Or don't. I've done both, published OSS projects and sold some software. The level of entitlement in some comments I received on the OSS side was pretty crazy at times. While with the paid software, all of the interactions I had were so much more constructive. YMMV, but willingness to pay is a great filter.
I’ve also done both, and I found both kinds of users in both situations. There have been cases on the commercial front where I just felt like giving customers their money back, even after years of having used the software, and told them to not come back. There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore. With open-source it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
My “favourites” are the ones threatening to abandon the tool, despite having never made a single positive contribution. On open-source that’s an easy laugh and a “good riddance”. On commercial cases it’s more frustrating and nuanced.
I disagree willingness to pay is that meaningful of a filter, in the cases I experienced. And it’s getting worse; many people are getting too impatient and act like everyone works for them specifically and only their needs matter.
There’s no cost to me to stop an entitled disruptive user with zero positive contributions from destabilising the project. No cost to my volunteers either. The opposite is true in both cases; removing that user is a net benefit and I’ve done so in the past specifically to protect the experience of the volunteers.
As for tokens, there have been exactly zero cases where someone has submitted LLM code to one of my repos that has been up to my standards and I have accepted it. Yes, I can say that with certainty. If I wanted LLM code I’d ask for it myself, having an intermediary in that process is worse than useless.
As someone who once had a popular open-source project. Opensource is just harder because you've to write code for <optics>. When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive. Despite what people here say, all these things have very little to do with the reliability of actual code.
Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.
I don't think this debate has an easy answer. Yes, not everything should be about money, but yes, we all need to make money to survive.
I think we all agree the answer isn't, "No one should make any money writing software." I also think we can agree that the answer isn't, "you should charge money for every bit of software you write."
So how do we decide which is which?
I don't want to stop being a professional software developer. I have loved being able to support myself and my family by doing my favorite activity. It has let me enjoy going to work every day for over 20 years.
I also don't think I should charge for random code work that I do for fun, though. I am not trying to monetize every minute of my day... but I do want to monetize enough of it that I can pay my mortgage, buy food, save for my retirement, and have some fun along the way.
I don't know exactly where I am going with this, but it is my gut reaction when I see a post about how horrible it is to make money off of writing software. It has to be more nuanced than that.
It's not horrible to make money from good software, but nowadays lots of the things people do to attract VCs are plain stupid. It's an attack on that, the ones who "ship startups in an afternoon" and seek to build a moat around basic features in the hope that some corpo will buy in and get trapped.
In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing. Many bakers love the craft but nobody expects free baked good (except maybe their family). Many plumbers are true craftsmen and take pride helping solve peoples problems, but we don't expect free plumbing. On the other hand, once you write the code, the logic is complete, its closeness to an equation makes it feel like selling algebra homework.
More importantly though, baked goods get eaten, and pipes aren't assumed to suddenly become load bearing. I think a lot of developers hesitate to sell software they aren't prepared to support professionally. Toy projects then sometimes gain a community and grow organically. It's at this stage I feel we need a better path to funding without a lot of the capture that can occur.
It would be cool if we could "farmers marketize" software though. Come together to taste some exotic and local varieties. Maybe meet the local shops, pay for some overpriced TUI gizmo or a hash function with a weird pattern.
Sorry went into fantasy land there. This is obviously not the solution to the broader OSS funding issue, but it's a cute dream where maybe some people make a buck.
I think the bigger solution would have more opportunities for people outside of academia to get small grants to work on their projects. More foundations supporting the core technology and development that the tech world depends on now, and prospectively in the future.
There is also a big difference between making money to live comfortably and make money to get filthy rich. Lots of people come to tech aiming for the second, so they won't make software so you can buy them a beer. They want to hit it big, and I think this is what smuggles perverse incentives in software development.
let's say agriculture. if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?
what about artists? it's not that their work even has a utility function...
If you've grown a ton of tomatoes, you're probably doing it for the express purpose of profiting from it. To dial back the scope to something more comparable, if I have 4-5 tomato plants, I'm going to have all the tomatoes I want and then some. In that case, yes, I'm absolutely going to give away some tomatoes so that other people can enjoy them (as opposed to them ending up in the compost bin).
As someone who's worked in UI/UX for 2 decades, I feel this too.
Recent developments have made me feel a form of guilt that's new to me. As though we've all had it too good for too long. Which is probably at least in part due to working for organisations that only care about the bottom line.
In short; all of this boils down to capitalism being simultaneously a drive and a drain on society.
If I was going to write something for free, it would some weird itch-scratching thing for Plan 9 or something, it wouldn't be something most people would ever want.
Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.
FOSS has delivered some great software, it's also demonetised a lot of areas where software developers could be earning a living. I don't think software developers should feel any need to give away their efforts than any other professional should.
FOSS has created pricing race to the bottom in software, and taken away financial incentive for improvement, it's not a 100% net positive.
Considering the strong opinion on this topic, OP is probably young enough to not remember (or know) the 80s and 90s with too few free options for personal computing and most of the software is proprietary and non-free (exactly as the OP states). While it fueled the traction of shareware, it was a very different epoch, and impossible today with strict controls from MS, Google and Apple on what app is allowed to run. It's easy to wish the world to be different, but it would be much harder to live in with the today reality of secureboot and AppStore controls.
It's possible to say we don't have personal colputers anymore, they are MS/Apple/Google's device now, as they decide what it is allowed to run and what isn't.
its definitely a double edged sword. foss helps move quality forward because when someone stumbles across a good idea or technique it becomes well known faster. but individual developers are screwed financially, their only options are to work for a company with a big sales team/marketing or do niche consulting work if theyre lucky enough. im sure there are other ways. if you can make something sass you might be able to monetise it but chances are theres a better free version floating around or that the majority of people just dont want to think about computers and will pay m$ instead. then theres startup culture which tries to come up with the next big thing and get investors to finance it. its all quite depressing. sometimes i wish i was a gardener, go do a job get paid, done. this whole trying to wrangle money out of a skill set that takes decades to get good at really sucks.
I got burned with an attitude like this: unexpectedly, people who had downloaded my open source tool for free started expecting support. Some of them sent pretty unfriendly emails.
I literally got bullied by people who called themselves "the community" because they weren't happy with my copyleft license and the fact that I wasn't implementing their feature requests for free.
Happened to me too! Guy posted asking kinda rudely whether I was going to fix a bug. Told him I'd be happy to accept a PR for a fix. Never got a PR (project has been dead for some years now - just lost interest).
I don’t understand what the downside of this is. That’s hilarious for them to expect, and you’re free to ignore them, take their suggestion and work on it, help them.
I'm sympathetic to FOSS developers but struggle to understand this, maybe because it hasn't happened to me. But, why is this a mental drain? Is there not a simple solution? Reply with the license, "comes with no warranty," "you're free to fork," close issue and move on? I suppose in aggregate it could be draining.
I'm doing exactly this. I started out only intending to create something for myself. As it got better, I thought that other people might want to use it. I briefly considered trying to sell it, and pretty quickly realized that I didn't want to ruin something I was having fun with by turning it into a business.
Now, instead of worrying about sales, I get to feel good about giving something back to the FOSS community that has given me so much.
I recognize that it is a position of privilege to be able to dedicate so much of my time to a project that gives me nothing financially... and in fact costs me money to produce. No shade at all to people who are not so lucky and need to sell what they make.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's what I'm working on. Feature-wise it's come a long way since the last HN post about it.
I think there is something to be said for monetizing ones' hobbies, but I've recently been taking some forays into this world of "build something amazing and give it away for free" as well. I recently took a very big experimental plunge in this path, and I'm curious how well it will work out for me.
Open-source state-of-the-art Magic: The Gathering card identification pipeline:
I used to do this kind of image recognition for a living, but I've been out of the business for a little while now. I had some ideas for a different approach from what I've done in the past and decided to code it up. This version is far better than anything else I've ever done -- especially for scanning against busy backgrounds or with occlusions, and also for noticing fine differences between otherwise difficult-to-distinguish printings.
I didn't have any interested customers waiting for this, so -- much like the OP -- decided to create an experiment and release it open source. I'm not opposed to having paths to monetize it (for people who want to license it for closed-source commercial projects), but I'm not trying to commercialize it so much as I would love to see how far we can take it with open-source.
I don't know which path I should take with this.
The biggest downside is that I feel like I've had a hard time getting people to be as interested in this project as I would have expected -- I believe this truly is the best identification software available (I've built some benchmarks to test it [0]), and maybe the market is just a bit flooded for such things (?), but I suspect that one very strong problem is that if you don't charge for something, then there is a perceived lack of value.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have more interest in this project if I _weren't_ trying to give it away.
For me, that's been the most negative aspect about releasing this for free so far.
I don’t know how big the market is, but seems pretty commercial-friendly to this old magic player. I have a big box of cards from a few decades ago I’ve held onto. I’ve thought about selling them, but it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth. taking a pile of photos and having the ID and valuation automated could go a long way! Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
> it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth.
No install -- scan your cards with your phone or desktop (downloads the weights in WASM -- runs 100% local -- the only web request it makes is to look up card names and prices online -- no image data ever leaves your machine), export the list as CSV, take your cards to your friendly local game store, and expect to receive 50-75% of TCG-low for your cards. This app currently only displays TCG Market, so probably about 50% of this price is what you could realistically expect.
> Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
Yes -- and part of this might be that this would have been much more amazing several years ago, but by now -- most marketplaces (I used to do work for some of the big ones) have their own recognition tools. If they aren't actively looking to replace their current software, many companies would rather stick with what's currently working "good enough" than expend effort to migrate to something with only incremental benefit that is difficult to quantify. It's possible that would happen, but it's a tricky sales call to make.
I might just be imagining things, but I'm also picturing what one of those sales calls might look like, and it feels like I've opened the kimono a bit. The cat's out of the bag. There's no mystery or allure behind it anymore, and I feel like that puts me on the back foot somehow -- almost like I've played my strongest cards (hah!) first and have nothing left. By being open-source from the beginning (and talking freely about my architecture and what makes my solution different), there's very little sales-pitch build-up. Maybe it's just a part of the problem of how I'm presenting it, but I think people (especially the big houses) are probably just-as (or more) inclined to silently learn from me and improve their own scanners than try to use / build-upon what I've provided.
It's funny -- that angle is almost more about raising expectations and forcing the big houses to improve their own tech and catch up to open-source, more than getting anyone to adopt my solution in particular.
Am I okay with that? Absolutely -- I made that decision when I open-sourced it. I feel like the tech has been stagnating for several years, and I want to increase the quality of scanners across the board. I want to be the rising tide that lifts all boats.
That's one of the strongest arguments in favor of open-sourcing it (it would be very difficult for a closed-source product to have that same effect), and I remain hopeful for that long-term.
As a mtg player with an absurd amount of bulk, this is awesome! I think there is something to be said about the perceived lack of value, I appreciate greatly open source and even hold it to a higher value all things considered. Keep up the good fight :)
This is awesome. I’ve been interested in something like this for some time as I’ve been working on slowly indexing my mtg collection and selling cards I don’t want/need. Will be checking it out this weekend!
It's still super rough (doesn't support foil-toggling yet, still some issues with double-sided cards, crashing on some iPhones), but overall the rough structure is there -- it can create lists and export as CSV.
If you have feedback or feature requests for your needs, please leave them on Github and I'll get to them as soon as I can. I'd love to hear more user feedback!
I started out in the BBS and demoscene of the 90s. The glory days of computing in my opinion, because of the technical innovation (people were making magic with 7mhz processors) and how the community arranged itself. e.g, some ANSI artists in the artpack scene went on to become legit artists, but nobody was sitting around grinding ANSIs to make millions or raise capital. I think about that era in my own open source work today, I just work on what I enjoy and find interesting and whatever happens happens as long as I can pay the bills.
I wasn't alive in the 90s, and barely was in the 00s. I look at others writings about those early days, and compare it to today, then get a weird feeling of wanting to experience the "good ol' days" before python scripts made in 10 minutes by an AI and sold to investors as "vendor lock-in" was the thing to strive for.
Fwiw, that's just commercially packaged nostalgia which is mostly the good (and often materialistic) part and forgets absolutely of the rest.
Our brains do that to us and I find it positive to have a nice fantasy world to escape to but definitely not to be mixed up with the reality of things.
OTOH being able to ride off into the bush with your mates and build tree houses and whatever and "be home when the street lights come on", have no phone, &c. was very different to the world we brought our kids up in.
The one thing I take away from those early days is that we didn't really care what most people were doing. We figured most people were lamers, so whatever most people were doing was probably lame by definition. I guess if you want to kind of approximate the good ol' days, I'd ignore what most people are doing, work on what you want to work on, and if you think it's cool try to join or build a community around that.
The AI grindslop today is infuriating but I mostly ignore it and do my own open source thing. I quit my job last year to work on open source full time because I felt like I had no choice, there was a project in my mind I'd go down with the ship with. If I wind up in the permanent underclass because it fails, 90s me would think not selling out was pretty l33t.
Yeah same, I'm older than you and I still yearn for the unix glory days of the 90's and early 2000's, when even Microsoft was just Micro$oft and not Microslop. I remember XP, for all its faults, was still a better experience than anything they put out and it had real charm as well.
I think in general things in computing were better when the nerds were still running the show. One the MBAs and bean counters got involved it's all gone downhill. Feels like the golden age of computers and the internet are well behind us at this point.
This is awesome as hell, haven't seen that one yet. I love that cracktros/demos are still a thing. A cracktro a day keeps the slop away.
If you like that one, you'd probably dig this. I feel like this is one of the best demos of all time from both a technical point of view plus storytelling. Dropped back in 2019. Warms my heart.
I was a former (minor) member of groups like ACiD, iCE, CIA (though I never released with them).
The cross-pollination between the hackers / college coders / warez pirates / digital artists was real. A lot of big company CEOs got their start in those days.
It was mostly just about exploring and connection, and as the BBS scene faded to irc chats (efnet, freenode, etc), that whole mixed-scene kept growing for quite awhile.
Nice, I was in ACiD's orbit too, my BBS was a TOXiC Net affiliate before the scene wound down.
That's the thing I miss the most about the scene, the cross-pollination. You'd distro a pack and learn something about a whole other scene, or help somebody mod their board and they'd become co-sysop of yours. That whole era is definitely why I wound up becoming a programmer.
A lot of comments can't help but mention the constant looming threat of potentially permanent destitution that pervades our society. It's increasingly hard to understand the position of people who think that this is a feature, excepting of course those very few with the resources to use that pressure rather than be driven by it
What disappoints me most is just how many people have been successfully disabused of so much hope, confidence, and imagination that they just accept our current reality as inevitable.
I have taken a road somewhere between FOSS and paid software. I have a data management system that has been in a 'free open beta' for a few years now. Anyone can download it and try it for free.
Right now it can be used as a great tool or analyzing data. Feedback is appreciated but not expected. I try to respond to bug fixes and feature requests in a timely manner, but I am not required to do that.
If it catches on, I might charge something like $10 for an individual lifetime license. Businesses might be on some kind of subscription.
Pretty sure product keys are like a 1 on the scale of 0-to-10.
It's mirrored to other servers running the software, plus there's entire separate instances beyond my control, and Tor-only instances. If one goes down, it will pop up somewhere else.
With AI it feels writing software that is open is less attractive. It's hard to trust OSS made recently b/c you can tell if someone knows what they're doing and even spent any time on quality. Also, often times people don't reach for software others make (unless it's boring and old stuff, in which case this advice doesn't apply.)
I always hoped that AI would enable people to take paid software and remake it so they could give it away for free. I started developing websites about 20 years ago back then apart from the big name software and Ide’s. Everything was free. Nowadays everything is a subscription.
That's completely and absolutely fine, if you are millionaire and/or have other well paid job then.. well done, congratulations and enjoy your newly found hobby.
BUT - I'm capable to tinker with my car a bit, to service and repair my bike, to bake a bread - BUT I'm not visiting mechanic shops, bike service shops and bakeries in my city telling owners that they should work for free and give away results of their work.
And yet you have certainly used and enjoyed software published by others free of charge, and your employer, company or favorite service has relied on it. Your career may even be entirely dependent on it.
If you demand remuneration for all your work, then it's only fair for you to also pay for every single piece of software you ever use. If OTOH you're willing to trade some of your time and effort for the time and effort someone else spent on the software you enjoy for free, then you might appreciate that a financial transaction is not required for value to be created in the world. What is required is fair collaboration.
As this is FOSS, I don't see why you need the security review (by who, with what qualifications?). Any users can look at the source code and arrange their own reviews as they think necessary.
Getting an external review/audit done is a common courtesy of privacy-conscious projects. You're totally free to do your own audit, if you write a report and disclose responsibly, I'll pay you $100 or more in a cryptocurrency of your choice.
Text selection should be working. It wasn't blocked. If it's still not working on the non-JS version (click "nojs" in the footer) would you mind making an issue?
Also, you can append .md to the end of any page (except /) to get the markdown from disk as raw text.
I just did this for a MacOS+iOS universal app that lets you take quick notes - and keeps them in Markdown files on your Mac's filesystem (so agents can parse them)
CloudKit makes it easy - and you can send push notifications (all part of CloudKit, no push tokens or subscriptions to manage) to inform the "other" clients when there is new data to retrieve. Best to think about each task being an individual file in CloudKit.
Wish there was a way to send this to every mobile dev who thinks they can (and should) charge a subscription for their hobby app that provides a basic function
I was thinking about this recently. I was gonna try an experiment where I make AGPL apps, release the source code ofc, but then published a 1-5$ version on the Google play store. There's the compiled version if you want, pay a couple bucks. If not, you're free to compile and sideload on your own.
Seems fair enough, similar to self hosted software that offers managed hosting for a price, or you can try to run the docker containers on your own or whatever. I do a bit of both, self host the non critical stuff, pay for the critical stuff.
Remeber to include the link to your alternate ios app store that you somehow got Apple to allow on everyone's devices, where you don't charge every developer a subscription just to exist. Even Google is 99 44/100 of the way to the same thing.
This is something I hope agentic coding helps to solve. It really just takes a few people annoyed enough with this problem to go out and start churning out truly free stuff like this so that the cash-grab apps can die.
I have already written a few tools for myself that I use in my homelab, and I plan to give them away. I've made stuff that, a few years ago, had I developed from the ground up, I would be far more interested in monetizing. But why bother now that I know that anyone with a coding agent can make a copy of it in an afternoon?
I paid other humans with security expertise to "soft audit" the program prior to release, which uncovered a variety of vulnerabilities which were patched.
It's a courtesy to the users, especially self-hosters.
To repurpose a quote from Walt Disney, I don’t make software to make money, I make money to make more software.
I want my hobby project to be my job, because I don’t want to work for someone else. I want creative control, freedom to explore and ship ideas, and financial stability.
The only way to get there, that I can see, is to charge for my work.
I've been doing this at my co-op, just as a kind of, I don't know, break from capitalism or something? Or maybe to practice getting users before finding a monetizable project? Most are rinky dink derp projects to let co-op members play around with whatever stack, or to give potential members a project they can get a commit on (requirement to join), but some I think are kinda useful. Some I use every day, like the calorie one.
None of these run ads or make any money so I'm going to share them guiltlessly:
https://calories.508.dev just a simple average calorie tracker over months. I couldn't find anything like this online or on the app store.
http://stuff4friends.508.dev A stuff library for your friends to borrow stuff you aren't using. I'm most excited about this one right now because I have so much stuff, and my friends seem to be enjoying borrowing random stuff they wouldn't have just because they can see it and know it's all being tracked. https://github.com/508-dev/friend-library
even better is to grow with your users, monetize ethically, and make a lot of money anyway simply by being very big and through other routes like enterprise
To see a millennial generations person write about developing software that you want or need, and then let other people run that software.
I know these words aren't allowed on HN, but this idea was originally known as the "free software movement".
The idea is that individuals and institutions than need or want certain software, develop the software, and then share it, binary and source.
You add to this the concept of "copyleft", which requires that any change to the software, that is distributed, must also be shared with others, and you have the GPL license.
Businesses, schools, agencies, need email, browsers, accounting, instead of paying for these, what if the people who need them develop than, and share the results?
> it really does turn your passion from something that you actively seek out because you enjoy it, to something that you seek out because you want to meet a quota or turn a profit. You're always chasing the next quarter or the next thousand customers.
Those changes in motivation that came from monetizing the software are exactly what happens to "free software" that transitions to "open source". Developed for profit, not for use.
Again, it's really really encouraging to see a thinking person rediscover this concept.
Or don't. I've done both, published OSS projects and sold some software. The level of entitlement in some comments I received on the OSS side was pretty crazy at times. While with the paid software, all of the interactions I had were so much more constructive. YMMV, but willingness to pay is a great filter.
I’ve also done both, and I found both kinds of users in both situations. There have been cases on the commercial front where I just felt like giving customers their money back, even after years of having used the software, and told them to not come back. There’s a lot of entitlement and craziness from paying users too, and those are harder to ignore. With open-source it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
My “favourites” are the ones threatening to abandon the tool, despite having never made a single positive contribution. On open-source that’s an easy laugh and a “good riddance”. On commercial cases it’s more frustrating and nuanced.
I disagree willingness to pay is that meaningful of a filter, in the cases I experienced. And it’s getting worse; many people are getting too impatient and act like everyone works for them specifically and only their needs matter.
> it’s much simpler to drive a hard line.
But driving that line is a cost: to you, your volunteers, or your tokens(?).
There’s no cost to me to stop an entitled disruptive user with zero positive contributions from destabilising the project. No cost to my volunteers either. The opposite is true in both cases; removing that user is a net benefit and I’ve done so in the past specifically to protect the experience of the volunteers.
As for tokens, there have been exactly zero cases where someone has submitted LLM code to one of my repos that has been up to my standards and I have accepted it. Yes, I can say that with certainty. If I wanted LLM code I’d ask for it myself, having an intermediary in that process is worse than useless.
My experience is similar, but I remain more motivated to give away what I make than to ask people to pay for it.
As someone who once had a popular open-source project. Opensource is just harder because you've to write code for <optics>. When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive. Despite what people here say, all these things have very little to do with the reliability of actual code.
Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.
I don't think this debate has an easy answer. Yes, not everything should be about money, but yes, we all need to make money to survive.
I think we all agree the answer isn't, "No one should make any money writing software." I also think we can agree that the answer isn't, "you should charge money for every bit of software you write."
So how do we decide which is which?
I don't want to stop being a professional software developer. I have loved being able to support myself and my family by doing my favorite activity. It has let me enjoy going to work every day for over 20 years.
I also don't think I should charge for random code work that I do for fun, though. I am not trying to monetize every minute of my day... but I do want to monetize enough of it that I can pay my mortgage, buy food, save for my retirement, and have some fun along the way.
I don't know exactly where I am going with this, but it is my gut reaction when I see a post about how horrible it is to make money off of writing software. It has to be more nuanced than that.
It's not horrible to make money from good software, but nowadays lots of the things people do to attract VCs are plain stupid. It's an attack on that, the ones who "ship startups in an afternoon" and seek to build a moat around basic features in the hope that some corpo will buy in and get trapped.
I think about this a lot.
In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing. Many bakers love the craft but nobody expects free baked good (except maybe their family). Many plumbers are true craftsmen and take pride helping solve peoples problems, but we don't expect free plumbing. On the other hand, once you write the code, the logic is complete, its closeness to an equation makes it feel like selling algebra homework.
More importantly though, baked goods get eaten, and pipes aren't assumed to suddenly become load bearing. I think a lot of developers hesitate to sell software they aren't prepared to support professionally. Toy projects then sometimes gain a community and grow organically. It's at this stage I feel we need a better path to funding without a lot of the capture that can occur.
It would be cool if we could "farmers marketize" software though. Come together to taste some exotic and local varieties. Maybe meet the local shops, pay for some overpriced TUI gizmo or a hash function with a weird pattern.
Sorry went into fantasy land there. This is obviously not the solution to the broader OSS funding issue, but it's a cute dream where maybe some people make a buck.
I think the bigger solution would have more opportunities for people outside of academia to get small grants to work on their projects. More foundations supporting the core technology and development that the tech world depends on now, and prospectively in the future.
There is also a big difference between making money to live comfortably and make money to get filthy rich. Lots of people come to tech aiming for the second, so they won't make software so you can buy them a beer. They want to hit it big, and I think this is what smuggles perverse incentives in software development.
wouldn't this apply everywhere?
let's say agriculture. if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?
what about artists? it's not that their work even has a utility function...
If you've grown a ton of tomatoes, you're probably doing it for the express purpose of profiting from it. To dial back the scope to something more comparable, if I have 4-5 tomato plants, I'm going to have all the tomatoes I want and then some. In that case, yes, I'm absolutely going to give away some tomatoes so that other people can enjoy them (as opposed to them ending up in the compost bin).
If you know any farmers, chances are they have given some away for free. To friends and family at least. Artists I know have done some art for free.
> . if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?
Now, no, of course not.
Originally though, yes this is how many human economies worked. Surplus was shared in a gift economy.
As someone who's worked in UI/UX for 2 decades, I feel this too.
Recent developments have made me feel a form of guilt that's new to me. As though we've all had it too good for too long. Which is probably at least in part due to working for organisations that only care about the bottom line.
In short; all of this boils down to capitalism being simultaneously a drive and a drain on society.
If I was going to write something for free, it would some weird itch-scratching thing for Plan 9 or something, it wouldn't be something most people would ever want.
Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.
FOSS has delivered some great software, it's also demonetised a lot of areas where software developers could be earning a living. I don't think software developers should feel any need to give away their efforts than any other professional should.
FOSS has created pricing race to the bottom in software, and taken away financial incentive for improvement, it's not a 100% net positive.
Considering the strong opinion on this topic, OP is probably young enough to not remember (or know) the 80s and 90s with too few free options for personal computing and most of the software is proprietary and non-free (exactly as the OP states). While it fueled the traction of shareware, it was a very different epoch, and impossible today with strict controls from MS, Google and Apple on what app is allowed to run. It's easy to wish the world to be different, but it would be much harder to live in with the today reality of secureboot and AppStore controls.
It's possible to say we don't have personal colputers anymore, they are MS/Apple/Google's device now, as they decide what it is allowed to run and what isn't.
linux
its definitely a double edged sword. foss helps move quality forward because when someone stumbles across a good idea or technique it becomes well known faster. but individual developers are screwed financially, their only options are to work for a company with a big sales team/marketing or do niche consulting work if theyre lucky enough. im sure there are other ways. if you can make something sass you might be able to monetise it but chances are theres a better free version floating around or that the majority of people just dont want to think about computers and will pay m$ instead. then theres startup culture which tries to come up with the next big thing and get investors to finance it. its all quite depressing. sometimes i wish i was a gardener, go do a job get paid, done. this whole trying to wrangle money out of a skill set that takes decades to get good at really sucks.
I got burned with an attitude like this: unexpectedly, people who had downloaded my open source tool for free started expecting support. Some of them sent pretty unfriendly emails.
I literally got bullied by people who called themselves "the community" because they weren't happy with my copyleft license and the fact that I wasn't implementing their feature requests for free.
Happened to me too! Guy posted asking kinda rudely whether I was going to fix a bug. Told him I'd be happy to accept a PR for a fix. Never got a PR (project has been dead for some years now - just lost interest).
Auto-reply with the LICENSE.
I don’t understand what the downside of this is. That’s hilarious for them to expect, and you’re free to ignore them, take their suggestion and work on it, help them.
I'm sympathetic to FOSS developers but struggle to understand this, maybe because it hasn't happened to me. But, why is this a mental drain? Is there not a simple solution? Reply with the license, "comes with no warranty," "you're free to fork," close issue and move on? I suppose in aggregate it could be draining.
I'm doing exactly this. I started out only intending to create something for myself. As it got better, I thought that other people might want to use it. I briefly considered trying to sell it, and pretty quickly realized that I didn't want to ruin something I was having fun with by turning it into a business.
Now, instead of worrying about sales, I get to feel good about giving something back to the FOSS community that has given me so much.
I recognize that it is a position of privilege to be able to dedicate so much of my time to a project that gives me nothing financially... and in fact costs me money to produce. No shade at all to people who are not so lucky and need to sell what they make.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's what I'm working on. Feature-wise it's come a long way since the last HN post about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46619391
And if you're not interested, that's OK, because I'm not trying to sell you anything!
I resonate with this blog post a lot.
I think there is something to be said for monetizing ones' hobbies, but I've recently been taking some forays into this world of "build something amazing and give it away for free" as well. I recently took a very big experimental plunge in this path, and I'm curious how well it will work out for me.
Open-source state-of-the-art Magic: The Gathering card identification pipeline:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHieOcmC7Dw
I used to do this kind of image recognition for a living, but I've been out of the business for a little while now. I had some ideas for a different approach from what I've done in the past and decided to code it up. This version is far better than anything else I've ever done -- especially for scanning against busy backgrounds or with occlusions, and also for noticing fine differences between otherwise difficult-to-distinguish printings.
I didn't have any interested customers waiting for this, so -- much like the OP -- decided to create an experiment and release it open source. I'm not opposed to having paths to monetize it (for people who want to license it for closed-source commercial projects), but I'm not trying to commercialize it so much as I would love to see how far we can take it with open-source.
I don't know which path I should take with this.
The biggest downside is that I feel like I've had a hard time getting people to be as interested in this project as I would have expected -- I believe this truly is the best identification software available (I've built some benchmarks to test it [0]), and maybe the market is just a bit flooded for such things (?), but I suspect that one very strong problem is that if you don't charge for something, then there is a perceived lack of value.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have more interest in this project if I _weren't_ trying to give it away.
For me, that's been the most negative aspect about releasing this for free so far.
[0] - https://blog.hanclin.to/posts/gh-26/
I don’t know how big the market is, but seems pretty commercial-friendly to this old magic player. I have a big box of cards from a few decades ago I’ve held onto. I’ve thought about selling them, but it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth. taking a pile of photos and having the ID and valuation automated could go a long way! Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
> it seems i either take them to a shop and get lowballed, or spend hours meticulously researching each card and then figuring out how to sell it for what it’s worth.
Well if you want to use the scanner for something useful, you can run the web version here: https://hanclinto.github.io/CollectorVision/
No install -- scan your cards with your phone or desktop (downloads the weights in WASM -- runs 100% local -- the only web request it makes is to look up card names and prices online -- no image data ever leaves your machine), export the list as CSV, take your cards to your friendly local game store, and expect to receive 50-75% of TCG-low for your cards. This app currently only displays TCG Market, so probably about 50% of this price is what you could realistically expect.
> Hard to sell to individuals like me, but i would think a card marketplace would find it invaluable?
Yes -- and part of this might be that this would have been much more amazing several years ago, but by now -- most marketplaces (I used to do work for some of the big ones) have their own recognition tools. If they aren't actively looking to replace their current software, many companies would rather stick with what's currently working "good enough" than expend effort to migrate to something with only incremental benefit that is difficult to quantify. It's possible that would happen, but it's a tricky sales call to make.
I might just be imagining things, but I'm also picturing what one of those sales calls might look like, and it feels like I've opened the kimono a bit. The cat's out of the bag. There's no mystery or allure behind it anymore, and I feel like that puts me on the back foot somehow -- almost like I've played my strongest cards (hah!) first and have nothing left. By being open-source from the beginning (and talking freely about my architecture and what makes my solution different), there's very little sales-pitch build-up. Maybe it's just a part of the problem of how I'm presenting it, but I think people (especially the big houses) are probably just-as (or more) inclined to silently learn from me and improve their own scanners than try to use / build-upon what I've provided.
It's funny -- that angle is almost more about raising expectations and forcing the big houses to improve their own tech and catch up to open-source, more than getting anyone to adopt my solution in particular.
Am I okay with that? Absolutely -- I made that decision when I open-sourced it. I feel like the tech has been stagnating for several years, and I want to increase the quality of scanners across the board. I want to be the rising tide that lifts all boats.
That's one of the strongest arguments in favor of open-sourcing it (it would be very difficult for a closed-source product to have that same effect), and I remain hopeful for that long-term.
As a mtg player with an absurd amount of bulk, this is awesome! I think there is something to be said about the perceived lack of value, I appreciate greatly open source and even hold it to a higher value all things considered. Keep up the good fight :)
Thank you -- I appreciate that. :)
This is awesome. I’ve been interested in something like this for some time as I’ve been working on slowly indexing my mtg collection and selling cards I don’t want/need. Will be checking it out this weekend!
Thank you! If you want to test out my tool, here's a link to the web version that is built for scanning in lists of cards:
https://hanclinto.github.io/CollectorVision/
It's still super rough (doesn't support foil-toggling yet, still some issues with double-sided cards, crashing on some iPhones), but overall the rough structure is there -- it can create lists and export as CSV.
If you have feedback or feature requests for your needs, please leave them on Github and I'll get to them as soon as I can. I'd love to hear more user feedback!
I started out in the BBS and demoscene of the 90s. The glory days of computing in my opinion, because of the technical innovation (people were making magic with 7mhz processors) and how the community arranged itself. e.g, some ANSI artists in the artpack scene went on to become legit artists, but nobody was sitting around grinding ANSIs to make millions or raise capital. I think about that era in my own open source work today, I just work on what I enjoy and find interesting and whatever happens happens as long as I can pay the bills.
I wasn't alive in the 90s, and barely was in the 00s. I look at others writings about those early days, and compare it to today, then get a weird feeling of wanting to experience the "good ol' days" before python scripts made in 10 minutes by an AI and sold to investors as "vendor lock-in" was the thing to strive for.
Fwiw I assume most people feel this way.
I am a 90s kid and I watch things like Stranger Things and feel nostalgia for a simpler time even though I wasn't even alive in the 80s.
Fwiw, that's just commercially packaged nostalgia which is mostly the good (and often materialistic) part and forgets absolutely of the rest.
Our brains do that to us and I find it positive to have a nice fantasy world to escape to but definitely not to be mixed up with the reality of things.
OTOH being able to ride off into the bush with your mates and build tree houses and whatever and "be home when the street lights come on", have no phone, &c. was very different to the world we brought our kids up in.
Don't worry, the future will be worse and you'll be nostalgic for the good ol' 20s.
The one thing I take away from those early days is that we didn't really care what most people were doing. We figured most people were lamers, so whatever most people were doing was probably lame by definition. I guess if you want to kind of approximate the good ol' days, I'd ignore what most people are doing, work on what you want to work on, and if you think it's cool try to join or build a community around that.
The AI grindslop today is infuriating but I mostly ignore it and do my own open source thing. I quit my job last year to work on open source full time because I felt like I had no choice, there was a project in my mind I'd go down with the ship with. If I wind up in the permanent underclass because it fails, 90s me would think not selling out was pretty l33t.
Yeah same, I'm older than you and I still yearn for the unix glory days of the 90's and early 2000's, when even Microsoft was just Micro$oft and not Microslop. I remember XP, for all its faults, was still a better experience than anything they put out and it had real charm as well.
I think in general things in computing were better when the nerds were still running the show. One the MBAs and bean counters got involved it's all gone downhill. Feels like the golden age of computers and the internet are well behind us at this point.
That was kind of always there too in some form. Countless people made countless bank on the jankiest vb6 apps.
You'd probably love this latest Razor1911 prod, if you haven't seen it yet: https://youtu.be/dybkLM-1eQo
Thank you for this. I grew up outside the scene but it is so encouraging to see things like this celebrated.
This is awesome as hell, haven't seen that one yet. I love that cracktros/demos are still a thing. A cracktro a day keeps the slop away.
If you like that one, you'd probably dig this. I feel like this is one of the best demos of all time from both a technical point of view plus storytelling. Dropped back in 2019. Warms my heart.
The Black Lotus - Eon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9xk3SDSYc
I was a former (minor) member of groups like ACiD, iCE, CIA (though I never released with them).
The cross-pollination between the hackers / college coders / warez pirates / digital artists was real. A lot of big company CEOs got their start in those days.
It was mostly just about exploring and connection, and as the BBS scene faded to irc chats (efnet, freenode, etc), that whole mixed-scene kept growing for quite awhile.
Now everything is for sale.
Nice, I was in ACiD's orbit too, my BBS was a TOXiC Net affiliate before the scene wound down.
That's the thing I miss the most about the scene, the cross-pollination. You'd distro a pack and learn something about a whole other scene, or help somebody mod their board and they'd become co-sysop of yours. That whole era is definitely why I wound up becoming a programmer.
A lot of comments can't help but mention the constant looming threat of potentially permanent destitution that pervades our society. It's increasingly hard to understand the position of people who think that this is a feature, excepting of course those very few with the resources to use that pressure rather than be driven by it
What disappoints me most is just how many people have been successfully disabused of so much hope, confidence, and imagination that they just accept our current reality as inevitable.
marketing. humans are quite reactive to certain stimuli
Ugh. Try being conscious of this situation and also the parent of a very smart 15 year old who is also rapidly becoming conscious of this situation.
I have taken a road somewhere between FOSS and paid software. I have a data management system that has been in a 'free open beta' for a few years now. Anyone can download it and try it for free.
Right now it can be used as a great tool or analyzing data. Feedback is appreciated but not expected. I try to respond to bug fixes and feature requests in a timely manner, but I am not required to do that.
If it catches on, I might charge something like $10 for an individual lifetime license. Businesses might be on some kind of subscription.
i do it here https://github.com/agentify-sh/
but have no idea how to get any compensation
i just do it because i use these tools and like to share it
I love the attitude, but this particular service in 2026 is a little risky.
A whole range of content can be posted that can make you liable that you want it or not... from product keys, to internal documents, ...
I'll just say this, I love the spirit but this is ballsy. It's just going to be used as another user-paste space.
Pretty sure product keys are like a 1 on the scale of 0-to-10.
It's mirrored to other servers running the software, plus there's entire separate instances beyond my control, and Tor-only instances. If one goes down, it will pop up somewhere else.
With AI it feels writing software that is open is less attractive. It's hard to trust OSS made recently b/c you can tell if someone knows what they're doing and even spent any time on quality. Also, often times people don't reach for software others make (unless it's boring and old stuff, in which case this advice doesn't apply.)
I always hoped that AI would enable people to take paid software and remake it so they could give it away for free. I started developing websites about 20 years ago back then apart from the big name software and Ide’s. Everything was free. Nowadays everything is a subscription.
That's completely and absolutely fine, if you are millionaire and/or have other well paid job then.. well done, congratulations and enjoy your newly found hobby.
BUT - I'm capable to tinker with my car a bit, to service and repair my bike, to bake a bread - BUT I'm not visiting mechanic shops, bike service shops and bakeries in my city telling owners that they should work for free and give away results of their work.
And yet you have certainly used and enjoyed software published by others free of charge, and your employer, company or favorite service has relied on it. Your career may even be entirely dependent on it.
If you demand remuneration for all your work, then it's only fair for you to also pay for every single piece of software you ever use. If OTOH you're willing to trade some of your time and effort for the time and effort someone else spent on the software you enjoy for free, then you might appreciate that a financial transaction is not required for value to be created in the world. What is required is fair collaboration.
Link to home https://nonogra.ph/
It has an onion address for those who are ritously privacy conscious: http://aue5jcgehi2uq5gdrxuhfqmyw4yfrsq3ggd7bvcydqyhlnwha27iq...
As this is FOSS, I don't see why you need the security review (by who, with what qualifications?). Any users can look at the source code and arrange their own reviews as they think necessary.
Getting an external review/audit done is a common courtesy of privacy-conscious projects. You're totally free to do your own audit, if you write a report and disclose responsibly, I'll pay you $100 or more in a cryptocurrency of your choice.
Everyone is commenting on the blog but not the service. I remain skeptical:
A. Either it will remain obscure and not see any real use
B. (Less likely) It will get abused to hell before it is shutdown.
Claims of removing violating content “immediately” seem unrealistic under decent usage, unless that $600 can grow unbounded.
Hey author, thank you for blocking text selection on your site!
Do you mind describing why?
Text selection should be working. It wasn't blocked. If it's still not working on the non-JS version (click "nojs" in the footer) would you mind making an issue?
Also, you can append .md to the end of any page (except /) to get the markdown from disk as raw text.
Text selection is working perfectly fine for me.
> Debian-based Linux (Raspberry Pi OS, KDE Neon, Pop_OS, etc. - not Ubuntu)
Why not Ubuntu?
That's outdated, I should update it. It used to be an issue before docker builds and makefile fixes were pushed.
I just did this for a MacOS+iOS universal app that lets you take quick notes - and keeps them in Markdown files on your Mac's filesystem (so agents can parse them)
https://www.github.com/klinquist/notesync
Neat, I just put together my first MacOS app. Am thinking about an iOS version and using the Apple data thing to keep them in sync. Any tips?
https://github.com/agoodway/goodday
CloudKit makes it easy - and you can send push notifications (all part of CloudKit, no push tokens or subscriptions to manage) to inform the "other" clients when there is new data to retrieve. Best to think about each task being an individual file in CloudKit.
Generally speaking it just works.
I don’t need money but I run some moderately successful open source projects. The users are very demanding.
The final three paragraphs really struck a chord with me. Nicely said. Thanks!
See also: "You don't have to monetize your joy"
https://thehabit.co/you-dont-have-to-monetize-your-joy/
The framing of this is far nicer/warmer/positive compared to OP's position of being "above" money. With that said, nonograph does look cool.
Wish there was a way to send this to every mobile dev who thinks they can (and should) charge a subscription for their hobby app that provides a basic function
What! You don't want to pay $3.99 a WEEK for a calculator???
No. You, so need to hoodwink me into paying it. Better yet hoodwink my kid.
What if I only want to use +? Do I get a discount? How about you only charge me when I use = at the end, but not before?
Guess they gotta hit you with the under-utilization "convenience fee" for $1.99? /s
I was thinking about this recently. I was gonna try an experiment where I make AGPL apps, release the source code ofc, but then published a 1-5$ version on the Google play store. There's the compiled version if you want, pay a couple bucks. If not, you're free to compile and sideload on your own.
Seems fair enough, similar to self hosted software that offers managed hosting for a price, or you can try to run the docker containers on your own or whatever. I do a bit of both, self host the non critical stuff, pay for the critical stuff.
Remeber to include the link to your alternate ios app store that you somehow got Apple to allow on everyone's devices, where you don't charge every developer a subscription just to exist. Even Google is 99 44/100 of the way to the same thing.
This is something I hope agentic coding helps to solve. It really just takes a few people annoyed enough with this problem to go out and start churning out truly free stuff like this so that the cash-grab apps can die.
I have already written a few tools for myself that I use in my homelab, and I plan to give them away. I've made stuff that, a few years ago, had I developed from the ground up, I would be far more interested in monetizing. But why bother now that I know that anyone with a coding agent can make a copy of it in an afternoon?
> It cost about $600 USD to release, mostly due to two initial security reviews.
Can someone expand on this? I've given software away free and it didn't cost me anything.
I paid other humans with security expertise to "soft audit" the program prior to release, which uncovered a variety of vulnerabilities which were patched.
It's a courtesy to the users, especially self-hosters.
To repurpose a quote from Walt Disney, I don’t make software to make money, I make money to make more software.
I want my hobby project to be my job, because I don’t want to work for someone else. I want creative control, freedom to explore and ship ideas, and financial stability.
The only way to get there, that I can see, is to charge for my work.
I've been doing this at my co-op, just as a kind of, I don't know, break from capitalism or something? Or maybe to practice getting users before finding a monetizable project? Most are rinky dink derp projects to let co-op members play around with whatever stack, or to give potential members a project they can get a commit on (requirement to join), but some I think are kinda useful. Some I use every day, like the calorie one.
None of these run ads or make any money so I'm going to share them guiltlessly:
https://calories.508.dev just a simple average calorie tracker over months. I couldn't find anything like this online or on the app store.
https://travelcards.508.dev Generate printable cards with localized allergies or whatever for trips. Apparently a lot of our wedding guests like this. https://github.com/508-dev/travel-cards
http://stuff4friends.508.dev A stuff library for your friends to borrow stuff you aren't using. I'm most excited about this one right now because I have so much stuff, and my friends seem to be enjoying borrowing random stuff they wouldn't have just because they can see it and know it's all being tracked. https://github.com/508-dev/friend-library
part 3. dont maintain it. do point in time stuff
even better is to grow with your users, monetize ethically, and make a lot of money anyway simply by being very big and through other routes like enterprise
What a really encouraging article!
To see a millennial generations person write about developing software that you want or need, and then let other people run that software.
I know these words aren't allowed on HN, but this idea was originally known as the "free software movement".
The idea is that individuals and institutions than need or want certain software, develop the software, and then share it, binary and source.
You add to this the concept of "copyleft", which requires that any change to the software, that is distributed, must also be shared with others, and you have the GPL license.
Businesses, schools, agencies, need email, browsers, accounting, instead of paying for these, what if the people who need them develop than, and share the results?
> it really does turn your passion from something that you actively seek out because you enjoy it, to something that you seek out because you want to meet a quota or turn a profit. You're always chasing the next quarter or the next thousand customers.
Those changes in motivation that came from monetizing the software are exactly what happens to "free software" that transitions to "open source". Developed for profit, not for use.
Again, it's really really encouraging to see a thinking person rediscover this concept.