GitHub stars won’t pay your rent

GitHub stars won’t pay your rent ↦

Kitze shared this somewhat controversial story of Sizzy — from struggling open source project to successful product launch and charging money. It’s important to hear more stories like this because not all of the roads of open source are paved with gold.

Honestly, it felt kind of shitty to delete the repository and unpin the project from my profile. I hated the feeling but I had to shrug it off. I had to convince myself that I’m not doing anything wrong. The app was serving a lot of people for 2.5 years, and I rarely got any contributions. It was time to get real and think about what matters.

Oh, here we go… I’m gonna mention the M word and lose a ton of readers at this point. Money. Money matters.

Kitze also made an appearance on JS Party #72: LIVE from React Amsterdam.

Discussion

2019-08-13T17:11:24Z ago

@kitze this sounds like a story for folks to hear on Founders Talk ~> https://changelog.com/founderstalk

2019-08-13T17:34:00Z ago

Hey, thanks for submitting this. I’d be definitely interested to talk about it on the podcast.

2019-08-13T17:54:03Z ago

I like the idea that open-source does not necessarily mean “free AND easy to use for all”.
For example, developers should be able to read source code, contribute, and build freely applications.
Non-technical users won’t know how to build apps from source code, or run a web server.
Get money from easy to use bundles installable through available app stores, but keep projects open-source.

Another part is about companies:
Companies using open-source projects to develop critical services might want to pay for extended support too. However that approach has a drawback: companies won’t want to contract an open-source developer. They’d rather hire a developer to interface with the open-source projects. Hiring means ability to get someone fired, but you can’t get rid of the ones making the software you depend on…