alt Hacker NewsI'm in no way an expert, but IMO there is a major misconception in the free-ish software community that profit should be at most secondary to offering a fair and as good as sustainably possible product.
I strongly disagree with this. IMO developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible within the rules they think that should be followed (and those that are mandatory ofc).
Profit is not only by far the strongest motivating factor for others to adopt your set of rules, but also a guarantee to your community that the product will still be around in a few years and not turn into a rug pull because its developer is burned out after working 80 hour weeks for months or even years for less than minimum wage. It is also something you can trade for your values, e.g. offering great working conditions to your employees or funding projects or lobbying for laws you think will benefit society.
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This is a really interesting view, but I'm not sure I agree. So many amazing projects are truly free without the goal of profit yet their maintainers still do amazing work. I feel like part of the reason this works is because often the load is split between several maintainers (of which I hope to onboard soon, and have one or two offers already from people to contribute) and also the fact it's genuinely something enjoyable to work on (of course, to the extent it's not too stressful and overworked).
Profit is fine.
Profit from advertising is highly corrosive and corrupts everyone it touches (social networks, your tube, search etc etc).
There’s part of this that I agree to - I tend to disagree with most anti-capitalist (or anti-profit) sentiment. However, I disagree that builders “owe” anyone anything, and I strongly disagree with goal of as much profit “as possible”.
I miss the days when someone would make a service where the user would benefit as much as possible and the creator got compensated fairly. I feel like that system worked for hundreds of years. It’s only in the last couple decades that we’ve made this obligation for maximal profits - something that I personally hold responsible for all the mass enshittification going on these days.
It depends what you mean by "profit". If you mean "the developers/maintainers can pay the bills of a modest lifestyle", then yes, I think that's important. But often "profit" is used to refer to the idea of unlimited upside, that there are stocks, that the project will be sold, that some kind of sizable windfall is expected, etc. And that I think is to be avoided.
> developers of free-ish as in freedom products OWE it, not only to themselves, but their community to be as profitable as possible
Wikipedia seems to do just fine without.
Commercializing a product is a whole other field, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be good at that, and not reasonable to expect developers to all take on a second job of commercializing their hobby projects.
Why don't YOU commercialize your fork of their service, and use the proceeds to hire developers to maintain the code? That would be infinitely more useful than armchair criticism of others.