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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

"only" $100K - aren't we living in a world now where companies started in a garage make that amount of money ten times a second?

I haven't heard anything from e.g. Google or Facebook's open source funding endeavours. IMO every successful company should do their part and set aside a sizeable percentage of their revenue to paying and supporting open source projects and developers. It's wrong that e.g. the developer of cURL is (was?) struggling to make ends meet, when he (and the people behind gimp, etc) develops software used billions of times a day. That should make him hundreds of thousands a year.

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I'm sorry, but I'm kind of tired of this double standard. If you want to get paid for your project, charge for it. If you want a lot of people to use and benefit from it, give it away. If you give it away, don't then complain that you're not getting paid for it.

We all love and benefit from free and open software, but if you're in a position where you're considering working for free, you should make sure you're squared away financially. Obviously, some people plan to use the reputation gained from creating a popular project to propel their success, which is fine too.

I disagree with this binary assertion. Dual license so that people can use it, but if people are making a killing with it, you get a piece of that.

Yes of course. I didn't care to enumerate every possible choice one could make. I guess I'd summarize my point as this: License what you make according to the outcomes you want. Do not complain about getting an outcome different from what you took action to accomplish.

Well in the end the world is not a fair place. Linux Torvalds isn't exactly loaded either, although he isn't poor. But In the end people are gonna abuse your products to make as much money as possible and there is no guarantee, you will ever see a penny of it if you sell it as Free Software.

Why do you use the word "abuse" ?

I always think of Linus in these cases too.

Supposedly he's worth $150m, but even if that's accurate it would still mean he's only captured a very small % of the value he created.

This is surprising to me.

Someone as pragmatic as him, still working and taking/giving abuse at that "milemarker" of wealth? Huh.

Outside of Google's Summer of Code, their sponsorship of Guido's time for years, their own OSS contributions (Go? React?)

But yes, I think some grants would go a long, long way.

How can the developer of cURL be struggling to make ends meet? With his fame and technical skills it should be easy to find a very well paid job. I don't know the story behind this but it seems a bit weird.

The same way that the author of GPG was struggling to make ends meet until the situation was publicized:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/02/gpg_financial...

> Werner Koch, who has been maintaining the GPG e-mail encryption program since 1997, is going broke and considering quitting.

HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9003791

Google does chromium, linux, mysql, go... The same about FB. $100k is a droplet in ocean.

Just because someone can use a software does not mean they can/will pay for it. In other words, you'll can only earn money if your customers are rich.

To be fair curl’s users are wealthy. It’s used everywhere. What companies need to do is make it as easy (or easier) for projects/applications to allocate some budget for open source projects. But there needs to be a trusted and consistent way to do that otherwise companies would fret over possible abuse/embezzlement.

> I haven't heard anything from e.g. Google or Facebook's open source funding endeavours

You owe it to yourself to spend at least 10 minutes researching google and facebooks contributions to open source. The fact that you don’t know about it only speaks to you limited knowledge.

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