[bellowsgulch]

Nice work. It sounds like you’re young, so you should know that basically no one makes a living from sponsor-based open source software, and even industry luminaries make chump change from their work.

Notably, and I won’t name who, there have been recent blog articles posted here written by some industry leaders basically e-begging and it’s just the weirdest, saddest thing.

As someone else who works in this space and has released internationally used free and open source software, if you want to make money off of your work, sell it, and ignore the class of developers who get mad that you don’t give away all of your hard work for free.

You’ll talk to a whole lot of low class people like that on HN. Just a heads up from one experienced guy to a younger developer.

[qweqwe14]

Why the downvotes? All of this is correct

[mightyham]

Probably because they could easily have given the same advice without needing to call people on hn that encourage and support open source software "low-class".

[unclad5968]

> developers who get mad that you don’t give away all of your hard work for free

> encourage and support open source software

These two statements are not about the same group of people. It's reasonably safe to assume all people that get mad about proprietary software support OSS, but not all supporters of OSS get mad when people sell their software.

Everything I do I license as public domain. I would also encourage OP to sell his software if he'd like to make money from it, albeit maybe some different software.

[mightyham]

When the GP says "You’ll talk to a whole lot of low class people like that on HN", I interpret that as them disparaging basically anyone who supports open source, since I believe most people on HN are not overly emotional about the existence of closed source software.

[krapp]

>Why the downvotes?

Probably for calling open source developers sad low-class beggars. Also probably for the presumption that OP should be trying to hustle an income from a fork of an open source project that no one would be willing to pay for anyway, because there's no market for 2d renderers. They're all already free.

It isn't only crass, it's stupid and crass.

[isjsixjeidjei]

You know what’s actually sad?

Having a temper tantrum disguised as “advice from an experienced guy”.

My friend, I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but at the very least those “e-beggars” are honest, something you clearly cannot claim to be. Those you deem “lower class” than you have more honesty, sincerity and dignity in them than you do.