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Comment by iamgopal | Hacker News Reader

What is the latest, state of the art way to earn money this way ?

Completely not proven yet, but I'm convinced: ask for it. Make it easy for people to pay you. Find a way (and reason) for people to invoice you for payment. Tell people that you expect payment even if they don't legally have to pay. Make it part of the "community ethos" that payment is a natural and good part of working with the community.

Free as in freedom, not beer. Ask for beer and give freedom in return.

I have this idea in the back of my head. Where I live in Japan, in the countryside they just put up these vegetable stalls. Nobody is there. There is a box and on it is say "100 yen" (about 1 dollar US). There are bags of fruit and vegetables. You take a bag and you put a 100 yen coin in the box. Not rocket science and nobody who isn't starving won't put the coin in (and if you are starving, take the damn fruit!)

You don't need leverage, you need it to be the norm that people pay for the software. That requires a cultural shift. Luckily, community cultures can be crafted (I think... maybe I'm wrong). People need to feel that if they pay for the software, you will make more (which they want). If they don't pay for the software, you will not make more (which they do not want). I think that's all it probably takes to earn money at this. I think... One day I'll test that theory.

While this is how it should be I find reality to be a lot different. The cultural shift required is so massive that I don’t think it will happen anytime soon, if at all. People have become accustomed to open source software. Critical infrastructure which is free. This is again drilled as a point, that software should be free, by the consumer software. Google and App Store have destroyed any resemblance of rationality in pricing software products. People expect stuff to be free (ads and stuff is fine, the really obnoxious people will block even those) or if not free, they expect a rock bottom price. People argue for software which costs 5 USD and some irrationally expect it to be cross platform, high polish and the dev should respond within minutes. Trying to sell software these days has become a harder argument especially if you are not able to quickly deflect these massive hoards of price-complainers.

This is the case for consumer software. I am not even trying to imagine how harsh it would be for an open source maintainer - who has absolutely no leverage given the source is already out there. What’s happening with docker, elasticsearch, Redis, MongoDB et al is not giving me hope either.

Open source projects are good at convincing their users (other developers) that they provide value, but developers are not yet very good at advocating for that value up the chain. I think the key to developer-driven enterprise SaaS is teaching developers to advocate for the value of their tools. Other departments do it very effectively, and it has the beneficial side effect of raising the employee’s status in the organization.

>Make it easy for people to pay you.

There's definitely a startup opportunity for this - making it super easy to receive payment as an OSS developer (either as a business or sole developer) and making it easy for businesses to pay.

If I saw a new issue on github and it came from a corporate "OSS gold account member" which potentially comes with $$$ attached I'd be much more inclined to implement it.

As it is my motivation drops off fairly quickly unless it's a serious bug or it's a relatively easy ask.

I think it would be much easier to get budget if the cost to get expedited OSS bugfixes were subscription based and accounts gets to deal with a professional billing department rather than "One Man and His Hat Inc. in Iowa".

"Daniel Pink's new book, Drive, in which he highlights the rather stunning amount of counterintuitive research that suggests that money can actually make people less motivated to do creative works."

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100603/0311539672.shtml

This could be a part of GitHub. Imagine there was a '$' button beside the star button, and each time you clicked it you gave one dollar to the maintainer of the repo, with a counter beside it. The '$ counter' would only be visible to the user and the repo maintainers.

GitHub is the de facto hub of open source/free software, and if it was as easy to donate to a repo as it is to star it, I imagine more people would do it.

Get a job with your new programming skills?

(seriously, there is a difference between a day job programmer, and a lifestyle programmer)

I'd say (but I do not maintain large FOSS):

- Ask for donations

- Ask commercial users to pay a fee (still voluntarily though)

- Offer yourself as a consultant on the software, you can help businesses with implementation or migration.

Of course, there is a thin line. Having people to pay for your software raises expectations. Also, paying customers could steer you into a direction you (or the FOSS community) don't like.

In my experience, almost all businesses are perfectly willing to pay for the software that make their business possible. Businesses understand that FOSS is free speech, not free beer.

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