this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
72 points (82.7% liked)
Technology
59157 readers
2307 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I kinda agree but you still need money to live and if I was able to work on open source projects while sustaining myself I would choose it anytime.
There are plenty of people who get paid to write open source software. The internet simply wouldn’t exist without OSS:
And that’s just scratching the surface.
Right, there's plenty of people also not getting paid anything for their work. This "You shouldn't care about money" feels like a straw man argument to OP's argument which I think could also be said as "OSS isn't sustainable unless everyone is paid a sustainable amount".
It's just all around frustrating. It has that same energy as "You criticize the system yet you're a part of it" example. For example, I wont be able to show this thread to my landlord when rent is due saying, "You shouldn't care about money, I'm an OSS dev so I dont"
So in closing, I guess I wish everyone had a UBI to be sustainable and then yeah OSS itself could be sustainable as a hobby project.
Never said devs shouldn’t care about money. If you aren’t having fun maintaining some code, stop. If it is commercially interesting, you will probably be contacted. Charge for bug bounties. Prioritize features based on compensation. Start a foundation. There are lots of business models for OSS, the author of this article talks about how this problem is already solved - just not for him.
OSS itself is not a business model. OSS is provably sustainable. Dude just wants it handed to him.
I never said someone shouldn’t care about money. That was never my argument.
My argument was that people who DO care about money have been claiming it’s going to usher in the demise of OSS and yet it thrives.