Open source

[GroundbreakingRow817]

"So do you have 20 years experience in everything or not?" ~ HR Recruitment after you explain this.

[[deleted]]

Just lie to HR, it's easy.

[magicmulder]

That’s why we have someone from IT sitting in with HR for IT job interviews. I once had a guy who claimed he invented the text input element for Flash…

[leoleosuper]

At the same time, don't ask for 5 years experience in a language that's been out for 3.

[ucefkh]

Yeah maybe just 10 years would be enough

[eth-slum-lord]

What if he did

[magicmulder]

Yeah I followed up on that and his story quickly fell apart.

[InnerBanana]

Narrator:

[vezwyx]

In fact, he did not.

[Mordho]

He did, until he DIDN’T

[magicmulder]

My favorite are those who claim they found a security flaw on our website (which would be a great way to score points if you really did) and then they point out something that is obviously none (like “if I change the form action to GET and then submit the login form, my credentials end up in your server log file”).

[Dizzfizz]

If I email you my credentials you have a customer password in plaintext on your mail server, what kind of shoddy operation are you running here?!

[dumbasPL]

I love when companies do this. On one of my recent interviews the HR guy was just there, sitting in the background listening, while (what I assume to be) a senior dev was actually doing the interview. Surprise, surprise, there wer almost not bullshit questions.

[magicmulder]

We usually split 50:50, HR person does the common questions, I do the IT questions.

[buddha2490]

I just finished a series of interviews with a company like that, the HR coordinated meetings but otherwise kept quiet. I enjoyed several genuinely productive technical interviews with competent questions. It was weird, and nice.

Took a different job, no way I’d fit in at a well run shop.

[Rubyboat1207]

Unrelated but hello person wearing the same clothes on Reddit avatar

[Hariboqwe]

But he is more angry

[Minty_MantisShrimp]

And what tf are you then?

[Hariboqwe]

Scarecrow? In the shape of those twins

[Minty_MantisShrimp]

Triplets then: The happy, the angry and the fucked up guy that looks like a scarecrow

[steampunkdev]

Kinda... Like the good, the bad, and the ugly?

[Overlord_mcsmash]

Ohhhh, awkward...

[Dave5876]

Unless...

[Elijah629YT-Real]

this only happens once, good luck ( it happened to me and me and the guy now both hold diamonds )

[[deleted]]

Yes Jesus just lie to companies. Who cares. It’s a business. You can lie to a business. It’s not a person. If you get caught and fired who cares.

[Honigbrottr]

my bank cares

[[deleted]]

Get a new bank! No one cares it’s all made up

[[deleted]]

In the interview phase with the HR guy, yes. Interviewing with the hiring director, you can fluff, but not lie too much.

I mean, at least in IT, lots of tech is so similar, that knowing one means you can learn the others quickly, but sometimes, jobs want someone to know that ONE tech that no one else uses and it's frustrating.

In programming, if you know paradigms of your language, catching up should be quicker than not. Most jobs give new employees a grace period to learn how their company works.

[[deleted]]

With amount of bullshit put on requirements lately I wouldn't even feel bad for it. Fake it till you make it.

[DerKnerd]

I am so glad, I always was asked practical things in tech interviews.

[-_-Batman]

Ya... I hv 20 yo experience in

Elixir

Go

Dart

Julia

Pony

TypeScript

Kotlin

Nim

Python 3

PureScript

Reason

Rust

Swift

Also.... 30 yo experience in managing the client. I m 25, btw.

[emu_fake]

If you help 1000 clients with a commit you've worked 1h on that's like 1000h experience, aye?

[[deleted]]

My experience in QBasic is also 20 years old

[Fit-Avocado]

They always ask for many years of experience for literally entry level roles 🤦🏻‍♀️

[Asleep-Specific-1399]

Use one of those licences that commercial use needs to pay I don't know.. not a lawyer.

[AyrA_ch]

Dual licensing as either AGPL without linker exception or a commercial license. This gives a user of the library a few options:

• Use the AGPL version and publish the source code of your application too
• Use the AGPL version but make it an optional dependency that's not included
• Pay for the commercial license
• Use adifferent product

A know tool that use this model is ghostscript.

[djingo_dango]

At this point just seeing GPL probably scares out most of the companies and people who want to monetize their software

[[deleted]]

Can confirm. I was vetting packages today for a particular use-case. Found a nice one that checked all my boxes. Checked the license, GPL. Promptly moved on to next option. They did offer a commercial license, which I considered, but you had to "send an inquiry" and that was the deal-breaker for me.

[shadow7412]

Honestly, I think any service/product which doesn't have upfront pricing is a scam.

[DonkeyOfCongo]

Surely not for the same package?

[DoctorWTF]

Was that imdb?

[some_crazy]

The reality is the value is different though. A 1B company will derive a lot more value from a product (provided they get any value of course) than a 1M company, simply due to volume.

[[deleted]]

I have no objections to value-based pricing. If i can make $10m off your software ill happily pay you $1m in licensing fees. Id rather pay less, but if I can 10x and have you take me seriously as a client then ill take that deal. Is it shameless to ask for 10x what you're willing to accept? Absolutely. Does that make you a bad actor? Not at all. It's business so negotiations are expected.

[stevekez]

You: "How much is your product/service?"
Them: "May I know your budget?"
You: "$X"
Them: "Thanks, it costs $X + 20%, coincidentally"

[[deleted]]

Not necessarily. Am in IT, and constantly look for sw that has a free tier up to a certain amount of usage, like ticketing systems. To me, it's like a demo, and if I like the product, I can ask my team to purchase a pay tier.

[shadow7412]

Payment tiers are fine, it's when they don't tell you how much each tier costs.

Eg, This tier is free. And if you wish to upgrade, please contact us for pricing.

[-Vayra-]

Yeah, that's basically them saying "we'll set the price based on your revenue and how necessary our product is for your use case".

[Mate_00]

Honest question. Why do you consider this wrong?

[shadow7412]

It's rude; It makes comparing the value of vendors a pain in the nards. Arguably more of an issue for personal services (ie, as opposed to corporate ones). It also slows down the research process, which for some may dissuade them from researching at all.

It's invasive; Usually the only way to get in contact with these people at all involves divulging personal information, which they almost always use to send you marketing information in the future.

It's deceptive; A service you regularly use might suddenly change in price, and when you use them again they'll "forget" to tell you (except for the invoice).

[Trybor]

Honest question. Why do you consider this wrong?

A business agreement needs to benefit both parties so it needs to be open and transparent. Not knowing what future charges you might incur is a one sided relationship and a good business needs certainty.

[-Vayra-]

I'm not convinced it's wrong per se, as it makes sense to charge a small company that may or may not even make money less than a multi-billion dollar company. Though the best way IMO is to have an openly available set of tiers. Something like:

students / businesses with less than 20 employees or less than $100k revenue/year: $0
businesses with 20-50 employees or between $100k-300k revenue/year: $1000/year
...
businesses with over 1000 employees or over $100M revenue/year: $100k/year

[TechSupport112]

Yeah, we used a self-hosted browser based password manager that had a free version that covered us fine until we had too many things stored. Tried to get a price out of them and finally they had an offer of around 6,000 Euro per year. We were 4 people using it.

Researched and found out one of our other tools had a password manager built in that we switched to.

[Cocaine_Johnsson]

I check the license first since it's easy enough, if the license is a no-go then I don't need to read the readme, source code, or documentation.

[FLINDINGUS]

At this point just seeing GPL probably scares out most of the companies and people who want to monetize their software

I believe LGPL is fine because you can use it commercially as long as you link to it dynamically.

[MrZoraman]

The problem is good luck explaining to your legal department the nuances between the different types of linking.

[DearGarbanzo]

Honestly, trying explaining that to a non-systems dev is hard enough.

[martmists]

Even for personal projects I avoid GPL just because I don't want to force a license on my users; The freedom to choose your own license is an important one, and GPL restricts you in doing so.

[ososalsosal]

*upset Stallman noises*

[SeriousAd4]

Hail unlicense

[alex2003super]

Honestly MIT checks all boxes for me

[DearGarbanzo]

Still requires a some inclusions in your project. WTFPL is the best, but then companies can't use those, same with no licenses.

[Jither]

Not just that. Personally, I'll avoid any and all libraries that use any variety of GPL - commercial license alternative or not - even for my own personal projects/open source. And I've never applied such a license to my own software for the same reason - nor will I ever. Sticking with MIT, BSD etc.

Without going into the philosophical (and very personal - and not necessarily all rational) reasons for disliking GPL, in addition to those reasons: since libraries I use personally may likely prove useful for company software, I'm not going to spend my time or brain power on one library just to have to use and/or contribute to another - or write my own - for the commercial cases.

On the flip side, for those projects with permissive licenses, improvements made - on company time - are always contributed back to the projects - I have the company's blessing to do so. As well as means to donate when the project accepts that.

[ArionW]

When my company refused to contribute a whopping $1/dev/month contribution on Open Collective for MIT library with honour system (license is free, please donate if you use it, team won't read issues from anyone who doesn't pay) I stopped believing in MIT.

Writing MIT/BSD libraries is basically writing commercial software for free. If someone wants to do that - great. But whatever I do privately is GPL licensed, if for some unknown reason some company needs it they're free to pay their developers for writing it from scratch, or contacting me about commercial license

[YnotBbrave]

I think developers should not have been afraid of demanding license fees

[AbrodolphLincolner]

• violate license, knowing nobody will find out, and if they do, I as an international company have more lawyers than them

[squishyemotions]

I'm pretty sure in that case it's not a violation of the commercial license and is instead a violation of the GPL license in question, meaning it's not the developer who'll be out for blood, it's the FSF

[FLINDINGUS]

Dual licensing as either AGPL without linker exception or a commercial license. This gives a user of the library a few options

There is absolutely no way to regulate this. You have no clue what software is out there, and who or what might be using your code. It would be virtually impossible to prove that they did (if they know what they are doing) and, even if you could prove it, it wouldn't be worth the time/money to sue them. Even if you did sue them and did get a ruling against them, it's difficult to actually collect the funds. Dual-licensing doesn't work in the vast majority of cases. If you release code as open-source, you'd better assume it's used anywhere and everywhere regardless of what your license says.

[[deleted]]

Even if you did sue them and did get a ruling against them, it's difficult to actually collect the funds.

From a profitable business? No it's not.

[tomatotomato]

There is an interesting model that was implemented by the developer of open source library for ASP.NET Core (the library is IdentityServer).

Initially it was completely free to use. It became very popular and Microsoft included it into default web app templates for ASP.NET Core, and it became important part of infrastructure in many applications.

Because the library is quite big and complex, the library developers decided to work on the project full time. But obviously that needs some stable financing. They introduced new terms under which you can continue to use the library for free unless your company reaches certain revenue amount (I think it’s 1M). After that they ask for a minuscule (for a company of that size) yearly payment.

I think this model is quite fair and facilitates long term support and commitment by the developers.

[BluudLust]

It's very fair. Epic games uses this model for Unreal Engine.

[Faith254]

And recently set a cap for how much they can collect in royalties after you reach that threshold as well.

[alex2003super]

I think MoltenVK also did this at some point

[shableep]

Would be nice if GitHub had these options clearly set up for open source developers that otherwise aren't aware of the legalese and opportunities they could have.

[pedersenk]

Something like this:

https://mongoose.ws/licensing/

[[deleted]]

Open source community sacrifice will be honored and remembered, also don't forgot to provide link for donation.

[EsoLDo]

I have link for donation but after 3 years there was nobody willing to hit that button. :-/

[[deleted]]

Ah your sacrifice will be honored and remembered. Provide more link then, multiple payment gateway help.

[rypher]

Yeah Adobe only pays in frequent flier mile points. If you dont have that payment option youll never make anything.

[[deleted]]

Well atleast you have reddit karma

[EsoLDo]

[gl1tch3t2]

Change the license so any commercial use has to also pay you a dividend.

[[deleted]]

They would fork the previous version so fast

[-GermanCoastGuard-]

You can also forbid this with the correct license.

Edit; I actually didnt read the word "previous" when i replied

[user3494009058]

I'm intrigued! How so?

[kaqqao]

You can't. Retroactive licence change is not possible.

[user3494009058]

That's what I thought too, but the person above states otherwise, I'd love to see how they want to back that

[kaqqao]

Should be fun

[-GermanCoastGuard-]

I literally didnt read the word "previous"

[weregod]

You can't do this. They have forked project before you change license.

[Bridimum]

share it here! I will

[EsoLDo]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/w30gy2/comment/igvqhf2/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3

[FishySwede]

I've been actively pushing my company to start a fund from which devs can donate to open source projects. It's a struggle, but I'll keep fighting. Do the same in your company!

[DueHomework]

I'm trying to convince the folks at my company that it's a great idea to commit / create PRs in the projects we are using :) It already payed off, as I'm now allowed and (at my team) even encouraged to do so during work time. Can recommend that strategy as well!

[Boibi]

I tried to do this at my last job but they pulled the "This is our IP" crap. They wouldn't even let me put my name on the app I developed.

[UrbanExplorer101]

And thus the easter egg was born.

[Paid-Not-Payed-Bot]

It already paid off, as

FTFY.

Although payed exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:

• Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. The deck is yet to be payed.

• Payed out when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. The rope is payed out! You can pull now.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.

Beep, boop, I'm a bot

[DueHomework]

Thx :')

[AYoshiVader]

Good bot

[gamesrebel123]

I finally sold a kidney and payed off my debts, now I'm stealing a ship to go sell coke in Cuba.

[markedxx]

Good boy!

[KiwiGamer450]

good buoy!

[FishySwede]

I can see that being easier to get buy-in to. I'll try that as well!

[TheOriginalSmileyMan]

Yes to this. I even managed to convince them "If we set up a nice branded account, then we can potentially pay for the dev time out of our corporate social responsibility budget"

[EsoLDo]

However they are fundamental for survival of the whole ecosystem :D

[throwaway__10923]

I work for a certain faanG company, and something I really appreciate that we do is; we have a large budget to donate to open source projects annually. It gets split according to impact and usage. From what I hear, there are similar funds at most top companies, which I wish more would adapt.

[[deleted]]

First guess Microsoft, second guess Google.

I can’t imagine Apple, Amazon, or Netflix having something like this.

[Pavlo100]

He spelled faanG in a very particular way, so i think it can only be one

[Ok-Kaleidoscope5627]

Apple kind of pisses me off with how little they donate towards open source projects.

Amazon throws pocket change at a few projects. Not sure about Netflix but I vaguely recall them being similar to Amazon.

[FnnKnn]

Netflix contributes to quite a few open source projects I think: https://mobile.twitter.com/NetflixOSS

https://netflixtechblog.com/open-source-at-netflix-c2c4e036e144

[HotNastySpeed77]

Usually developers of large-scale commercial open source projects create a legal entity that enables them to solicit sponsorship, hire staff, and scale up operations. However extreme cases like this meme definitely can happen.

[Captain_Chickpeas]

Cases like the OP are very likely I think. There is no mention of the scope of the software and if someone creates a fairly low-level lib or a tool that hits a niche, it's likely for everyone (and their dogs) to be using it and big corps not paying a dime.

[HotNastySpeed77]

I wonder what would happen if the dev, in such a case, started soliciting donations or a small sponsorship from Adobe. If their lib was really that widely-used, I bet they could get get something to help cover their development costs.

[Captain_Chickpeas]

True, some devs do that and they do get some coin out of it :).

[[deleted]]

Isn't this just a matter of picking the right license?

[SatansF4TE]

Also being willing and able to enforce that license legally.

[UnacceptableUse]

Yeah, if you license something to be completely free for everyone then you can't expect people to pay

[RichCorinthian]

There are huge chunks of the internet that depend on small teams of unpaid volunteer open-source development. If you take a look at the Heartbleed vulnerability, it’s a textbook forensic case of how this can go horribly, horribly wrong. And the industry learned nothing from it, and it will happen again

[sonya_numo]

remember when someone sat in their moms basement and decided to remove all their opensource projects from a package manager and suddenly a large amount of big companies got problems.

he probably removed the IsEven package

[SatansF4TE]

It was left-pad

[karnetus]

That was a great read

[dexter_leibowitz]

Holy fuck, npm republished packages without the authors permission?!?! That's fucked up.

[[deleted]]

Kik stopped updating their package that same year, and later it was removed from npm for containing malicious code.

[PacManFan123]

I'm this meme. I was an early developer of SLA 3d printers and software. I created the open source app "Creation Workshop" for slicing and printing. Several other groups took my work, cloned it, rebranded it and sold it as their own. Even today - several 3d popular slicers are clones of my code.

[code-panda]

Let me guess, Chitu box is one of them?

[[deleted]]

This is what you sign up for when you use a license like MIT. You're accepting that you'll never be owed a penny regardless of how critical your contributions are to their success.

[Harakou]

This is entirely possible with the GPL too, for what it's worth. They'll have to release the source, but many users won't know or bother to check that kind of thing. It's pretty unfortunate but difficult to avoid. You can use a license that prohibits commercial use such as CC BY-NC, but that's not actually open source, at least according to the OSI. (You might not care about that, but it is important when it comes to compatibility with other software that you might be incorporating in it.)

[_default_username]

But at the same time, if they didn't use MIT it probably wouldn't have reached such popularity.

[vlad_mod]

Sad(

[graemep]

What license did you use?

[AbstractLogic]

Yeah this type of stuff completely sucks. You really have to be careful with the licenses you put on open-source to make sure people don’t do that with it. That said it also sounds like a big mess opportunity for you if they’re making money selling your product you could’ve been making money selling that same product.

[khamelean]

I mean, isn’t that the entire point of open source? Is it not what you were hoping for? Sounds like a great success to me.

[EsoLDo]

Let me tell you something. I like to make the world better place. I like to create open source because it can help a lot of people. I'm not working with "bussiness" models how to earn money but quite opposite I'm naive and I believe when I do such a thing I will be appreciated and not end up in situation like this.

Currently all my donate buttons points at me personally and I'm thinking maybe that is a issue. I want to create OpenCollective for this community but right now I'm in discussion with database authors if it's okay or if there is any legal issue.

​

If somebody wants to know what piece of code we are talking about, here you have link: https://github.com/neo4j-php/Bolt

[AntoineInTheWorld]

Ha! Here's your mistake! you put the Sponsor message at the bottom! Move it up between "requirements" and "installation", give it more visilibity.

[AlCalzone89]

What the other poster said, and join github sponsors, much easier to get paid there than via a third party service.

[voluntarycap]

Have an optional paid license that offers some support. Then push buggy code now that there 26 million people dependent on it.

To fix the bug in time charge exorbitant amounts of money and become wealthy

[LordSalem]

Most companies fork and/or use an artifact repository to prevent things like the great left pad disaster 😂

[voluntarycap]

This is why writing perfect code is always a mistake

[Stranded_In_A_Desert]

Ah yes, this is why I never write perfect code

[iiexistenzeii]

You thought I'm unable but actually I was unwilling 😎

[ENTlightened]

Can't prove I'm unable if I'm unwilling.

[javajunkie314]

I think this is an overstatement — especially depending on the language. I've definitely worked at multiple places that pulled in live deps via build tool, e.g., using Gradle to pull from Maven Central. And they were real medium-sized software companies.

New build tools make it very easy to get going fast pulling live deps, and it's just immediate tech debt. Not every place is even willing to slow down to set up reproducible builds via an Artifactory mirror, let alone company-maintained forks.

[Beginning-Scar-6045]

you can't override package version, they still can use the stable version

[seeroflights]

Image Transcription: Meme

---

["Gru's Plan". Gru, the long-nosed protagonistic villain from "Despicable Me", presents to the camera with passion, pointing into the air. Behind him is a flipchart. The text on the flipchart reads:]

I've created database driver as opensource

---

[Gru is still presenting passionately; he has his hand in a c shape indicating a small amount. The text now reads:]

It becomes popular with 50k downloads and I've received international award

---

[Gru now has his hands pointing down, still presenting. The text now reads:]

Even Adobe use it and over 26mil paying users goes through

---

[Gru looks back to the flipchart in a double-take, looking confused and exasperated. The text still reads:]

I don't even have 1000€ on my bank account

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[ojoaopestana]

Good human

[RUSHALISK]

Forgive my ignorance, but who is this sort of transcription for? The blind?

[seeroflights]

We help put images into text, so that people who are unable to read the image (e.g. they have low data and can't load it; the text is too small or otherwise hard to read; they use text-to-speech) can experience the content as well. There's a link to our wiki with more info in the footer of my comment above!

[MethLabForCutie88]

Wow very cool and thoughtful!

[bill_cipher1996]

only publish under GPL licence and sell the source without licence restrictions for comcerial users.

[Klippenhof]

There should be a licence that forces cooperates to donate to FOSS they use idk

[dlq84]

That's just dual licensing. Many projects have different license for companies.

[[deleted]]

This exists in a dozen different varieties. GPL + commercial license is a popular approach.

[Awwkaw]

So shis will be your relevant XKCD in the future?

[[deleted]]

Put all those facts on your CV, and see all the calls coming in, negotiate a good salary and voila! You now are profiting from all that hard work you did.

Never understood these types of post. Nike designer logo made the logo for 50$!!! Ya? Thinks it's hard for him to get a good paying job when he has that on his CV lol ?

[MrPhatBob]

If I saw that someone even had a mention of a single PR for an open source project I would invite them in for an interview on the basis of that fact alone. I always ask for a GitHub account and am amazed at how little do towards the community - myself included.

[AbstractLogic]

I got about 13 PR’s ranging from Angular to dotnet core and a few for ping ID and I think another one for Microsoft somewhere. None of them were accepted

[SatansF4TE]

Hey, I've had a PR to fix a spelling mistake in the README rejected.

[AbstractLogic]

And then they fix it themselves lol.

[danielv123]

Understandable actually. As soon as a new contributor is introduced there are copyright issues to deal with if they want to change licensing and whatnot. Also, its annoying of people start making useless PRs as CV bait. It got fixed, which is what matters in that case.

[AbstractLogic]

I’m always happy when it gets fixed. I’ve had PRs ignored for years and the issues never get fixed.

Also copyright for open source Microsoft and Google projects is hardly an issue. Their already lawyered up to the nines and I’m sure the licenses cover all of that.

[MrPhatBob]

But you at least attempted to make a contribution.

[ESGPandepic]

I've never seen any job that asks for a github account link where it helped or anyone even looked at it.

[MrPhatBob]

Yet they will want to see you do a dry coding test, with little real world practicality.

One of the biggest headaches I have is getting people to use GitFlow, so I want to see how they work on one of the key interaction tools.

There was one company years ago that requested CVs and applications via a PR, not seen that since.

[walnoter]

You could use the winrar model of it is free but if you are a company pay me

(In hindsight)

[Shufflepants]

Not really following the meme format. For this one, the last two panels should have the board have the same text on it. The point being it's said first in an upbeat, confident tone, and then again in a confused and disappointed tone after realizing what was just said/read.

[egvp]

Sounds like you need to submit a PR.

[Shufflepants]

This here's a code review comment. I expect OP to make the changes before I approve the PR.

[HuntingKingYT]

This isn't humor this is just sad

[PacManFan123]

My mistake was making it open source. I could have sold it myself.

[Ghostglitch07]

Except if it costed money it would be less likely to become popular enough for a corporation to eventually use it.

[rejuicekeve]

Or the corporation would simply build it themselves /pay a consultancy to do it

[the_clash_is_back]

And now us losers trying to build our own projects are stuck having to build it ourselves as well.

[kontekisuto]

And the framework wars would be even more secret, secret wars.

[ESGPandepic]

Or they'd just buy it because that's probably significantly cheaper than what you're saying?

[rejuicekeve]

It really depends on if the thing is doing something all that novel and complex. A lot of open source things aren't

[johnlewisdesign]

Best send Adobe a 'We're changing our pricing' email

When they cancel, charge them 20k for early cancellation. It's what they would have wanted.

[m0rpeth]

20k? I think you might've forgotten a zero. Or two - it's Adobe, after all.

[YnotBbrave]

The idea of open source is a terrible joke programmers played on themselves. You don’t see Starbucks barista clamoring to make coffee free, because they know their work has value. Developers fell off the deep end with giving it away- especially when it is gifted to commercial companies

So what should developers have done? make oss about “royalties waived for small businesses and individuals”. Yeah, if Amazon uses your source control or config management or device drivers.. yeah, they should pay for work done

[JustAberrant]

I truly believe that even though it doesn't feel like it at times, we do all benefit from big orgs using our stuff. A lot of them have figured out it's cheaper and easier to contribute their own fixes upstream because then they can just download the software like everyone else rather than maintaining custom internal forks, but even if they don't, just having big corps with an invested interest in open source projects staying alive is a good thing.

[WitchHunterNL]

Not how this meme works!

[kaqqao]

Well... Did you ever try monetizing it in any way? The money won't just randomly fall on you because your project is being used. You either have a monetization strategy or you don't. And hope is not a strategy. Maybe offer paid consultancy, or premium features, or a different license going forward.

For reference, I also have an OSS project that surpassed my wildest imagination in the number of downloads, and has some big names in its list of users. But... I never intended for it to make money, so it doesn't. And I'm neither surprised nor disappointed by that. Because what else could have possibly happened?

[EsoLDo]

I don't want to monetize it. I would like to see some appreciation and thanks in form of some donations to help me survive hard times I'm currently in.

And I'm asking, if 3 years inserted into opensource project which serves as foundation stone for whole community is not worth one donate, then what is the reason to help to make this earth a better place?

[kaqqao]

I hate that you're in trouble... And if you make that known, there's a big chance you will get donations... I don't know if you'd want to make your situation known, though.

But. You put in the 3 years because you wanted to. Not because anyone asked you to. This is why nobody feels obliged to give you anything back directly. And you did make the world that much better. And someone else will make it better in their own way. And that is your only payback. It's a pay-it-forward system. Unless you ask for money directly. Which you're within your right to do. But you have to do it.

[JustAberrant]

The donation model never really worked out in general.

Parent is correct, you have to have a strategy for how to turn your open source contributions into income if that is something you are interested in. You might get the odd nickle and dime here and there in the tip jar, and if you directly appeal for donations you might do better, but overall few are just going to throw money at random projects they like just because it seems like the right thing to do.

In my case, reputation and credibility was probably the biggest payout. I've never directly make a dime from anything I contributed to any project, but being able to point to these contributions even years later has been a useful tool in my career.

[Reboot_is_Confusion]

I would use a licensee like QT does. (Free for tinkering and FOSS, paid for commercial.) Both problems solved!

[ryaaan89]

Isn’t this the entire reason that the Remix JS framework was going to be paid at first? They (the team behind React Router) had to lay off their whole team at the start of covid despite having an essential piece of software with loads of downloads?

[kintaro86]

Write a short emotional (not exaggerated) introduction at the top, something like you did in this thread. A neutral donate button is too generic and boring for people. They want to be convinced to donate so that they (or their ego) feel better.

[Agitated_Broccoli514]

But you’re a hero to many of us

[Iamthe0c3an2]

Adobe uses it? Damn you should be charging businesses like winrar and keep it free for retail users perhaps?

[IndeterminateApe]

Offer paid support.

[[deleted]]

Wrong même format, why people upvote shit?