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
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://www.github.com/klinquist/notesync
https://github.com/agoodway/goodday
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://thehabit.co/you-dont-have-to-monetize-your-joy/
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?
Can someone expand on this? I've given software away free and it didn't cost me anything.
It's a courtesy to the users, especially self-hosters.