Devs Hesitant About Open Source Funding
10 posts across 7 communities in the last 60 days; 30% from r/selfhosted.
“Overall, I don't see software as being an exception. Lots of people don't mind paying for software, even for free software. Many donate by their own free will to developers of free software. Just like some people are willing to pay for music, movies, and games, while others will…”
“ok I think I understand what you mean now, my view on that would be: it is a problem, I agree, I just fail to see how it's my problem My argument is even you're not a direct monetary beneficiary you still have a shared incentive of those people to be well paid and taken care of…”
“You clearly just want to argue for the sake of. We both want open source to succeed but ignoring software development is changing is naive. All the best [re: An open-source Overleaf fork with All Pro features]”
A recurring theme revolves around developers' reluctance to accept funding for open-source projects. Concerns include loss of autonomy, external influence on priorities, and the potential for negative impacts on project direction due to monetary incentives.
SOURCES (40)
“nah bro open source is actually a solid move 😭 just build something cool that people need and put it out there. you never know what doors it might open [re: Is a open source saas a good option]”
“You clearly just want to argue for the sake of. We both want open source to succeed but ignoring software development is changing is naive. All the best [re: An open-source Overleaf fork with All Pro features]”
“They may not shell out money directly, but I know a lot of Big Tech companies have employees contributing to open source. Sometimes to add/fix things the company cares about for a project, and sometimes specifically to work on open source projects. The implication of what you're saying is if we didn't live in our Big Tech timeline that somehow maintainers of these open source projects would be less exploited seems wrong. They would likely be putting the same amount of effort into the sam”
“Overall, I don't see software as being an exception. Lots of people don't mind paying for software, even for free software. Many donate by their own free will to developers of free software. Just like some people are willing to pay for music, movies, and games, while others will resort to piracy without a second thought. If you want to sell software, your software must be worth buying. Either by solving a problem that other software does not, or by being better at the same problem. But f”
“Free tier and open source are the two things that will kill you here and everyone keeps recommending them like they're a gift. You put your tool on github and now the guy who'd have paid is reading your code instead, and six months later his intern reimplemented 70% of it badly and now thats the internal standard, congrats. Same with the forever free tier. Sentry, Datadog, whatever, devs will happily run your free plan in prod for 4 years and then act surprised when you change the pricin”
“Supporting or even defending these practices is pretty stupid Why? It's the only logical conclusion for any large FOSS projects launched within the past decade. Nobody goes into FOSS for the sake of doing charity work anymore, everyone needs money in these times. [re: Bitwarden announces Dual License (Published version update in app stores - #41 by grb - Notices - Bitwarden Community Forums)]”
“Then is your anger about the treatment of open source devs? Cuz I'm with you there. I fully appreciate the effort out in, the stolen souece code turned into dosing models, the thankless users who don't even pay, but some things are just not a great business model. I don't know if I'd say bit warden isn't, I do like it a lot. I'd say tailwind as a for profit is not, though. Not all things will be a sustainable business just because we build good stuff, sadly. [re: Bitwarde”
“That's fine for an open source nonprofit project, but not for a for profit commercial project Pack it up y'all, u/saltyourhash has determined that BitWarden shouldn't be able to make any money because they have determined that the recent features are not up to their standards of a "for profit commercial project" [re: Bitwarden announces Dual License (Published version update in app stores - #41 by grb - Notices - Bitwarden Community Forums)]”
“Man. By now, I find myself hoping that the open-source projects I use don’t become too popular for the “commercial greed barrier”. [re: Bitwarden announces Dual License (Published version update in app stores - #41 by grb - Notices - Bitwarden Community Forums)]”
“I mean, are you willing to sponsor its independence? People act like this is something that deserves people working for free on this. Open source is not getting the support it needs for a lot of these tools to remain sustainable just for security updates in some cases. The fact that it’s work now gets to live on elsewhere is a joy. It rocked the boat and it’s best ideas are now going to make durable objects a standard. Not all projects get to be so lucky [re: Deno is joining Cloudflare - "We wil”
“Honest question: would this be useful to you, or does it feel like cheating? I mean even with this I wouldn't be contributing to anything unless I had a vested interest in what I wrote be contributing to. And if I had a open source project I wouldn't want people just using the open issues as some sort of little tick box to put some sort of bullet point on their resume. That's just my two cents tho. Also I'm assuming this is using an LLM to explain the code case. What protections”
“Knowing a little about the maintainers and their model, this isn’t a private-equity cash grab or Mr Monopoly twirling his moustache; it’s a business trying to stay sustainable in open source. There are no billionaires here: they staff developers who contribute to projects like OpenZFS, and developers who build enterprise features that fund all of it. Their business is being challenged by “global” shops taking advantage of the platforms openness - and this isn’t the virtuous or even legally tenab”
“Sure is low effort but how is it cryptic? Developers in FOSS are giving hundreds or sometimes thousands of hours of their free time so we can enjoy the things we use for free. Paying them a cup of coffee every now and then is the least we can do.”
“Developers prefer open source with some features that are paid when you are handling infra cost. Also, with open source u open the gates for sponsers”
Heres the thing, any company can just code your product with or without your code. If they are going to do that it doesn’t matter if you post it or not. Dont…
I'm working on a project I'd like to eventually turn into my main income, maybe even replace my job someday if it goes well. Right now I'm stuck going back and forth…
“One side of my brain knows that this argument is stupid, but the other side just wishes that this would happen, that all good software was open source.”
“It's actually a stupid argument to make, because this isn't about forcing anyone to open source anything. It's the sheer opposite. It's about organizations like the one he's working for trying to ban open source products released by people who willingly chose to release open source.”
“ok I think I understand what you mean now, my view on that would be: it is a problem, I agree, I just fail to see how it's my problem My argument is even you're not a direct monetary beneficiary you still have a shared incentive of those people to be well paid and taken care of financially. also I need to point something out here, ME? nope I think you're confusing corporate incentive vs. personal incentive, me, I have personally 0 incentive and 0 "monetary beneficiary", you”
“my train of thought is that you're going to do said changes either way on your own volition. Development isn't free because your time is money, therefore people can sponsor a thing you've already decided that you should do.”
“Don't you think this can be managed? With better triaging practices, like educating people to phrase asks as problem statements as opposed to particular solution requests. To give a concrete example: Good: exports fail for datasets larger than 50k rows Bad: Add a redis queue for the export job, it is slow”
“> what reasons do I have or do I stand to gain by contributing to open source? The dependencies of our work projects do not burnout into oblivion. Personally, you have receipts for the work you've done. You're helping out others with the same problem as you. > how much money are we talking about here? I'm exploring bounties. I imagine it would be most suitable for gig type of work, but if we take vulnerability bounties, there are people who are making a decent living out of the”
“It applies to any sponsorship. People are already very critical of the solutions we ship... telling us how our solution should work and many times criticizing us for the work we do (or don't do)...and they aren't even paying for it. The moment money is involved, it's even worse.”
“I feel like the thing you're describing applies to bigger corporate sponsorship, I do believe it comes with soft strings, which hurts autonomy. If it was more democratized and you had the control on what's fundable and what isn't, wouldn't that be better?”
“If you're in full control on what you work on, would that make it more appealing? On the "free" front, I agree that there should be a way to pay people for development”
“what made you stop? What value would you've liked to see in order to continue?”
“Thank you for your perspective, I haven't thought much on that front. I'm relating to the sentiment in my job though all this applies to bigger companies as well. I had numerous times where I can't get an improvement through because the code that it is in is outside of my org.”
“If it's a donation, that's fine, I won't stop people. But I wouldn't want to incentivize by being paid to do specific types of work or anything. Imo, the moment money is involved is the moment priorities change, incentives to do specific work changes and adds even more expectations to deliver work in a specific way. It's no longer fun to me. There's plenty of examples of popular open source software that have been negatively affected due to external money. It's a slip”
“There are definitely open source focused companies who would scout for frequent contributors, it happened to me in 2023ish. I'm not sure how common it is anymore though, and it also probably depends on the codebase you are a contributor for, among many other factors.”
“If it was serving your personal interests and potentially helping out others, wouldn’t you say that’s better?”
“I wouldn’t say it’s expected and I believe such work should be rewarded at least somewhat. Exactly this was my initial barrier even though I’ve formed my “taste” for good software, primarily from open source projects and their communities. Things like the unix philosophy, resisting bloat, efficiency through things like vim. And given that a substantial part of the love and joy of using computers was through such software, I’m bummed out it isn’t more viable from a monetary perspective”
“I’m happy to see that there’s positive sentiment, most of it seems negative so far. Thank you for your comment”
“I agree that the copyright issues are still swept under the rug and yet we all rely on open source in our swe jobs so I feel like we have an obligation to strengthen the sustainability of it by having more people engaging with it outside of consumption”
“Working on and contributing to open source projects requires a bit of a thick skin and a lot of patience. It is really easy to burn out and it is difficult to express how cliquish such social structures can get. In the worst case, introducing the wrong people to a project can turn the entire thing in to a hostile nest as most people who are not hyper confrontational aggressive folks will just leave. I think the framing of this question is wrong. The Linux Kernel is open source, but it is largely”
“Why is our field the only one where you’re expected to work for free after hours”
“My jobs funds the lifestyle I want to live. I program outside of work very rarely, and if I do, it’s on my own terms for personal benefit usually”