They do it for free

Exposure

There has been this long standing meme about how freelance artists always have to deal with people not wanting to pay them with money but rather with “exposure”. The idea being that crediting the artist for something they did when using the result would somehow attract actual paying customers. So instead of paying for advertisement you work for someone and then they advertise you in return. While this in theory doesn’t sound completely stupid it can only really work if it is being offered by someone who would expose the art to a new large audience of potential customers. It doesn’t need to be said that this is hardly ever the case and whenever it actually is the person that is trying to do this instead of paying most likely has more than enough money to do just that. Since this has been around for so long it obviously seems to be somewhat of a real problem and people also seem to feel a decent amount of sympathy for artists who have to deal with it.

I am obviously is not trying to belittle or question this problem, since I am not an artist and therefore have no experience with it. This is about something similar that apparently very few seem to care about, but this might just be my own bias. I’ve had to deal with this myself and have thought about writing something related to this, but like a lot of other stuff I’ve been putting it off for a while. That is until recently when I saw it happen to someone else. I’ll give a explanation to the situation I came across, which you might or might not want to read. There’s a tl;dr at the end if it gets too boring.

Fan mail

For those unfamiliar there’s a piece of software called OBS Studio which over the past ten years has become the de facto standard for recording and streaming anything from games to live events of any kind. It’s a splendid piece of software freely available to everyone without any of the restrictions of proprietary software. Alongside Blender it is one of the success stories of free software not only becoming a viable alternative but in many ways far exceeding what the proprietary and expensive competition has to offer.

While the program offers basically everything that most people would want, there are still plenty of features that it is missing. Because the source code is freely available and the program is built in a modular way, anyone who wants to can publish add-ons for OBS Studio. Because it is licensed under the GPL all of those add-ons that directly link with it have to also be licensed under a compatible license and therefore have to make their source code available. One of the more popular add-ons is called StreamFX. It’s a plugin that adds a bunch of features and as the name suggests a lot of effects. It’s been in development for quite a while and with that has become pretty popular.

I don’t really create any videos or streams so I don’t care about the plugin itself, but recently I came across StreamFX and the reviews of the plugin and saw that a lot of them were mainly negative, which surprised me a bit. Here are some excerpts:

You can also check out an archive of the review page here. The developer responded to some of the reviews trying to do damage control, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. There’s also an accompanying forum thread where you can find more of the same. You can read the last three pages here:

• https://archive.is/hDOmD
• https://archive.is/6Utbl
• https://archive.is/zFMCM

I think the basic idea comes across: People are mad. I’m not going to do a deep dive to find out what happened, because even I don’t care enough about this, but this is what I gathered from the forum thread:

• The last stable release of the plugin does not work with the last two major versions of OBS
• The versions that do work are not stable
• The developer has decided to not make unstable releases publicly available in binary form, but rather offer them only to Patreon supporters
• Hoes mad

So what does this actually mean? There is no GPL violation because the source code for all versions, including the latest ones is still publicly available to everyone. The only difference is that you can’t get the compiled plugin, i.e. the files you want for actually using the plugin, are no longer publicly available. Anyone who wants can compile the plugin from source. In fact anyone who wants could fork the plugin and let the CI automatically build the latest release. Most people however will not do that because they have no clue how that works. So they do the next best thing and yell at the developer.

Now before I go into this a bit further I just want to make it clear that I have no clue who the developer is. From what I’ve heard there have been run ins with him at least once before and if his website is any indication he seems to be a bit of a retard. There also have been accusations that he’s making around 8000 dollars off of Patreon, which is hard to verify. Here’s what graphtreon.com currently reports for his page:

Now as it seem he has stopped displaying publicly how much he earns (green bars), but it’s still visible how many patrons he has. His estimate earnings are between 1K to 10K, so a very wide margin. October of last year is the last time we have publicly available earnings which were 179$ per month or just a bit over two dollars per patron. As you can see there’s a steep increase at the beginning of this year which represents the switch to what people are calling a “paywall”. So if we assume that he’s still roughly getting two dollars per patron he would now be earning 2000$ dollars. The available tiers on patreon are:

• 1.50$/month
  • Credits entry in all (active) Projects
• 10.50$/month
  • (Early-)Access to Supporter exclusive releases and projects
  • Access to the Supporter exclusive Discord
• 26$/month
  • 1 Hour of 1-on-1 Support for (active) projects

Obviously the higher tiers include the benefits of the previous tiers. Thanks to archive.org (even though they are spineless) we can see how the tiers looked in the past. At the end of 2020 there were only two tiers, with the highest being at 6$/month, at the beginning of 2022 there were three tiers with the highest being roughly the same. So with that in mind the assumption that each patron only gives two dollars is a bit on the low end, most of the new supporters are probably only here for the second tier. If most of the one thousand patrons want the second tier he would easily get a few thousand dollars a month. Patreon obviously takes a cut and then there’s still taxes. Ultimately this is not really what this is about. The graphs show that the model seems to be working for him despite the negative backlash.

Get to the point ya dumb fuck

Now that I’ve bored you enough with some stupid drama about a piece of software that you most likely have never heard about I can get to what I was actually trying to say. While people usually have a lot of sympathy for artists it appears that that same sympathy does not seem to exist for software developers. They’re just retarded code monkeys who work in the background. Things working is the baseline and if they stop working people get mad. Talking to developers also doesn’t work so your best bet is to just yell at them and insult them, they deserve it anyways. When that ultimately doesn’t yield any results it just confirms your view of them and you can move on.

People love free shit and the moment they don’t get it anymore they’ll chimp out. It’d be nice if that wouldn’t be the case. That developers work on free software isn’t something people should take for granted and when people lash out like this it only makes it easier for a developer to stick to working on proprietary stuff where they’ll at least get a decent paycheck and most of the time don’t even have to deal with half the bullshit that they get when working on free software.

I know that the people being retarded assholes are a minority and that there’s usually a lot of people who just use the software without any major issues from whom you never hear anything as a developer. The problem just is that not only do people expect that developers dedicate their time to development and spoon feeding idiots who can’t read instructions, but they also demand that they do it for free, because if you dare ask for money for something as simple as binary pre-release builds, that anyone with two brain cells to rub together could get their hands on, you’ll get even more shit to deal with.

Charging for support and binary builds are one of few viable ways of monetizing free software other than just relying on the goodwill of people. The latter might work for OBS or Blender, but for smaller projects it doesn’t seem to work out so well. It doesn’t seem so far fetched for someone to offer some extra benefits for money after spending years on a project that also seems to get a fair bit of use.

Now I want to be clear that I find 10$/month for binary builds a bit steep. You can just donate 10$, take the build and then cancel the recurring payment or build the plugin from source. The latter has already been done by others, so if you know how to use Github you could also just download their builds. I personally don’t have an issue with working on projects where I only take donations. This always allows me to drop the entire thing whenever I want. Getting payment turns the projects into work for me, which I don’t want. I don’t want to owe anything to anyone and first and foremost I wan to be able to tell anyone that misbehaves to just fuck off without worrying about losing money. Generally that kind of approach should probably become more widespread. It would keep idiotic leeches away and encourage people to put more effort into their bug reports. There’s a reason why Linus was famous for his rough tone on the Linux mailing list.

TL;DR: Ultimately I just think that if you want free software to succeed you’ll have to treat developers with respect and cut them some slack, they might be spergs, but they still don’t like being chewed out. They have to wade through a decent amount of figurative shit and to add insult to injury they - for some reason - do it for free.

Edit: After watching the situation a little more I can sympathise with the reaction of the users a bit more. As I’ve stated before, I am aware that the developer is a bit of a retard to say the least. For a while there was an installer for the last stable release of the plugin, so everyone could still use the plugin just fine albeit only on an older version of obs. Now he has removed the installer for that version, claiming that someone submitted code to the repository that wasn’t GPL licensed. He also stated that he replaced the code with a GPL compliant version, but never offered a new installer afterwards. I’ll just throw out some speculation that this is just a convenient way for him to remove the last useable public build for the plugin. This does two (technically three) things:

1. Reduce the amount of support requests from people who aren’t patreon members
2. Make even more people support him on patreon
3. (rightfully) piss off people even more

On top of all of that there have been basically no commits to the public repository for the plugin, even though he claims that the new amount of support from patreon members has greatly helped him, which is pretty strange.