I remember, years ago, people at Metrowerks talking about how people don’t pay for IDEs anymore, after they had such success with their CodeWarrior IDE. This was before Apple started giving away the XCode IDE. Only Microsoft seems to be able to sell developer tools as a profit center, and I think even that is an eroding business for them.

Wow, what a sad commentary on where we’re at to have Kent Beck write this. I’d love to say I’m shocked, but I’m not. Have seen the corporate world going this direction for a very long time. You did well to say no.

Funny thing though, this reminded me of one of the experiments in Dan Ariely’s book “Predictably Irrational”. He experimented with two different classes he was teaching. One group he asked how much they would pay for him to speak. Another group he asked how much he would need to pay his students to show up. The results were fascinating. If you haven’t read it, I would suggest you do. Anyone who’s in business for themselves should, really.

Let’s drink to better days.
Cheers.

Thank you for the efforts you’ve put into the development community. You have indirectly affected the way I think and that’s had a very positive impact on myself and the people I come in contact with.

I believe in the idea that the the greatest value might not come from what you do right now, but what you can do in the future. Let me explain with a short example:

If you produced JUnit Max and gave it away, yes more people would use it and there could be more value created now. But if in doing so, you burned yourself enough to leave the industry in 3 years, how much future value has been lost?

So maybe holding back some value is a good thing, if it means you will be producing value over a longer period of time. Scarcity also tends to change people’s behavior and the value they percieve. Maybe selling JUnit Max is actually creating more value than giving it away?

Just a couple of thoughts. I’m a very active Open Source developer so I battle with this idea a lot.

As some online newspapers are experiencing these days, it may be difficult to convince people to pay for something that they are used to get for free. Good luck!

Hello,

I’m not sure I can comment on your frustration since my age equals the total years you are applying this strategy of yours (and I’m unfamiliar with Critical Path). Anyway, I hope you land safely. And, btw, I would love to hear more about these explorations on software design.

Cheers,
Thiago Silva

InfoQ recently ran the video of a talk I gave about Responsive Design. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/responsive-design

Maybe it doesn’t make sense to try to charge for something valuable that someone else is willing to give away. The problem is that writing developer tools is far and away the most valuable thing I do as a programmer. Then we’re back to the monkey scenario–what to grab next?

A touching and compelling story.

My experience generally is that I gain by giving and that this principle is a way of life. To be honest I honor it more in the breach than the observance … but when followed I am invariably rewarded in wonderful and unexpected ways.

On the other hand, I could not take a “vow” such as yours. I’d gag on it. I’m reminded of the poem by Kabir:

“The spiritual athlete … sits inside the shrine room all day
so that God has to go out and praise the rocks …

“he shaves his skull
puts his robe in an orange vat,
reads the Bhagavad Gita
and becomes a terrific talker.

“Kabir says,
actually you are going in herds
to the country of death
bound
hand and foot.”

This, to my mind, is the offense commited by Richard Stallman … not by you. But it should give you pause … and may give you some peace.

Be fair to yourself and cut yourself some slack. We are talking about programming tools and practices here. There is only so much “good” that can be done on that plane of existence; it’s not on a par with banishing hunger and disease. In this respect you do “have an overinflated sense of the value of your ideas”.

Moreover, you harm no one by asking just payment sometimes and giving it away at others … even the same lecture. Choose as circumstance strikes you. Rejoice in the seeming arbitrariness of your decision. Trust that you will recognize those who need and cannot afford your help.

This, too, has always worked for you.

I feel exactly the same. Everybody wants everything for free!
Especially in Development Tools…

Is my work not valuable?
Does my bread baker will give me some bread free?

People even do not thanks me for the work we do for them. And if something does not fit their mind… they complain!

What’s this world?

IMHO, you are doing the right thing, and your questioning of “reality” is very apropos. To be enslaved by perpetuating the fake reality of Giganto Corp not paying you for your value, yet — to your point — spend a gazillion manhours, is irrational.

As I read of the offer to broadcast it out to the many… my first reaction was to think “Oh my… that will cause a lot more work on Kent’s part.”

You are an incredibly gifted and giving individual. Make no mistake. And yes, giving of your own volition is virtuous and is always a good thing. Giving at the behest of others is not. You get to choose to whom and when and what you donate — not Giganto Corp (or the Govt). It *is* that simple.

Too much of what is going on all around us today is precisely that sort of thing. Irrational. Not to get off on a tangent, but as an illustration: Were it possible, I am sure the US Congress would tax the air we breath and would pass a law to lessen the magnitude of the gravity to save weight. We have been waging a war on poverty for 40 years with untold billions spent, yet no appreciable difference met. Cynically I consider it an enslaved voting block given just enough to keep them in shackles with no hope of escape. A sin against humanity, IMHO. But I digress…

For too long, too many remain silent when faced with obvious irrational behavior, decisions, and commentary. But not you!

Maybe you just reached a breaking point… maybe this was the final straw. Something that had been gnawing away at your subconscious finally crystallized. The veil of deception was lowered long enough for you to glimpse the ugly reality for what it was. Then it hit you with full fury. You probably could barely believe the manner in which Giganto Corp behaved — they may have even been smug about it.

I say “Bravo Kent!”

Swing from the trees. Let go. Another branch will appear. You will not fall. Your exercising the greatest gift of all — using your mind!

Thanks for sharing such deep feelings. There is much love for you out here in the wilderness.

Yea, there’s not much money in books and tools. I suppose there’s something to be said for being the most notable and paradigm shifting personality of our current decade though.

Best wishes on the “value” aka money thing.

I appreciate the opportunities that being “notable” and “paradigm shifting” have brought. I have met interesting people, taken my family to many parts of the world, and worked on some interesting problems. However, I’d swap wealthy obscurity for penurious fame in a second. To be frank, though, I have worked on fame a lot harder than I’ve worked on wealth. Perhaps I just have a case of regret about that.

I agree with the person above who noted that you’re going to produce far less value if you burn out or starve than you will if you make some money. It seems like a cheat on your vow, but it’s really just adding a bit of practical perspective to it. Once you’ve got enough to keep from starving, you’re more free to immediately apply your vow.

Consider it like charity: I give to the Red Cross, but I didn’t sell everything I owned in my 20s and donate the entire proceeds to them. And because I didn’t, they can be assured of much more from me long term than they would had I done so.

I get a lot of benefit from giving talks to people. When people are in the same room as me, I get direct feedback from them. This gives me feedback about my ideas and also helps me make sure I’m not misunderstood. It is much harder to give a talk that will be recorded or broadcast remotely, because it will be much easier for things to be taken out of context. Recording it also takes something which is inherently communal and reciprocal and turns it into a commodity.

I once gave a talk to a big corporation for $3,000. They wanted to video tape it and I said that would be an additional $5,000. They paid.

It sounds to me like you are tired of having people regard you based on marginal effort (e.g. the time it takes to give a talk vs. the time it talks to have something to talk about) and without regard to value. Also you seem to be falling into the trap of thinking people will see you as self-important just because you want the value you deliver to be duly recognized.

Part of your problem is that your value is related to your personality and values, and these make you a great programmer but perhaps not a great negotiator. Maybe you need a manager. Or a pair of glasses that you can put on, like Lucille Ball, when you need to act like one.

“JUnit Max was a crack in my vow. Making it free would benefit more people.”

Interesting assertion, but not necessarily true. Price affects perception of value (and thus affects utilization/benefit). Last year I taught a 13 week class on managing personal finances. The cost of the materials for the class was $100. But for two couples, the fee was waived. Both couples stopped attending class before we were half way through. They did not benefit from the class, they wasted my time and I strongly suspect that they discouraged the other class participants by bailing.

“[P]eople in this market use any price at all as a reason not to gain value from a piece of software.”

So what if they do? Write compelling software that overcomes their excuse. Other people *are* making money on software development tools. And software in general.

This blog post talks about two small software businesses. The first is a guy who wrote a Bingo Card generator and is just about to bring in enough income to match his job. (He works in Japan and therefore has a ridiculously low salary, but that is another story.) The second is two guys in Italy that wrote a UI mockup tool that is now bringing in so much cash that they are embarrassed to talk about it.

http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/too-small-to-fail-how-startups-can-grow-in-recessions.html

—-

It may well be the case that no one will pay you to talk. So simply make the decision on whether or not you want to continue to talk for free. You’ve made it abundantly clear that what you really want to do is get paid for writing software development tools. Focus on that. Don’t stress about the lack of speaking-related income. Avoid coupling the two.

I stumbled across–and watched and loved–your “Ease At Work” video a few months back. At one point you said (approximately) “We are afraid that a smart, talented group of people can’t come up with something that people will want to buy? What sense does that make?” I am currently in much the same situation as you are and I *do sympathize* with your emotional reaction. But it doesn’t really make any sense for you (or me) to believe that you (or I) are incapable of creating something that people would be willing to pay for.

—-

Thank you for all that you have given to us as a community. I have personally benefitted from your contributions (both free and fee-d). And I expect to benefit even more as I put your insights into practice.

I wish you Peace. Fear is the mind killer.

Some big companies are willing to pay their own employees to work on development tools when it makes sense to them, sometimes even if they’re open source. I think it has to do with being able to set the agenda.

Kent,

Your mistake is in undervaluing your time. There is a cost for you to give this talk to megacorp or whoever: it costs you (1) preparation time, (2) travel time, (3) presentation time, (4) family time, and (5) personal time, plus the additional opportunity cost of all the other things you could be doing with that time (besides personal and family time).

So don’t think that you’ve shattered a vow, instead realize that your time has value, and that value must be part of the balanced equation. The vow you made was, frankly, naive in the extreme, and based on some fairly faulty assumptions about how the world works.

Rejoice that you have gained wisdom on this day.

And raise the price of JUnitMax while you’re at it. A product that does not generate sufficient revenue is not a sound business investment.

Kent,

Open source software redraws the map for all of us. Of course we still want effort to be put into new development, and those developers have to eat.

Are the tools of the future written solely in spare time or by students tired of studying maths?

Partially. But I think the model where a company pays for someone developing OSS will be more common. And not only companies, why not organizations and even governments..? It lies in the public interest to develop general stuff. Google-friday spread to other companies as “OSS friday” maybe?

The “bucks” will be at close-to-business software development, no doubt about it. The more general the software, the less incentive for a small far-from-general company to develop it (even if they indeed need tools to do things).

And I don’t think it really has to do that much with being free; it has to do with quality. OSS developer tools are of higher quality, since everybody and anybody has the ability to patch and discuss with the developers. For example, there are really basic bugs in Visual Studio 2008 that has been there since 2005. Eclipse bugs do not live that long.

Perhaps you’re looking at a slightly more sophisticated version of the same vow.

In the long term, you’re only going to create value for the greater number of people *if* you can put food on the table for yourself and your lovely big family. So, what is needed is to secure some kind of revenue while you create value.

For most people, the arrangement is a quid pro quo: I create value, for which I am paid money. But that’s not a necessary or even necessarily desirable feature. What matters is that you have some source of revenue, and simultaneously (that being your goal) that you create value for the greater number.

Thinking of it that way has freed up options for me. It made me better able to set a workable price for my time when I went into freelance consulting. It’s helping me now as I try to redefine my job, seeking, in essence, corporate sponsorship to let me focus on activities I’m already doing for free.

Saying “no” this once is only going to delay your ideas reaching more people, not kill those ideas for ever. It’s one step in a negotiation, the end state of which – if you’re successful at negotiation – will include your creating value for the greater number *while* securing revenue.

Hi Kent,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and allowing us to be a part of them.

Just after reading your post I read this post by Steve Pavlina… You can call it a synchronicity

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2009/06/the-afternoon-of-life/

–
Regards
Parag

One thing I’d like to clarify is that I don’t have trouble saying “no” in general. What was different in this case is that I said “no” when there was absolutely no additional cost to me. I was prepared to give the talk for the value of the feedback (although I think the talk would be worth more than that to the client). That seemed like a fair exchange, at least in today’s weird market. However when they asked for more value that wasn’t going to cost me anything extra, that’s when I crossed my own line. I’ve hitherto always delighted in creating more value at no additional cost to me (Fuller’s “more with lessing”).

What I don’t like about the situation is that I can’t see how producing less value is going to bring me any revenue. I just got tired of not receiving value for value and created scarcity out of frustration. That still doesn’t seem “right” to me. It’s not what I want to be about. OTOH, I’m still not getting paid for the presentation, so it didn’t fix anything. So I’m left with one less principle and still no business.

Kent, I owe a lot of the success of my teams and my own career to you generously spending time answering my questions and encouraging my work years ago. I couldn’t do anything to return that value to you, so I’ve tried to pay it forward, and help other people in a similar way as much as I can. The reward for me is that I feel I can help more people do a better job with software development, which helps all of us. One reason I’ve kept on with full-time employment and done all the writing and speaking on the side is then I don’t have to feel I have to charge for my time. But I know it is different for consultants. You’ve given the software world a huge amount, I guess I’d feel frustrated in your situation too.

Hi Kent,

from reading your comments, I get the blurry feeling that there would have been some cost involved in making that talk publicly available. Perhaps not in money or time, but something more subtle, like future opportunities to make money – or “simply” your sanity. For example, it sounds like reciprocity is an important value to you – violating it might be seen as a cost, too.

Anyway, whatever it is, perhaps by more exploring what that “cost” is, and how you can reconcile it with your “more with lessing” principle – you might be able to find “a place to land”.

Best wishes, Ilja

Accumulating wealth and producing value are somewhat orthogonal.
Eager to see how you land, hoping you land wiser and also happier.
Trusting that we’ll hear why you are wiser and happier then.
Kinda hoping not to have to pay to find out.

What you’re saying sounds a lot more like “How do I earn money for the value I create and deliver?” which reminded me of this post on how to make money during a recession:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/12/how-to-make-lots-of-money-during-a-recession/

We met at Footprint Software in Toronto a few years back. I certainly appreciate your talents and how you apply them. So far, I’m not convinced you have broken your principle yet – as personally have needs to enable you to help others. Maybe the next tool will give you financial independence so your creativity can truly be unleashed. Some say we go through 3 phases, learn, earn and give back. I think it is OK that you stay in the earn phase for awhile and hopefully make a ton of money to magnify what you can return later in life. The perspective might be how you can equip yourself now so that you can provide even greater benefits in the future.

The market doesn’t seem to value knowledge, ideas or even wisdom very highly. It does value products, however. Maybe the best path would be to apply your knowledge, ideas and wisdom to build a great product (like Balsamiq), and then give away your wisdom once you’re in a more comfortable position to do so (like Paul Graham).

Kent,
by not allowing reproduction and distribution, even though there was no additional cost, you did add an intrinsic value to your talk. Although you didn’t get paid this time, it doesn’t mean that you won’t next time somewhere else as there is no other way to get “that” talk, hopefully an expanded/updated version of the infoq talk.

You can easily monetize on your talks. My guess is that you would probably make more money from your talks than from junit max, easily.

The reason why you’re not getting paid for this talk is explained in a book that I have recently read and that I invite everybody to read. It’s about behavioral economics. Just like, in your books, you define patterns of decision making in programming, this book, “Predictably Irrational”, the Dan Ariely describe patterns of economical behavior, purchasing decision making.

In this case I would say that, at the very least, chapters 3, 4, 9 and 10 apply to your case.
If you don’t have time to read the book, here is the 2cent summary.
1) Something FREE beats a really good deal even when the “FREE” item doesn’t solve the problem.
Given an offer between 2 gift certificates from Amazon.com: one is a FREE $10 gift certificate and the other is a $20 gift certificate for the price of $7 most people will choose the FREE one, even though the other option makes more economical sense.
2) You have been apparently applying social norms to your speaking services, but you are trying to switch to market norm. That’s a difficult switch to make. too long to discuss.
3) since you’ve been doing this talks for free, you gave a baseline, an imprinting of some sort that sets the expectations 2 ways.
a) your talks are free.
b) the value of your talk isn’t much since it’s free. Remember that the phrase “you get what you paid for” applies to almost everything. Why do you buy the name brand medicine vs the generic brand? Mainly because it costs more, not because it’s better, but the placebo effect applies. Something that you pay more sets the expectation of being more satisfying, more valuable.

I could go on and on, more than I have, on all the reasons.
Look at it this way, it’s good that you’ve smarten up.
Btw, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have it both way.
In a year from now, after you made $100,000 from this talk alone, you can decide to release it to the public, free of charge.

btw, I am just like you. I am a sucker.
I code, teach, help for free, make way too many favors, some costly.
I think it comes with the territory, being a programmer.
We are optimistic people (sure I can get that done in an hour Goven’r), doted with a good dose of stoicism (working all-nighters), otherwise we would quit right away.
At some point we just have to grow up.

Cheer up. Many companies and individuals just like to “use” people. Don’t let them get you down.

Charge the suckers (the blood-suckers) all you can. I am reminded of a concert which was free for the general public, and $10 for “students who showed ID”.

Most people will respect and return your good karma. You’ve just been hanging around with some unevolved people and companies. For them, of course, there’s Mastercard.

Kent writes: “What was different in this case is that I said “no” when there was absolutely no additional cost to me.”

I think there is a significant indirect cost to you having the talk recorded and widely distributed. No one can afford to write an all-new talk for every engagement; even if we could, this is probably not desirable, as many talks get better after a little practice and feedback. But if a talk were widely enough distributed, the next time a conference or customer invites you to speak, they might well ask for a different talk, becaues too many people have seen the recorded one — the content has lost its value. That raises your cost of accepting a speaking invitation, because you can’t amortize the considerable cost of creating good content over multiple deliveries.

This is not an idle concern. I’ve seen attendees ding a talk because “It was basically the same talk that is on parleys.com / infoq / wherever.” I’ve seen attendees give negative feedback to conference organizers because a speaker gave a repeated talk.

Of course, everyone wants everything for free. And sometimes they get it; in fact, they get it often enough that those who want to be paid for the value they create are viewed as weirdos.

Kent, you’ve contributed to our professional practices with far more than just JUnit. So see the present situation as a fork in the road. Time to change tack.

Like yourself, I’m a huge fan of Bucky’s work. But … all the change happens at the grass roots, not with the corporations. Corporations have no heart and never will. Some people within them may have shown “sensitivity” in the past, but with the GFC they’ve been bowed into submission.

I have great respect for what you have achieved, yet I feel compelled to suggest that you read Steve Pressfield’s “The War of Art” (that’s not a typo! I’m not talking about Sun Tzu’s work).

Kent, I believe Ilja Preuß got it right “…there would have been some cost involved in making that talk publicly available. Perhaps not in money or time, but something more subtle, like future opportunities to make money”

Giving away valuable things for free or low cost of course can undermine your future ability to generate revenue. Which is why, even in liquidation, businesses are contractually not allowed by the manufacturers (of LCD TVs, for example) to sell inventory below a certain price threshold, because dumping cheap products on the market would destroy their future revenue stream and eliminate the ability to take advantage of future pent-up demand (instead, they prefer to dump the inventory overseas for ~$0 in markets that have very little future revenue potential). Giving things away does generate a cost for you, but it is only felt in the future in terms of missed revenue opportunity.

I find myself recently becoming less and less willing to participate in this “economy of regard”, because the upside just isn’t there.

Kent, thanks for being so open and honest.

Often when I’m refactoring or getting started with a new design, I’ll catch myself thinking, “Kent Beck would be taking smaller steps.” Then I’ll stop and break my problem down into smaller, testable iterations. That’s a direct impact you’ve had on my professional life.

I’ve enjoyed many of your talks, in person and online. Please don’t stop sharing your reflections and wisdom.

Dear Kent

I will try now to directly give you some compensation for the value you generated on my thinking about software development.

Value is usually generated through a large and long social and economic process,
where conceptual creation represent a necessary but very tiny part.

The benefits we derive from our creation depends on how we position ourselves in this process. Unfortunately, in our current world, it is mainly a matter of power and control,
rather than an objective appraisal of the intrinsic value of our ideas.
Understanding other scopes and kinds of rationality is an eye opener for this actual reality.

Receiving our deserved rewards from the value generating process we ignite
requires comprehension of this broader picture
in order to transform our social-economic role in this process
from merely accidental to essential.

I wish you the best and am sure you will find new ways to harmonise
your own personal well-being with your highly outstanding contributions.
That will be the best for all of us.

This is bothersome.

Kent, as you are my personal software hero, I find writing this post more than difficult. I’m going to stick to basics and hope I don’t sound callous or rude.

Change course.

You’re right; you’ve had wonderful success for 27 years and influenced more people than you know. If you really understood your impact on this industry and the people in it you wouldn’t cry out in the night like this. But you don’t. And you may not. So, that being the case, change course.

Companies and event organizers don’t want to pay anyone because there are so many people willing to speak for free. Of course, many of those folks are schmucks, but lots of event attendees are on their companies dime so they won’t argue too much. Fair? It doesn’t matter.

The fact of the matter is that you are still Ken Beck. Kent Beck! We have contractors in all the time, consultants – you could make a ton of cash in that market. It may not be exactly what you want to do right now, but that’s just the market. You wrote the original and best TDD book plus many others. Your XP books are in corporations everywhere. Other industry pro’s drop your name.

Take advantage of the landscape and see what these types of opportunities turn up. You could walk into 9 out of 10 companies and be the best programmer without even writing a line of code. You could teach TDD (others make training cash off of this), you could subcontract or you could join up with a larger consultancy as “chief scientist”. Wow. You have so much at your disposal because Kent Beck is not just a man – he’s a brand.

Good luck.

I remember that someone said at the oslo xp meetup that they would pay to see a pairprogramming video session with you.

We respect people that give freely, but we are also willing to pay to see the good stuff!
And thanks for the talk in Norway! It was inspiring

The world of the internet is bizarre – if I need a new hammer I have to go and buy one, but if I need a development tool like Eclipse, I get it completely free?
Its insane.
We used to pay £3000 per seat for these dev tools.

Here’s a thought: what about a mashup between the PayPal “Donate Now” button and reputation/recommender systems? In other words, when I click the “+1″ button, giving my opinion, it was a real dollar transfer ($1 seems like a good valuation). I would still need to earn the right to give reputation points as now, through community-valued activity.

Would the ease of micropayments and the volume of the curve under the long tail represent significant value?

One explanation is that I’m just nuts, that I have an inflated sense of the value of my ideas.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The whole XP/Agile/Responsible Development idea set is really only worth a few billion dollars, your contribution is some fraction of that (say 10 or 20%), and you can only expect to be compensated for some fraction of that value. So once you’ve netted $100,000,000 or so from it, you’re just being egotistical and greedy to want more.

I suppose it’s possible you haven’t quite reached that point yet, in which case here is a hodge-podge of ideas:

1) You “worked on fame more than on wealth”. Well, now you have fame (it’s geek fame, true, but geeks (a) have money and (b) are loyal); there are ways to turn that into wealth. The simplest in the situation at hand would be to go give the talk at Giganto Corp for free, but see how much Company B would pay you to wear one of their t-shirts. Or be Company B yourself: take five minutes of the presentation to essentially do an ad for JUnit Max.

2) Broader strategies include starting a cult; Stephens and Rosenberg have a great description of how you could do it (though they seem to think you already have). It doesn’t have to be like Jamestown — you might find the Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin West model more to your liking.

3) Take on students or apprentices. They could pay a little, or work for low wages for a while. It worked for Da Vinci. Which would be worth more to a student programmer: a $4,000 college class, or a summer working with you?

4) If your development tools are actually valuable (I’m admittedly ignorant of JUnit Max, but that’s probably the way to bet), some large entity may see the value in getting all the benefit from them for five years or so. It’s not a big market: IBM, MS, CA, maybe Google. But think what having one of them fund JUnit Max for five years would do, if at the end you could either open-source it or sell it yourself.

5) Alternatively, you can do what Paul Graham did with his esoteric knowledge of that Lisp thing, and use JUnit Max as a secret weapon to develop end-user software which brings in cash. (Admittedly, this kind of depends on having a good idea for end-user software.)

6) Use the Street Performer Protocol to release talks: it worked for Mozart and Beethoven; it can work for you. Once you’ve received $5,000 in donations, you’ll release the 45-minute “Responsible Development and Foo” video for free to everyone. People pay $2 for an episode of Two and a Half Men; you could get 5,000 people to pay half that for twice the time (and they’d be smarter at the end instead of dumber). And, of course, some people or companies would pay more than that just to see it sooner. You’d probably be more comfortable if some third-party organization held the funds in escrow until release; I bet either the Agile Alliance or some bank would be happy to do so.

7) Ask other guru types how they eat. Jerry Weinberg’s lived a long, starvation-free life; some of his career paths are probably open to you in a way they’re not to most of us.

Assume people interested in what you have to say might also be interested in other stuff you have to say. For example, put links to your books on your blog.

9) Play more poker. More of my money went to you in that one game in Colorado than from all the copies of your books I’ve bought. Can be profitably combined with (2).

I’d be surprised if you haven’t already thought of most of these ideas; maybe you’re wary about possible conflicts with your values, principles, and vows. I guess I’m in agreement with many other commentators when I say that Kent Beck starving to death really doesn’t add value for anybody; we mostly benefit from the supply of golden eggs. You’re good at what you do; you’re famous among the people who do it; it’s a valuable pursuit — you can find a way to make enough money. Maybe you need a kind of anti-Google Friday, where you spend 10% of your time not giving stuff away.

As for the vow, how wise do you think you were at 21? Do you think you’re less wise now? Is it wise to let 21-year-old Kent beat up present-day-Kent because the latter has a more nuanced view of the world?

Thanks for giving so much stuff away, but thanks also for the stuff you sold (XPX 1&2, Planning, TDD): it’s not like they’re tainted just because I spent $20 to buy each book before spending $200 of time reading it. You’ll figure out how to capture enough of the value you create in a way that fits with who you are.

George,

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. After reading your post, my original message can be summarized as, “My existing strategy is selling software for money per user and/or giving valuable talks paid for by companies or conferences and/or selling books to people who find them valuable. That strategy isn’t working.” You message says to me, “Don’t give up. There are lots of options. They aren’t going to be as simple or obvious as what you were doing. Get over it.”

Seems like time to get over it to me. Thanks again for the encouragement.

Mark,

This sounds interesting. What’s the need this meets? A reliable reputation score? What’s in it for the recommenders?

Kent,

re: “What’s the need this meets?”

The idea arose in response to your dilemma – giving value (the video lecture) without compensation. Your original pact seems related to “Pay it forward”, which a great ideal, but enabling “Pay it (you) back”, as in my idea, is good too.

re: “What is in it for the recommenders?”

First, the idea is a generalization of a very concrete situation: quite simply – I need (value) access to your expertise, your experience, your philosophy in order to become a better (and more valuable) programmer myself. If you can’t continue to disseminate the valuable information, I lose out. If I have a micropayment compensation method, I can do my part to incent you to continue, which is in my best interest. This is a light-weight and much more fluid parallel to book writing.

Second, I am incented to contribute my (small) expertise to the community in the hopes of getting a +1 ($). How many start-ups keep their first dollar earned? I am encouraged to contribute thoughtfully and carefully, improving the value for others I provide.

Third, if my “+1″ costs me a real “$1″, I will be more thoughtful and careful in awarding it.

And, fourth, a mentor (or patron, as in the Arts) can use some of their capital to reward or guide developing community members.

I think you may actually be hitting the business purchase order wall. Most businesses make it very hard to purchase anything. Surprisingly its often easier to hire a new person than it is to get $10 for useful software. So although JUnitMax might only be a few bucks you are asking the grand majority of the interested audience to go through months of budget planning and asset valuation and other rubbish in order to purchase a tool. With that pain faced the difference between $0 and $10 is positively enormous, but the pain from $1000 to 10000 is basically zero.

It thus follows that tools need to be big and comprehensive. The essential pieces tend to get purchased with regularity (Operating systems, application servers, databases). These tools are expensive and if you want/need them then they are much cheaper than the alternative. The time cost of purchasing them is worth it. Most businesses can be described as pound foolish but penny thrift, especially when it comes to software.

Talks of value suffer even more pain because they are time bound. If you can’t guarantee that a purchase order will be raised in time its incredibly difficult to get a paid presenter in for a particular day. They need to go through the painful activity of getting the budget approved, getting you paid and arranging the date and time, something which is totally out of the control of the person wanting you to talk to his team/company.

Free means developers can choose their own tools, who they want to listen to and when. They do so on a time scale that is useful in their application and what they are doing. They have no need to consult the pointy haired boss to get permission to do it, and certainly no need to convince 50 pointy haired bosses.

I am sorry you are hitting this wall, I wish it was not the case. I personally use this fact to take consulting/contractor work instead. Then you give talks from within to an audience and hopefully get to spend some percentage of your time there working on something interesting. But I’ll be honest for the most part what happens is I spend 6 months contracting and 6 months off working on interesting projects and the two don’t actually come along together.

Paul,

Thanks for the thoughts. Forcing big transaction costs brings control but slows the flow of value (in this case). That’s a windmill I’ll let the Beyond Budgeting folks tilt at.

In the meantime I still need to see how to encourage the transactions that I can. I travel with my family when I travel on business, so consistent time on-site isn’t an option for me. I’m still searching, but I feel like I’m getting past Depression and onto Acceptance.

Kent, I call your situation the Dark Side of OSS.

After reading a number of comments such as yours I started thinking about a way for OSS developers to earn money directly from their code – which is, after all, the only good bit of the proprietary model.

The result is the P-BOS OSS licensing system.

If this interests you, or any of your readers, feel free to drop me a line (details on website)

Hey Kent!

I feel like we’re in the same boat, although I suspect that I’ve been less successful than you have in both the fame and fortune goals.

One of your tweets about JUnit max led me to write a blog article a few weeks back
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/2009/05/28/selling-shoes-to-the-shoemakers-children

I’d love it if Mark Laff’s suggestion would work. So far the experience is mixed. For example github makes it easy to put a tip-jar on a project page. I did that for RiCal which represents six months or more of work on my part, and seems to provide value in solving a problem for the Ruby community, but so far it’s netted a grand total of $50. Even the most successful campaigns I’ve stumbled across, for very popular projects have only raised maybe $2000, which doesn’t go very far.

Of course the real hope, is that open source projects like RiCal will lead to lucrative work opportunities, but so far in this economy there seems to be less of that than I’d like.

At least we can keep our sense of humor though. Right?

After reading this I think I have a slightly different take. I see the problem as one of positioning and potentially there was a shift perceived value.

You said that you proposed through a friend to give the talk at his company because you wanted to share the work with the people at the company. To me this suggests that you were looking for an audience to create some dialogue with and get feedback, which sets up the talk as a value to you, and the value to the company is constrained by audience size so you might have felt like it was a balanced cost-benefit equation.

When they wanted to expand the talk’s audience, you saw that the value equation shifted to the dominant perspective of you running a training session of sorts, which is not how you’d positioned the talk in your mind. This fundamentally changes the substance being negotiated, but because of the initial pitch, its hard to not feel like you’re being taken advantage of.

To me this is really a case of understanding what the object/substance being negotiated is–in this case your time and value training people, which I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t offer freely unless you perceived that your needs were already met–this is common issue with altruism. Because the “game” had changed through a slight of positioning, you really weren’t discussing the same thing anymore, and the principles involved needed to be reassessed.

If I’m correct in assessing that you were wanting a dialogue to get feedback on the work, then fundamentally you hopefully were/will be able to still able to extract that value from the experience, and leverage that for more direct financial gain. To some extent the issue of extra distribution doesn’t matter as long as you get your original desired value. If the change in distribution changes the way the session happens, and it might because in the less intimate setting people might be far less willing to provide feedback, then there is a real threat to the value you were looking for, and negotiating a different deal is completely reasonable. Given that you opened the opportunity through a friend though, this could have social costs which make the open renegotiation emotionally aggravating.

Ultimately, from your post it didn’t read like you pitched the idea as a consultant looking to improve the productivity of the company, so it wasn’t set out as “here is the value to your corp” at the beginning, which when dealing with business is always difficult to fix unless you’re willing to just walk away. Because they suddenly shifted it away from the reciprocal relationship you were seeking by getting feedback, because you approached from the stance of I have something I’d like to share (as a friend), they treated it like you were an employee they already pay and so any value you generate is theirs.

Again, this was based on some assumptions, and I only comment because it didn’t seem like anyone had accounted for the human (social) aspects of communication…which are really where things get their meaning and hence value.

Kent, why don’t you ask to be paid for the talk? (this is both a suggestion and a question)

I did. They said no, they don’t have budget for that sort of thing. At the time I was hoping to make up the difference by selling them a site license for JUnit Max. Now I’m wondering if that was naive or if I just need to up my sales technique.

Adam,

I think your comments are right on. We didn’t have a clear agreement to begin with about what I was offering. I’m still feeling naive for ever creating value at all for profit making companies without a financial transaction attached. I don’t mind working on JUnit “for free” because public service is an important goal in my life and JUnit gives me an avenue to serve my community. I need to take that hat off when I talk to the large corporations of the world though, even if that means I don’t have any connection with them at all.

It still seems unbalanced that large, profitable companies derive millions of dollars of value from my work without any of it flowing back to me. Odder still is that I feel I have as much more value to offer again as I have contributed already, but I can’t afford to pursue it because of the lack of a functioning market (at least it isn’t functioning for me any more). For the moment, though, I’ve given up trying to understand the market. I have programs to write and a garden to plant.

Great work so far. I am a professional software developer and I think it’s fully reasonable to pay for top quality tools.

For example, I just purchased the Ruby On Rails RubyMine IDE from IntelliJ, and I just donated $80 to the freeware developer Ryan Davis for his excellent Ruby programming gems.

Best of luck to you in your new path!

Its easy contribute to Kent’s ongoing work by http://bit.ly/Kent I did with $100.

In general the “everything is free” attitude is dangerous if you have to earn your living on that. So if you want to make free contributions to the community there must be other ways to earn money…

That said here are some more ideas:

become a big company fellow (like Martin and others) with freedom to work on whatever you like

work on client engagements (consulting, courses, project assessment)

“Pair with Kent” – distributed pair programming

Newsletter not just blog-entries (like javaspecialist.eu from Heinz Kabutz) with contribution link

set up a foundation financing research and other OSS work to be sponsored by developers, companies, media sponsors

offering aspiring software craftsmen paid sessions to hone their skills

donations have often the “responsibility diffusion” effect – rely on the million others to make the first step

Thanks for everything and don’t give up

Michael

Kent,

Much empathy for your situation. I hope that it will be redeemed by helping us rethink the idea that “knowledge should be free”. Who wants to see this particular meme become viral? Those who need the knowledge. They’re unconcerned with the very real cost of acquiring that knowledge. And if something as simple as a cheezy slogan induces really bright people to give their knowledge away, they’re all for that.

At this point, the notion of “free” is epidemic in the programming world. You’ve done so many good things for the development community (and I say this as someone who is most decidedly NOT a fan of Extreme Programming), I hope you’ll be able to help us rethink this pernicious idea that knowledge should be free — a notion that, followed to its logical conclusion, spells the end to original thinking.

Keep the faith. Don’t give up. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t give into the bullies.

Learning a lot from you. As usual. And struggling with much the same thoughts — although not at the same level as you.

I hope you try some new ideas and let me know how it goes.

I feel your pain. I love working on developer tools, and everybody knows that open source gratis developer tools have maximum impact. But how do we get paid?

A colleague of mine, much wiser than me, once argued that there are only two standard ways to get paid a living wage while working on developer tools.

1) Consulting. Speaking gigs help, but they don’t pay the bills; they act as promotional events for your consulting gigs. You could probably charge quite a bit, if you had more freedom to travel, but based on your earlier comments it sounds like this isn’t an option.

2) Organized charity. Typically this comes in the form of corporate charity, where a single corporation recognizes its dependence on an open source tool and so hires a developer to work on it. (Note that the corporation in this case is being charitable to their free-riding competitors, not to you; they’re hiring you as an employee quid pro quo, fair and square.)

There are also a few big open source foundations (e.g. Mozilla Foundation) that have gathered enough funds to employ some developers to work on dev tools.

Note the emphasis on ORGANIZED charity… gathering donations from individual users is too hard; the free-riding problem is just too great.

The corollary to this argument is that there is just no money to be made on for-pay developer tools (like JUnit Max). There are a few exceptions that prove the rule, like Microsoft (which exploits monopoly power to sell developer tools) and a few small-time shops whose niche nobody has tried to exploit yet. They fundamentally can’t get big.

In conclusion, I’d like to respectfully encourage you to go find your place working for a Giganto corp or open source foundation. They’ll pay you to speak, they’ll pay you to code, and you’ll get to give your work away for free.

Dan,

Thanks for the thoughts. I don’t disagree, but I hate it that the link between value given and value received is so tenuous in the “organized charity” case. Still, if I knew of a reasonable option for such a business model it would be very attractive. At this point I run into the limits of my relationship building, as I don’t have acquaintences near any of the open source money flows. If anyone would care to make an introduction, I’d appreciate it.

I know a few people. Send me an email (or send me a d mesg on twitter @dfab_con) and I’ll see what I can do.

This is almost too funny for words. I’ve watched the Open Source community almost my whole career and come to a realization which you haven’t. There is a large army of engineers who are willing to work very hard for nothing. Because of this software is valueless. To think you will write some great piece of software and sell it is folly. Some Open Source advocate will clone it and give it away. In fact he’ll attach a license to it so that not only will it be free, but if anyone wants to use some of it their own software, that new software will have to be free too.

What you need to realize is that you are selling a service. You might be writing software to provide that service, or even as that service, but you are selling a service, not a product. You are a worker in a service industry.

geoff;

Open source software does not mean “free as in free beer” it means “free as in free speech”.

You are welcome to sell eg. Ubuntu or OpenOffice at the stores, no problem.

As many people has said, you’ve helped out far more people you will ever know, which is something nobody can measure. You’ve given value to human beings all over the world. To me that is our primary mission in life, share with the others. Now, talking about business and money, which is the other reality, I think developer tools are no longer business. It is time to try plan B. Take a look at Timothy Ferris book, you’ll find it crazy, funny and useful: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/

Thanks Kent, you’re helping me a lot. You’re immortal already.

Do you feel that the eBay auction where you sold a two-hour remote pair programming session for US$405 was a success? I was surprised there were only 6 bidders; maybe if you advertise it better? You didn’t even blog about it. From looking at the bidding history, assuming all the bids were sincere, there were five bids of US$300 and up, so there’s at least another US$1200 of untapped demand if you want to work four more two-hour sessions in the, uh, last couple of weeks.

I presume your normal consulting rate is a lot higher, but I also presume that work at your normal consulting rate is hard to come by here in World Depression II.

I think part of the problem is that you have to choose who you interact with. If you’re playing by the rules of trying to *produce the most value* even at the expense of capturing some of it, and you’re interacting with people whose lives are driven by the game of *capturing the most value* even at the expense of producing some, well, the outcome is unsurprisingly that they will capture all of it. Maybe you need to find other people to collaborate with who are more like you.

…oh, you did blog about it. But at the end of a blog post about accounting.