Søren Sjørup retweetledi
My project was adopted by 32% of enterprises. I have no idea who any of them are. I only know because Wiz (a business intelligence security company) published an aggregate report on it. We had spotty download statistics from Hugging Face but Mozilla didn't trust them, because we saw very few people engaging on GitHub and Discord. There's no way to monetize a community of dark matter developers you can't see.
People pay for things if you have leverage, it's scarce, or it solves their pain. In the 2000s when open source was immature and the world was unfamiliar with how it worked, there was an abundance of folks willing to pay for help solving the problems that caused. But as Linux and friends became more polished and perfect, Red Hat's business model dried up.
Software is infinitely copyable and requires zero effort to maintain, which makes it fundamentally at odds with having any kind of economy. There have been numerous efforts to make software not be the way that it is. For example, software is the only thing on Earth that can be both patented and copyrighted. Both of them failed. Folks would pirate. Patent trolls abused it. Open source rejected it.
Additionally folks have tried to regulate software, with things like FIPS standards, that need corporations to pay for experts for certifications but this was rejected by the industry too. You have little hope of making any income off that unless you're a government contractor and that means having the right connections. There definitely exists an economy for certifying and owning the risks of open source, but I don't think much of the money goes to the people who did the software work. That's just how their world operates, and I think it's a good thing that open source has helped them succed.
The most successful model for profiting off software to date, has been to never distribute it. You put it in the cloud and charge rent to anyone wanting to use it. It's the only way the software industry could survive, and everything which isn't that just became open source.
At the end of the day, open source simply isn't compatible with any economic model we know, because it's the absense of an economic model. Capitalism won't work. Socialism won't work. The only funding model I've seen work is the most ancient one, which is patronage. Before devices like patents existed ancient innovators would seek the sponsorship of the most powerful folks in their day. This is how people like Archimedes, Michelangelo, etc. got paid.
So I wish people wouldn't try to solve the open source monetization problem because there isn't one. Money is orthogonal and it should stay orthogonal. I think it should be a gentleman amateur activity rather than an institutionalized role people perform to feed their kids. Open source is the byproduct of curiosity and it's not the sort of thing you can industrialize. If you bring too much money into the equation, it creates liabilities, responsibilities, etc. that corrupt the motivations at endanger those of us who just want to be curious.
However this isn't just my wish, it's a warning. I've seen many folks try to solve this unsolvable problem and it makes them all half mad, and if they're smart then they give up before they go completely mad.
The solution for an open source developer looking for income, to me, has always seemed as clear as day. You either win the affection of a Medici, or you make your money doing something else.
One modern Medici is the European social safety net. Many open source developers hail from Europe since their economic policies ensure people have food and shelter, giving them the freedom to focus on anything, while taking away many freedoms to be enterprising.
In America, I was able to fund my open source work on Cosmopolitan Libc for many years with a very simple stock trading strategy, which was to invest 100% of my money in a tech company on Charleston Road. With financial markets giving me money for nothing, I felt it was fair that I should work on open source to kick back some of the benefits to the community.
I've actually been discovering new ways to redistribute wealth from Wall Street to the open source community. It makes me happy to have the opportunity to apply my work towards building a thing for me. I mean, you can't spend your whole career making the tools to other people do things without ever doing a thing yourself?
What's great is that financial markets are unbiased. It's surprisingly competitive giving things away for free. I've dealt with plenty of hate and harassment for sharing software with the world. But the NASDAQ won't hate me because of what I am or what it thinks I believe. All that matters is if I can write a cleverer algorithm. That's the thing open source is supposed to be about. The only tradeoff is I'll stop making money the moment I share my algorithm with everyone. So there's no glory or recognition in doing it. Just dollars.
In life, you can optimize for earning respect. You can optimize for money. You can even optimize for impact. But you can't maximize all of the above. The world just does not let it happen. But it'll give you a lot more of one if you're willing to give up the others. So anyone who's made the intentional tradeoff to max out one stat at the expense of the others, shouldn't feel unhappy they weren't given all three.
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