I am hard line on not feeling sorry for projects going away, being taken over by organisations, when it mattered people should have actually sponsored them, instead of bosting how great is to get it all for free/gratis.
Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
There was an article in Byte magazine circa 1983 describing this dilemma: you release a successful 1.0 of a product, get a pulse of money, hold back some of it to develop 2.0, N months later version 2.0 competes with not only your competitors but with 1.0 in the minds of your most satisfied customers. Now if you're planning for N months and it is really N+M they have to scramble for money to pay your paycheck or release the product before it is ready or both. If you're laid off you could be one of the lucky ones because working under those conditions can be a living hell.
I'm glad I'm working on a service because even if a project I am working on is critical to acquiring and retaining customers it's not an automatic crisis that a project is a little late.
In the last 10 years or so SaaS seems like an investor-driven fad driven by the ease of putting a valuation on a consistent cashflow, but I think it is more basic than that.
That's not to say that the 'anti-consumer' concerns aren't real. Also with generative AI we are seeing that some things need to account for the resources they use. In the 2010s I was looking at a family of proto-AI businesses where my business partner and I were struggling with pricing, like we could not set an $X/month price such that (i) some users might not cost 10$X or 100$X a month to serve and (ii) that $X doesn't exceed the value the subscriber would get from the service for many users thus you don't make the sale. Yet we also liked the idea of stable revenue and boy all the software biz people and investors we talked to couldn't see past the "S, M, L, XL" subscription model.
On the plus side, at least there wasn't that many magpie development, and rewrites just because.
Subscriptions are the only way to fix piracy.
Adobe tools are subscriptions and they get pirated all the time.
You bought Borland C++ compiler, installed it and used it - you were free to buy the next version when it came out or not.
However think on your own salary and how many copies you need to sell, at what price, per month, to receive the same monetary amount after taxes.
Add to it, the amount of new user acquisitions per month, to keep a sustainable salary level.
If you're trying to make people cheer for the pirates, you're succeeding.
It seems to be going very well for video and music streaming services. Piracy is certainly nearly dead at this point and not at all at record-high levels.
I'm not so sure. If they can't pay for a one-time purchase, they won't be able to afford a subscription. Subscriptions are always more expensive in the end, that's why they exist in the first place. I don't see how people not using the software while still not becoming customers is a fix to anything.
As for being able to afford them, yes it cuts people out, many of whom would pirated anyway.
Digital stores, API keys, and SaaS seem to be doing alright
Adobe Creative Suite used to require a one time eye-watering payment and very few people could afford to keep it up to date, you might skip several upgrades before buying the next one if you did at all.
CC's monthly payment makes it easy to enter. You are paying more in the long term than if you bought one version of it, but less than you'd pay if you kept your subscription up -- so somebody could make the case that it is more expensive than it used to be or less expensive than it used to be.
Want people to pay for your tools? Don't offer them for free.
This is related to my usual point here, that if one offers something for free under a GPL or MIT license, claiming to do so for the betterment of humanity, only to later retract it because corporations profit without paying or AI companies use it for model training, that person is an entitled liar who released proprietary software while using openness and generosity as a marketing strategy.
Proprietary software is fine. Lying about it and using good ideals as marketing strategy is not. That applies as much to "released as MIT so it be useful to many, then unreleased because author realized it might end up in training data of some LLMs (and in so doing, actually become useful to many people)" software, as it does to blogs and all the whining about AI denying them credit (and pre-AI, search engines, except then the developer community was on side of search and not free-but-with-ads/credit publishers).
> Every, single time, someone posts a cool paid project, there is the usual comment why pay, look at MIT/BSD/Apache/... project so and so.
That comes from some combination of the project looking not worth a cent, probably not working (at least not for the use case intended), payments being a big step starting a real multi-party relationship, much distinct from just looking at a webpage or playing with code locally, and the poster being a student or younger.
I too strongly favored MIT over everything when I was a kid. Didn't have money to pay for anything, and GPL was complicated and my slightly older colleagues (with probably more business sense than I) didn't like it.
Why do you think it’s the same folks? People tend to be louder when they don’t agree with something, and many topics will divide a community mostly in half. The end result is that you will more than likely hear complaints and subtle digs/insults no matter what happens.
It feels like there is entitlement on both sides. People who do OSS work feel entitled to financial benefits, despite explicitly choosing to give their work away for free. And people who consume open source software feel entitled to unpaid labor in perpetuity. It kind of sucks on both ends.
Rich Hickey wrote an essay titled "Open Source is Not About You" [0], where he states "As a user of something open source you are not thereby entitled to anything at all. You are not entitled to contribute. You are not entitled to features. You are not entitled to the attention of others. You are not entitled to having value attached to your complaints. You are not entitled to this explanation."
This is true. Unequivocally. What is also true is that OSS is also not about the contributors. They aren't owed anything by the consumers. They aren't entitled to any compensation, and they aren't entitled to others putting effort into making their contributions sustainable, helping them make a living wage, or alleviating burnout. We're all adults here, we can stop working on something if it's causing us pain or suffering. And we can freely fork a project if it's going in a direction we don't agree. That is the nature of open source. It's just a licensing model, which only exists because of certain laws. Otherwise, it's just a decision on what is public and private. Nothing more.
So if a project isn't going in the direction you want? Shut up and fork it. Not getting paid for your work? Find a way to monetise it or move on. Don't whine about either of these things on the internet.
0: https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...
If someone starts working on a project in college and 3-4 years later it blows up, they might now have a young family to consider. The person working on this thing that people love is no longer the same person who started it. In other words: life happened. Perspectives change.
It's also kind of pointless to deny human nature and we should at least try to assume best intentions; it's one thing to say all of the Rich Hickey stuff, and you might even believe it at the beginning of a project. X years later when someone raises $20M to build a company around the best parts of what you did and often forgets to mention you in the origin story... I suspect that would mess with you, and all of that stuff about entitlement would start to feel a bit thin. I don't begrudge people for those emotions, because it's not my place to do so and I see myself in their imperfect-ness.
Ultimately, I am optimistic that we will continue to establish better and better ways to create sustainable projects with maintainers that are compensated for their efforts.
I know you don't want to hear the obvious, but making your passion your paycheck is a one-way ticket to burnout. Even your heroes are still human.
The passion is the magic, and keeping it going requires contrast with something else as a day job. You really don't want to know the pain of losing both because they're one and the same. Burnout is not inevitable nor inherent to age or experience. It's actually the opposite if you set proper boundaries and get a grip.
That said, what's the deal with this topic coming up over and over? Is it just coming from young people too afraid of the broader working world, or is it something more sinister? Is this opinion being propagated by bad actors trying to take advantage of young people wanting to work this way (the "rockstar" delusion)?
That said, I do feel as though you're presenting a nuanced topic as a false dichotomy. There's lots of people who have figured out how to build something sustainable that blurs the line between occupation and enjoyment. We only tend to pathologize when talking about folks who haven't figured out how to make what they created into a flywheel.
The real trick is to figure out a viable structure to fund a lot more projects. Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy, even GitHub Sponsors are steps in a positive direction. Things really are better for builders than they were 20 years ago. That should be celebrated.
Yet, I think it's very likely that there's something just as disruptive (in a positive way) for OSS and makers in general as, for example, OnlyFans was for adult content that we just haven't stumbled on yet. So when I implore the person who wrote the OP to focus on solutions, this is broadly what I was hoping for.