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If you release under MIT and you don't have a plan for public speaking, or consulting then you have no way to profit financially from that work. Used to be that you could offer hosted solutions, but if you become too high profile the Cloud providers will have a 'better' offering.

Too many of us still fall into this Calvinistic work ethic that if we just put in the work the rewards will appear through some ineffable mechanism we don't (think we) need to understand. I am currently fighting this battle with myself on several fronts. That shit is hard, especially when you don't have a lot of role models.



This. The other fallacy is that a work is not yet good enough to charge for it.


How often is that true though?


almost always true. The creator tends to be biased when judging value (of their own work).

Just because it was used a lot by many people because it's free, doesn't mean there's economic value. Charging for it is the only way to find out the economic value people assign to it.


The work is the reward.


We don't talk about the people who agree with you, because it doesn't come up.

Enjoyment of something can be substantially reduced when you find out someone else is taking all the credit for your work, however. And the transition can be a bit shocking. In many cases these are probably the people we are talking about, in other cases it's someone discovering that they don't have the luxury of doing this passion project for free anymore.




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