If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
> Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
I am struggling to see how this analogy is relevant. It seems more like a knee jerk to the use of "force" in the headline. TFA seems to be talking about a potential way to _generate revenue_ through side channels that are deemed valuable by the users. This is clearly different from "demand the user to pay for it" as the analogy would imply.
Open source contributors don't come unsolicited to "clean the users' windshields". They just write stuff that they find useful and the inherent value of that work attracts other developers as much as users. And then the whole thing grows too large to maintain without serious money.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
sameerds · · focus · HN ↗
I am struggling to see how this analogy is relevant. It seems more like a knee jerk to the use of "force" in the headline. TFA seems to be talking about a potential way to _generate revenue_ through side channels that are deemed valuable by the users. This is clearly different from "demand the user to pay for it" as the analogy would imply.
Open source contributors don't come unsolicited to "clean the users' windshields". They just write stuff that they find useful and the inherent value of that work attracts other developers as much as users. And then the whole thing grows too large to maintain without serious money.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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