Can we please dispense with this notion and start realizing one simple fact: people will typically only pay for something if you make them pay.
Things to appear to be changing for the better though. As an examply, Gina Häußge is working full time on OctoPrint (3D printing software) supported entirely by donations:
https://www.patreon.com/foosel
There are probably others too, I'm just not aware of them and have only really started looking at Patreon recently (for a project I'm involved with). :)
Whereas clearly it can, as there are the occasional success stories. So, it's more than 0%. Maybe not a high percentage yet though. ;)
My point is that you can't start a business based upon some vague hope that someday, somehow, someone will possibly choose to donate money to you. You need a reliable stream of income, and one that will keep coming long after the shine has worn off the original product and now you're slogging through complicated maintenance and upgrades.
You want to know why the JS ecosystem keeps suffering from the "shiny penny" problem ? This is one of the reasons.
For an already successful OSS project though, it might be a way to turn that into an ongoing income stream to then continue improving the software.
What part of that doesn't apply equally proprietary software too?
I hire some dev interns every year. For the past 5 or 6 years, they all were using Sublime Text as their main editor. And none of them paid it, they simply clicked the nagging dialog away. To all of them I had to explain that it would be fairer either to use a free alternative like Atom or VSCode, or pay the fee (or learn to use a real editor like Vim or Emacs :). People go through incredible pains not to pay, even if your program isn't free. Even if they're programmers, and spend all day using your program.
Having paid for sublime and PHP storm, both have vim modes. But I prefer nano (yes I'm one of those lol ;-) )
But, I would seriously argue the proposition that open sourcing one's software does not harm your ability to make money from it. Exhibit A is how often you see a mass of "They want money ? We're switching/forking !!!" type of posts and comments whenever the inevitable "we need to start making money from this project" point hits with an open source project.
As for your example, you're kind of making my point for me. ;-) It's a serious issue, and one that I'm trying to make as much as possible: as software developers, we're seriously harming our own economic well-being as a group by being overly-altruistic and conditioning (what would normally be paying) customers into thinking that our work is without value. It doesn't matter what the reality is, but free=no value in the eyes of consumers.
I also am the author of an active Open-Source project. I accept donations but they have never amounted to much.
https://www.patreon.com/evanyou/overview
And yep, I definitely agree. The long term sustainability of projects via Patreon clearly hasn't been established yet.
But, at least some _are+ actually now making decent money, so we can find out how sustainable things are over time.
Hopefully it mostly goes well, but yeah... it's unproven thus far. ;)
https://www.patreon.com/sindresorhus
but he's kind of a unicorn (pun intended). I am sure this would not work for everyone.
https://github.com/sindresorhus/ama/issues/414#issuecomment-...
The creator of Vue.js (in sibling comment) has a Patreon account with a monthly income of $US15k+ (at time of writing this).
That seems to be more in line with "standard" professional rates. :)
I'd heard of it before, but haven't yet tried it out. I'll try to get time to do so, as I've recently started helping out a different CNC project (github.com/synthetos/g2).
They kind of look like they might complement each other. Not 100% sure yet though. ;)
Looking through the Buildbotics stuff now and some of the video's. Looks nifty!
Is the motion control done by TinyG2 or g2core? If so, would it be ok to add some appropriate links to our "Who uses g2core?" page?
https://github.com/buildbotics/bbctrl-firmware
No worries at all. :)
Open source, on the other hand, is like trying to shave with a razor blade with no handle. It's a hard sell to get people to donate to projects that they know are going to cut them at some point.
By all means please donate to projects you want to support. But 'donation' implies you aren't getting something in return. Otherwise it would be a 'purchase'.
The point being that anecdotally, windows doesn't have it down either.
I see more passion in paid software in macOS when I see a beautiful UI because it shows that the developer actually wants me to use and enjoy his creation day to day.
Then, there are also badly run commetial projects, which are crap despite being paid for.
My OSS project, which I haven’t worked on in ages to be fair, I never made any effort to make it work anywhere but on Debian for example. I know some people used it in Suse and RHEL so it can’t have been too painful but I never had that as a goal.
This makes it hard to target 'linux' in general with polished software. The issue of package managers seems on its way to being solved by containers. However, the issue of desktop environments is much more thorny. As you can't really abstract away the metaphors with which a user communicates with his PC.
Years ago, I went through a phase getting the installer working well (cross platform) for a PostgreSQL replication project. FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, RHEL, ... there might have been others too, it was a long time ago. ;)
Think about OSS software you've written and contributed to. 99% of time it is to scratch your own programmer centric itch.
Usability usually takes a backseat in OSS model as not many usability experts are working for free.
Same goes for documentation. It is autodoc or nothing.
An open source project creates no obligation on the part of the developers. Open source licenses explicitly indemnify the authors. Receiving something for free and expecting something more is the essence of the entitled behavior that frustrate and burn out many open source developers.
A donation is a voluntary gift. Like any other gift, a donation to an open source project is understood to have no strings tied to it. Giving a dollar a month to a project doesn't entitle you to round-the-clock support. If you expect something more, have a conversation with the developers to work out a plan.
P.S.: we (https://sheetjs.com/) build and maintain open source projects (our largest is https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx) and we turn down donations precisely because many people expect something in return. Instead, we offer actual paid support plans and additional features.
I meant a subconscious obligation, not a legal one. When somebody gives you a gift, it puts pressure on you (subconscious and social) to reciprocate. You see it all the time with youtube streamers, who frequently cater their content to their subscribers wishes to keep them happy. And to clarify, the streamers don't do this because their users are unhappy or protesting. They do it because they feel a sense of obligation to give their subscribers what they want because the subscribers were generous enough to give the streamer money.
For whatever reason, this phenomenon is completely lacking in the open source community. Instead, the opposite seems to occur. OSS developers are actively hostile toward their users, both vocally and how they react to criticism that their software isn't user friendly or respectful of their user's time. Anybody who has spent hours trying to set up a piece of OSS and then made the mistake of asking the developer for help can attest to this.
Most moderate sized projects have at least decent documentations, some channel for support, and there are a range of third party options to consult. The developer generally should not be who you contact.
Not my experience at all. Well sometimes bugs gets closed for no apparent reason etc but I've rarely been shouted at and I think more often than not they try to help.
And - if this approach that you are showing here is representative for how you communicate it might explain a bit ;-)
Edit: and yes, my approach has worked for years so either it is something I do that you don't or I'm just consistently lucky or something :-)
This sounds whiny and more importantly it isn't true its hard to get people to pay for things that they can have for free full stop.
Don't make things more complicated than they are.
Are you an OSS developer by chance?
> its hard to get people to pay for things that they can have for free full stop.
The Apple third party app ecosystem proves you wrong. Users are willing to pay for good software, even if there are free alternatives available.
People are disinclined to fund open source projects that they can get for free.
If you rely on voluntary donations you will find yourself poor.
They may be willing to pay for value added only if getting something for nothing isn't an option.
Then communicate your point better. Losing the hostility would be a great start.
OSS isn't polished many times. The installer might be missing. Documentation is out of date or incomplete. The plug-in manager requires using the file system explorer directly.
All of that cuts. OSS can be death by a thousand cuts at times.
This is as much true as it is for developers of proprietary software.
There are many examples on both sides that make your statement false, also as many to make it true.
Realistically, a $100 donation doesn't get much of my time anyway.
It's more of a pat on the back; people like what you're doing, and the way you're doing it; so keep going. (Don't do anything differently, just more of it.)
I always go out of my way to help users who showed gratitude to me, either with a donation (those are very rare) or by being extra nice to me last time I helped them.
But obviously, users who insult my software and myself every time they have an issue come last on my list of priorities.
The things that people choose to donate for, in software, drive an incentive system that results in ever-increasing code quality and security and a bunch of other things that developers themselves care about, and feel that users should care about, but which don't actually affect application polish very much.
It's not even down to the companies choosing to do this or that with your money. It's a response to incentives. They know that, under a paid model, they'll keep getting money only if they do X; and under a donation model, they'll keep getting money if only they do Y. And so they prioritize X, or they prioritize Y, regardless of which one they think should be prioritized.
If you want X from your software, you should advocate for an ecosystem of paid software businesses. If you want Y from your software, you should advocate for an ecosystem of donation-supported software organizations.
If you want both... I'm not sure. Maybe support both ecosystems, and encourage the donation-driven organizations to put their work into "cores" or "engines" that can be wrapped into polished experiences by the paid companies?
Oh, and BTW, the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace and many other NGOs live, AFAIK, mostly on donations. So that definitely can pay the bills, but the same reasoning applies: it's only true for a small minority, and you can't count on it.
They do, but they also get sponsoring from many governments across the globe, do continuous street actions trying to get people to donate for them´, and after a certain age most people end up leaving to some positions with more stability.