hello world! 👋
This is my first #discuss thread and I want it to be on something relevant rather than "Which IDE color scheme does devs ...
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This shook me, I love your enthusiasm for creating mate, keep it up.
Make beautiful things.
I enjoy reading about your enthusiasm.
I have a slightly different problem - I have come up with some ideas in my past, and have started building them. I will investigate, try out new languages to solve the problem, but as soon as I have figured out my roadmap for solving the problem, I lose all interest.
I think it comes from the fact that I created many web-based projects when I was younger. So once I feel a "deja vu" kind of feeling, I gradually lose interest, because I've done it so many times before and don't get paid for it.
I am still waiting for that "omg I need this" idea to come forward and really stick :P
Anyways, I enjoyed the article. Thumbs up :)
Trust me my friend, this happens to all. But do you know how I find motive to continue working on existing or new projects..?
It's because I believe "motivation is a choice."
Don't wait for that motivational quote to read, or that youtube video to boost your self confidence or that advice from a great personality.. Take responsibility and make things. Motivation is a choice.
That is true. I used to be able to keep the interest, and have made my own lightweight social network for a school I went to when I was younger.
However, now that I have tried that many times, I like the technical challenges like algorithm solving more than I like making a complete usable product :)
You'll grow everyday ✨
I could be motivated to work on something like this ... maybe:
"motivational products don't work. but our demotivator products don't work even better."
What a thinking, mindblowing haaaa
Actually I think GitHub stars could pay your rent. Microsoft would just need to change how pro/paid accounts work. If you are paying for an account, they should donate a certain percentage (say 20%) of your subscription fee to the projects you have starred. So if you have only ever starred one project in your life, it would all go to that. Otherwise it would divide up that 20% evenly among all the projects you have starred. You would only be eligible to receive money for your project if you yourself have a payed account, which would encourage more people to have one. Then we would just need to be cognizant to go out of our way to unstar projects we prefer to no longer support so more of our 20% can go to other projects.
Whoa, I love it. I would voluntarily pay a higher price for my Github accounts for this.
Count me in 💯
That's an interesting thought! I wonder how much it is practical to an organization as huge as GitHub and were talking about millions of repos!!
I don't see why Microsoft (the owners of GitHub) could not afford it. They would only be giving away a percentage of the money that comes in from people that pay for GitHub.
I wanna ask a genuine question here: what if there exists a platform that allows creators (especially developers) to accept donations and or recurring payments from fans (those who benefit from their works)..? more like a shopify for developers.
there're couple of such platforms already.. open collective, patreon etc.. anyways.. how cool it would be?!
I think another angle to think about is that while a developer may not directly make money from an OSS project that they contribute to, they can build their portfolio or perhaps even be discovered/hired by a company because of their OSS contributions. This is an indirect route to getting paid and it's also a big "if", but it's worth mentioning that OSS work could be a catalyst for money making.
This is a great discussion topic, by the way!
My hope is certainly to be discovered, or somehow power through the fact that entry level jobs are basically nonexistent, which I'm guessing requires feats of astonishing brilliance. My main worry is that I'm not talented enough to do nontrivial work.
Even if you're not the most confident with your skills at the moment, I think that's okay. If you show that you're actively trying to learn, I think that counts for a lot. Everybody has to start somewhere!
I wish you the best of luck!
I too wish you best of luck and an awesome career ahead!
That's a huge topic for discussion. Since we're talking about OSS, where source code is publically available there's lot of chance of duplication. I wonder how to solve this forgery problem.
But projects like devfolio, no cs degree are doing extraordinary things.
You sound almost like me, except the part that I have no fraction of success stories or ideas to share. Only a bunch of unfinished projects in my Gitlab account. Your write up is a great motivation. Hello from Kerala! Hope this place is familiar to you ;)
I'm from Thrissur 💜
Ernamkulam 😍
I was at Kerala Startup Mission Kalamaserry for 2-3 months before I went to Kozhikode Cyber park. Now I'm at Kozhikode.
Awesome! I am basically from Malappuram. Been here for around 8 years. Got a telegram id? Connect further?🙂
t.me/liyasthomas
"On many days I despair that I won't live long enough to build even a tiny fraction of the things I see in my mind. It's infuriating! ". My version is that I am booked for the next 100 years, only I'm already 56 and counting.
I came across TideLift (unaffiliated) yesterday, which seems like Patreon for OSS - cool name (“a rising tide lifts all boats” nice). Hopefully it is a fair service and takes off, as a way for independant devs to be funded to maintain their OSS projects!
Cool.
Hey, My name is Elad. I'm the CMO at xscode.com
We are creating a licensing and billing platform for open-source developers.
We launched yesterday our pre-registration website and the platform should be ready in the beginning on November,
I would love to hear your thoughts about our mission and to see if it's a platform that you would use.
You can check it out here:
bit.ly/2mDZ3Cn
That's a great plan. Looking forward on its execution 🎉
Thanks, will let you know once we will be up and running
Thanks Liyas for starting this topic.
I was once looking for an open source license that says:
Apparently, OSS never works that way... it's free in essence.
So the way to go is to launch a premium service for highly desirable features.
I don't know why the author of Sizzy has bitter feelings about the experience of publishing his tool as an OSS:
If he can't see all that as a positive experience, I don't know what to say!
Afterall, contributing to OSS community is a free will. No one's gonna force you to do anyways. But what I must say is that, all things premium/paid kinda services are made because of open source projects.
What if all npm packages were paid services..? I can't even imagine what would've happened! No one will ever make a facebook, twitter, google, and nothing.
Firstly, thank you for your contributions! Secondly, I can't help but share your pain with the catch-22 of OSS. I have made many tools that continue to save me countless hours of pain and misery; and after sharing these with the world, and seeing others benefit, I can attest to the zero-sum game of profitability. Hopefully this is something GitHub can fix.
However, not all is lost! Don't despair. There are working models out there for making an OSS project a sustainable source of income. You may find this interview with Mike Perham (creator of Sidekiq) encouraging 😄
Initiatives like GitHub sponsors are doing pretty much great things. But that again gives privilege to only developers and similar streams. There's lot of other creators like artists, musicians, etc. They are struggling to make a living, to be honest.
I like your enthusiasm. I too have a lot to accomplish, and a slightly different mind set on monetizing open source. As you said, you can add the "buy me a coffee" button to your GitHub, but that's about all there is. The monetized projects I have my eye on are very large, but encompass many smaller sources that would be useful to many developers. I plan to open source the smaller and more universal things, while keeping specifics closed source. Now if I were less burned out from my 9 to 5 I could get to writing some of what's in my head... Keep that drive, it's nice to hear younger developers with that mindset.
I mentioned Buy Me A Coffee because there ate lot of kind hearted people who are willing to make small or one-time donations for a project they find helpful. But most of the donation platforms are subscription based and that makes them refuse to make donation.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
There are a few potential options out there. Perhaps if used in combination, it could add up to be more substantial: monetizeyourcode.com
Very much valuable for me :) thanks @liyasthomas
I'm happy for you 😄 and I hope you are a malayalee 🔥
Yes, how do you gues that.
Your second name "Prajapati" is a malayalam word. I'm from Thrissur.
Ok, I am from Uttar Pradesh, India
This is really a nice discussion, I am quite like in this path, although I am not a pro-coder.
But I think the gist of doing OSS (even for a beginner) is you get to LEARN how to build things.
Also I recently heard about this hivefive.io
(What i think its like adding Ads on your Repository which slowly builds up revenue, that platform is yet to launch but I have some hopes from this)
Ads works. Amazon, Google etc are living proof. But I wonder how much page views would a freelance dev / an artist / a musician / YouTuber will have..!?
Anyways, if it helps somehow, it should be appreciated. I've an eye out for hivefive.io/
I can definitely relate to this. When one of my repo crossed about 5k stars (now 8k+), I put up donation links and received from only one person (which had to stop in the middle due to payment gateway changes) and then nothing at all since. My repos are learning resources than software, so that might have played a role too.
Somehow, I got the courage to start self publishing ebooks instead of putting up tutorials on github. When I release them, the readers have an option to get it for free for a few days (could pay as well if they choose to). And this definitely gave much better results. I was driven to research deeper and write the books in a well structured manner, adding exercises, etc compared to the tutorial. Overall, I consider this a win for all parties involved compared to donation model. Plus, payment options like Stripe do not work for individuals in my country.
Yours is an inspiring story. Good luck!!
One of the most frustrating issue is that there's not even a single payment gateway which has global access. This keeps people apart. That is bad.
Only solution I could think of is donation platforms like BuyMeACoffee which handles payment gateway and have lot of checkout options. Actually BuyMeACoffee is an official partner of PayPal and Stripe.
👐
Your humility is something to aspire to. I will credit you with working hard to get where we want to be. This is a breautuful writeup because it speaks on things we understand and answer questions we need to ask. Thank you.
Everybody should. Speak out, be the change.
There's always a lot more to accomplish, for ex: globalclimatestrike.net
It's very cool how you have such a strong inate drive to create. If 10% more people had the same urge and thought process as you, the world would be a much better place.
Thanks for your kind words!
"be the change you want to see"
-Gandhi
This is the number one thing I think about all day. I can never tell which ones are worth spending time on, since they all seem great to me. I'm 37, and I've been going since 13, so I hear you there. I for one welcome our AI overlords, given that some of us will likely be the ones who create and control them. That way it can do all the dumb stuff and I can finally focus on the fun/important stuff I need to do. If that doesn't happen, I'm not quite sure what I'll do. Wallow probly and keep plugging along in semi-futility. Maybe something I do will end up doing well. Good luck on all your projects.
I feel exactly the same. It's a creative urge, like writing music (which I also do, and I feel the passion for both is very similar).
I've received some donations, but nothing that could pay for anything significant, but I don't really see the donations as something that might eventually pay, but instead I see them as "thank you for the work", which is always appreciated.
However, I have seen some upsides, which are hard to put a dollar value on:
Learnt new things
Made great connections with smart people
A powerful sense that I'm contributing to humanity (even if it's in a relatively small way), rather than just being a consumer
There are probably other things that I've forgotten, but there's more value to OSS than just cash.
For some people who are young or people who already have relatively secure lives (like me). Reality starts hitting hard when there is something like medical emergency or a desire to owning a house to live.
You might think about streaming your activity if you're ok about it and having people donating not to support, but to have fun.
It's so weird how much money can be spent not on things you already have as they're free, but on things that do not actually belong to you (like someone else's smile etc)
I would love to see someone else's smile. For an open source dev, people making a donation (support) big or small makes his day. Do you know what's better than seeing someone else's smile?
Its knowing: the reason behind smile is you ✨
I feel the same way! I lie in bed twitching thinking about it sometimes :-)
It's a positive story for you that there is a sustainable way to continue on your path. Thanks for sharing.
That's the same thing as I'm doing.I have a full time job and a side project that I really enjoy doing. While I would love to see it become profitable I don't have any expectation.
💚
Free software always meant free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
Luckily, companies big and small are willing to pay 100k+ a year for competent developers who can build an ship products.
But I've always been skeptical of the 'get-lots-of-stars' model. Most people aren't heroes, and there is only so much branding developers can do before the market becomes saturated. There are millions of us, just like there are millions of artists and most people won't pay for most art. Just like there are millions of musicians, but most people won't pay for music.
A focus on the pragmatic, that someone is willing to pay for isn't that bad a gig. There are problems aplenty that need solving. In that sense developers are more engineers than they are artists. Most of us can't finance our well being like artists.
well said 💯
Enticing to read on. People like you move the humanity forward by practical contemplation of worldly things (OS).
Thank you, @liyasthomas .
Don't give me any extra credits. Be-ing human.
That hitted me hard!
That was the hard truth we always forget
I like the article and the topic. What I don't get is the relation between the title and the content of the article. Probably it's just me. Could you explain, please?
I just tried to express my opinions on what OSS means and few ways to get paid doing OSS. Sorry if there has been any confusion.
Peer Production License is an interesting approach.
So, you can't "pay your rent from open source".
great article!
Glad you liked it 💜
Make a open source software and try to give a SaaS service as well. This model works. E.g. MongoDB.
This line "money is not the mission, money only funds the mission."
Succinctly put. May I quote this?
Of course you can. Just give credits 😅
I think people have to appreciate the amount of work that goes into open source projects and contribute or donate to them
Well, I suppose I'll have to switch up my tactics. No more mailing my landlord USB drives.