Building with love, and paying for it

A quick note before this one: this post isn’t intended as commentary on any internal conversations at ProPublica. We care a lot about sustainability, fundraising, and memberships! But this piece has a broader focus.I remember the comment like it was yesterday. The social networking platform I was building had already been used by major non-profits, universities, Fortune 500 companies, and even governments. It was created in the public interest and distributed in such a way — under an open source license, with accessible code — that anyone could pick it up and use it. And we dared to think about an underlying business model.“Nobody pays for open source,” the comment read. “You should do this for the love of it.”I was aghast. I was doing it for love! I could have been paid an order of magnitude more money if I’d made a career in big tech. Public interest technology was not a choice I made for glory or riches.“Can I buy food with love?” I asked my cofounder.He shook his head (and maybe…