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Comment by averageRoyalty | Hacker News Reader

Others have some great suggestions here, but my advice is - don't.

I don't mean this negatively, but your focus seems to be wanting to share cool shit you've done. a successful business sells a solution to a problem, and sometimes to solve the problem you actually sacrifice the cool shit ans just build boring code you've built 100 times before.

If you're super keen, pick a problen to solve and build a conpany. Open source all the above code on github and use it as a funnel with links back to your new company site. Then you can share the cool shit, no matter subgenre it is.

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Don’t do this. When you open source stuff you want to monetize, people will take it and not pay you. This is not ideal, but real.

If you released the code do it under a non permissive, commercial license and add license key activation and telemetry. Don’t let anyone use it for free. If you want to be generous give people a temp SaaS free tier. Don’t trade your time and IP for Stars, trade it for dollars.

People will not reciprocate if you just give them avenues to free use. they will take, then act entitled if you ever charge. Keep it locked solid from the start.

That other thing to avoid is companies that try to use contracts or employment to rip off your IP because they assume that as you are a developer building stuff you’re an easy mark. Protect yourself from such abusers. Many “legitimate” companies use highly shady practices to try to exploit the individual selling good IP.

Just use one of the good ideas and productize the shit out of it. You got this.

Yeah, never open source your code. There are no benefits to it. I speak from experience.

1. Unless you have business connections and raised funding from people who do, open source wil not help gain any additional adoption or raise awareness of your project. This only worked in the past.

2. Hardly anybody who does happen to use your open source project will pay you. You need massive global exposure just to make a developers' standard salary... I remember for years Evan You who built VueJS was getting like $120k max in sponsorships annually (I think it was Patreon), at the peak... And VueJS was extremely popular at the time and being updated frequently... And companies got something (e.g. exposure) in exchange for the sponsorship.

3. It doesn't matter how good it is. Implementation details don't really matter. If your product is useful, some big tech company will build an inferior alternative but promote it like crazy. Nobody will even know your project exists. It doesn't matter if your product is better for many use cases; people won't know it exists so that fact is irrelevant.

4. At best, some big tech monopoly will use your open source code to train their AI to replace you in the marketplace or drive down your wages.

People like Linus, DHH, Matt Mullenweg, Solomon Hykes... Who made millions; are from a different epoch and different place too. Not happening anymore. Don't be fooled. They all had to move to Silicon Valley at some point. It's a big club and you ain't in it.

My advice is; if you can't sell it, keep your code and use for yourself and your friends/family.

If all that one is concerned with is maximizing one's finances, then yes, you're entirely correct. A developer who takes the attitude of "fuck you, pay me" for the 80 line function they wrote that wraps some API to make it easier should never open source their code.

For anyone not taking these attitudes, the above comment author is either unfamiliar with, or familiar with and choosing to ignore, the point of the FOSS movement.

Yes but your project won't be sustainable without funding.

Unless you're already financially independent, won't be able to find the time to maintain it after some time.

Don't be fooled, somebody else will benefit from your work. Open source is for privileged fools who don't understand reality or human nature.

If you get into it with the mindset that it's for fun, you won't see it the same way in 10 years... Good chance you will be disgusted by the whole scheme. I have seen horrors which destroyed all illusions I had about the subject.

Almost nobody in open source nowadays really cares about code quality or engineering excellence. So it fails on that front too. It's a pointless status game. Only big corporate projects get any exposure nowadays. The others can't form communities.

> Open source is for privileged fools who don't understand reality or human nature.

I get what type of people you are refering to, but it's possible to be fully aware of the reality of human nature and nonetheless to choose open source. There are other business models, like selling consultancy services, educational materials and such, that work well alongside open source codebases.

In addition to this I’d say that the incredible abundance of amazing open source software and tools is a wonderful proof of a generous and collaborative human nature.

This is a reality not less valid than the capitalistic transactional worldviews.

> Yes but your project won't be sustainable without funding.

> Unless you're already financially independent, won't be able to find the time to maintain it after some time.

Okay...so it isn't "sustainable". So you stop maintaining it.

So what?

You made a neat thing. You had fun making it. You shared it with others because you thought it was neat, and maybe someone else found it useful too. That's the happy ending of a happy story.

Gasp, someone found your free software you published, and...profited using it? Darn that person! How dare they! Don't they know that each of us is supposed to start as an infant in the woods? No one should be able to benefit from any other person's work.

That's bullshit. Just make something you think is neat, let it out into the world if you think it's useful, and let it go and move on as soon as you don't care to maintain it anymore.

> Yes but your project won't be sustainable without funding

What project? Maybe the ML model OP has might be a decent amount of work. OP clearly has no project, just a collection of tools they could conceivably use in a project. People don't pay for code, they pay for solutions to problems.

If OP wants to keep the code to themselves then go ahead, your IP nobody cares. If OP wants to build an actual project to monetize the code that way then go for it. But the industry long ago decided that random code snippets that haven't been integer into a project just isn't worth the overhead of monetizing. Open source it or keep it to yourself.

> Don't be fooled, somebody else will benefit from your work.

It's either hilarious or depressing to me that you say that like it's a BAD thing, when the entire point of open-sourcing code is so that EVERYONE benefits from your work. Just as I've benefited from countless open-source codebases over the decades.

Is it possible someone will use my open-source code in a product that makes them a lot of money? Of course.

Is that a bad thing? Why would it be?

Does it mean they owe me a cut of the profits? Of course not. I didn't have anything to do with their product.

And I'm 50 years old and have been coding since my teens, so save your predictions that I just haven't woken up to reality yet. Not everyone is a libertarian cynic.

> And I'm 50 years old and have been coding since my teens, so save your predictions that I just haven't woken up to reality yet. Not everyone is a libertarian cynic.

Not everybody is a 50 years old cynic, too. Young people need to make money and the coding gigs aren't looking as promising as when you were in your teens.

Working for free (even worse, for the benefit of VC-funded companies) is not in the best interest of most software engineers nowadays, unfortunately.

Fine, I'll bite. I don't write code professionally anymore, but I occasionally bang out code to help me get shit done. It is of no monetary value to me or anyone else, and I'm more than happy to vomit it onto GitHub under WTFPL for anyone to use.

Anyone dumb enough to base a commercial product on it will have gotten what they deserve, and anyone with more time than money is welcome to use it for, well, whatever the fuck they want to. Anyone with the wherewithal to make big bucks off of it is only a couple hours ahead of starting from scratch.

If you're training an LLM, it's of middling quality at best. Take it. You're no better or worse off than if it wasn't out there.

Before you decide to keep your code for yourself, think hard about how much it's really worth. If the answer is very little, what do you really lose by letting anyone use it?

Also, i think we have arrived to the point where publishing open source code becomes hard to sustain even from a moral perspective. Because it is immediately mined by AI giants, it does little but enforces and perpetuates the power of monopolies. Few people will see open source contribution from all but a few most prominent people - but AI mill will see everything.

This hits the nail on the head for me. When I built my open source project, I felt like a part of society, I was happy to be a part of it. I was proud to contribute even if I didn't capture much of the value I created...

Now I feel like all of this structure is exploiting and manipulating me and others psychologically. The level of ethics is so low, it is beyond what I could have imagined. I simply don't get the same feelings as I once did. Working on open source doesn't make me hopeful and feel like part of something, it makes me feel like a naive fool.

My comments may sound negative but I'm trying to help others, who may be slightly younger versions of myself, to avoid a lot of pain.

This pain doesn't teach you much besides resilience and the gains there become extremely marginal... On the other hand, it doesn't seem very useful career-wise to see things as they are.

To succeed, you need to be on the same wavelength of optimism as existing successful people. My worldview is holding me back. Ignorance can be an advantage.

This is your brain on capitalism.

I won't deny it. Though I think if it was just capitalism and not also an expansionary monetary system which compounds the wealth of incumbents and gives them an unshakable advantage, then my brain would be a little bit more balanced.

I tend to view open source like a gardener treats extra produce from their garden or orchard.

You spend some time and energy to grow some delicious fruits and vegetables that you and your family enjoy eating. You have extra so you share some with friends and neighbors. You still have way more than you need and you don't want it to go to waste.

You contemplate opening a stand to sell to passersby. That's a lot of work so you just put out a box with a sign for anyone to take what they want for free.

Some drop by and get what they need and you get an occasional 'thank you' note. Someone leaves a few bucks in a jar for you. It makes you feel good.

But not everyone is so well behaved. Kids come by and tip over the box or throw some peaches at your house.

Some criticize you that some of your free stuff is not the best quality and demand better service.

Then you find out the local grocer is stopping by every day to take it all and sell it in his store.

What started out as a good will gesture, turns into a headache.

Of course the analogy falls apart a bit when you compare a tangible good like food to easily replicatable digital bits, but it still fits in some ways.

"Just be rich, bro".

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