[HN Gopher] State of OSS Monetization
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State of OSS Monetization
Hi OSS Developers, I hope that you can help me understand the state
of OSS Monetization better. I'm interested if and how you monetize
- or try to monetize - your projects. To get a better picture of
the current state of OSS monetization I've set-up a quick survey to
evaluate different monetization approaches and what OSS developers
would require to work full- or part-time on their OSS projects.
The survey with 16 questions will take about 5 minutes and is aimed
at OSS developers / maintainers: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/
1FAIpQLSegX_yKiGtXamKrVfg_1ioVWZ3Xdvtc3usZYn7p20dysHiaGQ/viewform
Best regards, Joerg PS: if you want to get the Survey Results you
can join an email list at: https://mailchi.mp/8e59bb1c13db/state-
of-oss-monetization
Author : joergrech
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-03-26 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
| oxff wrote:
| Essentially, most of open source is slave labor for big tech who
| can build their services on top of the "contributions" while
| extracting ridiculous amounts of value from them and giving maybe
| pennies back to a single sponsored contributor.
|
| This could be changed essentially overnight, if Big Tech wasn't
| against it. For example, it is trivial to add payment to
| something like GitHub. There could be PRs that are behind a
| paywall and someone would have to pay for the contribution so
| that it can be merged; and ban 0$ dollar PRs.
|
| The fact that someone can come into my open repository and tell
| me something completely orthogonal to it is an "issue" makes me
| vomit (and this basically reveals the whole sham of GitHub).
| Posting an issue should probably be behind a paywall too now that
| I think of it; but you deposit it to the maintainer / repo owner
| / assignee.
| joergrech wrote:
| Slave labor is a little harsh as open source developers act on
| their own free will but I understand that it is a little
| loveless that some companies make billions without giving back.
|
| Making issues private (behind a paywall) is probable the new
| approach of Github with their "sponsors-only repositories".
| However this will probably cause more closed-source where the
| community cannot contribute bugs or feature requests.
| cryptica wrote:
| This is accurate. It is slave labor because corporations go out
| of their way to harm the developers of open source projects
| which they benefit from because they view them as competition.
| They engage in blatant anti-competitive practices while
| benefiting from their victim's work.
|
| It's slave exploitation as evidenced by the lack of payment for
| labor which, from the perspective of the open source developer,
| was motivated by the complete deprivation of opportunities for
| paid labor.
|
| Many people make their project open source because they know
| that their project would have 0 chance of getting any adoption
| unless they gave it away for free. The masters created market
| conditions which deprived the slaves of any opportunity for
| fair remuneration (made possible by the design of the modern
| monetary system).
| gyulai wrote:
| > Essentially, most of open source is slave labor
|
| "slave labor" would imply a lack of freedom on behalf of the
| slave laborer.
|
| I think there's something quite remarkable going on that is
| quite the contrary of what you say: People who work as software
| engineers in their day jobs are so starved of freedom, that
| they spend evenings and weekends doing _more_ software
| engineering, i.e. more of what they 're doing in their day
| jobs. Only now, they are actually happy doing it, because
| they're _free_. This freedom comes at a price, and this price
| is that they have to give away their work for free.
|
| If paid software engineering jobs did a better job at
| fulfilling people's psychological needs on creative freedom,
| the drive for mastery, the desire to make a name for oneself
| through one's work, etc. there probably wouldn't be any open
| source, because the psychological needs that motivate it would
| be otherwise met.
|
| If software engineering was better organized as a profession
| (like the way "labour" is organized when doing collective
| bargaining, or the way certain professions are organized like
| the legal profession) then maybe paid software engineering jobs
| would be better.
|
| But we are totally disorganized as a profession and each
| individual seems to be perfectly ready to undercut others at
| every turn, e.g. being more accepting of bad working
| conditions, like lack of creative freedom, than the next guy.
| Studying harder for ridiculous leetcode interviews than the
| next guy. Putting in more hours than the next guy on hiring
| projects. Being more accepting than the next guy when employers
| refuse to give employees time for training on new technologies
| and instead doing it on weekends. When the work is actually
| enjoyable, being willing to do it for less money than the next
| guy. The equilibrium of that last dynamic is where the price is
| zero, and that's what open source is. A corollary of that is:
| Since all the enjoyable work gets done for free, there is no
| enjoyment left in any of the work that one can hope to get paid
| for. -- We have to stop doing this to each other. We have to
| stop the race to the bottom.
|
| Open source, and not getting paid for it, is not the problem.
| It's the imperfect solution to a problem that, in a more
| perfect world, wouldn't exist in the first place.
| cryptica wrote:
| The best way to monetize an open source project so that the whole
| community can benefit is by launching a blockchain token and then
| provide a service around it based on the open source project.
| Unfortunately, the powers that be won't allow such tokens to
| succeed. Only scam crypto projects are allowed to succeed.
| Rygian wrote:
| If you remove the "launching a blockchain token and then" from
| your sentence, that describes what we already have with the
| likes of Red Hat (net income $434 million USD).
|
| So why attach a working idea to a Proof-of-Waste scheme? What
| would be the added value?
| cryptica wrote:
| Red Hat was early enough in the fiat monetary ponzi scheme to
| be able to benefit from its network effects. Nowadays,
| projects cannot get any traction at all without a blockchain
| token to incentivize collaboration and create shared
| financial interests around that project.
|
| Nobody cares about features or quality anymore, it's all
| about financial schemes; you need to create financial
| incentives for adoption of the product. The product is
| secondary, the financial scheme is primary. How do you think
| SaaS companies manage to convince big corporations to pay to
| use their services? Kickbacks to corporate employees!!! It's
| all corrupt. The good thing about crypto is that it's more
| hidden and it allow the provider to keep their hands clean.
| The employees of the corporations can buy the token
| themselves to profit from their own corruption so it's not
| direct like a kickback and only the employee of the
| corporation is to blame, not the SaaS provider.
|
| It allows the provider to participate in the corrupt modern
| economic system whilst not actively bribing people. It allows
| corporate insiders to bribe themselves without implicating
| the provider. This effect is already commonplace among big
| corporations; politicians buy corporate stocks and then pass
| laws to benefit the companies whose stocks they bought...
| Crypto just levels the playing field by allowing small
| players to also participate in this scheme.
| Rygian wrote:
| I have read your second and third paragraphs and feel very
| confused. You believe that OSS would be better off with
| more bribes, more financial scheming, less features, less
| quality, and in general with more corruption? Because you
| end up saying that "crypto allows small players to
| participate in this scheme."
|
| So, no thanks.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _You believe that OSS would be better off with more
| bribes_ ...
|
| I agree, but I'm very confused about the original
| proposal because I think fiat is not good enough for
| bribes.
| cryptica wrote:
| Bribes are not suitable for aligning financial incentives
| because they are illegal (both to solicit and to offer).
|
| On the other hand, if a financial instrument exists which
| is coupled to a specific economic service, then no
| solicitation or offering step is necessary in order to
| align incentives between a provider and a supplier.
|
| Also, note that this is not insider trading. Insider
| trading means that a trade was made after an event
| occurred but before that event was made public. In this
| case, the trade is made first, before the event occurred.
| cryptica wrote:
| What I'm saying is that all projects NEED to have a
| shared financial incentive in order to have any chance at
| becoming self-sustaining and encouraging collaboration.
| It's orthogonal to the quality of the product. Monetary
| incentives provide the baseline for survival of the
| project in our modern, godless society. Look at any
| popular OSS project which exists today and you will see a
| connection to big money. This is no coincidence.
|
| It's hypocritical to suggest that this is dirty or
| unethical when the entire economy including all popular
| open source projects depend on these same kinds of
| financial incentives to exist.
|
| The modern monetary system is corrupt to the core and yet
| it drives every single human interaction and every single
| collaboration. Let's not pretend it doesn't.
| joergrech wrote:
| Do you mean approaches like tea.xyz by Max Howell
| (https://medium.com/teaxyz/tea-brew-478a9e736638)? It looks
| interesting but I'm unclear if project maintainers would
| monetize or only the package manager cli.
| evv wrote:
| Makes a lot of sense to sell a service powered by an open
| source project. Why is the blockchain token "the best way", or
| necessary at all?
| joergrech wrote:
| As far as I understood tea.xyz it uses a DAO contract to
| "bill" every download/install by the user. If you don't pay
| (in tokens) you won't get the package.
|
| So the blockchain approach has a mechanism already in place
| that will support the payment.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> How much of their Revenue (in Percent) should companies
| contribute to OSS?_
|
| This is extremely poorly phrased. Are you talking about
| Microsoft/ Amazon/ Google/ Facebook? Your local pizza shop? A
| percentage of all corporate revenue? Is this "should" as in
| "would ideally", or should as in "we should shame them if they
| don't"? I don't think this question is going to get a meaningful
| answer.
| joergrech wrote:
| You're right that the question alone might be misleading. I
| mean every company using your open source package in their
| development not only FANG etc. The local pizza shop might be
| using OSS but probably does not have a dev team of their own
| (they either use a SaaS or have freelancers for their website).
| r283492 wrote:
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Are you developing OSS or ransomware?
|
| If you want to make money from your software, make it closed
| source and SELL IT.
|
| The whole point of OSS is: You have an itch -> scratch it ->
| release it -> others maybe use it, maybe don't, they add on to
| it, release changes back -> now 2 people are working on it
| instead of one and both benefit.
|
| That's the point. It's not about trying to trap companies into
| giving you money because you released something for free. Either
| sell software or don't. No one owes open source devs anything
| beyond what the license states.
| joergrech wrote:
| That might be right for side-project in the beginning but what
| happens when they grow and thousands or even millions use them?
| There might come a point when you have too much work and not
| enough time to fix the bugs or develop new feature requests.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| You don't owe anyone a bug fix. They can fix it themselves
| and merge request.
| jka wrote:
| What you're saying seems like a potential false dichotomy;
| developing open source software can be as profitable -
| sometimes more profitable - than developing proprietary
| software.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| It _can_ be. But you shouldn 't _expect_ it to be if you don
| 't offer support, a product, etc... Lots of these recent
| threads are basically people who just release something into
| the wild, put no effort into monetizing and then wonder why
| they're not getting paid...
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Money is the root of all evil.
|
| Making money is a bad thing to do.
|
| Don't do it if possible.
| Kye wrote:
| That's a lot of pressure to put on money rather than on the
| people who charge it for everything we need to survive and use
| it to consolidate and raise prices.
| indymike wrote:
| Glad you are asking this question... but... I think it would be
| wise to ask what a respondent's motivation for
| building/maintaining their open source project really is. Often
| times, monetization is really low on the priority list.
| joergrech wrote:
| Yes the initial drive is probably always to solve a problem or
| make something cool. However, I often get the feedback that
| some projects get overwhelmed with feature or bugfix requests
| and loose the fun of it. Having the opportunity to live from
| their project - and maybe even goin full-time - would be a
| great option for some.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| For some. Not for others. There is a huge difference between
| different people's motivation.
|
| For me it is split. I develop open source licensed software
| at work and my employer tries to make revenue. Privately I do
| stuff for fun and don't want the responsibilities of having
| "customers." If people use it for free and make money, so be
| it, but I have the liberty to stop/pause working on it.
| indymike wrote:
| > some projects get overwhelmed with feature or bugfix
| requests and loose the fun of it
|
| That can happen, but sometimes monetization isn't the answer.
| Getting more contributors is. As the song goes, "Can't buy me
| love..."
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