Open source product is a marketing tool
vitonsky.net
Big tech companies invest a lot of effort to sell us the point that every good programmer must have their own open source project. Many programmers have open source side projects, but quite few of them can explain why they waste their time on it. As a result, they work for free, to make big tech rich. Actually, open source can't make money for programmers, but may be useful as a promotion tool for them.
  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    8 days ago

    Many programmers who start working on new personal open source projects wrongly assume that building something cool guarantees users, fans, and revenue will follow. Maybe it’s because they have seen too many cool stories of influencers on Twitter and believe it is true.

    It’s statements like these that remind me just how different the internet is for some people. I don’t think I’ve ever strayed far outside of the “look at this cool thing I made!” parts of the open source community. The idea of chasing fame and monetization isn’t really a thing in those circles, let alone “influencers” shilling content like that.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    8 days ago

    Many people enjoy programming, you know. I’ve got like ten reasonably-sized projects and I haven’t posted about them anywhere. Because I built them to scratch my own itch, both in terms of functionality I could use and the itch to build something, no matter what it is. I’m not wasting my time, because I’m doing something I enjoy.

    • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
      5·
      8 days ago

      Same here. Bold of anyone else to assume that I want to share my open source project. I don’t mind if someone finds it, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I promote it. Haha.

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        Yeah, after writing that comment, I was thinking, if I do promote it, that means there’s a certain expectation that I’ll integrate or implement functionality that others want. At that point, it becomes less of an egoistic thing. And I’ll be doing more communication and whatnot, therefore less programming.

        Maybe that’s the puzzle piece that OP is missing? If you don’t promote it, you have practically no extra work compared to developing it under a proprietary license. In fact, it often reduces the workload, if you can just post it publicly without having to secure the repo.
        And you don’t incur costs from giving it away either. So, if you make sure to only put in the work that you want to put in in the first place, you have no disadvantage from publishing it with an open-source license.

  • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
    71·
    8 days ago

    It is bold of the author to assume that anything I have open sourced is useful to anyone besides me, much less profitable to a corporation.

    Confused meme: You guys write useful code?

  • RommieDroid@programming.dev
    4·
    8 days ago

    Yep definitely, If you open source when you are a small team or individual a company will steal your code and, with their massive teams, wipe the floor with you. That is why I like what Plausible Analytics (Google Alternative) is doing, https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses there AGPL-3.0 licence scares big tech because by using code with it, you must open source all code using or related to the code you use, and they have the means to enforce that.