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Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

(spliit.app)
260 points scastiel | 5 comments | 18 Oct 24 14:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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carlosjobim ◴[18 Oct 24 15:35 UTC] No.41880377[source]▶
Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source". People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind!

> A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community.

And this is why open source will finally die, because being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.

A better way to "give back to the community", instead of making open source software, would be to purchase software from other indie developers.

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aniviacat ◴[18 Oct 24 15:54 UTC] No.41880585[source]▶
> People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind!

We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).

> being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.

edit: remved anecdote

The cost of living will never rise so much that the upper 50% can't easily make enough money. (Otherwise what? The other 150 million people go homeless?)

And unless our industry sees a major shift, which I don't see happening, software engineers will continue being comfortably in the upper 50%.

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carlosjobim ◴[18 Oct 24 16:08 UTC] No.41880708[source]▶
> We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).

That's a given. If you open source your code, other developers will steal it and sell your software. Just like billion dollar tech companies are the main benefiters of open source today, that some guy made for free. Excuse me, I meant for $42 in donations.

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immibis ◴[18 Oct 24 18:59 UTC] No.41882392[source]▶
That's why I make all my software AGPL now.

I haven't published any software at all recently. But if I did (anything non-trivial), it would be AGPL. Or even SSPL.

Permissive licensing (MIT, BSD, Unlicense, public domain, etc) is a scam to make you work for companies for free - if your software is worth anything to them, that is. They told developers they should use MIT licenses so more people would use their software. That's true. They didn't ask whether that was a good thing.

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samatman ◴[18 Oct 24 22:53 UTC] No.41884219{3}[source]▶
If you don't want to give away software, and it sounds like you don't, then. Don't.

Perhaps you're under the impression that I blindly click the button for a permissive license? No. I read it first. I know what it allows. That's why I choose it.

I think it's nice when companies make money, for the record. Pays for houses, puts food on the table, sends kids to summer camp and college. Some of them even make a lot of money. That's fine too.

If they want to use my software in the process, more power to them. That's why I put my name next to the copyright notice, on a license which says in plain English that they can do that.

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1. immibis ◴[19 Oct 24 06:20 UTC] No.41885991{4}[source]▶
Did you know that every dollar a company makes gets taken away from someone? It's zero-sum if you aren't close to Jerome Powell. Why assume the dollar is better in the hands of the company owner than whoever had it before?
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2. aniviacat ◴[19 Oct 24 08:23 UTC] No.41886469[source]▶
The economy is not a zero sum game. We (non-politicians/non-billionares) have significantly more resources than we had 100 years ago, and we will have significantly more resources in 100 years than we do now. And open source developers are a small part of why.
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3. samatman ◴[19 Oct 24 09:09 UTC] No.41886641[source]▶
Every dollar a company makes is given to them by someone, in exchange for something else.

I go to the supermarket, they don't take my money. I pull it out of my pocket and swipe it into their coffers. They have food, you see. Which I can eat. Unlike money.

Strange how a game you describe as zero sum has built the prosperity of the modern world. I wonder if something is missing from your understanding of how that game is actually played.

4. immibis ◴[19 Oct 24 15:16 UTC] No.41888287[source]▶
The economy is not a zero sum game because we produce more stuff. Money, however, is a zero sum game unless you are Jerome Powell. We produce more stuff because we work hard to produce it, not because venture capitalists have larger bank accounts.

Especially in relation to open-source software, this should be obvious. Software exists because someone wrote it, not because a company owner was paid for access to it. Programmers may be paid to write software. However when comparing two worlds, one in which a programmer wrote some software for free, and another in which a programmer was paid $1 by a venture capitalist who received $5 from a customer who is now out $5, it's not at all clear that the second world is better. Especially since in the second world, the customer has to keep paying and has to contend with software full of ads that make it slow.

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5. samatman ◴[20 Oct 24 14:32 UTC] No.41895608{3}[source]▶
This is straightforwardly, nakedly, embarrassingly illiterate and wrong.

Money has velocity. The faster it moves around, the more there is. If you're a waiter and you get tipped the same serial-numbered twenty dollar bill five times, you've earned a hundred bucks, not twenty.

When economic productivity increases, there's more to buy, and more people doing and making valuable things which others want to pay them for. This increases the velocity of money, it moves around faster, so it isn't zero sum.

This is taught early in any course of study in economics. Since you don't know the most basic and fundamental facts about the subject, it's not surprising that your conclusions make negative sense.

You could spend two weeks of evenings on YouTube and never again reveal your ignorance in such a naked way. I highly recommend this. You're making perpetual-motion class arguments in a place where people know the second law of thermodynamics. Step your game up.