can't stop thinking about it every waking moment (and not because TechCrunch said VCs are funding it), then if you have a sharp eye and good instincts, that can put you near ground zero of the next 'next big thing' before the funding cycle starts.
Sometimes the most valuable part of being on the ground floor in the early days is it attracts others who are smart and have good instincts about cool new things. And in the early days, new communities are still small enough that high-quality individual contributions get noticed by everyone - especially when passionately inspired and freely given. Just look at the careers of the random teens who squandered any hope of dating or sports in high school to waste thousands hours on the demo scene in the 90s. While I wasn't part of the demo scene, I was attracted to a couple similar ground zero tech niches in the 90s and it's spooky how many people I met back 'in the day' because we were all doing 'the best' stuff out of the few hundred people on Earth doing this stuff at all, were people who've gone on to become founders of well-known startups, senior fellows at Google or to invent some fundamental part of what's in my pocket right now. And none of the "cool things" my teenage daughter is impressed I was involved in creating before she was born are things I pursued with a monetization plan or after careful analysis of the TAM (to be honest, I'd already done two startup exits and was a week from my first IPO when I had to ask one of my investment bankers what "TAM" stood for).
The obvious counter-argument is "Cool story, boomer... sadly, the days when a tech nerd could succeed by running toward whatever new thing seemed cool and then naively giving away their time and talent are long gone." And maybe that's true. But today doesn't really feel different. Back then a lot of nice, more experienced people warned me I was wasting my time and talent or that I was being taken advantage of. They were wisely monetizing their time and talent toward a carefully laid plan while I was off experimenting with stuff that didn't even work yet, making toys no one would pay for and spending long nights helping people who couldn't pay me just because I thought the thing we were making was super-cool. While the wise and prudent people with a plan got paid for every single hour - somehow I ended up with generational wealth and most of them didn't. Yeah, maybe it's survivorship bias and in an alternate universe, some other version of me did just waste his time, get taken advantage of and end up nowhere. But here's the thing. Even if I ended up scraping a workaday living together for my whole career and retired after a series of "almost made it" products with nothing but a half-funded 401k, - I still wouldn't trade it. The amazing people and experiences I had and all the joy from creating new things that so inspired me I literally couldn't sleep at night was still worth doing even without the big payday at the end. And maybe that's the difference between fake passion and the real thing.
So I guess, my story is only for the crazy fools and dreamers that old Apple ad was talking to. If what I wrote kind of resonates with you but you also worry about being a chump and taken advantage of - know that there's a version of this story where following your passions and giving stuff away, at least for a little while in the early days of a new thing, ends up working out stupidly well - as long as you're smart, do great work and, of course, actually take care of the business end when the ground floor turns into a skyscraper. Now you just need to decide if you're living in the universe you were made for.
I think part of the problem is there's too much collectivism, which makes dissent harder to do and deal with. This collectivism and excessive capitalism means Guy A sees Guy B making money by taking away features and charging for them, so Guy A does the same thing... on a massive scale. Then there's the people who come into open-source with the expectation of profit, get depressed when there is none, then feel vindicated when they sell out to VC or enshittify their projects and see more returns than their FOSS stuff.
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
[2] https://sdocs.dev/analytics
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.
I’ve also done both, and I found both kinds of users in both situations. There have been cases on the commercial front where I just felt like giving customers their money back, even after years of having used the software, and told them to not come back. There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore. With open-source it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
My “favourites” are the ones threatening to abandon the tool, despite having never made a single positive contribution. On open-source that’s an easy laugh and a “good riddance”. On commercial cases it’s more frustrating and nuanced.
I disagree willingness to pay is that meaningful of a filter, in the cases I experienced. And it’s getting worse; many people are getting too impatient and act like everyone works for them specifically and only their needs matter.
> it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
But driving that line is a cost: to you, your volunteers, or your tokens(?).
There’s no cost to me to stop an entitled disruptive user with zero positive contributions from destabilising the project. No cost to my volunteers either. The opposite is true in both cases; removing that user is a net benefit and I’ve done so in the past specifically to protect the experience of the volunteers.
As for tokens, there have been exactly zero cases where someone has submitted LLM code to one of my repos that has been up to my standards and I have accepted it. Yes, I can say that with certainty. If I wanted LLM code I’d ask for it myself, having an intermediary in that process is worse than useless.
> There’s no cost to me to stop an entitled disruptive user with zero positive contributions from destabilising the project.
Having to spend time reviewing a PR or issue is “no cost”?
I’m not convinced yet.
> As for tokens
I did not mean LLM contributions…I meant using AI tools to automate the reviews of contributions and users you seem to think cost no time or attention, but I do..
Why would you have to “review a pr or issue”?
You can choose to
Or you can choose to ignore them
All of them?
Why are you on a platform open to accepting them in the first place?
Are we talking about the same thing?
Yes, all of them if you want to. It's 100% up to you whether and how you deal with other people and their contributions, and it's completely orthogonal to being FLOSS or using a git hosting.
The central freedom provided by opensource software maintainers is the fork button. Not the “merge pull request” button.
Git hosting provides discoverability and the ability to fork repositories. Everything else is an optional feature.
Then the thread feels a little tangential,
because you don’t have to “drive a hard line”, to do that,
you just draw it once (publish a no PR policy, don’t host on GH, etc),
and you shouldn’t be hearing from users.
That's just one way to do it. Even if you let them send you PRs or whatever, you can still act on them or not depending on how they behave, your available resources, health, mood or just whim. You don't owe anyone anything and "creating a community around a project" is not a goal you have to be striving for regardless of whether you take contributions or provide some user support or not.
> depending on how they behave
So, reviewing them.
Which takes time/focus.
So don't do it when you don't want to.
A TV-presenter of a fairly popular TV-show with an audience in my country once told an anecdote that they wanted the admission for the audience to be free. But when the tickets were free, a lot less people showed up. When they changed the ticket to be the quite arbitrary amount of 7 EUR, suddenly the theater was full every time.
Back in my home town, we used to have free events all the time. Outdoor concerts, theatre, even indoor concerts and festivals.
They were almost always full to the brim.
Anecdotes are fun, but not much more than that.
Context is king. A famous cello player playing on streets is valued less and is valued more when playing in a stadium. This is the typical framing phenomenon which psychology has discovered about humans. Even what colour we perceive changes based on surrounding context so not surprising.
We naturally go for scarce things first. A few examples of this:
- I'm not particularly into castles, but I've visited a fair few while travelling. I lived in Norwich for 10 years, home to one of the finest Norman castles in the country. Did I visit? Did I heck.
- When your favourite film was on TV you'd watch it every time. Then when you got it on DVD you'd never watch it again.
- Give a dog some miscellaneous leftovers and notice how they prioritise ingestion.
Not sure it's really the same entitlement phenomenon the GP was talking about, though.
I've regularly heard something similar said of consulting work, too. Many people new to the game worry about charging too much, because if a client is paying more then surely the pressure will be higher. Instead they end up experiencing the opposite: charging a higher rate tends to get them a better kind of client.
I'm not sure what the exact lesson is here. Something about stingy people not being nice to work with, perhaps?
Stingy people are indeed not nice to work with, which is why I raised my prices as a freelance coder through the roof about 20 years ago, usually pacing about triple the going market rate. But filtering out stingy people isn't the main factor in the phenomenon you're describing, because some of my happiest customers have been stingy people who capitulated to paying much more than they initially thought the work was worth. They tend to also be the ones who are most prone to congratulating themselves and bragging to their friends on springing for the most expensive option, and when they do, they invariably (even pathologically) need to assert to themselves and everyone else that they paid for "the best".
The name for this is the Veblen Effect [0], and it applies to all irrational market behaviour where people are actually happier with luxury goods the more they pay for them.
Funnily enough, I've seen some of the exact same clients brag about how cheaply they got something else. The lesson I've drawn is that they're mostly looking for approval, so they're equally interested in buying status as they are in getting real stuff done. It's a win/win if you deliver a great product that they can brag about, because they'll do the hard work of selling it to themselves for you.
A corollary of that psychology is that some, maybe even most people are never happy with stuff they paid market price for. They either think they could've gotten it cheaper, or they think they could have gotten more for their money. Paying market price makes them feel like a chump. But paying way more than market has to be justified to themselves first. It's simply too embarrassing to admit that they might have overpaid an arm and a leg. So as a contractor, pricing your work as either very cheap or very expensive, on the margins of the parabola, alleviates this vague sense of dissatisfaction from your clients' internal debate, and gives them the peace of mind that they're actually trying to buy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Value is relative. Effort-to-income ratios vary significantly between traders.
The pragmatic accept that work ≠ value, some do so permanently. But someone newly aware of this may deem it unfair, and react with totally disproportionate demands, some do so permanently.
Then you come across those who already benefit greatly from the imbalance, yet still make disproportionate demands. These tend to be good at it, subtle, strategic. Which may explain why they end up on the benefiting side.
Broadly, you find three types: the greedy, the balanced, and the generous pragmatic.
The greedy exploits relativity. The balanced respects it. The generous navigates it without resentment. Whether consciously or not.
It’s about the price subconsciously influencing the client’s evaluation of your competence.
I don't think it's subconscious at all. If, for instance, you contract something on fiverr for $5, you expect $5 of work. If you contract something for $1000 you expect $1000 of work. And the former's probably going to take a lot more feedback to get to where you want than the latter.
Basically, you get what you pay for. That's not always true, but it holds pretty reliably.
Not to mention that "OSI open source" is basically sponsored and advocated by the firms that stand to benefit the most: hyperscalers that will embrace, extend, and encrust the thing you built with their monetization tendrils and leave you without a way to make money on it yourself.
See: Redis, Elastic, etc.
Not an ounce of AWS or GCP is open source, yet they'll happily spin up a managed version of your thing and make hundreds of millions without cutting you in.
We need new licenses that are more "shareware" like. That permit individuals, but slap big trillion dollar companies.
"Fair source", "Fair code", the defold license, etc. are all pretty good.
AGPLv3?
They'll find loopholes around that too, in time - they already found some, which led to the SSPL being created.
What you actually want is some kind of noncommercial clause: you can use my free shit as part of your free shit. If you want to make money off my shit, the rules change to "fuck you, pay me"
"But what if a company just wants to try it out?" well they can live within the already existing exception called "not telling me you're breaking my license". If I don't know about it I can't impose any penalties on you. Every good business already knows how and when they can break the law with impunity, and that's one of them.
This. It's that simple.
Companies shouldn't get your labor for free. Especially the big ones.
Trillion dollar companies don't deserve hand outs.
We should have figured this out twenty years ago.
There are more than 2 ways to do OSS vs proprietary. You can do OSS and refuse all commits or even any comments, e.g. https://codeberg.org/y20k/escapepod/src/branch/master/CONTRI...
Using GPL or MIT or whatever open or free license you prefer does not mean it's OK to get bullied.
It's perfectly fine to not accept entitlement and still let others use or even build on your work, if you want to.
You have the freedom to shape the interactions you want even if nobody else does it this way.
It's totally fine to turn off issues and pull requests, and refuse all contributions. The problem is many maintainers create undue responsibility for themselves with snide responses like "PR welcome" to every issue or request. When people show up with the patches after a response like that, I'd say that they are very much owed some of the maintaner's precious time.
Agreed, if a patch is offered after being suggested then some reaction should take place, even if to clarify that currently there is not enough resource to accept/reject it and thus it might be better to temporarily rely on their own fork.
> if a patch is offered after being suggested
I'd say it comes off as more of a challenge than a suggestion. "I don't care, do it yourself if you care so much". Most people just go away when they get told that. Some people actually rise up to the challenge.
> even if to clarify that currently there is not enough resource to accept/reject it
That's fine if clarified beforehand. The CONTRIBUTING.md from the above comment is an excellent example. It clearly communicates the maintainer's stance.
If it's coming from someone who previously "welcomed PRs", that sort of reply is extremely rude. Learning and modifying someone else's project is a major undertaking, and it's very disrespectful when maintainers don't match that effort, especially when they invited it upon themselves.
I personally give away free software, and actually don't get bothered by comments as much. The catch? I write the software to fulfill my needs, and may or may not take anyone's suggestions at heart.
If they are so inclined, they can fork it and patch it. It's out there after all. As long as they obey the terms of the license I put forth, it's all fair.
I like the idea of creating a OSS project, and then build extra on top of it for selling.
The OSS part ensured that even if I went full Sam Altman, the user will still have an absolute baseline they can fallback on. And given how lazy I am, the OSS is often basically 70% of the project. This also has the benefit that the significant part of the code can be audited for security/etc, sometimes even for free.
As someone who once had a popular open-source project. Opensource is just harder because you've to write code for <optics>. When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive. Despite what people here say, all these things have very little to do with the reliability of actual code.
Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.
> When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive
Your team cares though. Probably including yourself later. Maintaining proper commit history is always worth it.
Do you not trust your teammates? LGTM click merge
I wanted to say "nonzero correlation with employability", but I've seen entitled GitHub issues from megacorporations too.
Agreed, which is why my stance on the matter at least on what I have control over, is either GPL/LGPL, or commercial license.
"Be entitled to whatever one is willing to give upstream" is my motto.
My experience is similar, but I remain more motivated to give away what I make than to ask people to pay for it.
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.
I think about this a lot.
In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing. Many bakers love the craft but nobody expects free baked good (except maybe their family). Many plumbers are true craftsmen and take pride helping solve peoples problems, but we don't expect free plumbing. On the other hand, once you write the code, the logic is complete, its closeness to an equation makes it feel like selling algebra homework.
More importantly though, baked goods get eaten, and pipes aren't assumed to suddenly become load bearing. I think a lot of developers hesitate to sell software they aren't prepared to support professionally. Toy projects then sometimes gain a community and grow organically. It's at this stage I feel we need a better path to funding without a lot of the capture that can occur.
It would be cool if we could "farmers marketize" software though. Come together to taste some exotic and local varieties. Maybe meet the local shops, pay for some overpriced TUI gizmo or a hash function with a weird pattern.
Sorry went into fantasy land there. This is obviously not the solution to the broader OSS funding issue, but it's a cute dream where maybe some people make a buck.
I think the bigger solution would have more opportunities for people outside of academia to get small grants to work on their projects. More foundations supporting the core technology and development that the tech world depends on now, and prospectively in the future.
There is also a big difference between making money to live comfortably and make money to get filthy rich. Lots of people come to tech aiming for the second, so they won't make software so you can buy them a beer. They want to hit it big, and I think this is what smuggles perverse incentives in software development.
It's not horrible to make money from good software, but nowadays lots of the things people do to attract VCs are plain stupid. It's an attack on that, the ones who "ship startups in an afternoon" and seek to build a moat around basic features in the hope that some corpo will buy in and get trapped.
I think that thanks to the behavior of corporations a lot of people have a very unhealthy association with money. Corporations engage in a grossly unethical fashion to try to coercively exploit every single penny from people, and that's generally disgusting. I think that makes 'normal' people want to go in the exact opposite direction and you end up where we are in this discussion.
But if you just look at money as what it is - a simple means of exchange, then charging money doesn't need to be some sort of parasitic or exploitative profit-maximization thing. It's simply a means for people to be able to support themselves while doing something they enjoy, without having to rely on the wholly unreliable and potentially undignified behaviors in relying on donations.
This is all further compounded by governments making it difficult for people to transfer money between themselves openly + anonymously online, let alone on a global level. Actually selling things has some pretty significant hurdles to overcome. Easing global anonymous transactions would greatly lower the pain involved in selling stuff 'ethically'. Of course there's already one tech that had the potential for this, but hasn't yet quite lived up to its potential.
wouldn't this apply everywhere?
let's say agriculture. if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?
what about artists? it's not that their work even has a utility function...
If you've grown a ton of tomatoes, you're probably doing it for the express purpose of profiting from it. To dial back the scope to something more comparable, if I have 4-5 tomato plants, I'm going to have all the tomatoes I want and then some. In that case, yes, I'm absolutely going to give away some tomatoes so that other people can enjoy them (as opposed to them ending up in the compost bin).
If you know any farmers, chances are they have given some away for free. To friends and family at least. Artists I know have done some art for free.
Yes, it would, it does, they should and they often do. When they don't it tends to be because they're struggling to have their other needs fulfilled.
I think plenty of artists would give away their work for free without second thoughts if they didn't have to make it pay their bills.
Yes, I understand most artists would be glad if their landlords accepted "exposure" as rent.
Similarly most salespeople would gladly work commission-free if it meant more sales.
> . if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?
Now, no, of course not.
Originally though, yes this is how many human economies worked. Surplus was shared in a gift economy.
As someone who's worked in UI/UX for 2 decades, I feel this too.
Recent developments have made me feel a form of guilt that's new to me. As though we've all had it too good for too long. Which is probably at least in part due to working for organisations that only care about the bottom line.
In short; all of this boils down to capitalism being simultaneously a drive and a drain on society.
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.
I literally got bullied by people who called themselves "the community" because they weren't happy with my copyleft license and the fact that I wasn't implementing their feature requests for free.
I don’t understand what the downside of this is. That’s hilarious for them to expect, and you’re free to ignore them, take their suggestion and work on it, help them.
It can't be helped either way if it's public, but I was reminded of this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192025
Happened to me too! Guy posted asking kinda rudely whether I was going to fix a bug. Told him I'd be happy to accept a PR for a fix. Never got a PR (project has been dead for some years now - just lost interest).
Auto-reply with the LICENSE.
I'm sympathetic to FOSS developers but struggle to understand this, maybe because it hasn't happened to me. But, why is this a mental drain? Is there not a simple solution? Reply with the license, "comes with no warranty," "you're free to fork," close issue and move on? I suppose in aggregate it could be draining.
The assholes outnumber the good ones, and it feels like all of humanity is transactional and extractive.
At first all engagement is exciting and validating. You work nights and weekends to please people you’ve never met, sure that one good turn deserves another.
Then you get your first jerk, then your second, then your third, while your father is in the hospital. You feel pressure to ship a feature you never wanted. Your issue tracker is demoralizing. You get a PR! Maybe someone is coming to your rescue. It sucks. Now you need to figure out how to respond. You’re alone. Your passion project has become your albatross.
Encourage forks, not PRs
Sounds like a hard lesson in boundaries. No-one is entitled to your time but you.
Really the problem boils down to:
“I don’t want to maintain a custom fork with my fix” - valid sure, if you are not sure if your fix is the best solution for it, and would like the general community to comment (i think the problem here is that iterating on a fork is generally difficult to discover and work on)
“I really want everyone to have the benefit of this fix” - Could be interpreted as wanting the "fame" of authorship or participation in a large open source repo, otherwise just sharing the fix and letting whoever needs it is enough tbrh.
“I don’t know what the fix is, but there is a bug here and the core team should fix it” - would be a user support issue.
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.
Considering the strong opinion on this topic, OP is probably young enough to not remember (or know) the 80s and 90s with too few free options for personal computing and most of the software is proprietary and non-free (exactly as the OP states). While it fueled the traction of shareware, it was a very different epoch, and impossible today with strict controls from MS, Google and Apple on what app is allowed to run. It's easy to wish the world to be different, but it would be much harder to live in with the today reality of secureboot and AppStore controls.
It's possible to say we don't have personal colputers anymore, they are MS/Apple/Google's device now, as they decide what it is allowed to run and what isn't.
linux
Yes, and becoming harder to use with UEFI removed S3 sleep (which MS pushed). I also expect banks and govts to force the requirement to have trusted platform (secureboot with some OS level stuff like in Android) to be able to log in from desktop, probably this or the next year. All "for your safety", sure. And for children's also.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Just because we’ve spent he last 30 years running Linux and not worrying about the nonsense in the wider computer world doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do the same for he next 30 years
The era of the hacker, the ethos of free software, it’s mostly over. In the 80s and 90s people could get jobs and write software on the side, Just for fun.
Today it’s all about side hustles.
Your one-word answer probably violates somebody's rules here. It's also perfect and therefore worthy of upvoting.
its definitely a double edged sword. individual developers are generally screwed financially. if you can make something sass you might be able to monetise it but chances are theres a better free version floating around or that the majority of people just dont want to think about computers and will pay m$lop instead. you could sell your idea to investors i guess but thats heavy sales. should software dev even be a paid profession? with enough tools, automation would be within everyones reach, i think thats where we are headed in general.
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.
I wasn't alive in the 90s, and barely was in the 00s. I look at others writings about those early days, and compare it to today, then get a weird feeling of wanting to experience the "good ol' days" before python scripts made in 10 minutes by an AI and sold to investors as "vendor lock-in" was the thing to strive for.
I was there.
It's mostly rose tinted glasses.
There were some amazing feats. But it was slow and frustrating. Like you wouldn't believe how long things took.
In the 90s most technical documentation was in actual physical books. If you wanted to learn something you had to order and buy the book (and Amazon wasn't a thing everywhere!), and it would take weeks or months to arrive. Or you did inter-library loans (which were amazing but also took weeks).
Or you relied on magazines which had a publication cycle. Writing actual physical letters about a program that was written out in the magazine was a thing.
When I got internet access in the mid-90s I remember emailing someone to ask about mirrors of their documentation project because I didn't want to use up their bandwidth.
I'd never ever want to go back. Bring on the future!
Fwiw I assume most people feel this way.
I am a 90s kid and I watch things like Stranger Things and feel nostalgia for a simpler time even though I wasn't even alive in the 80s.
Fwiw, that's just commercially packaged nostalgia which is mostly the good (and often materialistic) part and forgets absolutely of the rest.
Our brains do that to us and I find it positive to have a nice fantasy world to escape to but definitely not to be mixed up with the reality of things.
OTOH being able to ride off into the bush with your mates and build tree houses and whatever and "be home when the street lights come on", have no phone, &c. was very different to the world we brought our kids up in.
That's true but it doesn't have to be different. I know that in some countries (e.g. US) that's not often possible due to enforcement but that's not the case in other regions.
So, if you can, be the change you want to see in the world. Although videogames and screens are a big culprit too, in my opinion.
Don't worry, the future will be worse and you'll be nostalgic for the good ol' 20s.
Yeah same, I'm older than you and I still yearn for the unix glory days of the 90's and early 2000's, when even Microsoft was just Micro$oft and not Microslop. I remember XP, for all its faults, was still a better experience than anything they put out and it had real charm as well.
I think in general things in computing were better when the nerds were still running the show. One the MBAs and bean counters got involved it's all gone downhill. Feels like the golden age of computers and the internet are well behind us at this point.
The one thing I take away from those early days is that we didn't really care what most people were doing. We figured most people were lamers, so whatever most people were doing was probably lame by definition. I guess if you want to kind of approximate the good ol' days, I'd ignore what most people are doing, work on what you want to work on, and if you think it's cool try to join or build a community around that.
The AI grindslop today is infuriating but I mostly ignore it and do my own open source thing. I quit my job last year to work on open source full time because I felt like I had no choice, there was a project in my mind I'd go down with the ship with. If I wind up in the permanent underclass because it fails, 90s me would think not selling out was pretty l33t.
What are you making?
That was kind of always there too in some form. Countless people made countless bank on the jankiest vb6 apps.
You'd probably love this latest Razor1911 prod, if you haven't seen it yet: https://youtu.be/dybkLM-1eQo
Thank you for this. I grew up outside the scene but it is so encouraging to see things like this celebrated.
This is awesome as hell, haven't seen that one yet. I love that cracktros/demos are still a thing. A cracktro a day keeps the slop away.
If you like that one, you'd probably dig this. I feel like this is one of the best demos of all time from both a technical point of view plus storytelling. Dropped back in 2019. Warms my heart.
The Black Lotus - Eon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc
I was a former (minor) member of groups like ACiD, iCE, CIA (though I never released with them).
The cross-pollination between the hackers / college coders / warez pirates / digital artists was real. A lot of big company CEOs got their start in those days.
It was mostly just about exploring and connection, and as the BBS scene faded to irc chats (efnet, freenode, etc), that whole mixed-scene kept growing for quite awhile.
Now everything is for sale.
Nice, I was in ACiD's orbit too, my BBS was a TOXiC Net affiliate before the scene wound down.
That's the thing I miss the most about the scene, the cross-pollination. You'd distro a pack and learn something about a whole other scene, or help somebody mod their board and they'd become co-sysop of yours. That whole era is definitely why I wound up becoming a programmer.
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.
[0] - https://blog.hanclin.to/posts/gh-26/
I don’t know how big the market is, but seems pretty commercial-friendly to this old magic player. I have a big box of cards from a few decades ago I’ve held onto. I’ve thought about selling them, but it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth. taking a pile of photos and having the ID and valuation automated could go a long way! Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
> it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth.
Well if you want to use the scanner for something useful, you can run the web version here: https://hanclinto.github.io/CollectorVision/
No install -- scan your cards with your phone or desktop (downloads the weights in WASM -- runs 100% local -- the only web request it makes is to look up card names and prices online -- no image data ever leaves your machine), export the list as CSV, take your cards to your friendly local game store, and expect to receive 50-75% of TCG-low for your cards. This app currently only displays TCG Market, so probably about 50% of this price is what you could realistically expect.
> Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
Yes -- and part of this might be that this would have been much more amazing several years ago, but by now -- most marketplaces (I used to do work for some of the big ones) have their own recognition tools. If they aren't actively looking to replace their current software, many companies would rather stick with what's currently working "good enough" than expend effort to migrate to something with only incremental benefit that is difficult to quantify. It's possible that would happen, but it's a tricky sales call to make.
I might just be imagining things, but I'm also picturing what one of those sales calls might look like, and it feels like I've opened the kimono a bit. The cat's out of the bag. There's no mystery or allure behind it anymore, and I feel like that puts me on the back foot somehow -- almost like I've played my strongest cards (hah!) first and have nothing left. By being open-source from the beginning (and talking freely about my architecture and what makes my solution different), there's very little sales-pitch build-up. Maybe it's just a part of the problem of how I'm presenting it, but I think people (especially the big houses) are probably just-as (or more) inclined to silently learn from me and improve their own scanners than try to use / build-upon what I've provided.
It's funny -- that angle is almost more about raising expectations and forcing the big houses to improve their own tech and catch up to open-source, more than getting anyone to adopt my solution in particular.
Am I okay with that? Absolutely -- I made that decision when I open-sourced it. I feel like the tech has been stagnating for several years, and I want to increase the quality of scanners across the board. I want to be the rising tide that lifts all boats.
That's one of the strongest arguments in favor of open-sourcing it (it would be very difficult for a closed-source product to have that same effect), and I remain hopeful for that long-term.
As a mtg player with an absurd amount of bulk, this is awesome! I think there is something to be said about the perceived lack of value, I appreciate greatly open source and even hold it to a higher value all things considered. Keep up the good fight :)
Thank you -- I appreciate that. :)
This is awesome. I’ve been interested in something like this for some time as I’ve been working on slowly indexing my mtg collection and selling cards I don’t want/need. Will be checking it out this weekend!
Thank you! If you want to test out my tool, here's a link to the web version that is built for scanning in lists of cards:
https://hanclinto.github.io/CollectorVision/
It's still super rough (doesn't support foil-toggling yet, still some issues with double-sided cards, crashing on some iPhones), but overall the rough structure is there -- it can create lists and export as CSV.
If you have feedback or feature requests for your needs, please leave them on Github and I'll get to them as soon as I can. I'd love to hear more user feedback!
I also running an open source software I developed for free. It's one of my hobby so it helps too. Issues or suggestions are no problems, I can choose what I want to fix or implement.
A free software can have good things like there could be a lot of users which is good learning experience on how to deal with it. If you are already experienced, then it would not be as much valuable.
There is also argument that paid software is better. I can't say that it wrong. With less people using it, and the developer has fund to run the service on good machine does make a difference.
I don't think there a right answer to free or paid. Just do it the way that align with your goal.
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 it
What disappoints me most is just how many people have been successfully disabused of so much hope, confidence, and imagination that they just accept our current reality as inevitable.
Ugh. Try being conscious of this situation and also the parent of a very smart 15 year old who is also rapidly becoming conscious of this situation.
Man do I feel this. :-( Got a very smart 11 year old and she’s starting to ask questions.
marketing. humans are quite reactive to certain stimuli
> If software development is treated as a vehicle for self-exploration, rather than just a means to a financial end, this makes a lot more sense. From my experience, it also generally produces better software that doesn't come with user hostile (value extracting) actions or features because there's no expectation of a financial return.
I strongly identify with all of this. I started programming computers when I was about 7, so now I've been doing it for decades.
I sort of accidentally made it a career for a few years, because I was really good at it, but I didn't like being a professional software developer for a huge tech company.
I still like writing code though, and view it primarily as a means for exploration, figuring out how things work and explaining and systematizing them for myself and for others.
> but I didn't like being a professional software developer for a huge tech company
This feeling is probably shared by many lefties people. They love to work, they just don't like to be restricted/manipulated into working under a highly specified and standardized environment, especially when every bit of their performance is measured for competition.
But I have grown to understand the environment of the "big tech" companies. It is hard to manage a project as it expands, and the result of human work is hard to predict, so often there's two ways to choose: 1) only hire people who's "on the same channel", highly talented "rock star" programmer, or 2) regulate everything to the detail, and "filter out" (a.k.a. firing) those who's incapable of fitting. Both are brutal, but effective and cheap to implement at scale.
If you don't like to work for big companies, maybe try start one of your own. But then of course you'll have to find some kind of financial support, maybe it's from "value extracting", but maybe it's something else.
BTW, I don't think "value extracting" == "user hostile". A lot of people go overboard with their religious beliefs, thinking rich is bad. But your time on this Earth is limited, and this is the only adventure you'll ever have. Thus your labor must be fairly compensated, so you can continue your journey a bit more freely. Otherwise it's a zero-sum game, more you "give out", less chance for yourself. How can you be so sure that other people would utilize their time better than you?
Selling your produce for financial isn't "user hostile". It will be if you're predatory, but it won't be if you're being fair.
> If you don't like to work for big companies, maybe try start one of your own.
There's a huge landscape of things in between these two options.
What do you do now? I’m just curious.
I've returned (?) to the semiconductor industry, which is where I was working before I became a software developer at AWS and then at a scammy-but-VC-funded scientific computing startup.
I've been writing software for ~35 years, have taken exactly one course in CS (graduate machine learning while getting my PhD in physics), and did it professionally for about 5 years… that said, "writing software" has been a big part of other jobs I've had, even if not the headline description.
This post misses that the people selling their "I built" SaaS advertised as a hobby/passion-project are just marketing something as indie that they fully intended to get rich from the beginning. It was never even a hobby worth giving away for free, it was always an attempt at making an easy fortune because they bought into the dream that infra was selling.
I'm mostly retired from a lifetime as a graphics programmer and CTO, and now I'm working through my lifetime of fun backlog projects. https://pcons.org, https://deep-timeline.org, https://pelorus-nav.com, https://packzen.org, https://github.com/garyo/sea-surface-temp-viz, https://globe-viz.oberbrunner.com/ and lots more. All open source and free.
Sure, make money from software. I did. But when you have enough and it's time to give back, open source it.
> Sure, make money from software. I did. But when you have enough and it's time to give back, open source it.
This is where I'm at. I'm one of the few Gen-Z with enough to live on comfortably + safety net, so I give back.
Edit: took a look, neat stuff you're doing!
This is a wonderful ideal. Like some ancient scientists and philosophers, they don't have many worries about money and can pursue pure passion. This also seems like a key source of social progress -- diverse purposes and paths of exploration.
I'm doing exactly this. I started out only intending to create something for myself. As it got better, I thought that other people might want to use it. I briefly considered trying to sell it, and pretty quickly realized that I didn't want to ruin something I was having fun with by turning it into a business.
Now, instead of worrying about sales, I get to feel good about giving something back to the FOSS community that has given me so much.
I recognize that it is a position of privilege to be able to dedicate so much of my time to a project that gives me nothing financially... and in fact costs me money to produce. No shade at all to people who are not so lucky and need to sell what they make.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's what I'm working on. Feature-wise it's come a long way since the last HN post about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46619391
And if you're not interested, that's OK, because I'm not trying to sell you anything!
that looks useful, will try it out!
Only if people do - "grow some grain and give it for free, manufacture some products and give it for free, provide some service and don't charge for it". If everyone does all of those as hobbies, then we are good.
https://nonogra.ph/100-days-of-digital-blackout-05-06-2026
I wonder if you'd also be arguing for libre software to reject available funding? What's the difference?
The Ruby on Rails foundation brings in a million per year: https://rubyonrails.org/foundation
The Linux foundation is funded at around $250m / year from a quick Google search
Not at all. As a KDE Plasma user, I love and donate to open source.
I'm arguing that the current climate of "vibe code a startup a day" is unsustainable, terrible, and should NOT be the thing people strive for. Instead of appeasing VC firms, that energy can be better spent on passion projects or contributing to other open-source projects like KDE / Linux / GrapheneOS / etc..
They're different goals though. Someone selling software is doing it to put a roof over their heads and money in their retirement accounts. If you straight up replace that with working on passion projects and giving them away you get.. homeless people.
I'm not sure the starving artist is an ideal to strive for, either. Surely there's a middle ground?
Obsidian's model seems fair: https://obsidian.md/pricing
JetBrains' lifetime "subscription" which gets locked at the version you paid for seems fair to me
I don't see why you can't work on something you're passionate about and make money from it. For those of us not retired, the money is essential to make it sustainable.
I just interviewed somebody who works for mac productivity app that has been around forever. For many years it worked as a simple one to two person operation and then they took some money and started to try and scale the business. But it is an idiosyncratic product that has a small number of highly passionate users. They tried to make it a platform. They tried to sell it in bulk. None of this makes sense for the product and the team responsible for it knows it will never work.
This kind of mentality is easy to have when you make 6 figures and don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. For the majority of the world, which makes a median of $10 USD per day, monetization is the only way they can do things they enjoy. There's no "hobbies" for most of humanity if its detached from survival.
This is simply not true. Majority of humanity isn’t starving and yes they have hobbies. Even better social life than westerners who believe they live in a utopia.
Even in these comments I keep hearing the same complaint: "when you do open source people come asking for support and complaining about your software"
I don't get why this is such an issue. You can just ignore these people if you don't want to interact with them. You shouldn't take bug reports or support requests personally.
Link to home https://nonogra.ph/
It has an onion address for those who are ritously privacy conscious: http://aue5jcgehi2uq5gdrxuhfqmyw4yfrsq3ggd7bvcydqyhlnwha27iq...
This has always confounded me when presented as a first choice when developing something with value. I can't think of any other fields with so much practical value where all participants are practically shamed for not giving away something that is identical to their most commercially valuable skill.
Most of my life has been financed by closed source products I developed on my own to fill a real need and others had it too. Had I given them away, the best I could have hoped for was what, a job offer?
That's completely and absolutely fine, if you are millionaire and/or have other well paid job then.. well done, congratulations and enjoy your newly found hobby.
BUT - I'm capable to tinker with my car a bit, to service and repair my bike, to bake a bread - BUT I'm not visiting mechanic shops, bike service shops and bakeries in my city telling owners that they should work for free and give away results of their work.
And yet you have certainly used and enjoyed software published by others free of charge, and your employer, company or favorite service has relied on it. Your career may even be entirely dependent on it.
If you demand remuneration for all your work, then it's only fair for you to also pay for every single piece of software you ever use. If OTOH you're willing to trade some of your time and effort for the time and effort someone else spent on the software you enjoy for free, then you might appreciate that a financial transaction is not required for value to be created in the world. What is required is fair collaboration.
It's easy to have that view when giving away something not that many people are interested in. Once you're a platform full of media, entertainment and social connection you have to find a way to keep serving billions of users.
The VPS costs a few dollars and is holding up just fine against roughly 11k proxied requests per minute. 0.19% CPU and 148mb MEM usage.
A RasPi would be an upgrade!
Also, Nonograph doesn't store or serve any media, just html and markdown.
Great read, explains the issues I have with modern software well. As a matter of fact I am planning to release an App on the Google Playstore just so my mom can use it and has an easier time of installing it. The server is about 15€/month but I dont really care about the expenses. I just want her to have an easier time.
I love the attitude, but this particular service in 2026 is a little risky.
A whole range of content can be posted that can make you liable that you want it or not... from product keys, to internal documents, ...
I'll just say this, I love the spirit but this is ballsy. It's just going to be used as another user-paste space.
Pretty sure product keys are like a 1 on the scale of 0-to-10.
It's mirrored to other servers running the software, plus there's entire separate instances beyond my control, and Tor-only instances. If one goes down, it will pop up somewhere else.
> 1 on the scale of 0-to-10.
I didn't mean in terms of 'seriousness' I meant in terms of liability.
Having terms saying "do what you want, not my problem" isn't a good strategy.
Well then I better up my OPSEC
I have taken a road somewhere between FOSS and paid software. I have a data management system that has been in a 'free open beta' for a few years now. Anyone can download it and try it for free.
Right now it can be used as a great tool or analyzing data. Feedback is appreciated but not expected. I try to respond to bug fixes and feature requests in a timely manner, but I am not required to do that.
If it catches on, I might charge something like $10 for an individual lifetime license. Businesses might be on some kind of subscription.
As this is FOSS, I don't see why you need the security review (by who, with what qualifications?). Any users can look at the source code and arrange their own reviews as they think necessary.
Getting an external review/audit done is a common courtesy of privacy-conscious projects. You're totally free to do your own audit, if you write a report and disclose responsibly, I'll pay you $100 or more in a cryptocurrency of your choice.
All my personal software is MIT licensed. Selling software isn't my bag, baby.
With AI it feels writing software that is open is less attractive. It's hard to trust OSS made recently b/c you can tell if someone knows what they're doing and even spent any time on quality. Also, often times people don't reach for software others make (unless it's boring and old stuff, in which case this advice doesn't apply.)
One of the room elephants: Most free software projects will have 0 users beyond the author.
This is why I'm building free "spite apps" in homage to Larry David's spite stores [0]. The goal being to push back on enshitification of tech and dark patterns like mandatory subscriptions, ads and user data tracking.
As a solo indie-dev, writing free software (as in you don't need to pay anything) is fine, but I usually do not make the project (entirely) open source due to the added churn & maintenance.
In my experience, setting expectations early in my apps ("I'm a solo indie dev", "this is a free app", "you can reach out to me through email but don't expect super quick responses") helped reduce entitled users and - quite the opposite - people were super happy to get replies from me solving their problems.
[0] Blog post about it: https://sxp.studio/blog/spite-apps-the-latte-larrys-of-apps
All my publicly available code on GitHub dot com is available for free for anyone to clone and copy.
What is not free is my time, my attention, and support. I don't know how open source maintainers do it but I can't imagine doing it for free.
See also: "You don't have to monetize your joy"
https://thehabit.co/you-dont-have-to-monetize-your-joy/
The framing of this is far nicer/warmer/positive compared to OP's position of being "above" money. With that said, nonograph does look cool.
Everyone is commenting on the blog but not the service. I remain skeptical:
A. Either it will remain obscure and not see any real use
B. (Less likely) It will get abused to hell before it is shutdown.
Claims of removing violating content “immediately” seem unrealistic under decent usage, unless that $600 can grow unbounded.
https://www.candy-crisis.com/
Enjoy my free, goofy puzzle game
Ha, thats delightful. The pugcompetitor makes it strangely more compelling to keep playing
I would love to write open source software for a living. So far, I haven't worked out how.
The final three paragraphs really struck a chord with me. Nicely said. Thanks!
Wish there was a way to send this to every mobile dev who thinks they can (and should) charge a subscription for their hobby app that provides a basic function
What! You don't want to pay $3.99 a WEEK for a calculator???
No. You, so need to hoodwink me into paying it. Better yet hoodwink my kid.
Answers are free. Correct answers cost extra!
What if I only want to use +? Do I get a discount? How about you only charge me when I use = at the end, but not before?
Guess they gotta hit you with the under-utilization "convenience fee" for $1.99? /s
Remeber to include the link to your alternate ios app store that you somehow got Apple to allow on everyone's devices, where you don't charge every developer a subscription just to exist. Even Google is 99 44/100 of the way to the same thing.
This is something I hope agentic coding helps to solve. It really just takes a few people annoyed enough with this problem to go out and start churning out truly free stuff like this so that the cash-grab apps can die.
I have already written a few tools for myself that I use in my homelab, and I plan to give them away. I've made stuff that, a few years ago, had I developed from the ground up, I would be far more interested in monetizing. But why bother now that I know that anyone with a coding agent can make a copy of it in an afternoon?
I was thinking about this recently. I was gonna try an experiment where I make AGPL apps, release the source code ofc, but then published a 1-5$ version on the Google play store. There's the compiled version if you want, pay a couple bucks. If not, you're free to compile and sideload on your own.
Seems fair enough, similar to self hosted software that offers managed hosting for a price, or you can try to run the docker containers on your own or whatever. I do a bit of both, self host the non critical stuff, pay for the critical stuff.
I don’t need money but I run some moderately successful open source projects. The users are very demanding.
i do it here https://github.com/agentify-sh/
but have no idea how to get any compensation
i just do it because i use these tools and like to share it
> Debian-based Linux (Raspberry Pi OS, KDE Neon, Pop_OS, etc. - not Ubuntu)
Why not Ubuntu?
That's outdated, I should update it. It used to be an issue before docker builds and makefile fixes were pushed.
Hey author, thank you for blocking text selection on your site!
Do you mind describing why?
Text selection should be working. It wasn't blocked. If it's still not working on the non-JS version (click "nojs" in the footer) would you mind making an issue?
Also, you can append .md to the end of any page (except /) to get the markdown from disk as raw text.
Text selection is working perfectly fine for me.
I always hoped that AI would enable people to take paid software and remake it so they could give it away for free. I started developing websites about 20 years ago back then apart from the big name software and Ide’s. Everything was free. Nowadays everything is a subscription.
I just did this for a MacOS+iOS universal app that lets you take quick notes - and keeps them in Markdown files on your Mac's filesystem (so agents can parse them)
https://www.github.com/klinquist/notesync
Neat, I just put together my first MacOS app. Am thinking about an iOS version and using the Apple data thing to keep them in sync. Any tips?
https://github.com/agoodway/goodday
CloudKit makes it easy - and you can send push notifications (all part of CloudKit, no push tokens or subscriptions to manage) to inform the "other" clients when there is new data to retrieve. Best to think about each task being an individual file in CloudKit.
Generally speaking it just works.
> It cost about $600 USD to release, mostly due to two initial security reviews.
Can someone expand on this? I've given software away free and it didn't cost me anything.
I paid other humans with security expertise to "soft audit" the program prior to release, which uncovered a variety of vulnerabilities which were patched.
It's a courtesy to the users, especially self-hosters.
The report is kind of concerning to read, particularly having XSS in this kind of app. The report was not meant to be exhaustive and fixing those vulns isn't some kind of implicit tick of approval.
It's from October 2025, lots of issues have been fixed since then. At least you're more informed and can decide whether you'd like to use it accordingly. Compare that to most projects which are complete unknowns.
> Most projects don't need a team of 3+ engineers, they should stay hobby projects.
I don't have a problem with this, but there is still the cost of living; and renumeration possibilities for time spent and invested into a given project.
Something should be done to improve the ecosystem situation here, even if the renumeration is low.
This is the reason why developers here are upset about AI. You can't have it both ways and 'open source' is now weaponized against them.
AI will consume OSS software and anyone will be able to clone your closed-source app for free and open source it for 'the community' to avoid paying $1 to maintain it.
One thing that is not free is hosting.
An one thing which isn't free is AI. Try to maintain moderately complex app with AI and not spend $ on tokens or GPUs.
part 3. dont maintain it. do point in time stuff
even better is to grow with your users, monetize ethically, and make a lot of money anyway simply by being very big and through other routes like enterprise
Still doing that :)
A long time ago, I wrote a small MS-DOS program that I gave away for free. Last I heard someone as of 2 or 3 years ago someone was still using it. It was a .com program.
To repurpose a quote from Walt Disney, I don’t make software to make money, I make money to make more software.
I want my hobby project to be my job, because I don’t want to work for someone else. I want creative control, freedom to explore and ship ideas, and financial stability.
The only way to get there, that I can see, is to charge for my work.
if putting a subscription is considered enshittification, can the OP kindly enlighten me on how I am supposed to pay my bills while offering value?
If that's the only way you pay your bills then this article is not asking you to give away your software for free. It is for second jobbers.
What a really encouraging article!
To see a millennial generations person write about developing software that you want or need, and then let other people run that software.
I know these words aren't allowed on HN, but this idea was originally known as the "free software movement".
The idea is that individuals and institutions than need or want certain software, develop the software, and then share it, binary and source.
You add to this the concept of "copyleft", which requires that any change to the software, that is distributed, must also be shared with others, and you have the GPL license.
Businesses, schools, agencies, need email, browsers, accounting, instead of paying for these, what if the people who need them develop than, and share the results?
> it really does turn your passion from something that you actively seek out because you enjoy it, to something that you seek out because you want to meet a quota or turn a profit. You're always chasing the next quarter or the next thousand customers.
Those changes in motivation that came from monetizing the software are exactly what happens to "free software" that transitions to "open source". Developed for profit, not for use.
Again, it's really really encouraging to see a thinking person rediscover this concept.
i have never understood this idea applying to all sofware. sure general research level software should be free and open source. business logic or specific use cases should not. The law is free and open source. Lawyers will not draft you a contract for free. Medicine is free and open source. A doctor will not set your arm for free. FOSS is kind of the worst of both worlds. Unfunded or corporately funded amateurs give away poorly executed sofware that should be standardized basic research while also creating a race to the bottom in specific applications. Locking out true innovation because the reward for monetization is not there. In other words FOSS acts like a non-profit monopolist: restricts production and quality by dumping free software on the market. Anyone who thinks linux is a paragon of quality needs some perspective, or that rust multi gig builds are efficient. essentially foss is the wikipedization of software.
Most programming languages and tools are free and open source. Software developers will not code you an app for free.
Yes they will. There are doctors working pro-bono. The fact that you have accepted that you owe this world nothing is your own narrow worldview that you have to contend with just don’t pretend it’s a global fact.
I've been doing this at my co-op, just as a kind of, I don't know, break from capitalism or something? Or maybe to practice getting users before finding a monetizable project? Most are rinky dink derp projects to let co-op members play around with whatever stack, or to give potential members a project they can get a commit on (requirement to join), but some I think are kinda useful. Some I use every day, like the calorie one.
None of these run ads or make any money so I'm going to share them guiltlessly:
https://calories.508.dev just a simple average calorie tracker over months. I couldn't find anything like this online or on the app store.
https://travelcards.508.dev Generate printable cards with localized allergies or whatever for trips. Apparently a lot of our wedding guests like this. https://github.com/508-dev/travel-cards
http://stuff4friends.508.dev A stuff library for your friends to borrow stuff you aren't using. I'm most excited about this one right now because I have so much stuff, and my friends seem to be enjoying borrowing random stuff they wouldn't have just because they can see it and know it's all being tracked. https://github.com/508-dev/friend-library
neat!
Free software vs paid software - doesn't even matter right now.
What matters is: billionaires and capital have full control, and increasingly more, of everything in our lifes. Throwing tantrums won't help either. What you need to do as a programmer is to get involved in social movements and politics and fight to change the world and to effectively shape the social adoption of new technologies.
Truth is most programmers were always mediocre. And most acted like they were superior to others - not strange with the high pays and utter success of ideology. Glad that's about to end.
If your imagination was ripped completely already, all I can say is: rip. You have the option to cry for the next years, and complain online, like a child, or you can step up your game - and make it multiplayer instead of this sad sad singleplayer.
Current society is devastating both the planet and crushing our souls. According to the most popular topic on HN of the last few days, most users from this bubble can't even talk to other people (calling them "strangers"). Sorry to say, but fuck your FOSS or your expert software - this is utter failure as humans. If we can't fix that, among other things, we're absolutely doomed.
Across the decades of my career in high-tech, I found that repeating the pattern of "Create something you're personally passionate about, then give it away" has directly led to quite remarkable success - not every time, but a surprising amount. Admittedly, I found this out accidentally, since at first it wasn't exactly by choice. It was just what ended up happening after all my original plans failed miserably :-)
While I agree with OP about not always turning hobby or passion projects into businesses, I also realize some HNers may be closer to where I started, as a broke teenager with no degree, no job and no skills, than where I am today, recently retired and looking back on a fairly notable career as an 'accidental' serial tech entrepreneur. So, if you really need the money and/or hate your day job, why shouldn't you try to monetize any project you can? After all, these days everyone's got a side hustle (and 'passive income' was the success-porn meme before that).
Honestly, if you really need to, then go for the money but if you can afford to not go for every dollar early on in an emerging niche, sometimes playing the longer game can work out better. And not only financially, but in other ways like personal development, valuable relationships, practical experience and industry insight. And even in cases where your investment of time and energy doesn't appear to pay off in any tangible way, not turning it into a side hustle can preserve the sense of joy and personal satisfaction you get from it. And the older I get, the more I appreciate just how rare and fleeting that innate joy can be.
So at the end of the day, even if it doesn't go anywhere, not monetizing a passion project costs you maybe a few hundred dollars? I don't really count all the hours because, let's be real, if you're counting hours (instead of hiding them from yourself) it's not really a passion project. And in terms of effort and energy, I've always found doing stuff that feeds my soul tends to renew more than it consumes. So, full disclosure: N=1... but, over the years, most of the things I was unhealthily obsessed about to the extent I poured myself into them with wild abandon - ended up working out extremely well, despite usually having little apparent financial upside at the start. And, being obsessed, I rarely ever paused long enough to worry how much money I would make. To be fair, the 'big win' didn't always come right away but... too often to just be random, it would happen within a couple years - and more than once in life-changing amounts.
To be clear, I don't think there's anything metaphysical or 'woo' about this pattern. It just seems to activate disparate things which each nudge my cumulative odds toward positive outcomes. One unexpected factor was how people responded so strongly to what I was doing because they saw my 'non-mercenary' passion. So much so, that nowadays I tell young entrepreneurs "If you create enough value for people around a real and interesting problem, you won't be able to stop them throwing money at you" by which I mean, over-achieve on creating uniquely transformative value first and if you do that well enough, collecting the money gets a lot easier.
There's also an interesting filter effect around emerging passion niches which are outside the mainstream. In the early days of a new thing, most people don't 'get it' but when you impulsively leap into it because YOU can't stop thinking about it every waking moment (and not because TechCrunch said VCs are funding it), then if you have a sharp eye and good instincts, that can put you near ground zero of the next 'next big thing' before the funding cycle starts.
Sometimes the most valuable part of being on the ground floor in the early days is it attracts others who are smart and have good instincts about cool new things. And in the early days, new communities are still small enough that high-quality individual contributions get noticed by everyone - especially when passionately inspired and freely given. Just look at the careers of the random teens who squandered any hope of dating or sports in high school to waste thousands hours on the demo scene in the 90s. While I wasn't part of the demo scene, I was attracted to a couple similar ground zero tech niches in the 90s and it's spooky how many people I met back 'in the day' because we were all doing 'the best' stuff out of the few hundred people on Earth doing this stuff at all, were people who've gone on to become founders of well-known startups, senior fellows at Google or to invent some fundamental part of what's in my pocket right now. And none of the "cool things" my teenage daughter is impressed I was involved in creating before she was born are things I pursued with a monetization plan or after careful analysis of the TAM (to be honest, I'd already done two startup exits and was a week from my first IPO when I had to ask one of my investment bankers what "TAM" stood for).
The obvious counter-argument is "Cool story, boomer... sadly, the days when a tech nerd could succeed by running toward whatever new thing seemed cool and then naively giving away their time and talent are long gone." And maybe that's true. But today doesn't really feel different. Back then a lot of nice, more experienced people warned me I was wasting my time and talent or that I was being taken advantage of. They were wisely monetizing their time and talent toward a carefully laid plan while I was off experimenting with stuff that didn't even work yet, making toys no one would pay for and spending long nights helping people who couldn't pay me just because I thought the thing we were making was super-cool. While the wise and prudent people with a plan got paid for every single hour - somehow I ended up with generational wealth and most of them didn't. Yeah, maybe it's survivorship bias and in an alternate universe, some other version of me did just waste his time, get taken advantage of and end up nowhere. But here's the thing. Even if I ended up scraping a workaday living together for my whole career and retired after a series of "almost made it" products with nothing but a half-funded 401k, - I still wouldn't trade it. The amazing people and experiences I had and all the joy from creating new things that so inspired me I literally couldn't sleep at night was still worth doing even without the big payday at the end. And maybe that's the difference between fake passion and the real thing.
So I guess, my story is only for the crazy fools and dreamers that old Apple ad was talking to. If what I wrote kind of resonates with you but you also worry about being a chump and taken advantage of - know that there's a version of this story where following your passions and giving stuff away, at least for a little while in the early days of a new thing, ends up working out stupidly well - as long as you're smart, do great work and, of course, actually take care of the business end when the ground floor turns into a skyscraper. Now you just need to decide if you're living in the universe you were made for.
I think part of the problem is there's too much collectivism, which makes dissent harder to do and deal with. This collectivism and excessive capitalism means Guy A sees Guy B making money by taking away features and charging for them, so Guy A does the same thing... on a massive scale. Then there's the people who come into open-source with the expectation of profit, get depressed when there is none, then feel vindicated when they sell out to VC or enshittify their projects and see more returns than their FOSS stuff.
Also, I like your comment so much I immortalized it in a Nonograph: https://nonogra.ph/na-ymlu-05-06-2026
Thanks for the long read!