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.