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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

I read it slightly differently.

Virtually no open source project makes it big without some kind of full time commitment and/or corporate patronage.

However, there also isn't really any incubation mechanism in place for OSS. It sort of grows organically or it fades into obscurity, and that's not necessarily an optimal model.

The solution being that financial contributions early on might inject energy into a project which might otherwise lose steam. It makes sense to me. We've probably lost at least a few cool projects to atrophy-and-entropy land, which is a shame.

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projects that became successful had zero financial backing more often that not. They get financial backing AFTER they're successful as a side effect (because the corporations use them).

You know. Linux. GCC. emacs. gdb. you name it. In fact, some of those still don't have financial backing. Heck Linux certainly wasn't started with Linus thinking he'd gain anything _financial_ with it.

Yes, he was definitely putting the cart before the horse. Forcing people to pay for every tiny little project would lead to far less open-source activity on the low-end. The lack of support may be a problem, but it's necessary–not everything is worth supporting. And frankly, a couple dozen people paying $5 is not enough to seriously encourage anyone to commit themselves to long-term maintenance. You have to turn the complaint on the head and ask yourself are we better with the code out in the wild even if it's unsupported than not existing at all? It's hard to deny that the answer is yes. Even if you have to learn it and self-support, there's still an opportunity to save time and for new ideas to blossom.

> Forcing people to pay for every tiny little project would lead to far less open-source activity on the low-end.

Forced? Don't think that was ever suggested nor even a remote possibility.

>You have to turn the complaint on the head and ask yourself are we better with the code out in the wild even if it's unsupported than not existing at all?

Well, yeah. I don't think anyone's really claimed this is some stark choice betwee financial support or nothing at all. The article, to me, was about improving the existing model.

> They get financial backing AFTER they're successful as a side effect (because the corporations use them).

The relationship is a little more symbiotic than you're implying. Financial backing is as much a "side effect" as it is a necessary pre-cursor to any kind of genuine wider adoption.

> Linux. GCC. emacs. gdb. you name it.

Hadoop, Mongo, Android, My/Postgre/SQL

> Heck Linux certainly wasn't started with Linus thinking he'd gain anything _financial_ with it.

Don't think I ever implied otherwise. This isn't really about motives.

Financial backing quite often simply means that a developer(s) can work on a given project full time. There are real limits to what can be achieved part time and with crowd-sourced code. Take video editing in Linux as an obvious example of this phenomenon.

Well, I would say that something of a corporate patronage or making it big is a side effect of having a big idea that sells. If you want a business to give you lots of money you need to create something that will meet business needs. Not only that but you can't assume that businesses will find you're great idea and throw money at it, there's personal marketing involved as well.

Yes it's quite a shame that we may have lost a few projects that might have gone somewhere with investment, but I believe that to be the nature of the beast. Also my thought was that the open source movement was about contributing out of good will, and if you made some money off of it great.

> Also my thought was that the open source movement was about contributing out of good will, and if you made some money off of it great.

I think OSS contributors are driven by a fairly wide variety of motivations. Linus, for instance, has spoken out on this issue :

    I do not see open source as some big goody-goody "let's 
    all sing kumbaya around the campfire and make the world 
    a better place". No, open source only really works if 
    everybody is contributing for their own selfish reasons. 

    Now, those selfish reasons by no means need to be about 
    "financial reward", though.[1]

I made sure to include the last part, because it's both relevant to this discussion and it "completes" the statement. OSS contribution isn't necessarily about monetary reward, nor did the article claim it was.

However, money does happen to be necessary to devote time to a given endeavor. Without it, the best a project can hope for is a collection of part-timers, which is ultimately limiting.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18419231

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