Give away your code, but never your time

Most of us live in countries where you need money to pay rent and buy food. Unless you're already wealthy, that means you need to work (trade time for money) or find a way to trade time for an ownership stake that will, you hope, generate income (and in the process that stake becomes itself more valuable).

A buddy of mine in a maintainer for a popular Drupal module. A very large, well known, social media platform uses it. One day he got an email from someone - likely someone making $150-$200k- more or less demanding that he review and accept some PRs, as well as do some work himself, for a feature they needed.

I told this friend "Ok, did you ask them about their budget to pay you for that?" My friend, more idealistic than me, looked at me like I had 3 heads at first. But he got my question. Nonetheless he decided to "honor" their request and proceeded to work several weeks unexpectedly - for free - so the large for-profit company could stick with its plan and the person requesting this, who is paid, could meet her/his commitment to their boss. His rationale was afraid he'd criticized by the community for not dropping his paid work (!) to do this, since he was the maintainer. He did not want to be a "sell out". I think his decision was insane but such is the pressure to stay true to the ideals.

These stories are all to common and similar to what Willian describes.

I do work around expanding computer science in schools. I do work around mobilizing tech communities to lend their tech skills to disaster relief. A lot of folks in the "startup tech" and open sources communities (different communities with overlap) do the same -- I'm seeing them show up in big numbers for Irma volunteering right now for example. I view these efforts as akin to open course - they are contributions people make of their (unpaid) time to the greater good.

The big tech companies by contrast, many who got their start using open source software and many of whom still power much of their systems with it, could do much much much more on any number of fronts - CS in schools, supporting civic hacking, etc - than they do now. I am sure folks within those companies think they do a lot, but it's not, in my opinion, 5% of what they could do.

And when they do get involved in causes they make huge, often unreasonable expectations of unpaid volunteers in order to minimize their donation, whether that's a donation in time or money. (Case in point: last year a large tech company that provides search and email services asked me to organize Hour of Code events at 30-40 schools around NYC at which their staff to volunteer for an hour or two -- planning and logistics work that would have taken me 1-2 days a week for 4-6 weeks at least. They balked at the idea of paying me for my time since this was a "cause" and I should do it for free, though of course the people who would have been working on this project with me from said company would have been paid.) Sound similar? Expect a ton from volunteers to minimize your own investment.

I bring this up because the LEAST that people who work on open source projects - at least those who aren't pulling in $300K at one of the big tech companies - and ESPECIALLY maintainers, should expect is to get paid somehow. Seriously, how are people supposed to pay rent? William is right on with his piece.

Ideals are great but people need to eat. This emerging duopoly in tech where on one side there is a group of people who are entitled to make massive wealth and demand huge salaries and, on the other, are the open source maintainers, civic hackers, and computer science teachers who are being disloyal to the noble ideals of tech for not wanting to eat cat food is serves the industry poorly.

I engage in this hyperbole to make a point -- an industry that was built by many idealists who saw tech as being an engine to democratization and equality is now becoming exaggerated mirror of society large.

And if you're one of those making $250k, $300k, $500k at some tech company and demanding people work for free or else you'll accuse them of being sellouts for wanting to pay their rent -- well, look in the mirror before you cast that stone.

> most people are only willing to contribute to open source to the extent that it scratches their itch. They feel that their obligation ends as soon as the code is written, and the maintenance of their code falls on you.

> So from a maintainer perspective, you have to act like people's contributions are your contributions. You have to evaluate the code as if you have to maintain it later, you have to understand the circumstances surrounding it, etc. You have to be aware of everyone's concerns at the same time and make sure you don't end up messing up other people's use cases without good reason. And more often than not PRs reflect a "selfishness" of sorts wherein it solves their problem but breaks the general case.