That's because you need to understand the difference between a project and a product.

If you want your product to succeed, it must target decision-makers with a budget to buy your license, and it must make enough difference to them to justify the costs.

Most software libraries aren't products. They target other software developers who are not responsible for allocating funds. Furthermore, if there wasn't a library, most devs would absolutely love writing one ad hoc. Their salary would remain the same, had they been solving the problem from scratch (which most of us love doing) or adopting an existing one. It's the business people that would feel the difference, but business people don't understand the specifics of libraries. And they hate integrating closed-source parts into their codebase because it comes with tremendous risks should the vendor go belly up.

What could sell is a higher-level product that would automate boring/repetitive tasks that everyone hates. Like a GUI designer for some boilerplate stuff that everyone codes by hand (mind you many people like coding by hand, but some hate it and they will buy your GUI).

Your product can also be your consulting business. Don't add stuff based on everybody's requests for free. Make it open-source, welcome contributions, but if someone wants some specific stuff, give them a quote. From time to time, add commonly requested parts and write articles explaining how they work to gain visibility. You will have to deal with lots of entitled assholes, but you will also find people willing to pay you.

You're right, of course. But I am so, so tired of having to "sell" over and over just to have the value of my contributions recognized. And I think gp would agree.

The poster, marak, is a founder [0]. They definitely understand product-ization. Yet two weeks ago they suffered an apartment fire and have been struggling to keep a roof over their head [1].

I can definitely understand the kind of bitterness that comes out of going through something like that only to realize how little the fellow humans around you really value you. Realizing that for all the positive signals (such as "popularity") you received before, precious few are willing to actually put resources on the line for you.

So, I think gp and marak aren't coming from a place of misunderstanding the world as it is, but rather a depressing understanding of our world.

Imagine, if you can, a much different world. A world where helping or recognizing the efforts of others meaningfully didn't put you worse off. A world where your quality of life wasn't determined by your ability to take more than you give (or to have started off with enough resources that you can afford to give more than you take).

Once you really see what could be, I think it's difficult to suffer what is.

[0] https://twitter.com/marak

[1] "I lost all my stuff in an apartment fire and am barely staying unhomeless." https://twitter.com/marak/status/1320465599319990272

I wonder if this is advoidable by realizing what the popularity is actually for? It's not like it's for them personally it's for the fact that it's free and available. I feel like these values will always tend to conflict. I.e open source / free software and making money. They are opposed ideas in many ways.

I highly recommend not letting your personal happiness and feelings of success being controlled by random strangers on the internet. Getting approval from random strangers on the internet is fast food not real food.

"take more than you give" is not an accurate description. free exchange is a positive sum game.

Free exchange is a positive sum game when it is truly free. But if one party has significantly more leverage (like an employer or a landlord), that is no longer guaranteed.

Surely home insurance is going to make it whole?

That's assuming he could pay for a plan that covered his assets. I'm guessing that since he said "apartment" that he is renting, and the owners probably only cover the structure with their insurance and not the contents of said apartment.

This comment is golden! Most qualms on indie hackers and similar sites could be quickly settled with this line of reasoning. Not growing fast enough? -> buy ads -> "but I don't make enough money to spend on ads" -> is it really a product then? -> etc...

It's always blown me away (as a person of average intelligence relative to many on HN) that brilliant people who can actually conjure up entire libraries, frameworks etc fall short when it comes to understanding how to convert code into $$$ or anticipating how users will see the same concepts.

Creating a software program is only 10% of the work. The rest is marketing, promotion, sales, support, accounting, paying taxes, attending conferences, creating manuals and videos, etc.

Most developers fail because they stop after getting the program to work.

"Build it and they will come" is a stupid Hollywood myth.

There's a lot of the mentality of OSS where the project creator releases it permissively, and is fine with many little guys (who otherwise wouldn't have paid for an equivalent library) using it. Then as they get traction, a big company who _could_ afford to pay also benefits from said project, and the creator is whinging that they don't get paid by the big company - with the reason that the company _could_ pay, that's why they should.

yet, that's an entirely fair stance. The little guys, not having created the mechanism for value capture that the company has, are likely contributing to the ecosystem (or at least are active components of the ecosystem). the corporation, on the other hand, has ensured that they capture and process value such that they enjoy exclusive benefit from their output.

it's not unreasonable for an individual to decide that contributions to other open source developers are good, and contributions to a black hole are bad.

if you decide you don't want me to benefit from your work without profiting you, then you have to pay me for mine. if you want to play nice, then I'm willing to play nice, too.

Which is exactly what dual licensing with (A)GPL and commercial license is.

And yet, this is more rare than common.

Exactly. It's astonishing how little people understand this and just go post a rant about the big evil corporation not paying the little open source coder for their work.

It's all in the license(s). Make one that's fine for trials and other open source hackers, but draconian for proprietary commercialization, and another one for productization so that big corp pays you. That's it.

And if you don't care about the money aspect since open sourcing was never a way for you to make money anyway, then go with a single permissive license and be happy that your code gets widely used and hopefully contributed to.

If that scheme of dual-licensing with (A)GPL and commercial did actually work out in reality, we probably wouldn't have the precedent of MongoDB dropping AGPL in favor of their own SSPL.

You are explaining how a person can deal with the world as it is. But if you think of yourself as a builder, then you really ought to know better than to accept the world as it is.

Are there probably choices available to a skilled software developer where they could make more money than just working on something that they love and that provides value to the world? Sure. But why is that an acceptable world to live in?

If a work adds value to the world, shouldn't the worker rightly feel entitled to just compensation? Sure, not everything in the world is as it should be, and as a responsible adult the worker may have to deal with that, they can't just sit around whining about not getting their fair share and expect everyone else to solve their problems for them.

But are YOU someone who sees problems in the world and says "yep, that's how it is, deal with it, not my problem"? Or are you someone who sees problems in the world as something to be fixed?

I am a pragmatist that is accustomed to the physical, mathematical and social constraints of the world. One big constraint is the average attention span of your target audience. Do you have time to care whether a guy designing/manufacturing that USB cable on your desk got compensated well? Or the one making your clothes? Or cleaning the corporate toilet? You know, unless you have sewed your shirt yourself, it was probably made a by a person in a less developed country earning about $1 per hour [0].

The thing is, we physically don't have time to look at every situation from every stakeholder's perspective. There are just not enough hours in the day. Like it or not, that's a pretty hard constraint and there's no better way around it than understanding marketing and product management.

So ultimately, it boils down to:

* Strategy A that gives you a 10% chance of outperforming your corporate salary and 90% chance of getting bored and getting back to your 9-to-5.

* Strategy B that gives you a 0.2% chance of changing the world, 49.9% chance of giving up and another 49.9% chance of seriously burning out and getting into depression. The actual world-changing chance is likely even lower. You can guesstimate it by dividing the number of Linus Tordvaldses by the number of Github users with 1 or more repository.

Mind you, strategy A requires a lot of trial-and-error while learning how to do business (and getting burned multiple times), while the strategy B is about just doing what you like do and hoping that it will somehow bring the desired outcome. So please, please, please, be honest with yourself about wanting to change the world vs. just wanting to keep is as a stress-free hobby vs getting face-in-the-mud while learning an orthogonal skillset.

[0] https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/sewing-machine-opera...

Sure, there aren't enough hours in the day for every person to fix every problem in the world. There are also not enough hours in the day to say everything worth saying about every topic on every forum on the Internet.

But you took time out of your busy day to comment on this thread, out of all the threads on the Internet, about this problem, out of all the problems in the world. You even came back and replied to me.

I am not suggesting you spend every waking moment of your life trying to solve every problem in the world. I am suggesting you divert a portion of the time that you're currently spending on advising people on how to live in this world, and instead spend just a little of it on thinking about how to build a better one.

while the strategy B is about just doing what you like do and hoping that it will somehow bring the desired outcome

Really? The only other option besides accepting the world as it is, is to do what you like and hope that the world changes to your liking, entirely on its own? You can't think of any other options?

social constraints are only as strong as the amount of people who treat them as constraints. culture is recursively developed.

I would say a lot of the constraints are more based on the incentives given by our economic system, which naturally aren't necessarily fixed either, but pretty hard to change

The problem is 'feeling entitled to just compensation'; it is not a good concept. Lets imagine you favourite fast-food joint offers all menu items for 1cent. Then one week later they ask for more money, because:'If a work adds value to the world, shouldn't the worker rightly feel entitled to just compensation". And lets not make it about the company, lets say it has to close down and leave the workers unemployed if people dont chip in. Do you really think they should be entitled? What about if they gave away the stuff for 0 cents, any difference?

I have no idea what you're saying. Surely you're not saying "we all agree fast food workers don't deserve to be paid, therefore software developers don't deserve to be paid either"?

Of course fast food workers should feel entitled to be paid for their work, and fast food joints should feel entitled to charge money for the items on their menu. What?

No I an saying, if people or companies give away stuff for (almost) free and other people take that, the entities which gave that away are in no way entitled to get more compensation afterwards. I think it is so obvious that it might be confusing.

If you make bad business decisions it is your decision. Because the only way to do price finding is to make an offer and have customers accept it. If the price is low more customers accept it. This doesnt mean at a higher price they would have done the same. So selling with a low (or free) price does not give you any moral rights later to say it was too low, give me more.

Thank you for clarifying, makes much more sense.

Because the only way to do price finding is to make an offer and have customers accept it. [...] So selling with a low (or free) price does not give you any moral rights later to say it was too low, give me more.

You're thinking of this in a very narrow way.

If I tell you "here, have this for free, no strings attached", and then after you use it, I jump out of the bushes and say "hey! That thing had value! You're morally obligated to pay me!", of course you are under no such obligation. That seems to be the situation you're thinking of.

What if you open your imagination a bit? What if I say, "if I tried to maximize the amount of money I made, I would have to price out people who wouldn't be able to pay anyway and their lives would be better off being able to use what I built. I don't care about maximizing the amount of money I can make, I'd just like fair compensation, so instead of setting a specific price I just ask you to 'tip' a fair amount if you can."

Am I "morally entitled" to any specific amount of money, if I didn't set a specific price? Not really, no. But it's not like I'm saying "please, have this for free, I don't want anything back, seriously", instead I'm saying "I would like something back, but I'm trusting you to decide on a fair amount".

Here's the more interesting question: if you're not obligated to pay a specific amount, can such a "trust" system work? Can I get fair compensation, and still allow anyone who wants to be able to use my work?

As it stands today, in most cases, probably not. But open your imagination a little. Can it be made to work? Can there be public pressure on major companies to contribute to TideLift and/or OpenCollective? Maybe non-commercial source-available licenses, which still contribute to The Commons, even if they're not the traditional understanding of "open source"?

I fully agree. Yes, I read the post like the situation you described I am thinking of. Was it different, actually?

About if the first approach can work: maybe. For the companies I know it would be very difficult to donate money. First from what budget, then I am not sure if such donations can be tax deducted, then there is always the thing if you give money to a person how do you distinguish this from hiring the person (oral employment contracts are legal), so authorities might be interested if you circumvent labor laws. So this support has to come from the top of the company. I think paying for bugfixes/features might be much easier and cleaner for companies (still takes 6 month to get him as a contractor into the ERP system)

There seems to be working examples for 'pay what you like' restaurant, but there might be much bigger social pressure.

Well, the README's footer has prominently displayed OpenCollective badges and avatars and a request for donations for >4 years: https://github.com/Marak/faker.js/commit/58aa94a99d6161418c4...

There is room for debate about how clear or strong the expectation of compensation was, but at least we can agree it wasn't 100% on the far extreme of "here, have this for free, I'm not expecting anything at all in return", and then going back on their word afterwards.

can donations be tax deducted ... labor laws ...

Interesting points. I think one of the ideas of the Open Source Collective as a 501(c)(6) non-profit is to provide more of that kind of legal certainty (donations aren't deductible as a charitable contribution, but may be deductible as a business expense). I wonder if it works?

Yeah, it's possible social pressure has the potential to be effective, although I think it would have to be well-organized, with someone like OpenCollective (or maybe it would be better if it was an independent organization?) that monitors and publicizes which companies are "leeches" making a lot of money off of open source, and which are "good citizens", or something.

The difference with software is, for many reasons users most often need to know the recipe (code), but knowing the recipe is enough to trivially replicate the software for free. And incidentally, that's also the expected mode of acquisition (vs. feature films for instance, which are almost as trivial to copy for free but discouraged culturally).

With physical goods or services, knowing the recipe or at least composition is also often desirable, but the actual product/service itself is hard to replicate and brand inertia is heavier.

I believe some small changes in the delivery methods associated with a decent cultural shift could bring open-source software development into a position more similar to older creative professions. For instance, stronger security concerns could incentivize users to subscribe to privileged, paid update channels directly from the developers (like done by Unreal Engine or the TradingView charting library).

This is how we framed it at browserless.io. Libraries generally aren't a product, and even though some of them do a lot, it's hard to charge folks for an `npm i`-style product. I tried a lot to look into this and it just didn't pan out. I think there's an opportunity for a library marketplace that does all of the curation, security checks, and other validation as it would provide a lot of value to organizations so they don't have to build all this themselves. Seems like all of this already exists, just not in a concise package.

On that, I feel like docker could provide a much much better storefront, and charge folks for their packages, but just hasn't. Did you even know they had a store? That's what their hub is supposed to be, but they don't charge for anything! How great would it be if they built out a marketplace?! This has even more potential, IMO, since images are generally a whole service and not just a library.

The opportunity and value definitely are there, and the need is there, it's just not something that anyone has tackled in a way that makes sense with software.

> Libraries generally aren't a product

That's not true - look at the games industry, the vfx/cinematic rendering industry and all that ; their middleware libraries are all paid products.

You are correct but so is the parent of your post, the key term they used is "generally" and I would say that is a correct observation. General problem libraries tend to not sell. There are specialty markets where one can make money from licencing libraries or frameworks as you highlighted game/cinematic there is also some areas in medical and legal but for the most part if one is building a general purpose library or one that appeals to a broad market, they tend to not be commercially viable. Those that provide specific solutions for a vertical tend to have more success in commercial licencing.

> Most software libraries aren't products

This is the rationale for https://tidelift.com

> Most software libraries aren't products. They target other software developers who are not responsible for allocating funds.

Perhaps devs and engineers should manage the funds. Like AMD's current CEO.

The other option is: Pick any of the above licenses and don't tie your entire financial identity to this thing.

I think its a legitimately weird thing specific to software where people release something interesting as open source and free, it gets used, they feel an obligation to make building it their job, and then they feel anger when they don't make money from it. I understand the feeling of being slighted when there are billion dollar corporations using your software, but it was also a situation you opted in-to in the first place, with no expectation of reciprocity until now.

I support the idea of asking people to pay for your time. That's totally fair. I think its also a little icky to say "pay me six figures or fork it"; so, is there no intention to actually make this an open source project? One where people contribute code instead of money and its supported by its users in that way? This project has over 100 contributors.

It's an interesting situation. I've often pondered what I would do in this scenario.

I have some hobby projects that I do purely for fun. Feeling an obligation to work on them because other people find them useful would really drain me. The point is to get away from work and rediscover the joy of programming, not add more work on top of work.

I guess I can just keep them private. But if someone really happens to find them useful, I would be happy if they forked them for themselves. Maybe a giant disclaimer at the top of the readme so I'm clear and upfront how the projects will be managed (they won't be).

Regardless, I'm sure it's a problem I'll never have.

> One where people contribute code instead of money and its supported by its users in that way?

I suspect this is really hard to do. You can get contributions now and then, but to get someone to take long term ownership is hard.

5: Don't release the code and sell your product. Taking pride in your work also means valueing it properly.

- 95% chance you die poor. 4.999% chance you make a decent living out of it. 0.0001% chance Facebook buys it for enough money that you can buy your own island on Mars.

The problem here is that selling your closed source project requires a significantly distinct skill set from writing good code. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Venn diagram of a good project and being able to sell the project for a decent living is much smaller than 5%.

> The problem here is that selling your closed source project requires a significantly distinct skill set from writing good code.

Similar skill set as required to make money via open source code.

1. Write awesome code!!!111

2. ...

3. PROFIT!

isn't a business plan, regardless of whether you're writing open or closed code.

You're not making code for the sake of writing 'good code', whatever that means. You're writing code to perform some sort of function. Otherwise it's not something to earn money with, but a nerdy art project.

Sounds like providing that skill set would a good business opportunity.

Make it a SaaS!

Already done:

https://bytepack.io

By the same team behind Elixir/Phoenix no less

They're talking sales and marketing, not software packaging and delivery (which most software devs can do just fine).

I should add that I got excited for a moment at the thought of some one-stop shop for sales and marketing for software devs building a product.

But no, just packaging and delivery. Which is cool, and probably useful for some people. But it doesn't help address the biggest weak spot for solo devs, or small teams: sales and marketing.

Back in the days before the internet became a distribution platform, there actually used to be software distributors that acted like this, they would publish in hobbyist magazines as well as send out their own catalogs. Some were better than others and would get the small shops they represented to collaborate to make complementary products work better together. In those days you could be a one person shop and just write the software. I don't know how one would recreate that model in todays realities.

> I don't know how one would recreate that model in todays realities

Seems like a good opportunity for innovation.

That looks pretty cool! I'm surprised they only have enterprise level contact us pricing though, it'd be an interesting SAAS self-service product.

JetBrains Marketplace is like this. It's a store for plugins to their IDEs but they also say they'll do co-branding and marketing with you, you get access to their reseller network, they handle a lot of the accounting etc.

But it's just for IDE plugins. Not the rest.

6: release parts of your closed product as open source (saying it was sponsored by the company that sells the moneymaker, so not some dual licensing of the entire product)

- 5% chance you make a living etc + fame and glory

If you release under MIT and you don't have a plan for public speaking, or consulting then you have no way to profit financially from that work. Used to be that you could offer hosted solutions, but if you become too high profile the Cloud providers will have a 'better' offering.

Too many of us still fall into this Calvinistic work ethic that if we just put in the work the rewards will appear through some ineffable mechanism we don't (think we) need to understand. I am currently fighting this battle with myself on several fronts. That shit is hard, especially when you don't have a lot of role models.

This. The other fallacy is that a work is not yet good enough to charge for it.

How often is that true though?

almost always true. The creator tends to be biased when judging value (of their own work).

Just because it was used a lot by many people because it's free, doesn't mean there's economic value. Charging for it is the only way to find out the economic value people assign to it.

The work is the reward.

We don't talk about the people who agree with you, because it doesn't come up.

Enjoyment of something can be substantially reduced when you find out someone else is taking all the credit for your work, however. And the transition can be a bit shocking. In many cases these are probably the people we are talking about, in other cases it's someone discovering that they don't have the luxury of doing this passion project for free anymore.

5. Use https://commonsclause.com or another commercial use restriction with an open source license.

  - Get bashed for not being a real open source by fellow nerds

  - Get licensing fees from larger companies

Just say it is commons clause, not ordinary open source.

I've even become convinced (based on someone digging out enough references) that the term ipen source was being used before OSI, but for the rest of the HN, just say "commons clause" without saying "open source" and I guess most bashing disappears.

There will always be that person annoyed that it isn't AGPL - or MIT for that matter - but for most if us we just want to know what the license actually is.

>I've even become convinced (based on someone digging out enough references) that the term ipen source was being used before OSI

Basically at the same time. Christine Peterson seems to have coined it in 1998, the same year the OSI was founded. https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...

As far as I'm concerned, people can use whatever license they want. I just think it's borderline deceptive to claim something is an open source license even if it clearly doesn't meet the OSI (or FSF) definition.

This is just a special case of option 3. Why would this get you licensing fees when it wouldn't?

> commercial use restriction with an open source license

Any licence which explicitly forbids commercial use is by definition not a Free Software licence or an Open Source licence.

Or do you mean something like the AGPLv3, which isn't explicitly anti-commercial but which has strong terms that scare off many companies?

Isn't the situation somewhat akin to what modern musicians face? i.e. very little money from selling music, but a lot of money from performances, merch, etc?

If I were hoping to make money off my OSS work, I would try to sell services related to the product. Consulting services, hosted instances, commercial forks, feature bounties, etc.

Complaining about compensation for OSS work is like musicians pining for the days where you could create an album and sit back while the money rolled in. You can vent your frustrations, but the world is what it is and complaining is only going to make you and your work less popular.

If you release software under a commercial license, you're essentially forming a software company. It's hard work and not guaranteed to succeed, but isn't that legit and well-traveled path to wealth? Also not mentioned is using your coding skills to land a decent tech job, which seems like a much better shot at financial stability than what many have.

> 4. Dual license it as GPL and commercial and:

This works if your product can target big corporations. They are unlikely to intentionally misuse the license; and would pay licensing fees for something that can be freely available online. There are several companies doing this already.

You just need a few contracts to cover a software engineer salary. So unless you are after maximizing profits, you don't really care about the dudes who are using it commercially for free.

Who has ever been bashed for releasing a commercial product on HN? It is a startup forum after all.

This place seems like venting outlet for random people working in tech - the startup tone was drowned out years ago.

Even Dropbox got bashed here for asking money just for linking some hard drives together.

I remember Stripe getting bashed on HN for releasing a commercial feature that took months to develop, by someone saying they could do it "in a weekend"...

Apple and NVIDIA are excruciatingly unpopular amount the "techie" crowd precisely for choosing proprietary licenses and closed, proprietary environments. Every single time they are brought up you can be guaranteed a screed about how Linus gave NVIDIA the finger that one time, or people don't like the extent to which NVIDIA supports Wayland (which is not zero!).

People absolutely do not accept the explanation that these companies are businesses that spend R&D money developing novel hardware and software and won't immediately race to interoperate with copycat standards from competitors who want to leech off that R&D once it's proven commercially viable. Nor do they have to expand the scope of their work to implement that one feature 0.1% of users want, nor are they obligated to open things up to allow you to implement the things they won't. And nor are you obligated to use their product if you don't find it satisfactory.

I guess it really goes to show how much Copyleft has won the war that people are immediately hostile to proprietary licenses today, particularly in consumer-facing technology. Oddly this does not seem to apply to more industrial or embedded use-cases, you don't see anyone ranting about the awful proprietary Xilinx toolchain or Broadcom's awful binary SOC blobs any time those products are brought up. But then again it does apply to software APIs and such?

It's probably not unfair to say that "anything I use should be free and open but also enough people should pay me that I should be able to make a living" is not an unfair characterization here. Everyone wants nice things, they don't want to pay for them. That's why gmail and Windows 10 and other spyware-funded services are so popular.

5. Do nothing.

  - Die poor

6. Get a job that pays the bills, write code in your spare time for the joy of writing code, publish code as PD to help others learn. Maybe blog about it. Die happy.

7. Get a job that pays the bills, write code in your spare time for the joy of writing code, or not write any code in your spare time at all. Die happy.

Yeah - I write open source code to learn things that I won't get to or be forced to learn from a day job (currently a data platform in Python) - implementing authn/authz, network programming, creating a small framework.

I enjoy it and I expect it to help me become a more well-rounded and therefore more employable developer.

6. Quit IT, buy a farm

  - Get crushed by the market
  
  - Die poor

At least you don't die poor and hungry. Maybe it's a permaculture farm and you also died knowing you contributed to less carbon emissions and more biodiversity.

This is a interesting topic because it exposes one of the great sins developers commit - we don’t pay each other. I’m not talking about nickel and dimeing your fraternity, but there is certainly a reasonable price for a lot of these packages and plug-ins we install that can create financial autonomy for a lot of people via modest efforts.

Developers are the toughest customers because we all think: "that's just a small script and a cron job" done in a weekend and basically worth $0. All the while staying each day in a meeting costing a cumulative $xx(x) just to announce what the job for today is.

I agree that is part of the problem, but I think the real problem is that even if you accept the premise that it would take just a weekend it is still the wrong analysis for the company. Even a job that you can complete in an hour is easily $100-200 worth of direct engineering costs.

I think the real problem is that most developers naturally plug in the value of their time on a hobby project/in school (which is ~$0/hr) when deciding if a time-cost tradeoff is worthwhile. Since the answer is almost always no if you incorrectly value time at $0/hr and management usually can not do the analysis themselves, management pattern matches and determines that spending money on developer tooling is essentially never worthwhile and that sums like $5k (which few people would spend on personal projects) are outrageous. If the correct time-value analysis was done, you would get outcomes more like electrical engineers (who generally make less than high-end software developers) where companies will spend literally $50k/yr/engineer on tooling to make them 50% more productive since that actually makes perfect business sense based on the amount they are being paid. In contrast, if you went to management in a software company pushing for a $50k/yr/developer expense they would probably laugh you out of the room or require some totally outrageous improvement like 10x for everybody.

Indeed, this is visible at personal and corporate level. I've seen companies balk at a Total Commander license which is negligible.

I've also had corporate procurement waste my time on a project for a potential $200 sale which never materialized.

On the other hand devs in corporation usualy have no spending budget. Going thru official management ask and procurement process is a real PITA. The last thing a dev wants is drowning in a red tape swamp.

I do sometimes pay for software with my own cash. However that is mostly limited to personal productivity tools because I can't transfer licenses to the company.

It’ll have to be cultural shift. The same way you get free food and beer, or a budget to buy your own gear, we need to start allocating a no-nonsense dev budget to get licenses.

Of course, we’d have to create a marketplace that has modest price points. The marketplace isn’t supposed to be filled with enterprise grade Jira solutions that cost - I can’t even imagine what it costs.

I’m not above paying a few bucks for all these things that I’ve used in my project if it was as seamless as npm install. But it’s not. Some take donations, some take bitcoin, some have a enterprise version with their own payment portal, some require you to call their sales staff, etc. There is a ton of friction here.

For these things to become profitable means we as developers have more places to generate income, it’s a win win.

> It’ll have to be cultural shift. The same way you get free food and beer, or a budget to buy your own gear, we need to start allocating a no-nonsense dev budget to get licenses.

+1 insightful. I wonder when we'll see the first company do that.

(I must admit, though, I've never worked at a company that offered me free food, beer, budget for gear, books, or anything else. They might as well be silicon valley myths. I have worked a few places with an on-site vending machine, where you pay for the snacks.)

It’s a tough one for sure. We recently had a whole debate about whether we should buy a solution that charges about $450. This is a company with a lot of revenue. No point in being cheap about this. I attributed it to the friction involved, which will require a mindset change.

Society, in general, is oddly cheap when it really doesn’t have to be. You won’t become millionaires by saving a few thousand bucks (at the company level) by forgoing decent things. No way to live.

I think the Tailwind css model seems the most sustainable right now - build an open source project until it reaches a suitable level of success and then build commercial support/other projects around it.

Think of Red Hat employees. Most of them are paid to contribute continually to Open Source (linux kernel, numerous libraries, etc), then they sell product and support licenses. The problem is that few developers are helping to maintain Open Source libraries. In what universe is it feasible for an large Open Source project maintainer to make a living without patrons?? For-profit orgs should be the driver for maintaining Open Source.

I'm a big promoter of open source software. However, I do see a fine line between getting open source and charging. In general if something is generic enough like Kernel of an OS or MVC framework for web dev, then yes open sources it.

However, it if it becomes specific and company clearly are benefiting and/profiting from it, then yeah charge for it!!

My personal preference would be more like:

5. Make something cool and release it under any license which I feel like. Ruthlessly limit the project scope so I can finish it while still having fun and learning interesting things. (This means completely finished; documented, optimized for performance, and exhaustively tested with close to zero bugs remaining.) Then:

- Be very clear on the project page about what people can expect in terms of support and timely bugfixes. Let people make their decision to use the project or not, with knowledge of how much time and energy I am ready to give. Politely refuse to go beyond what has been stated.

- Make whatever amount of money I need through other means.

- Use the knowledge I gained from making said "cool thing" to make other cool things (whether for fun or for money).

- With a glint in my eye, reminisce about the great times spent hacking on computer code and all the fascinating discoveries made.

5. Refactor your SW, release a basic functional FOSS version and license ($$$) the full-featured version

I see some open source authors having success with Patreon. I’ve been trying off and on since 2017, I think what I’ve lacked is production quality and consistent updates. Getting crowd funding is a job ontop of just developping, no doubt.

And let's not forget corporations actively suppressing open source developers by going out of their way to not award them support contract.

Your insight and the comments in the Github thread all back up the same point - the current economic model is not set up to empower or distribute wealth to the little guy.

I think it was phk who many years ago pointed out that Free Software is really anti-capitalist at heart; it makes sense that it would come from America (and MIT!) because of how the economic system works there.

The licenses are a distraction. The bigger issues are structural in terms of how the economy is set up. Our current free market system is predicated on folks at the bottom of the pyramid getting squeezed for their labor. It is only when it starts happening to us and not folks somewhere else that we begin to do something about it.

i could be wrong here but I'm sensing a theme

OR,

    - release it under a permissive license

    - wait until it reaches reaches a significant level of popularity for your purposes (see below)

    - flex it to get a good job at a good company

    - abandon the original project altogether or find new maintainers

    - focus on your new job, build skills and connections

    - invest most of your income in bonds and experiment with profitable side ventures which don't require much economic contribution from your side

    - most probably die relatively well-off

No interviewer has demonstrated anything but perfunctory interest in my open source work, popular or not.

It's a myth, like 'nobody cares where you went to school so long as you can do the work'.

That's fascinating, I had the opposite experience.

Never once have I been asked which school I went to or anything about my CS degree. I had multiple people contacting me after finding me on Github (and my OSS work is very unpopular and mostly unmaintained) and one of them was a C-Suite who offered me a job.

I never found a job with a recruiter - just networking, so it may be a form of self selection for more personal interactions.

Seems to me, if a project is successful enough, one could leverage that network to get a job if they needed it. In many companies developers have an outsized influence on which other developers get hired. If I were in this gentlemens shoes that is the angle I would have taken (and maybe he tried). I would have posted a message to the fellow contributors that basically stated:

I had an apartment fire, I am in a jam and am looking for employment as such my contributions to this project may diminish while I focus on my finances, if anyone has any leads at their company please let me know.

Unless one is looking to only work at a FAANG, I suspect something to that effect would net leads for a top developer of a successful project.

I mean, I guess. On the other hand, if you have a niche side project (I have several in a rather niche language), then you become known in the community.

Most people's 'side projects' don't shine on their resume because the side project is just a replica of one hundred other projects that do the same thing. In order to be known for a side project, you have to make sure the audience is small enough for it to make a difference, but large enough that there is commercial interest.

> No interviewer has demonstrated anything but perfunctory interest in my open source work, popular or not.

In he past when I did candidate screening I used floss work extensively to evaluate a candidate. To me, personal projects are an excellent way to assess skillsets at multiple levels.

Perhaps you've been interviewed by people who place a greater focus on soft skills, or HR headhunters who can only read CVs?

I've been a software developer for 15+ years now. It's been the same, every place I've ever interviewed. People place a lower priority on things they can't easily quantify.

I'm proud of the fact that many volunteer collaborators on the D project have, as a direct result, landed very well-paying jobs.

I know it's not the point here, but do those jobs often involve D directly?

Yes, they do. I also get the impression that many employers are looking for people who are more broadly interested in programming beyond C/C++/Java and are willing to pay.

I think it's a part of a bigger problem I see. People are hung up on where they want to work. If you HAVE TO work for certain companies, and you want your finances in order, you're doing it wrong. Priorities!

Also, you don't need most companies or all companies to value your open source project. You need one.

I think that's true for contributions to existing projects or other hard to notice stuff.

On the other hand, I got my current job exclusively via my open source work. But I created a project from scratch.

There's an article that makes the rounds now and again on HN about a engineer who wrote a widely used opensource tool and then didn't get past the Google interview process. FAANGs are still more interested in seeing if you can solve the Knapsack Problem then seeing that you can write good, maintainable code.

It was the developer behind the macOS package manager Homebrew https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

Sheesh I'd forgotten - he's right, everyone does use that tool. He backed off on a bit but the point still remains, I'm sure he's a better engineer than half of google.

I wonder if they asked Pike and Thompson to invert a binary tree.

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

I'm not so sure. By his own admission homebrew is not that great a piece of software. There's a lot more that goes into popularity than being good. Being first, marketing and network effects are as or more important than being good.

He

- acknowledges and understands the problems and

- could certainly fix them if paid a Google-sized salary

But he won't dance to the tune of the "Cracking the Coding Interview" juggernaut so to heck with him. Better to spend time memorizing the Floyd Cycle Detection algorithm than produce useful code.

( OK, I may be a bit bitter )

I mean he says he doesn't really know what a b-tree is. That's a pretty basic data structure and kind of table stakes for being a software engineer. Even then, Google gave him a good look with 7 interviews. Just speculating here, but they probably would have given him a chance if he wasn't "often a dick" and "often difficult".

> That's a pretty basic data structure and kind of table stakes for being a software engineer.

It really isn't. You don't need to know what a b-tree is to do most modern software engineering.

> Even then, Google gave him a good look with 7 interviews. Just speculating here, but they probably would have given him a chance if he wasn't "often a dick" and "often difficult".

I think you're right on this one.

> It really isn't. You don't need to know what a b-tree is to do most modern software engineering.

if you're hiring a car driver, then yes, the driver doesn't need to know the innards of how an engine would work.

But if you're hiring a car mechanic, surely you expect them to understand the innards of the engine.

This is not a good analogy. Most cars work in roughly the same way. Most software does not.

Software engineering is a diverse enough topic that you can have two "software engineers" who, aside from very broad general concepts like control flow and modularity, have very little overlap in their areas of expertise. Developing microcontroller firmware requires a very different set of skills and knowledge to building an ML model in R.

Most pieces of software require zero knowledge of the inner workings of, different implementations of, or even existence of a b-tree structure in order to be able to successfully create, understand and maintain them. Let's not gatekeep by telling people they're not real software engineers unless they understand and can recite an arbitrary set of mostly useless topics.

It's actually not a good analogy because most mechanics nowadays specialize. You don't have an engine guy do an automatic transmission rebuild and you don't have your local car dealer do a coil-over 4 link suspension upgrade on your Jeep.

This is exactly analogous to software in that you don't need to know deep algorithms to build CRUD web apps. They are a different part of the machine and closer to the business domain. Looking for deep CS over skills like requirement gathering, collaboration, information theory gives false signals on competency for the task at hand.

The reality is front end, backend, embedded, desktop etc. etc. all have different requirements on the skill sets they need to be successful. People gain the skills they need via the process of working, then we have this ritual of interviewing where we act like all these things that never get used in their trade are so so important to know.

The direct analogy is I am hiring an engine guy,he will never touch a transmission. The guy knows fuel maps, timing and compression ratios like the back of his hand, but I keep insisting that he tell me how the sun gear of the transmission engages the planetaries and in what sequence because he has to know this to be any good as an engine guy and come to the conclusion in my head that if he does not know transmissions it is a signal that he is not fit to be an engine guy.

>The guy knows fuel maps, timing and compression ratios like the back of his hand, but I keep insisting that he tell me how the sun gear of the transmission engages the planetaries and in what sequence because he has to know this to be any good as an engine guy and come to the conclusion in my head that if he does not know transmissions it is a signal that he is not fit to be an engine guy.

Sure, but that's not what happened. The real story, in contrast to the tweet, is that he didn't really know what a b-tree was. And if you're hiring an engine mechanic and they tell you they don't really know what a transmission is, well, that's a pretty big red flag.

Agreed and I don't know what he was applying for, I was just highlighting that this happens a lot in our industry where we misapply (not saying everyone in the tech industry) what we do with the ritual of insisting that applicants are worthy via a cargo cult process of ensuring that they too have the smartest guy in the room mentality.

I hate to entertain this bad analogy further than necessary, but knowing what a gearbox is in the field of cars is not even remotely near the same level as knowing what a b-tree is in the field of software engineering.

I guess we'll just have to disagree. They're a pretty basic data structure that's used quite often to solve a class of problems. And they're not that hard to learn. How they work is pretty simple and the reason to use them is pretty easy to grasp. I would say that there are few good software engineers out there that aren't clear on what they are at a basic level.

I am curious. Which one do you think is more difficult to understand? (I couldnt tell)

You don't need to know what a b- tree is, just a binary tree. The question was about a simple binary tree, which is really trivial, even you have no idea of b-tree's and you never inverted a binary tree yet.

The dick part might be true, esp. after getting 7 interviews.

the only interaction with b-tree's i had was:

CREATE INDEX index ON table (column);

so I doubt the knowledge of b-tree's are that important for 90% of the users/people/developers. heck I know how to write a multipart parser/formatter, which I doubt that many people do. especially people who know how a b-tree works. well most people which do know how a b-tree works, do not know when to use it.

Actually writting good software (from an engineering perspective) is easier than coming up with a popular software. If you dont like the 'easier' statement, I can replace it with 'more important' or 'different'. So maybe he shouldnt work as a programmer for FAANG, but more like a product manager (and let the other people write code for him)

> I wonder if they asked Pike and Thompson to invert a binary tree.

Would surprise me if they couldn't. Writing compilers include lots of working with trees. Pike has literally written a book with a chapter on Algorithms & Data Structures, including trees.

OK I concede that they'd pass it, I suppose I'm just amused at picturing the scene.

"Can you invert a binary tree?"

"I wrote a book on binary trees!"

"That's very nice. The clock is ticking, you now 19 minutes left... "

I picture the scene as:

"...and that's the answer."

"Sorry...you're wrong. That's not how we solve it."

"I wrote the book on it. I just solved it for you starting from first principles. It can be used as a proof."

"Sorry...if you can't think the way we do you just won't fit in."

"I asked you to write an algorithm, not a bunch of Greek letters. Is that your fraternity or something?"

If that's the answer you get, be glad. Dodged a bullet. Go find a job somewhere else where they value your skills. There was no good fit to begin with.

So the plan is to abandon the project? It will work some individuals, but we need something more sustainable for the industry.

If the project is valuable, someone will step in to maintain it.

If nobody does, its value didn't justify the cost of maintenance.

Perhaps all the people using it value it enough that they might pay (if they had no other choice to keep it), but might not be able to maintain it.

In that situation, it's valued but it only gets maintained if someone offers to do the maintenance for pay.

If the current maintainer is stepping down from the project if they aren't paid, but willing to continue for pay, it makes sense for them to let everyone else know they are willing to continue if paid, doesn't it?

If your finances are not in order, you can't be worrying about sustainability of some library or tool, or the industry for that matter. The industry is made out of people. If there are individuals who have to slave away to maintain an important tool or library, it's not going to be sustainable either.

Human existence is Venn diagrams of desperate efforts for attention.

Why would I bother publishing it or creating it?

I'm well fed and I don't need to sell myself.

Your only motivation in life is making enough money to meet your basic needs?

Not only my basic needs, I also had a strong urge to reproduce - but that would be irresponsible without being able to support the offspring.

When I was younger I always had an insane drive for making money, which translated into tons of business ideas and a true passion for working.

After having kids and after having enough money to buy a house in cash, a lot of that business drive disappeared. I definitely feel like I completed a part of my life. There is still some drive - and it's focused at creating enough value to pay all my expenses: food, entertainment, private school for the kids.

After that is done, I will spend my days working out, growing my kids, cooking, gardening, travelling.

I know society sells the lie you should be working yourself off (possibly for some giant evil corporation), hoarding as much money as possible until you die - but I couldn't care less.

Removing economic incentives would see a steady decline of value creation in society. Stakhanovism was most likely Stalin propaganda.

The ridiculous treadmill of people saying UBI is going to work despite all evidence to the contrary, apparently a long, long time..

Citizens of rich oil sheikhdoms in the Gulf have had de-facto UBI, and a high one, for a long time, even though the formalities were a bit muddled. In practice, if you were lucky enough to be born as a Saudi or Qatari citizen, your needs would be covered.

It did not lead to any explosion of creativity, arts and science there. People are morbidly obese and spend their money on gambling, drugs and sex.

I am not very optimistic about human nature when exposed to easy life.

My question and this truly is a question as I am not well read on UBI concepts and social theories is:

So it did not bring about nirvana and human nature is well human nature but did it eliminate suffering to a noticeable degree i.e homelessness, poverty, food security, healthcare?

It seems to me the two are not directly tied, people are always going to seek out the vices because they are the roots of pleasure but that does not mean that the other side of the equation is negative, if it does eliminate suffering then it would be a net positive. I am not advocating for UBI, I am completely ignorant on the subject, just trying to understand if it did produce positive results against suffering.

I definitely do not want to diss a concept that hasn't been tried out extensively, though I am more skeptical about it than many others - not least because people tend to discriminate "good" neighbourhoods from "bad" using rent level, so we might just see a general jump in rents and property prices that eats the entire UBI and a new unhappy equilibrium is reached.

That said, I think that rich Gulf states show us that it can be overdone, that a completely sheltered life of plenty sucks. It sucks in a very different way than hunger or homelessness, but it gnaws on human psyche too.

Capitalism + UBI = still capitalism. Of course people are fat and lazy, there's an entire economic apparatus convincing them to be. This is why I prefaced the entire point with "abolish capitalism."

If you were financially independent, what would you do or build? I know I'd never stop producing useful things.

I don't know whether you should be so sure that you're not mixing up cause and effect here. It might as well be that we have the economic apparatus because people naturally gravitate towards becoming fat and lazy. Or, most likely, both options are true to some degree.

> I know I'd never stop producing useful things.

I think few people are this driven.

I'm sure you believe this in good faith, but most human beings are not as driven and are not as good natured as you.

This is also why governments or any form or redistribution is inferior to a perfect market without human interference: you will always have bad apples stealing resources or being as inefficient as they can be. I know this because I'm a psychopath, I feel zero guilt or empathy and the thought that someone like me could be in a position of power is downright scary.

> despite all evidence to the contrary

Do you happen to have some of this evidence on hand? Everything I've read on it suggests the exact opposite: that (at least here in the US) it'll not only work better than existing welfare systems, but would end up being cheaper.

It's hard to claim something is evidence or counter-evidence of anything in social science. Once you add one or more brains, the complexity skyrockets quite quickly.

I think it's a terrible idea for (at least) three reasons: - More money is being forcefully redistributed from people that produce work to people who don't produce. This will make people lazier and less entrepreneurial. Yes, I'm against any form of taxation for the same principle and I think the terrible corporate lifecycle is caused primarily by people not being entrepreneurial enough. - Taxes will increase, pushing businesses even more outside of here. - The more money you give to bureaucrats the more they will keep for themselves, the more they will waste, the more will not go to the economy.

> More money is being forcefully redistributed from people that produce work to people who don't produce.

I think it's a bit presumptuous to declare that the people footing the bill are even most of the time (let alone all of the time) producing more work than the people receiving a net income from UBI. I would, indeed, argue the exact opposite: your average warehouse or restaurant or farm worker is almost certainly putting in significantly more labor than your average landlord or C-level executive or Bitcoin hodler while receiving a fraction of the income. This might not be the most popular opinion on a website that revolves specifically around the worship of venture-capital-backed get-rich-quick schemes, but I really have close to zero sympathy for those in the latter category; "won't you please think of the poor billionaires" is, frankly, insulting to those actually working for their money.

In any case:

> Yes, I'm against any form of taxation for the same principle

A land value tax wouldn't have this "problem"; it's arguably the one form of taxation that ain't "theft", since it's actually a service payment (i.e. you pay rent to the government that actually owns land - that is, the basis of a "fee simple" title system as used in e.g. the US and other common-law jurisdictions - in exchange for said government recognizing and enforcing your claim on that land). Even if it came from income taxes (which I'd agree would be a worst-case scenario), I've yet to see a single proposal that taxes anyone other than people who can readily afford those taxes. Taking things to an extreme, a billionaire with a 99% income tax is still overwhelmingly richer than (I suspect) the both of us combined.

But this all assumes we'd be pursuing UBI in addition to other welfare systems; I'd argue that ain't necessary. That is:

> Taxes will increase, pushing businesses even more outside of here.

There's every indication that the overall tax burden for all but the absolute wealthiest Americans would decrease substantially by replacing existing welfare programs with UBI.

> The more money you give to bureaucrats the more they will keep for themselves, the more they will waste, the more will not go to the economy.

By replacing existing welfare programs with UBI, you eliminate a considerable amount of that bureaucracy. Most of that bureaucracy revolves specifically around determining eligibility; if literally every US citizen is unconditionally eligible for a fixed income, we can immediately replace those bureaucrats with a pretty simple system:

    def redistribute_tax_as_ubi(amount):
        for c in citizens:
            c.send_check(amount / citizens.count)

And from there it's just a matter of tuning how much tax needs collected in order to ensure every American can afford basic needs. And at that point, with that UBI flowing, it then becomes entirely unambiguous whether or not someone's poor due to circumstance or bad choices - that is, UBI eliminates that variable, and achieves actual equality of opportunity.

As an added bonus:

> I think the terrible corporate lifecycle is caused primarily by people not being entrepreneurial enough

UBI would directly enable all Americans to pursue entrepreneurial ventures without putting themselves in danger of starvation. People would be more entrepreneurial than ever when they know that even if their startups flop (because let's face it: the vast majority of startups crash and burn) they still have food on the table and roofs (rooves?) over their heads.

Hi yellowapple, thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciated!

> on poor billionaires

I'm not talking about poor billionaires, they pay (almost) zero taxes through loopholes that their friends in the government allow to exist. I'm talking about middle class who can't setup a foreign entity to pay zero taxes. The problem with taxation (and progressive taxation in particular) is that it applies only to people who are too poor to meddle with the government.

I think middle class people are probably creating more value for society than poor people, which is way they're rewarded with more money.

> on land value tax

I would consider a land tax immoral as well, why is the land owned by the government? We're talking about a group of people who got everyone to agree they decide for everyone and they decide everyone needs to pay some money or they'll end up in jail.

> UBI would reduce burden for all but wealthiest

Does that account for wealthy people structuring their wealth in a different matter to avoid that? When progressive income tax in the 60-70s reached 90% (for high tax rate payers), rich people just started getting loopholes added to the law to exempt specific cases.

> UBI would reduce bureaucracy

That sounds like an improvement Given how much the government managed to grow in the last 2 centuries, I'm not very optimistic on this being the case for a long time.

> UBI would make people more entrepreneurial

Something I personally found in my entrepreneurial journey, is that living on passive money (MRR in my case, but a passive business nonetheless) doesn't affect positively my willingness to do much. When I was a broke engineer counting how much proteins I could buy and living in a basement after having spent all my money on a startup that failed, I definitely had a different grit.

I think need is a powerful motivator, but I don't really have a cross population study on the subject.

> Hi yellowapple, thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciated!

No problem :) Geolibertarianism is something I've become pretty passionate about over the last couple years.

> I'm not talking about poor billionaires, they pay (almost) zero taxes through loopholes that their friends in the government allow to exist. [...] Does that account for wealthy people structuring their wealth in a different matter to avoid that?

Well that's the great thing about LVT: you can't exactly move land overseas, so there's no room for loopholes there. If you hold land, you pay tax on its value; if you don't, you don't.

Wealthy people could certainly end up getting rid of their land holdings (particularly vacant or otherwise-unused ones), and I'd argue that's a good thing, since it opens up that land for use by others (provided they're willing to pay LVT on it), thus better achieving equality of opportunity than the current system. LVT, in other words, would promote land ownership as a means to an end rather than as an investment in and of itself, thus discouraging the sorts of speculation that promote NIMBYism and housing crises and all that jazz.

That is, indeed, the crux of why those billionaires are unjust in their holding of wealth: it's specifically around their ability to hoard finite resources - like land - without justly compensating the other members of society prevented from having that same opportunity to claim those resources.

> I think middle class people are probably creating more value for society than poor people, which is way they're rewarded with more money.

I disagree, at least in a general sense. There are certainly people in both groups creating a lot of value for society; the difference is usually whether they're adequately compensated for that value. This is a big reason why corporations tend to be hostile to unionization: because workers have an easier time negotiating for fair wages and treatment as a group than as an individual, especially when they work for large corporations.

And likewise, there are certainly people in both groups who don't create much value at all. One nice thing about UBI is that it makes it a lot easier to tell the difference between those who are just lazy and those who are victims of circumstance. That is: it maximizes equality of opportunity, and better ensures that the people who deserve to move from the lower to middle class actually get to do so.

> I would consider a land tax immoral as well, why is the land owned by the government?

Because it's within the territory of that government. All land "ownership" derives from a government granting someone a title to that land, be it indefinite (e.g. with a "fee simple" title) or limited-duration (e.g. the 99-year leases some countries use). This is, indeed, exactly why things like eminent domain are legally permissible in the US and other nations: land is really owned by the state, and leased to landholders.

That is: unless you have an allodial title (hint: if your land is in the US, you almost certainly don't), your land is already de jure leased to you by a superior landlord (that is: the state), and the recognition and enforcement of your claim to that land is a service provided to you by that government. Without that service, "land ownership" would be limited to what you can physically defend against trespass yourself (since land titles would be worthless pieces of paper without some authority backing them - much like paper currency, come to think of it).

> and they decide everyone needs to pay some money or they'll end up in jail.

Who said anything about jail? If you stop paying rent on something you're leasing, you don't go to jail (at least not for that reason); you simply lose access to that thing being leased. Land would be no different: a land value tax is simply the fair rent to lease that land ("fair" due to it being a tax on the land's value).

And indeed, the goal of Georgism and derived philosophies (like geolibertarianism) is to ensure that a land value tax is a "single tax" - i.e. the tax anyone ever pays, replacing taxes on sales, income, capital gains, payroll, inheritance, you name it. Therefore, the only possible punishment for tax evasion in a Georgist single-tax system would be eviction.

(Sometimes Pigovian and severance taxes (i.e. taxes on pollution and natural resource extraction, respectively) get thrown in by Georgist/geolibertarians, too; I'd argue pollution should be a criminal or civil court matter (i.e. treating it as reckless endangerment and property damage, and fining/suing accordingly) rather than a taxation matter, and that natural resources are an extension of land and thus would be included in LVT)

> I think need is a powerful motivator

That's definitely a fair assessment, and I agree with it. However, that raises a question: if the only reason you're doing something is because the alternative is to starve or freeze to death, are you really doing that thing voluntarily? This question is what underlies the socialist concept of "wage slavery", and socialists' perception of capitalism as inherently reliant on coercion (namely: by threatening risk of starvation or homelessness unless you submit to a corporation's terms, regardless of whether or not those terms are actually in your best interests). Seems to me the best way to address that concern (without abolishing capitalism entirely) is to make sure nobody has to do things just to survive.

That is: the only just motivator, in my opinion, is one's own happiness - which is consistent with the pursuit thereof being one of the three inalienable rights specified in the very rationale for this country's existence. People should do things because they actually want to do them - either because they enjoy doing that thing or because they're (fairly) compensated for it and using it as a means to achieve things they want.

And that's the other thing, too: since UBI would provide an option besides "work myself to death", you'd see interesting dynamics on wages. On one hand, jobs that few people want to do would command higher wages (or other benefits) to make it worth folks' while to take on those jobs. On the other hand, workers would be more willing to work for low or nonexistent wages (e.g. as volunteers) if the work itself is interesting. The free software movement, as one example relevant to this post, would flourish; so would the arts, education, and numerous other fields where people would be participating if it weren't for such activities not exactly paying the rent.

You're right! Let's keep doing what we're doing. It's working great.

I know you're being sarcastic but I disagree.

I think capitalism is fine and we need more of it. We need to get rid of governments and minimise centralisation of power instead. I don't want any more wars, jailing of people committing victimless crimes or people being forced to give up half of their economic output to bureaucrats.

Every service offered by the government should be offered by multiple private companies. People in need should get money through voluntary donations, not through taxes forcefully stolen from people.

Just because you made something cool doesn't mean you are entitled to make any amount of money from it. The world doesn't owe you anything. Even if you make something useful to people, that doesn't mean you are entitled to live rich. More than likely your solution is just good enough that people don't feel the need to make their own, but not good enough that no one can't compete with you.