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Are you confusing revenue and profit? Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and Lichess are examples of successful non-profit sites. They have costs, they have revenues, but they don't exist to generate profit.

>but also a guarantee to your community that the product will still be around in a few years and not turn into a rug pull

There are no guarantees. Think of all the perfectly good websites that got shut down not because they weren't financially sustainable, but because they didn't generate enough profit for their owners. Google's graveyard is a good place to start.

Or the sites that were profitable, so they then they got bought out, and shut down, because what the owners really wanted was money more than anything.

Clearly the site in question here is not currently sustainable. But attempting to build a sustainable non-profit website is not impossible.

> developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible

Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.

Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.

Why don't YOU commercialize your fork of their service, and use the proceeds to hire developers to maintain the code? That would be infinitely more useful than armchair criticism of others.

> Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.

No, they still pay fair wage, and I would trust it more if it pays fair wage to people spending their time on the project(including the creator).

They pay fair wages because they have enough scale where pestering for donations once a year is enough to justify their costs and then some. And even then, this forum is very famous for shitting on such a large scale not-for-profits, with many justifying their decision not to donate by seeing how much money the non-profit already has in their pockets. The only reason we even know how much money the non-profit has in its pockets is because non-profits are legally obliged to publicly disclose that, while for-profits are not (until they go public of course).

My point being that it's a mountain to climb, and just because those at the top have already climbed it doesn't translate into everyone being able to climb it. It takes a whole lot of effort and probably some public grants, but getting those public grants is a whole different skill set than actually building the thing. And you can only get a public grant after you've already created something useful, so your idea of a non-profit quickly turns into an inescable hole in your pocket that you're desperately trying to fill for at least a year or two.

This is why while our lists might vary, every single one of us can only name like 5, maybe 10 non-profits that have "made it" (however we define that success).

All that said, go set up a reocurring $2/month donation to your favourite non-profit right now. Whether you choose Wikimedia or something else, I'm sure it's well worth 10% of a monthly subscription you're already paying for an LLM or whatever. Unlike your for-profit subscriptions, if the money becomes tight you can always cancel these without losing anything.

Wages and profits are conceptually different sorts of things, even if it's sometimes hard to draw a bright line in specific cases.

If it was not clear till now I am talking about wage or wage level earning for the creator.

> Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.

Because donations are a system that works very much in their favor and not at all in favor of other types of projects. Look at the OpenSSL Software Foundation having received less than $2k in yearly donations during the leadup to heartbleed.

> Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.

I very much want to disagree with you, but I do not know how. Achieving some commercial success if you do look for it where others with your skill set are successful is not too difficult (see the trades), but the whole point of such projects is the exact opposite: Doing things differently and pushing accepted boundaries to where you think they should be.

On the other hand I think that this is acceptable. As I wrote in another comment, the obligations in these projects mostly arise from what the developers wants to commit themselves to (or, sadly, do so mistakenly). It is very reasonable to e.g. not value the long term success of your project highly.

You might want to just share an idea, maybe someone else will carry on your project or maybe if in 5 years someone shows a picture of you proudly presenting your project, you're like "AI has gotten really impressive, if I didn't know better, I don't think I could tell that this is a fake". And if you're anything like me, strong commitments to internet strangers might be life-threatening. 2 out of 3 times a promise I made got upvoted, I got hit by a car within less than 48 hours of making it and not once otherwise. An up-arrow got just one pointy end, a GitHub star 5. I'm not taking chances.

This is a really interesting view, but I'm not sure I agree. So many amazing projects are truly free without the goal of profit yet their maintainers still do amazing work. I feel like part of the reason this works is because often the load is split between several maintainers (of which I hope to onboard soon, and have one or two offers already from people to contribute) and also the fact it's genuinely something enjoyable to work on (of course, to the extent it's not too stressful and overworked).

There's a difference between awesome projects that don't have a recurring cost (i.e. open source software that users run themselves) and a search engine. You cannot physically run a search engine without real-world costs today. Those funds need to come from somewhere. And offering a good product at scale costs a lot of money.

That is very true, and it's not cheap to maintain. I do however really hope that donations can cover it enough, and I have plans about other ways to monetise it while remaining not-for-profit without ads or anything that affects the user.

Just brainstorming here, but would a distributed search index be possible / usable with current network speeds and latency? I'm not sure how to set up the data structure to not require many high latency jumps, but maybe someone has solved this problem.

It's possible, see the YaCy project. It suffer from probably a couple of orders of magnitude too few resources (in the funding/development sense) to really be competitive though.

Examples? If you are going to say something like linux, almost every developer gets paid to contribute to linux(I remember 95% commits have company attribution). Same with postgres etc.

They are paid, but the end used doesn't pay.

End user are corporate linux users and they pay for maintenance? Perhaps you mean all the end users doesn't pay.

They don't pay to the full group of Linux devs, they pay to companies like redhat, which does not represent the Linux kernel dev community.

Profit is fine.

Profit from advertising is highly corrosive and corrupts everyone it touches (social networks, your tube, search etc etc).

Honestly I agree. This is part of what I love about the idea of Kagi. I do believe a not-for-profit alternative is needed, however if there's any for-profit model a search engine should have, it should be paid for by the user rather than the advertiser imo.

It depends what you mean by "profit". If you mean "the developers/maintainers can pay the bills of a modest lifestyle", then yes, I think that's important. But often "profit" is used to refer to the idea of unlimited upside, that there are stocks, that the project will be sold, that some kind of sizable windfall is expected, etc. And that I think is to be avoided.

Debian keeps doing very well.

There’s part of this that I agree to - I tend to disagree with most anti-capitalist (or anti-profit) sentiment. However, I disagree that builders “owe” anyone anything, and I strongly disagree with goal of as much profit “as possible”.

I miss the days when someone would make a service where the user would benefit as much as possible and the creator got compensated fairly. I feel like that system worked for hundreds of years. It’s only in the last couple decades that we’ve made this obligation for maximal profits - something that I personally hold responsible for all the mass enshittification going on these days.

> I disagree that builders “owe” anyone anything

I disagree, but I think "owe" carries too much of a negative connotation. Through your project you enter both a relationship with yourself, having taken on a commitment to achieve what got you interested in starting your project in the first place, and the community (who also could be nobody but yourself) you want to benefit from your project, who want to rely on your project to some degree.

These relationships lead to obligations, few, if any, of them being legal or moral ones. Instead they are obligations put onto you by your own interests. You do not observe them because e.g. your project's community demands them (who, I'd like to point out again at this specific point, may still be nobody but yourself!), but because they are important to you. What is important to you can and will change, of course.

> I strongly disagree with goal of as much profit “as possible”.

TBH, I consider the "within the rules they think should be followed" part essential to the statement.

> obligation for maximal profits - something that I personally hold responsible for all the mass enshittification going on these days.

I'm not sure, but I don't think that's the case, sad enough, IMO the reason is to be found a bit to the opposite:

As a group, the people we're overall aligned with in our values (on this issue), having found fulfilling success in goals way less influential than money.