this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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I think the reason so many new software projects have authors asking for donations is the barrier to writing software is now incredibly low. In the 90s you’d have to have a pretty nice PC, a good dial up plan, and writing software was much more of a hobby unless you were a pro. Nowadays internet access is ubiquitous, and with the tooling and wealth of resources available anyone can write good open source software. Often those people legitimately could use a donation to help fund their free time work. That and the open source projects that are just used as dependencies for corporate projects are all too common. I absolutely blame the system where people need more money to get by rather than thinking open source software devs are more greedy nowadays
lol ok maybe not anyone
I hadn’t really been coming at it from that perspective, but your post got me thinking. I’ve been in the business one way or another since then in multiple capacities - hobbyist, military, government, academia, and commercial.
Back in the 70s, there was barely a major called “computer science” at most colleges. Most people writing software were largely self-taught, and software companies were a couple of dozen people. Going into the 80s, as the industry expanded, more computers were being sold (mid-sized and mainframes, with a small but growing PC market. Being a programmer would give you a solid middle class career. These were the days when Donald Knuth wrote the cost complete and comprehensive software for laying out text and equations available (TeX, now used via LaTeX) because such a thing wasn’t available and he wanted it to be. He was a professor at Stanford, meaning he had a salary already, so he just released it for free. Those were the days when people argued that software couldn’t be copyrighted because any piece of software is really just a mathematical equation, and you cannot copyright math. Anyway, many of the people writing software had a day job, “programmers” included a large proportion of people who wrote COBOL in tiny chunks for not very much money. There was a large chunk of people whose greatest dream was getting paid to do software for a living, and it was seen kind of people whose dream it was to be a professional librarian. Very few were in it for the money.
It all took off in the mid-late 90s when the industry got financialized. Fast forward to today, and no one on my team has less than a six figure salary, I make more than most MDs, and my bosses make far more than that. Because of our age demographic, few if any of them have even a bachelor’s degree, much less one in computer science. It was really that 90s transition when it started to be about money.
But I wouldn’t use the word greedy. The industry just changed, and so did the social relationships. I still have nostalgia for the days when it was more like Wargames and Real Genius than like Black Mirror, but I would never say it’s a result of the folks writing an app that want to do it for a living on their own terms. I think people like Christian Sellig (the author of Reddit client Apollo) represents the best of that earlier mindset, and I sincerely hope he made fuck-you money off of his app before spez shut him down. If anything, it’s people like Spez who are at fault.
Anyway, that was just a rant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.