[moltar]

This is a foreign position to me. I open sourced my code not to make money but because I saw that others can benefit from it. I never made money from open source. If I did my mental model would be that these are charitable donations, not an income stream I can rely on.

[vidarh]

I've "made money" from my relatively limited open source contributions primarily by being moved straight past coding stages when interviewing a few times. That's enough payoff for me. Other than that it's mostly a "why not?"

There are some - very limited - pieces of code I keep private relating to my consulting business, but I've seen more downside in keeping code private over the years than not. E.g. lots of code I've written that are locked up in companies that no longer use it that I wish I could still use.

The proportion of code I have that would create a moat that makes it worth holding the code back is miniscule.

[jampekka]

The post mentions this:

> Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity.

I'm all for non-monetary motives, but the reality is that most people have to work for a living, leaving quite limited time/energy for volunteering. The scale of OSS that we have today would not (perhaps sadly) be possible without OSS development paying the bills.

[throwaway150]

> Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity.

I read that. That statement is technically true but I don't like that they put a negative connotation around it. Apologies if they didn't intend it like that.

But I'll say that there is nothing wrong with charity. Some devs will do open source with hope to monetize. Some will do it for charity. Both are equally valid motivations.

[moltar]

Wealthy devs context is also foreign to me. I started to open source my code way before I was making any money. I just did it because I saw no reason for it to be closed sourced. It would only benefit me. But in the open it can benefit many people without taking anything away from me.

[coldpie]

I worked for 13 years on open source software and I definitely did it to make money. Nothing wrong with trying to make money on open source software, it's just a different business model than proprietary. More consulting oriented than product oriented.

[pepa65]

Nothing wrong with making money on your work, and if you work on open source, even better I think. I have been spending hours a week for decades working on FOSS, never got paid, so yes, that was (and still is) intentional charity.

[arnvald]

That's cool, and I'm happy for you that you are in a position that allows you to get income from other sources, so that you can write OS code in your spare time.

Not everyone can or wants to go this way, though, and we got a number of fantastic tools and libraries thanks to people who tried and succeeded in making money from open source. Some folks live off donations, some are paid by their employers to write OS, and some added extra features that allowed them to both offer their tools for free and to monetize them at the same time. It's sad that the last path starts to disappear, at least for some tools. In the end it probably will result in fewer OS libraries, because some number of authors will have to either find another income stream, or abandon their projects.

[nothercastle]

The problem is that’s ai is monetizing your code And not giving you anything

[bathtub365]

AI is also likely not following the terms of the license. I.e., for BSD it needs to include attribution.

[RealityVoid]

So? If some other riser used my code to make money sould I be upset? Isn't it the whole point to me useful to others?