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Comment by sbjs | Hacker News Reader

This is really amazing and it's too bad the author is getting so little from his Patreon for making it! But at the same time I understand why. People can't contribute to every open source project that increases their productivity, there's just too many of them. But what other options do innovative geniuses like Shaun have to keep making things like this? Make a kickstarter for a product? Nobody would bite for small but invaluable utilities like Parinfer. Commercialize it and keep it closed source as an IntelliJ plugin? Would be incredibly hard to market. Keep it open source but charge for support? It's not complicated enough, he'd have to add a gazillion configuration options and intentionally bloat it just to justify it. I would really hate to see things like Parinfer die out because most people wouldn't justify spending the time making it, or would make it but wouldn't open source it.

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>This is really amazing and it's too bad the author is getting so little from his Patreon for making it! But at the same time I understand why. People can't contribute to every open source project that increases their productivity, there's just too many of them

That's not a valid reason. They can also pick and contribute to their 3-4 more important, or to their 3-4 favorites, or to those that look more in need (eg. not much need do donate to Mozilla for example).

But how many Lisp programmers are out there anyway, and use this? The intersection should be quite small, compared with most famous FOSS projects for languages like Java or Python (and even those projects don't get much).

"People can't contribute to every open source project that increases their productivity, there's just too many of them."

I'm sure there are people on HN who can do just that, and much, much more. Some of them may even use parinfer. But whether they can and whether they want to contribute are two different things.

For me the more interesting question is how the tiny minority of people who have gotten their hands on the overwhelming majority of money, power, and resources in this country and around the world can be persuaded to use what they have in socially constructive ways rather than for the benefit of the tiny, exclusive minority they are part of.

This gives me an idea for a platform that:

- looks at your Github repos

- looks through all your dependencies

- lists all the projects you depend on that support donations

- shows you how much (or rather little!) they're making now

- shows you the (Patreon) rewards you can get for supporting them

- allows you to support them right there and then!

I honestly think this is a legitimate idea and kind of want to pitch it to Y Combinator right now. It would be like something that ties Patreon and Github together.

---

Okay I just posted this idea to Hacker News, find it in my submissions if you're interested :)

Sounds like a cool idea for a free open-source project. Too bad your Patreon for it would be somewhat underfunded...

Chicken v Egg! Haha, did not think of that :D Actually I think a Kickstarter would be more appropriate for this, but even then it seems unlikely to get any funding. I think going straight to a VC would be my best bet.

Nah, just build it. A VC would cause the resulting service to end up very poor due to money pressure.

I don't think so? The product is too simple to get destroyed from money pressure and bloat. All it needs to do to make it worth their while is skim a little off the top, maybe 1%.

Somewhat similar: https://github.com/feross/thanks

Very similar, but a product like this has to remove absolutely every point of friction it can, and make it as close to 1-click as possible. This is a command line utility that gives you links, which is a great start. We can make it even simpler!

Worth a discission IMO, have my upvote :)

Direct link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634117

> kind of want to pitch it to Y Combinator

Does that imply that you see it making money too? How would it do that?

Ads to developers?

I figured it would take 1% and keep it, but ads might make more sense.

>For me the more interesting question is how the tiny minority of people who have gotten their hands on the overwhelming majority of money, power, and resources in this country and around the world can be persuaded to use what they have in socially constructive ways rather than for the benefit of the tiny, exclusive minority they are part of.

Income, corporate, payroll, VAT, property and capital gains taxes are great for this.

> For me the more interesting question is how the tiny minority of people who have gotten their hands on the overwhelming majority of money, power, and resources in this country and around the world can be persuaded to use what they have in socially constructive ways rather than for the benefit of the tiny, exclusive minority they are part of.

That's what taxes are for. "Give up some of your money to be used for the collective benefit, or we will lock you in a box and then take your money away anyway" is pretty persuasive.

It's not making much money because it's not that conducive to writing real lisp code with. Nobody thinks about sexprs the way parinfer does unless that's their first encounter with them. If you went and taught parinfer users how to use paredit, they'd wonder why paredit is so much easier and feels more w useful to them.

Additionally, it's a niche market in the first place. People aren't exactly clambering for more lisp dev tools except in recessed corners of the academic universe and places where clojure is used. Aside from those users, there's little demand for a tool like this, and that market is like I said, further eroded by significantly higher quality tooling that's already available.

Not every piece of code someone writes is worthy of being paid for. Not every piece of code written deserves to have been written in the first place, unfortunately.

I think its because so few people get paid to wrote Lisp.

Nah, open source just isn't lucrative.

https://www.patreon.com/sindresorhus

Most JS devs know sindresorhus by reputation. You can't help but knowing him through his work. He even put up a separate twitter solely because people kept wanting a way to see whenever he made a new github repo.

Patreon makes him $3300/mo. So that appears to be the ceiling for all of us.

> Nah, open source just isn't lucrative.

And closed source isn't either when it comes to productivity tools (because there are so many free alternatives).

> Patreon makes him $3300/mo. So that appears to be the ceiling for all of us.

Hopefully it becomes an average, not a ceiling. We're not all going to make the next Vue, but that guy is getting $16k/mo https://www.patreon.com/evanyou .. that's what I consider the ceiling.

That person appears to be getting paid a significant amount of that for advertising, _not_ for contributing to an open source project.

the advertising subset of that patreon exists because of the popularity of the open source project he develops full-time.

I think the open source model that has been shown to work is to make a great code product for free and then add a few more awesome features for a “pro” version with support attached. That’s how Sidekiq works and he’s making good money: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-fo...

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