Tell HN: OSS spirit - you should only give if you feel compelled to make a gift

2 points by greatgib 3y ago ↗ HN

I was reading the following post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33904251 (About how and why the ending poem of Minecraft was freed)

And it is not possible to comment anymore.

And I saw the following paragraph inside that I think is philosophically incredible:

<< But you should only give if you feel compelled to make a gift. Not out of guilt, but because it would make you happier to do so than not (because my work has moved you, or because you think it is important); and only if you have the spare resources to do so. I will never think less of anyone for reading my work without paying. (Unless they are billionaires, in which case I might think a teeny-tiny bit less of them). A lot of us are broke, or need the money for something more urgent, and I totally get it. Your thoughtful attention is the gift I will always value most. >>

I think that it is really interesting to describe the inner spirit of Open Source / Free (Software) and why being a contributor.

I say this in opposition to the current trend of "this is free, but please donate or otherwise you are assholes and I will withdraw from open source" or "I made this software OSS but big companies are not paying, and so OSS doesn't work as I was expecting to make money, so here is now my custom license that I will say is OSS despite it not being so"

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ungravitomic 3y ago ↗

In a world without hunger and poverty, where everyone is looked after, I would have no objection to what you said. Sadly we don't live in that kind of world. It requires only a little imagination to think about genuine people, ignoring their own needs over the needs of the community for a long duration of their life time, only to realise that caring about the community above themselves doesn't really brings dinner to the table. Those frustrations are real and that anger is genuine. And it is not just the problem with open source. No one pays Google for search or Facebook for feed and many still complain about them while continuing to use them everyday.

Instead of dismissing these outrages, it is worthwhile to figure out why some of the smartest people on the planet whose work powers almost every digital service we touch, are totally powerless in our economic framework.