Confreaks
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2019–2022
1:01:08 · 46K views · May 20, 2019
David Heinemeier Hansson's opening keynote at RailsConf 2019 argues against the expectation of payment for open source work, drawing on his experience releasing Rails. It also includes lighter asides about the industry.
It is the go-to reference in debates about whether open source maintainers are owed compensation, and commenters say it is worth watching even for non-Rails developers.
6 comments from Hacker News
> Given the amount of value open source provides to for-profit companies (with the open source maintainers rarely getting any reciprocal value from the companies that profit off them), why is it so alarming to think that these maintainers might think of a clever idea like this to make a couple thousand bucks? Because it's not a clever idea at all. First of all, open source software should stay true to what is is, which is free and open. If maintainers really wanted to profit off of this, they should have never made it free or at least offer some sort of pricing model that doesn't affect the essence of the project being open source (e.g., offering paid support), projects like Sidekiq having Sidekiq Pro. Users shouldn't be the one "paying" for open source software through the ads. This is making developers pay for the project indirectly. DHH latest keynote from Railsconf 2019 hits the nail in the coffin: this video
This reminds me of a lot of DHH's keynote about open source from last year: this video Even if you're not a Rails developer it's worth watching. From what I remember from the talk he is totally fine with and doesn't hold any grudges against Twitter, GitHub or Shopify making hundreds of millions of dollars off Ruby on Rails while getting zero compensation in return. Mainly because he open sourced Rails with no monetary / fame expectations and then worried about generating income from services around his open source project. I don't know Marak's history but I do know developing a good faker library definitely isn't trivial, so I'm sure his work is very much appreciated by the folks who use it but I think if you're doing open source work for money and other non-pure byproducts you're only setting your self up for disappointment.
It's an interesting idea but I wonder what will make this different than gittip from years ago, or gratipay, or Patreon, or just having a "donate" button in your README file. I guess I'm just skeptical in that this will change anything for the developers who are trying to make some type of income for their contributions. On a related note, DHH recorded a very nice keynote at Railsconf 2019 on expectations of payments in open source: this video
>25 dollars a month for solo projects >125 dollars a month per seat for companies That's.. irregular. I really have nothing nice to say about this model, so I'll just leave a really good conf talk here. The part around 8:30 is really pertinent to this situation. this video
> My pet peeve with README DHH had a funny line around Dropbox's "mission" in his 2019 railsconf video (linked to the direct point in the video): this video Dropbox's official mission as of 2019 was: "We're here to unleash the world's creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working" And DHH's remark was: "For fuck's sake Dropbox, you host files and make them appear on all of my computers" Funny enough since then they changed their mission to be "Our mission is to design a more enlightened way of working" based on [LINK] but it still doesn't come close to explaining what they do.