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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

No, the mistake is trying to make money from open source in the first place. That's. Not. The. Point.

Paying for developers to work on some open source project that you rely on, absolutely, great idea. But trying to monetize an open source project itself is myopic - obviously the solution if you want to do that is to make the project not open source as you say.

This isn't a problem with open source software, it's a feature and it's part of why it's so ubiquitous - no one company pulling the reigns who can fuck it up.

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> No, the mistake is trying to make money from open source in the first place. That's. Not. The. Point.

But the point is people are trying to make a living using their software development skills, not specifically make money from open source. As part of that the question is should they release their code as open source or keep it closed.

But their point is not "you should make money from open source", but "open sourcing your code makes it easier for corporations to eat your lunch with a closed source solution, so you need to be able to compete, which requires money."

> Paying for developers to work on some open source project that you rely on, absolutely, great idea.

Where does the money come from to pay those developers to work on open source?

Someone who wants new software to be developed that doesn't exist yet. (Or improvements to existing software that don't exist yet).

Developer/Designer/QA/PM/Whatever time is the thing that actually has meaningful cost here, not the act of sending bits across a wire. So that's the thing that the market should be paying for.

The difference with proprietary software is just that you can get people to pay for those man hours after release time - in OSS you don't have that luxury, and pretending that you do, or that you're actually fundamentally charging for something else is a mistake.

Unless we are talking about hippie farms, money has to come from somewhere.

Get a job then. Open Source is for people who want to have their cake (be their own employer / business owner) and eat it too (not actively compete in the market, just ask people to pay for their work since they are doing a service to the community).

Then they shouldn’t get shocked when it works against them. If you are releasing open source (especially under permissive licenses) you are relinquishing your rights - so do it from a view that its charity to the world, but don’t expect to get all the compliments for doing OSS work but also _expect_ market rates for the work you did. No one agreed to pay you for it, no one agreed to pay you royalties for using your product in theirs and so forth.

I have a very nice one doing enterprise consulting, and for what I care we could be back at PD and Shareware, which is what killing GPL will do anyway.

Sorry it was not direct at you, but to the certain class of FLOSS developers :-)

ps I was having a go at non GPL licenses, because they simply give away everything.

What is PD?

> What is PD?

Public Domain software [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain_software

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