Maybe write your article after you've done this and tell us how it worked.
Give away your code, but never your time
41–50 of 228 posts
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#42Devil'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 g…
Something like this could work, but I worry that it would create competitiveness and animosity among users.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#43I 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…
Something like Gratipay is good for facilitating that use case but I don't know that there are enough other devs out there willing to fund these projects themselves. At least I haven't seen one yet where the maintainer pulls in anything like a normal developer salary for their experience level.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#44Here are a few ideas off the top of my head for a purely open source (non-commercial) project:
* custom features
* prioritization
* training
* enterprise support
* sponsorships
* invites to free conferences and swag
* t-shirts and swag sales
* commercial software integrations/partnerships
* brand sponsorship/inclusion on docs/websites/etc.
* professionally managed and scalable hosting
What did I miss?
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#45Why does the text on this website have 52% transparency?
You gotta pay to get 100% opaque.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
He probably opens an issue and then complains why the project maintainers don’t give it priority. He is too busy to do privileged OSS work.
That's exactly the situation I described in my long comment a second ago. It's also worth point out that it's not always as simple as reviewing/testing PRs and accepting them (which also takes time). Sometimes prioritizing a PR, especially if it is not something that was on the roadmap to be released just now, means having to write a bunch of new code and features to make it work.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#47Glad to see other ideas and operating models being proposed and tried. 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 pop…
Reviewing and either accepting or rejecting (in full, no need to cherry-pick) large PR's is entirely up to the author.
You were right; the safest way is to simply ask if they're willing to sponsor that custom work, and how would they like to be credited for their sponsorship.
There's no need to go crazy about it. If it's not a right fit for the project or too much effort for the maintainer, then they can pay or it will just go undone. No one has to sell out in order to simply ask for someone to sponsor a feature.. it's simply logical to just ask for a contract or donation, or reject the PR if it's too big.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#48I led a small open source project more than a decade ago.
Most people involved had more time than money. I'm quite certain that trying to charge an annual fee from members would have killed the entire project before it was even born.
Introducing money to the equation changes everything. People start to look at the project as a product they are buying, instead of a cause they are contributing to.
I believe the author of this article is deeply misguided. Money is not a way to make open projects work, but it is a good way to kill them.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#49>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…
I understand both your perspective and the perspective of the maintainers who do it for free. Spending all your time dealing with pull requests, code review thereof, etc is a huge hastle. On the other hand, no one is going to do free work, then pay to have it merged.
I would offer a compromise. Freely accept requested modifications. Project maintainer creates a list of features he/she will willingly merge. Any other contribution would be a pull fee.
Either way, I'm amazed that people working tirelessly for free to promote open source all these years hasn't hit this problem yet (burnout due to lack of proper monetary compensation).
I wish all maintainers luck.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#50I shudder to think of the sense of entitlement some of my users would have towards getting me to fix their pet issues that they had to pay to tell me about. This article got a lot right but then charging for community membership is a super bad idea.