[hrbf]

GitHub stars are a useless metric. It’s basically a bookmark count. If there was any correlation between them and donations, my combined projects of 35k+ stars should make me at least a couple of bucks each month.

Instead, lifetime total of ~7 years is ~300 EUR, which includes donations to a NGO I forwarded, which account for most of it.

Most people will not pay voluntarily for something they can get for free. That’s just how it is.

[collaborative]

Sadly, it's now got to the point where people will downvote you for charging anything more than 0 and, if possible, they will write 1 star reviews in caps DON'T DOWNLOAD, IT'S NOT FREE!!

[hrbf]

You know, let them. Whatever I decide to share with the world, I do for reasons of giving back. If some grab, run and foul-mouth, that’s their issue.

The main idea of free culture is building on each other, not maximum extractive consumption. I believe the idea to be further ahead than our economic systems and accompanying incentives though.

[collaborative]

I also am a fan of showing the other cheek but have to admit this does get me down from time to time .. makes me feel like a vending machine with no coin slots. Only hope is regulation of gate keepers at this point

[ilyt]

well, most of the project use tens if not hundreds other project's open source code and also do not donate to them

[hrbf]

What about those self-contained ones like mine?

[Jorengarenar]

Unless it's rigidly self-hosted compiler for your own language, I have a feeling it still depends on other projects a lot.

[hrbf]

One of it is, in fact, a static document, basically just a very large README.md file chock full of information. It could be a book.

[Jorengarenar]

I don't think projects comparable to books can be at the same time comparable to software

[hrbf]

I thought we were discussing GitHub stars' correlation (or lack thereof) to donations. I don't see how usefulness for many people should be limited to software only. Anyway, I've said what I wanted to say.