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Give away your code, but never your time

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Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#21

Post by bkovacev »

I dislike the key suggestion. What's the point of open-source - if not to give back? It's a developer's codex/morale to answer.

It seems the author is salty about the fact he doesn't make money from open source, but is investing a lot of time. Well my dear colleague, offer support to the bigger companies that use your software in production or use that software to sell another. Simple.

Open source was never meant to be for-profit, at least from my understanding. Something you give back to the community, because you have taken a lot from it in the first place. You dislike new issues by non-payees? Well, write better docs. Someone is also giving YOU time by submitting that issue or by finding a bug - so should you pay them money for testing? Be grateful.

Should we all pay for the open source tools/frameworks we use? I can guarantee this would cause riots. If you don't want to contribute to OSS don't, but please do not whine about it.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#23

Post by LeoNatan25 »

5_minutes wrote: post #18

I always wonder where coders find the time to significantly contribute to Opensouce projects - which many seem to do - after their day job, having played and eaten with their kids, and were an attentful husband.

A lot of companies encourage open source contributions and maintenance. Some companies even have departments of engineering dedicated to open source. And yes, when people like the community and technology, contributing does not feel like work. Some contribute because of more “practical” reasons—still, completely legitimate—such as improving their visibility for job hiring. It is always impressive to get a résumé with a GitHub and StackOverflow links.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#24

Post by adekok »

rcfox wrote: post #11
cabaalis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The majority of my contributions have been around projects I use for work. Bug fixes, extending functionality, performance enhancements, etc.

That's the real answer.

If you spent 1/10 of an engineer on an open source product, and 100 other companies do the same, your company gets much more than it puts in. And because it's open source, you know how to fix it, and you can fix it.

I know of multiple billion-dollar companies who can't get the time of day from Cisco, HP, etc. for bug fixes or new features.

The vendors attitude is: Bought 10M of product in the past year? Meh... piss off. We're working on important customers.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#25

Post by hartator »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #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 proj…

The issue is donations don't work even if you have a large user base.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#26

Post by Deestan »

cabaalis wrote: post #9
outoftacos wrote: post #5

I'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.

> I would love to, of course

If you did, you'd have found a way for it to work.

Making a pretty cool deploy script? Document it and put it out there as OSS.

Making a class/module to sort items semantically? Make it OSS.

Someone made an IDE extension to syntax highlight WebVTT files? Make i OSS.

Made a file lister/selector for JQuery? OSS.

Integrating 3rd party X with 3rd party Y? Opensource your module for it.

Unless all your developers do is hack stuff badly together in a monolithic mess, some of it can be opensourced.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#27

Post by Klathmon »

ef4 wrote: post #13

Color me deeply skeptical of the suggestion to try to lock people out of community participation unless they pay. The real secret to not burning out is to scale up the set of maintainers in proportion to the users. You do that by lowering the barriers to involvement, not raising them. Most maintainers err on the side of controlling too much. Which makes them into bottlenecks. One or two good PRs is enough for me to g…

I completely agree, the only thing I still like to keep to myself (or to a very select group) is the ability to cut a release.

If you want commit access, just ask. But I still want to validate releases that get pushed out to a bunch of people.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#28

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

>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. People who don’t pay should feel like they are missing out on the party.

This could be the dumbest thing I have ever heard of it. I mean seriously, you want people to pay even for PRs they have already written?

>Also charge contributors for the time it takes to merge nontrivial pull requests. If a particular submission will not immediately benefit you, charge full price for your time. Be disciplined and remember YAGNI.

This sounds like a great way to lose all your real contributors. The article mentions "get paid for your time" over and over again, yet who is paying me for the time to write the code for the PR? You expect me to both dedicate my time to writing the code for a PR, and then pay you for the privilege.

Perhaps what projects worrying about work for commits should require rigorous testing (integration tests at the very least) on unknown PRs if they ever feel the need to do something like this. And limiting feature requests is understandable, but most projects already ignore overly specific feature requests. Charging for PRs though seems like the fastest way to have your project forked, and have you lose control of it, or for it to split the development talent and die completely.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#29

Post by isaaclyman »

Devil's advocate: How about an issue/PR tracker that lets users pay for priority? A simple bidding system. If BigCorp International is willing to pay $200/hour for IE10 support, they can be next on your list. And afterward, an bug with significant community support totalling $50/hour, pledged by 50 different users. With allowances for your own preferences as maintainer and the needs of the community, of course, but giving people who care the most the opportunity to put their money where their pain is.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#30

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #14
outoftacos wrote: post #5

I'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.

This smells like a small-minded startup-bubble nonsense to me. If you have time to use open source software, you should make time to also submit fixes and open some of your work. That’s not to say startups don’t contribute, but my experience is that a lot of startups—usually led by inexperienced managers—see contribution as giving something for free instead of charging. Small-minded nonsense indeed.

Lots of companies use open source code but don't actually require any changes to be made. A lot of industry standard open source software requires no code modification of the source for the vast majority of applications. Examples being Nginx, Python, Apache Web Server, Tomcat, pretty much any enterprise level application. So many people use it that for the 99%, the code already exists, with 99% of the use cases being heavily tested.

Now they could be donating some amount of money, but that's in no way required.

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