If you're doing open-source software as a living it's essential you have:

1. Books: You should at the very least write the canonical book on using a package, tool or application you've written. Amazon residuals might not be high, but they're non-zero. The effort involved in writing a book is considerable but they can pay dividends for a long time. It's also something you can chip away at over time.

2. Patreon: You need some way of measuring community enthusiasm for your project and what better way than to see how much they're willing to pay for it. Reward tiers can also help by allowing more generous patrons to help with advice, like feature requests, early code review and so on. This builds engagement.

3. Support Contracts: These might be super obnoxious, customers can be very difficult, but if you're in it to win it you absolutely need to cover this off. At the very least offer incident-level consulting to get people out of a jam. Figure out what the hassle's worth and price accordingly. $200/hr? $500/hr?

4. Corporate Sponsorship: I like it when companies step up and help fund open-source software directly, like how Redis has been supported by various companies along its lifepan (https://redis.io/topics/sponsors). If you find a good partner it's not "selling out", it's validation that your project is meaningful. They'll respect your decisions and not interfere.

5. Talks: Get out there and talk about your project. At the very least make videos, or get people to make them for you, that introduce how your tools work, how they can be used, and where you're going with the project. Being a speaker at an event might be daunting for some, but it's a great way to make connections and find opportunities.

Too many developers want to focus on nothing but the code. That's not how the world works.

If you do any of the above you invite yourself to so much criticism that it's not worth it. I have first hand experience of this.

I hope to retire next year to do open source full time with money made from closed source. My audience will not be developers though; I'm soured on them. I'll be targeting a niche group who are actually grateful for free tools and don't feel like it's their life duty to criticize every small thing.

That's how it used to work. That's 1990s thinking back when people would do these things purely out of love, and when those using it were hackers or ramen-noodel eating entrepreneurs.

Now huge corporations are using open-source tools, and some huge corporations have been built with open-source tools. Where would Google be without Python? Where would Facebook be without PHP? Where would Twitter have gone without Ruby?

That's why having an official method for giving back is important. Node has shown tremendous leadership here in setting up an NPM corporation (https://www.npmjs.com/about) that makes it easy for corporate concerns to donate without accounting concerns: Writing personal cheques to people to "donate" is out of the question. Giving to a foundation is noble. Paying for a support contract is reasonable. The difference might seem superficial, but it's important.

> I'll be targeting a niche group who are actually grateful for free tools...

There's nothing wrong with finding your own niche and doing it out of love and passion. That you're able to do this is great, but some need to concern themselves with how to make a stable, sustainable living that's not predicated on having a large amount of money saved up.

I'm not saying open source is bad, I'm saying Dev culture in not paying for tools is bad. I agree that ideally it would be different.

I speak from decades of experience doing Dev tools inc open source. All of my friends are practitioners in the space. We're all obsessed on how to get people to use better tools. It is something I've put a lot of thought into. I've personally spent over $200K on salaries for people to build open source tooling. If I could make a business out of it I would spend more. But I can't. I had to build an entirely separate company to make money.

Edit (addendum): People who have paid $1500 for my software are grateful that I'll even talk to them; whereas open source freeloaders constantly demand I do more free work for them.

What high horse did you fall off of? They may not be perfect languages, but they get the job done, and for many people they've made their career possible. Greatness doesn't come from beauty, PHP is the ugly bastard-child produced when Perl and C got drunk one night and had a baby, it comes from utility.

> I'm saying Dev culture in not paying for tools is bad.

Maybe that's bad, but you know what's worse? Back when you had to spend huge amounts of cash to get a barely working compiler because there were no viable open-source alternatives. This was on top of the huge amounts of cash you had to fork out for an operating system from a vendor like Sun or SGI. Oh, and you also had to drop thousands more on a proprietary system that could run it.

So, yeah, good times back when nobody could afford to do anything but at least the people at Sun and SGI had jobs.

Then Linux happened, then scripting languages like Perl, Python and PHP proved themselves capable of getting the job done, and the modern web came about. This would never, ever have happened without those tools.

The single greatest thing to happen in the last twenty years is that you can get a computer that you can develop on using free languages, resources, and tools for under $10. That price is $0 if they use someone else's computer, or borrow time at a library. That, and that alone is enough to make these languages great.

I agree that the world is a better place with open source. I simply wish there was a culture were developers opened their wallet and supported it. That way we would have even more of it.

For example: I think personal donations can only go so far. I'd rather see an easier sell for simple "support packages" that developers can recommend to their organization that helps further development. "We're really invested in package X and it'd be great to be listed as a supporter on their page, it's cheap marketing and they'll help us with technical support issues! We could try a $50/mo. subscription..."

Compared to $50K annual server licences that's an easy sell if it can be phrased in a culturally compatible way.

"If it can be phased in a culturally acceptable way" - have you ever tried to intentionally change a culture? It's damn near impossible. Having it as a prerequisite to success practically guarantees failure.

They had to endure multiple failures, but each time they failed less than the last. Success was really the one where they failed the least, and after that they can chart their own path, they're finally above water.

> have you ever tried to intentionally change a culture? It's damn near impossible.

Yes, I have. It's not impossible, it's just very hard. It requires stubborn determination.

Don't expect anyone to care about your project unless you make them care. Don't expect anyone to pay for your project unless you ask them to. You need to engage, you need to evangelize, you need to promote. Relentlessly.

For example, I haven't heard one bit of promotion from you in all of these comments. Not a peep. Does that mean whatever you're doing isn't worth mentioning?

There's an idea for a service, there. Have something that developers can use to generate "support packages" or "freemium" offers, and get a cut. Basically, a sort of appstore for developers to developers. You could even offer a white-label service that people can integrate in their own websites.

These services exist already for generic commerce, we just need something slightly more focused on the needs of developers.

Perhaps because ggame is not a good marketer. I for example try to promote some ideas (unrelated to the topic here) all the time, but I am talking to a wall. Thus I'm surely not a good salesman, but a very good programmer and mathematician, I think. So don't ascribe double standard to ggame.

While I'm not claiming to be a marketing guru, I am successful in business in a different domain. Hence my early retirement.

So Linux was so good . . . that it enabled a world where normal people don't use it, but instead use JS apps that store information on other people's servers? Because that's what I hear when you say Linux is a success because it enabled the web.

Normal people use shared hosting. Which often uses Linux.

Normal people use Linux a lot more than they realize. I think it's fine they don't have to pay attention to that, that computers can be invisible that way, but if you call yourself someone familiar with technology you can't be ignorant to it.

So do you have an argument or just a whole lot of misplaced anger?

Normal people use shared hosting, with runtimes that don't require Linux. It could be something else and PHP, Perl, ASP, JEE stacks will still run.

Normal people use Linux on devices, because it is the best OS OEMs can get their hands on without paying a dime for it.

Android apps are only allowed to link to these specific set of libraries.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis.html

To put an hand to the cowboy programmers that were linking to system libraries not part of that list, starting with Android 7, they will be terminated if they try to do so.

https://developer.android.com/about/versions/nougat/android-...

The only form of binaries allowed on a standard Android device are shared objects.

The Native Activity is actually just the native method calls of https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/NativeAc... that loads a shared object with a predefined name.

None of the stable NDK APIs are GNU/Linux specific and the POSIX layer isn't fully compliant with the standard, many APIs like e.g. SYS V IPC are missing.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~vatlidak/resources/POSIXmagazine...

https://roxanageambasu.github.io/publications/eurosys2016pos...

Rooted devices don't count, as that is not what people get on the store when they buy an Android device.

Linux is great for experts, and I really respect it for that. It has been very empowering to people like us.

The web is a peasantizing TV replacement and a trash fire. Linux is great on its own merits, not because it enabled this "web" abomination.

(Talking about webapps here, not web sites. Your personal static site is awesome. The fact that many people's experience with computers is remotely delivered JS storing data places they don't control is not.)

GNU/Linux and *BSD became relevant to the web infrastructure, as no one wanted to give money for UNIX.

Which is the culture that lead developers as the Octave's author to search for income elsewhere.

I don't know, JetBrains seems really popular to me. Off the top of my head, I know of a few commercial tools that seem to be doing ok? (judging by their continued existence), e.g. https://blackfire.io, http://undo.io, https://scrutinizer-ci.com, etc.

Of course, a non-open-source programming language doesn't stand a chance today because of the massive network effects required for success, but that seems natural (people want to use what they already know, what they know is often what they learned in school or on their side projects).

Make a Code of Conduct and use it to control your community rather than let your community control you.

It's like parents complaining their kids are "out of control" and "there's nothing I can do". Seriously? We've been raising kids for a hundred thousand years. This shit isn't new.

I wonder what proportion of that has been done with only a couple of hours of parental/family contact per day (and those when the parents are most tired).

Also probably, for better or worse, corporal punishment has been a mainstay up until the last few decades.

In short, I don't think modern Western parenting can rely much on the methods of the past.

It's totally OT but I'm interested in thoughts/responses.

I've never found a case where someone is using tons of 'better tooling' for a well engineered project. 'better tools' are crutches to support a 500,000 line spaghetti code base.

Even general purpose devs can benefit from better compilers and code completion.

There is no situation where better tooling isn't better!

This is trivially a tautology. The non-trivial part is that what is better or worse depends a lot on the circumstances.

Sounds like pulling the ladder up afterward. Perhaps the niche you plan to target with FOSS would have supported a fresh graduate's new career. But your work may condition that market to expect it for free.

If enough people take those extra steps then eventually the value of programming as a skill is diminished for everyone.

By the way, your argument attempts to invalidate vast majority of FOSS out there.

Is it? AFAICT, they take a 5% cut in exchange for setting up recurring billing. (I'll ignore any ethical questions about automatic recurring billing; I likely get free satellite radio because someone else forgot to cancel it.) Are there any stats about how readership/viewership translates into payment that are more informative than the PR department's "Average Pledge" of $5?

> The most obvious difference between Gratipay and Patreon is that we don’t skim 5% off the top. Instead, we’re funded on our own platform using a pay-what-you-want model, exactly the same as any other user of our service. Gratipay is funded on Gratipay.

https://gratipay.news/how-is-gratipay-different-from-patreon...

Sort of. That recurrence can be time based (monthly), but canalso be based on work produced. It allows people to set the amount they way to pay, and for payment of work produces, it allows you to set a monthly cap. Most importantly (in my opinion), once you've got a patreon patron account it allows you to easily track and change what you decide to fund, and easily fund new things without setting up card/paypal/bitcoin payment individually.

When I signed up for Patreon (for a webcomic, IIRC), I actually went looking for and found a few other things I consumed to add. I've suggested they set up and added a few people from the HFY subreddit for some of the more prolific authors. I actually find it rather annoying when some people/groups specifically decide to not use Patreon in lieu of Paypal or something less automated. That friction has actually kept me from donating a few times, because the friction is real. Reducing that friction can lead to a lot more donations IMO.

Exactly. The total cost is probably over 8% (pretax), which is more than those sketchy check-cashing places charge. It might be worth it if the adoption rate is high enough, but does anyone have personal anecdotes or (better) independent statistics on Patreon adoption and income?

From a business perspective, the processing fee is (I guess) incurred by the payee, so that's unfortunate, but I have difficulty thinking of a reasonable way to avoid that in any case. The 5% service charge that Patreon takes should be be an expense for you, as a business. Then you have to pay for marketing and advertising, so you're not going to walk away with more than 80% of the payment no matter what you do. At least you have the opportunity to directly balance the marketing/sales effort against the income (which is not something you can do if you are trying to sell through an existing sales channel -- they will advertise as much as they want and you will either like it or lump it). Patreon also gives a limited form of marketing by featuring projects in the newsletters they do, so that's a small benefit as well.

As a remote contractor that works in another country, I'm fairly well acquainted with bank charges :-P Most banks will happily charge you 6% for foreign exchange, and then still charge you $20 (plus a percentage) to transfer funds to another bank. It is (information) highway robbery. Like I said, 5% to actually provide a valuable service is refreshing.

P.S. For anyone in Japan, funnel all your money through a personal account in Shin Sei bank. You can thank me later. Not associated with the bank in any way, other than to be enjoying reasonably priced ForEx.

Edit: To answer your question, Tarn Adams has been sustaining about $7K a month from Patreon. He is likely an outlier, though.

I wasn't making some obtuse statement about how money from me was being skimmed, I was commenting how the way they eased the friction of donating has caused me to done monthly to a lot more projects than I normally would, and that's added up over the years to a few hundred dollars of mine making its way to the accounts of people or groups whose services I use or works I consume, and that's a good thing.

Would I be happier if Patreon took a smaller cut? I guess. I don't see 5% at the low-level donations as very significant, given the platform Patreon supplies. Maybe it would be better if they changed to a 4% fee if you were getting over $500/mo in donations, and to 3% if you were getting over $2000/mo. Then again, when you start making that much per month, chances are Patreon is likely working out very well for you, and that 5% might be seen as well worth it?

In the end, as a consumer, it doesn't really matter to me. I'm bullish on the model of Patreon, and I think Patreon seems to execute fairly well on that model from what I can tell. I wouldn't mind if a few producers used Gratipay and I set that up too. I can deal with maybe 2-3 donation aggregators, I just don't want to deal with 10+ individual donation systems.

Imagine a site that auto-bills your credit card every month. You can specify projects you want to support, or just support a portfolio of projects that someone else has devised.

If so, please fill out this quick survey. I'm curious if this idea has legs:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfXIqUqsfDoUplWeWYs...

e.g. for one random example: https://www.patreon.com/monkey2

Obviously, there are also lots of open source people earning income from Patreon and the traditional bountysource too - but salt is the Bountysource clone of Patreon, specifically for OSS.

The Open Collective project mentioned in your sibling looks even nicer, but tops out at $5k/year.

These guys are making $24k per month on Patreon, for example: https://www.patreon.com/Kurzgesagt - I would guess it's just a function of their audience size and the amount of work they put into fundraising - actually asking people to contribute.

ElementaryOS have actually been working at this a little bit (unlike almost all other open source projects) - and they've built up to $1k a month on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/elementary - plus ~$200 a month on salt/bountysource, plus direct donations, etc...

The problem of this model is that it's still basically B2C, a sort of charity for free work. What we need is enabling more B2B, i.e. a flow of invoices for some nominal "premium" work.

I think jwe would be miserable working at TMW. It would be the ultimate insult to his life's work.

"our entire purpose for working on Octave is to make sure people don't have to use Matlab."

That's a really negative way to put it. Isn't Scilab a viable Matlab alternative as well. Are you hoping to block people from using that as well? What about Intel's fortan compiler...

The point is, it's much more approachable to describe things in positive terms rather than negative when all you are essentially doing is offering a product in a not-ruled-by-monopoly market.

This is why Octave is part of GNU, and why it's GPLed.

As for Scilab, they don't have quite the same aim as Octave. They don't aim to implement the same language so you can take your Matlab scripts away from Matlab, without change. They have a compatibility layer that does it partly, but there is still a need for implementing the same language. Imagine if the only way to run Javascript or Python was to sign away your rights to some company.

Freemat is a bit more comparable in aim to Octave, but it has a smaller contributor pool.

And why NumPy/SciPy will overtake Octave, if it hasn't already.

As long as people need to run Matlab scripts without Matlab, there will be a need for Octave.

A lot of people can get by just fine without FFTW or SuiteSparse (they aren't dependencies of everything written in the language, so don't belong in the standard library), and GMP is LGPL so not quite as problematic. But people do want to use a programming language to deploy applications, including proprietary commercial ones. Doing that in R or Octave isn't really possible because of the GPL, and that hurts the prospects of commercial backing (as does being pretty bad languages for developing software, but that's a separate matter).

Scilab is already open source, and GCC has a Fortran backend, so I don't see how those are relevant

I don't know what the relationship between MathWorks and Octave is, but probably the last thing MathWorks wants to do is give the creator their biggest competitor access to their trade secrets and proprietary information.

Is a piece of software not art? Are its creator/creators not artists, expressing their vision?

Indeed this can happen (though not always - I, for example would not describe, say, some business applications as "art"). But nevertheless the markets for art and software are IMHO rather different, so I would be cautious when lumping these two markets together.