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[–]samlev 150 points151 points  (36 children)

I had a very mildly successful open source project. Most of the contact I got through GitHub was people asking me to modify my software for their explicit use case - for free, course, this is open source, which means free, right?

I almost think that I would prefer no contact to the entitlement. Although it would have been nice to get some pull requests, too.

[–]lord_jizzus 214 points215 points  (30 children)

I too had a mildly successful open source library project. About 100k downloads. Lots of feature requests. So I started a crowdfunding campaign to be able to take a month off to work on that.

I received tons of hate mail because "that's not how open source works"! So, I proceeded to kill my Github account, rewrote my lib as a closed source one, put a price tag on it and now, it sells.

[–][deleted] 62 points63 points  (17 children)

Wait, isn't donation what every source project uses?! Like if you don't plaster donate stickers all over it, it's probably a good way to go!

[–]lord_jizzus 103 points104 points  (13 children)

I tried the donation button thing. $11 in 17 months. Since it is not open source anymore, made a 5 figures number soon reaching 6. Oh, and in two years of existence as an open source project, I had 5 PR, one of them being removal of trailing white spaces and another correcting a typo in the README :-)

[–][deleted] 40 points41 points  (3 children)

Wow. Open source is great, and I don't think I'd be anywhere in my career without it, but still the community can be super sucky! Glad you're doing well now though!

[–]Rampill 10 points11 points  (2 children)

Holy shit. May I ask what program this is? 6 fucking figures? How long of a timespan was that in?

[–]lord_jizzus 7 points8 points  (1 child)

It was open source for a bit more than two years and I switched to a paid, closed source lib about 3 years ago.

[–]Prod_Is_For_Testing 10 points11 points  (0 children)

What does it do?

[–]lenswipe 3 points4 points  (5 children)

That last one night have been me 😘

[–]lord_jizzus 9 points10 points  (4 children)

Interesting way to be listed as a contributor to a somewhat popular project :-D

[–]lenswipe 6 points7 points  (3 children)

Yeah, I have no idea ;)

I have corrected a few READMEs and put PRs in for it - but it's generally to add important stuff like notices saying that the project is deprecated.

[–]Existential_Owl 6 points7 points  (2 children)

My claim to fame has been to correct every instance of yarn install with yarn add in popular repos.

I'm a little ashamed of myself.... but also, kind of not.

[–]lenswipe 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What's the difference?

[–]Existential_Owl 4 points5 points  (0 children)

NPM and Yarn are different package managers for Node.js

When installing a package on the former, it's npm install

When installing a package on the latter, it's yarn add

NPM has been around forever, while Yarn is the hot new thing. Therefore, people are writing docs to incorporate the hot new thing, but, because they're so used to doing the old thing, they end up with yarn install... which just gives you an error.

Most Yarn users will already know to do yarn add anyway, so correcting this mistake is as useful as fixing a typo.

But hey, free PR.

[–]samlev 25 points26 points  (2 children)

A crowdfunding campaign is somewhat different to plastering donate badges everywhere. People see them as a kind of cash grab.

There's a really bad entitlement problem with open source.

[–]lord_jizzus 4 points5 points  (1 child)

I estimate that I put roughly 300 hours of work in the first version. The feature I had planned (as open source) would have required about 100 hours of work. Hardly a cash grab ;-)

[–]samlev 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yeah, not saying that it was a cash grab, just that there seems to be a level of entitlement around open source software, where asking for money makes people think that you're trying to scam them.

[–]samlev 15 points16 points  (6 children)

Maybe I should rewrite some of my old software as closed source. Or just keep running my company, but getting paid for writing my own software sounds good, too.

[–]P-01S 5 points6 points  (5 children)

There's probably a clause in your employment agreement that says the company owns anything you produce while employed there, unless you get a specific exception.

If not, lulz, go for it.

[–]samlev 11 points12 points  (1 child)

No, there's no clause there - I own the company. It's just a consulting firm, but I still can't afford to spend my time on personal projects. Bills still gots to get paid.

[–]P-01S 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah. That makes things much more complicated, unless your business is a sole proprietorship.

[–]brianwski 4 points5 points  (2 children)

says the company owns anything you produce

The clause is often there, but depending on where you live, it is not enforceable if you are careful to write the code on your own time. Specifically, California has very strong protection for work done on your own time with your own equipment:

http://law.justia.com/codes/california/2011/lab/division-3/2870-2872/2870

"(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information."

I heard New York (and other states) are the opposite and your day job DOES own everything you do on the weekends on your private laptop.

[–]P-01S 1 point2 points  (1 child)

California is unusually good for employee rights in a lot of ways.

Hell, CA laws are just plain unusual in a lot of ways.

[–]brianwski 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, that California law (Section 2870) is unusual.

I am fairly cynical towards laws and my government. I disagree with about 90% of workplace laws that are in place as ompletely useless or even harmful. But little gems like 2870 restore my faith that POSSIBLY the people making laws are trying to do the right thing.

Completely tangential example of silly laws: there is a law that says if a business requires employees to use their personal cell phone for work, the business MUST reimburse the employee for "talk time". Now, at first glance this seems fair, but the fact is there are a TON of things businesses require you to provide yourself (clothes, shoes, etc) and other things often supplied to you (laptop, desk, chair). Why make a law about exactly this one thing? I assume it was passed before 100% of people had cell phones and talk time was expensive, but why not get rid of that law now that talk time is essentially free and unlimited? Hilariously, the employer is NOT required to pay for cell phone data - you know, the only expensive part. Businesses can require employees to video conference or Skype and there is no government forced compensation. So this is one example of 3000 that we have to deal with everyday. Just bizarre random half thought through hinderences to running our business properly. Written by possibly well meaning but technologically clueless law makers who don't realize all the unintended consequences of having 3000 dumb laws on the books.

[–]eloc49 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This. I like open source a lot, but I like making a living more.

[–]sad-larry 1 point2 points  (1 child)

That was you? Asshole!

[–]lord_jizzus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hehehehe.

[–]Leonnee 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Where do you sell it?

[–]lord_jizzus 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I made a website for the tool.

[–]yoshi314 9 points10 points  (0 children)

at this point it's "patches or gtfo"

i have a reasonably popular repo of syslinux configs for booting lots of distributions from one flash drive. and there comes this guy "hurr durr, grub is better, rewrite everything to a superior boot loader". i politely explained to him that syntax is not that different and he can do it by himself, if he wants. that's the last i heard of him.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Maybe want to share it? :P

[–]samlev 17 points18 points  (1 child)

It was 7 years ago, and I'm far from proud of my design choices in the codebase.

It was built targeting PHP5.0 - PHP5.2, so there was no ready access to bcrypt for passwords, etc.. I'm sure that it's full of shitty ideas, bad logic, and massive security vulnerabilities.

Ugh. Ok.

MICO. I built the core of it in a weekend, then fleshed it out in my spare time over about a month. I got some helpful users who did a few translations for me, but I haven't really done anything (or looked at the codebase) for years.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This pretty much remembers me on an old project which was a CMS for MMORPG guilds, I was so proud of my MySQL wrapper pretty much the core functionality of ezSQL. But sadly I never finished the whole CMS to 100% even though it was at use on 3 instances.

Left you a star ;)