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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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