Posted by collinmanderson 13 hours ago
Would something like this qualify:
So this is another reason why developers do not pay for their tools and instead the developers of these tools go to VCs anyway. It's not the fault of the author, but most of the users (developers themselves) always want their tools for free at $0.
You have to pay and support the tools you use or else the VCs will do it for you so you can't complain when scenarios like this keep happening.
This software was "free" (as in libre) and costed $0 and until now, it was licensed under AGPL 3. But contrary to one common misbelief in open source and free software, the maintenance is not free at all.
> The best thing a software dev can do is donate some of their time to do more open source development, and in that way we all benefit from having more and better open source tools. If someone wants to exchange code for money there are plenty of avenues to do that.
In the case of this project which took off, why would you expect the maintainer to work on the project for free?
I gladly donate / pay subscriptions to software I use regularly... but the company has a responsibility to make it obvious on how to do so
You are straw-manning a point no-one made. Herdr is open source and if the users would like to see it maintained for a long time, they would donate $$$. Clearly the donations were no-where enough and raising money was.
The point is maintaining open source projects for free is NOT sustainable and most HNers in this thread clearly struggle with not understanding that.
> This status quo is fine.
Seems like you would want him to work for free, then wait until the author becomes demotivated and then he abandons the project entirely and we'll see a new post about why Herdr got abandoned.
That's a bad-faith dilemma, you know it. The users can want to see it maintained without necessarily having the money, userbase or motivation to sponsor the lead dev. It's not criminal to have a tight pocketbook, and that's why free devtools succeed while paid ones rot. There will be always be a FOSS version of Herdr, and thanks to vibe coding it will probably retain feature parity with the paid version.
Everyone is happier with this arrangement, you're one of the only ones fulminating at the outcome.
> Seems like you would want him to work for free
Clearly he's content releasing the software for free. Let me guess, you're going to complain that the free market "forced" him to work without pay?