Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize?

Re:Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize? by dasmoth on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @04:17PM (#14448202)

Very good list. I would add that most open source projects have many people working on them.

I'm almost positive this isn't true. If you restrict to the top few percent of projects, it'll be much more true, but even so I think you'll find a lot of projects with relatively small core groups, and sometimes a single hacker who wrote most of the core.

Weekend project: try to quantify this via GitHub APIs? Although suspect that might still give a somewhat skewed picture (not every major project is on GitHub...)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Why don't more open-source projects monetize? by chubot on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @04:28PM (#14448275)

Yeah I'm sure that's true if you count by the number of projects. But if you count by utility to the world, I'm sure it's not true.

Think of every open source OS, browser, compiler, interpreter, etc.

There might be one person who initiated the project and did much of the design, like Guido van Rossum for Python, but it wouldn't be fair if he got 100% of the compensation and everybody else on python-dev got 0%.

[ Parent | on HN ]