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Comment by TimJYoung | Hacker News Reader

Relying on the good will of others does not work, period. The fact that it works sometimes is not something that one can use as the reason to quit their job and start an "endeavor" (you can't really call it a business).

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.

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> 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). :)

Again, donations, etc. may work for some creators, but they will not work for all. There are always going to be products that are "Wow, I'm donating to her !", but the vast majority are more of the "plumbing" variety that are much, much harder to monetize in ways other than "pay me".

Sure. But the original statement was that it does not work. eg 0% success

Whereas clearly it can, as there are the occasional success stories. So, it's more than 0%. Maybe not a high percentage yet though. ;)

Yes, but that statement was followed by more details as to exactly what I meant. A model that only works for a small percentage of people does not work.

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.

Ahhh. Yeah, now I understand what you mean.

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.

>>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

What part of that doesn't apply equally proprietary software too?

I see the biggest difference being that with commercial software you know when to stop and move on to something else.

You seem to forgot that most independent developers don't make money, period. The fact that your app is open source or not is only marginally related to the fact that it earns you a living. Thousands upon thousands developed applications for desktop or mobile or whatever and simply cant' make end meet. Believing that because your app has a sticker price on it will make you money is an illusion.

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.

Any software I have used and found to be a tool I've relied on, I have purchased a licence for at some point in time. Granted this is when I've been comfortable financially. If it comes down to eating or paying for a software license is obvious. But to keep being a tight ass after you're more than able is just crappy. Especially since as a dev you should be able to relate to those dedicated to their craft & realize they too could be struggling financially. I do find smaller orgs more enticing than say a Photoshop license as an example, of the pricing is high for using on occasions. That said being a solely design or front end type that's something you'd use and rely on to make money on. It's really that case (for me at least) if it's used for profit it should be profitable for the creators. However I've also been a musician too who believes strongly on the opposite. Music should be free to individuals and paid for up corporations. The same model is great for open source like redhat (centos) or Magento that offer enterprise license that mean dedicated support. My point being as an individual it's hard to justify at times, but for organizations it should be obvious to licensed.

Having paid for sublime and PHP storm, both have vim modes. But I prefer nano (yes I'm one of those lol ;-) )

No, I didn't forget or ignore the fact that a lot of software products fail to make money. I went through several failed software product attempts before building one that stuck, and it's part of the process of getting to know what one's forte is, as well as getting good at running a software company and making money from it.

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.

Thibault Duplessis also works full time on lichess.org only with donations.

Gina Häußge is the only one making reasonable money on Patron for a software project, last I checked. I exchanged several emails with her about this very topic. Despite her success in fund raising, even she was concerned about the long-term viability of this sort of funding.

I also am the author of an active Open-Source project. I accept donations but they have never amounted to much.

There do seem to be others. The author of Vue.js seems to be doing ok as well:

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. ;)

Sindre Sorhus has a successful Patreon as well:

https://www.patreon.com/sindresorhus

but he's kind of a unicorn (pun intended). I am sure this would not work for everyone.

And $3500 per month is not what a lot (most?) people here would consider a successful financial model even given some consulting etc. on top of that. It depends on where you live of course but bringing in $50K per year (with no benefits) or so in donations is not something a lot of professionals--especially those qualified to work for major software companies--would consider a sustainable income stream.

He looks to be located in Bangkok:

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. :)

Mastodon's main dev too: https://www.patreon.com/mastodon

Just noticed you're the primary author of CAMotics.

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. ;)

Yes, I'm friends with the Syntheos guys. It can work with CAMotics. You might also be interested in another project I work on, the Buildbitics Open-Source CNC controller.

Thanks. :)

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/synthetos/g2/wiki/g2core-in-use

Ahhh, looks like something custom instead:

https://github.com/buildbotics/bbctrl-firmware

No worries at all. :)

We did start out using the TinyG firmware but have since replaced it with our own code.

The recurring online payments/donations economy is just starting out. Give it some time to pick up steam and get a better UI, I believe it will become more popular.

I have been really surprised with how often she posts Patreon updates! It makes sense now as I didn’t realize she was full time.

In this house I have 2 tablets 2 phones 1 router 1 laptop 2 desktops all running linux it appears to be working for me. This isn't to say that more money for creators wouldn't benefit everyone.

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