Give away your code, but never your time
wgross.net
Give away your code, but never your time
1–10 of 228 posts
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#2The key suggestion:
"bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer... If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails."
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#3The key suggestion: "bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer... If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lo…
Right, so are there any examples of successful projects which do this?
The idea is certainly plausible given that the vast majority of initial contributions to an open source project are based on need: http://climate-action.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Library/S...
However continued involvement seems to be usually based on hobbyist motivations, so you might be setting yourself up to not see anybody else jump on board with you long term.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#4I like the idea of donating to projects that benefit me, so the developers working on those projects have a financial incentive to continue doing so. For example, I'm interested in the Crystal language, so I give the project $10 a month. Yeah, it isn't much, but if enough people did this, it would allow open-source developers to make a living out of these projects, rather than being enslaved by them to the point they burn out.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#5I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world.
The rest of us have work to do.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#6The key suggestion: "bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer... If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lo…
Right, so are there any examples of successful projects which do this? The idea is certainly plausible given that the vast majority of initial contributions to an open source project are based on need: http://climate-action.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Library/S... However continued involvement seems to be usually based on hobbyist motivations, so you might be setting yourself up to not see anybody else jump on board…
https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/
I'm not sure how successful it is, but Crystal seems to have the right idea.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#7The key suggestion: "bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer... If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lo…
There's probably a compromise, but often non paying users do contribute in the form of bug reports and user feedback via the very same issue tracker that that they are to be locked out of. I also wander if paying entities have different objectives then non paying entities in such a way that paying entities will corrupt projects or alienate future contributors.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#8> We also need to bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer.
> The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.”
So, for me, this goes against the reasons I decide to give my personal time to the community. For me, creating an open source project is a contract with the community, and part of that contract is to assist members of this community that might require features or have issues. Statements such as the ones quoted above go wholeheartedly against my idea of an open source community, and I have a feeling most of the open source community shares this sentiment.
Breaking this contract would be, for me, a cease and desist of the project. For me, it is very simple, if a personal project is stagnated, that’s acceptable as no one owes anyone here anything. If a company’s open source projects go stagnant, but the company continues to boast how pro-OSS they are, it is a cardinal sin, as they have broken this contract with their users. This may be a naive look, but I don’t think a company should be able to have it both ways—boast about its OSS projects, lure people in and then ignore them and move on to their next PR OSS project.
Donations are a different proposition than the suggestions in the article, and should definitely be encouraged.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#9I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.
Nor have I. As a manager/co-owner I can't think of a reasonable business-friendly way to allow my developers to spend work time on OSS. I would love to, of course, but our systems really do not facilitate community involvement.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#10I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.
Your company almost certainly makes use of multiple pieces of open source software. What do you do when you need a feature that doesn't yet exist in one of them?