Not personally, but twice in my career I’ve been part of interview loops with people who had created semi-famous open source projects. Projects that you’ve heard of if you read a lot of HN, but not so critical that you couldn’t think of another alternative if it disappeared.
Both of them expressed regret for not commercializing it. The weird part for me, as the interviewer, was hearing them imagine how wealthy they’d be if they had commercialized it instead of releasing it as open source, entirely neglecting the fact that the projects became popular because they were open source.
I imagine this is the thought process behind the various projects that try to go closed-source and commercial after a certain point.
The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
I can see why people have these fantasies. Huge businesses have been built on open source code bases.
Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
The place where I disagree with your take is that commercialization and open source popularity are not mutually exclusive at all. The FSF makes this quite clear: open source is 100% compatible with charging money for some kind of service or for the convenience of a binary or something like that.
Software freedom is really about availability of the source code and your right to modify and distribute your modifications, not free as in beer freedom.
Commercializing it doesn’t have to mean bleeding customers dry, it can be something where most people are not paying a dime and are enjoying a fully open source experience. I think nginx plus is a good example of that sort of model. I have never met anyone who pays for nginx but there’s some big companies with big company problems that do.
Another example is Discourse forums. You can pay for support and hosting.
> The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
‘Business owner’ in the sense of owning stock, sure.
Save 10–20% of your income. Invest it in index funds (we can argue about which particular indices). Work for a few decades. Retire wealthy.
Then bequeath that wealth to your heirs when you die, giving them a leg up on this whole process.
> Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
The employer takes the risk that the software will have no benefit at all. We get paid no matter what. I like that trade. I’ll invest in a diversified market index rather than my single program, thank you very much.
People working in finance aren't in a good place to disagree. They haven't escaped wage slavery, even if they technically have the ability to. The funny thing about really high paying jobs is that people tend to get so wrapped up in them they forget to free themselves from it.
> Eh, how is that different from going into business by yourself?
Pedantically, there is unlikely to be a wage. But even if we use the term loosely, the type of scalable business described usually do not make any money until it is sold, so you are effectively forced out as soon as it is possible.
A highly paid wage slave may technically be able to leave just as quickly, but in practice the golden handcuffs are often very strong. It is telling that the phrase used was "People working in finance" rather than "People who briefly worked in finance".
>The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
Another way: marry someone rich. Understandable that it did not occur to you or most people here, because most here are likely to be the XY chromosomal variety.
All businesses are hard, but I don't think selling support is especially hard for one. The above two are how x264 development was funded, but it's also how Klara works for BSD and Igalia for web browsers.
Thing is the original owner has to have fast paced development and add new features or else people would stick to the open source version. So its not just free publicity
Society is bait and switch. You have to pay for rent and food/necessities or you’ll die/rot on the street while every politically illiterate person and the structures and institutions of society exclaim how amazing and freedom loving liberal democracy and capitalism is
Possibly also their way if boasting, eg, "look this thing I did is so great I could be rich off of it!" When they may mean it much less in the way of regret than "hey, I do very valuable work, you should hire me"
Both of them expressed regret for not commercializing it. The weird part for me, as the interviewer, was hearing them imagine how wealthy they’d be if they had commercialized it instead of releasing it as open source, entirely neglecting the fact that the projects became popular because they were open source.
I imagine this is the thought process behind the various projects that try to go closed-source and commercial after a certain point.