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by enitihas 2238 days ago
> Same goes for Open Source software with donation jars.

But no open source software is being sustainably developed on contributions form donation jars. There might be 1-2 exceptions, but most open source projects make pennies from donations.
2 comments
zozbot234 2238 days ago
The Blender open source project was started entirely from voluntary donations, and it gets very sizeable contributions to this day. The same applies to many other major projects. Even development of the Linux kernel itself and closely-related projects is largely funded via voluntary contributions to the Linux Foundation.
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ghaff 2238 days ago
>Even development of the Linux kernel itself and closely-related projects is largely funded via voluntary contributions to the Linux Foundation.

Development of the Linux kernel is largely funded by companies paying for developers to work on it (and by paying membership fees to the Linux Foundation to cover professional LF salaries like Linus').

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diggan 2238 days ago
I think the same goes for technical books. I don't have any source available for this but remember reading blog posts from authors that wrote; compared to the time spent on writing a book, the earnings doesn't justify writing the book for just the income. Rather, you do it for all the side-effects (sans income) of writing a book, exposure and the alike.

Not sure there are people who survive on only writing technical books, usually they have another job and do the book on the side of other things. At least as far as I can gather.

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ghaff 2238 days ago
I think that's correct about technical books for the most part. Certainly the case with me. Writing the books has been very valuable career-wise. But the money is trivial.

The difference with open source projects is that there are a lot of project leaders who in my experience get sucked into an ongoing full-time role for which they receive very little money. Such a role can lead to a good job of course. But my sense is that there are more people doing a full-timeish largely unpaid gig writing software/managing a project than in the case of technical books--which people are more likely to do as a one-off project that they may even do partly on work time.

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