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Quick question: Would you have actually donated to Herdr if they were asking for donations? I don't think any of you would have, unless stated otherwise.

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.

5 comments

I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free. 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. Starting an open source project and using it to attract VC funding is one path.

> I don't love this framing among software developers. This framing is very transactional, when many of the authors are explicitly trying to make their work free.

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?

When I moved to herdr I specifically looked for a donate / purchase button on their website and it wasn't anywhere to be found (at least in a prominent location).

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

Yep. It's funny how much open source maximalists harm their own cause. Everything must be "free", ergo everything must be VC or big tech backed because free doesn't put bread on the table, so in the end devs just put more power in the hands of corporations and less power in the hands of themselves and other independent devs/small businesses, and then have the gall to complain when everything gets enshittified.

Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too? This status quo is fine.

> Are you lamenting the death of proprietary UNIX and paid compilers, too?

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.

> if the users would like to see it maintained for a long time, they would donate $$$.

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?

> That's a bad-faith dilemma, you know it.

No it isn't, it is the reality. It's perfectly fine for you to say you don't pay for your tools, but don't be surprised to see them funded by VCs instead of donations from multiple backers if it is useful enough.

> 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.

You understand both can rot without enough donations / backers? There are free (as in libre) software that has tens or hundreds of backers (Mastodon, ffmpeg, curl, OBS and Blender) and they are not VC backed.

Even when there is a FLOSS version of Herdr, it will run into the same funding issues (Herdr was FLOSS software). What we do know is that open source maintainers do not get paid enough for maintaining their projects [0] [1].

So the smaller but useful popular projects usually running on less backers, are more likely to spin-off and turn to VC funding anyway.

> Everyone is happier with this arrangement, you're one of the only ones fulminating at the outcome.

Except for the lead developer / maintainer.

> 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?

You seem to be still confused with was was "free" here. He already released the software as libre software, but it is the maintenance of the software that is never free. There are already examples of FLOSS software that has hundreds of backers, even when it is released for $0.

Again, another thing HNers don't seem to understand or care about.

[1] https://www.sonarsource.com/open-source-maintainer-survey-20...

[0] https://assets-eu-01.kc-usercontent.com/ef593040-b591-0198-9...

I actually donate to a bunch of tools I use.