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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

#71

Post by edem »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #28

>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…

My thoughts exactly. What a steaming pile of crap...no wonder that the OP has zero public repositories which have contributors...in fact all of the OP's repositories are forks.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#72

Post by cavneb »

As much as I agree with the sentiment behind this post, I disagree with the implementation. The nature of open source code is collaboration. Paying for collaboration seems like it would hinder progress altogether and possibly direct the project into a direction that is not suitable for the poor majority not paying. One more thing that bothers me is that money for maintenance should not come from developers. This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Code Sponsor (https://codesponsor.io)

Code Sponsor is trying to help provide those who are maintaining OSS projects with untethered sponsorship funds. They can go about doing their business on the projects and be making money through sponsor-based ad revenue. This provides them with the incentive and finances to justify continued support on those projects that end up being abandoned when unfunded.

I agree that this is a HUGE problem that needs to be addressed. Code Sponsor's approach is to go where money can scale: marketing budgets.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#74

Post by peterwwillis »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #65
morgante wrote: post #58

The notion of charging people to be part of the community seems like a terrific way to immediately kill any semblance of community. Realistically, the only people who will pay a membership fee are those who can charge it to a company. That means you'll lose all the people hacking on the project in their free time. Personally, I contributed a lot more to open source when I was in college and had more free time than mo…

Are you sure? If what you're saying is true, wouldn't that mean it would be impossible for any business to have a "sense of community" around it?

To be part of a community you need to have the same stake as everyone else. Businesses don't have communities, they have customers.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#75

Post by TCM »

The social contract of open source is to give away code and time to open source to enhance the community and software. The problem that open source projects really have is that raising and or selling a product is a goal that not every person with a successful project has.

If you want to actually have people pay for open source you should look into making a grant style system for people in open source that is targeted to maintainers. Google Summer of Code and Aigrant are good examples of this.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#78

Post by ghthor »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #53

I think what open source needs is some very deliberate price discrimination. Have the license be free to the vast majority of users, and cost money for large corporations that can damn well afford it. Not, like, large amounts of money, just something vaguely close to the all-in cost of one full time developer. Basically, "BSD, unless you're a $1B+ valued company that is not paying our software foundation $10k/mo".

This is pretty much exactly how I feel about this issue. The contributors you really want are the youth that are young and ambitious, setting a price to contribute would hinder this growth. The contributors you probably don't want are the large corps who will try to push the project based on there income, charge them a lot for the privilege of dealing with their bias.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#79

Post by burntsushi »

ajdlinux wrote: post #51
davidgerard wrote: post #19

> When I say “open source”, I mean code licensed in a way that it can be used to build proprietary things. This redefinition of a basic term should have been at the beginning, not the end.

And so should "open-source code is utility software". Stallman was right when he said that the Open Source movement would eventually abandon any conceptions of software freedom - it seems to me that we now have a whole generation of "open source" contributors for whom the only type of freedom that matters is the freedom of downstream developers, rather than users, and who seem to think that the role of open source in…

I maintain both types of open source projects. I, for one, am happy that we are trending towards more so-called "developer freedom" in open source. I never actually abandoned the concept of "software freedom" as defined by Stallman because I never bought into it in the first place.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#80

Post by mjevans »

Klathmon wrote: post #27
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.

My policy is to never ask, and to only accept if I think I can be worthy of the work at the time (so I might accept at a later date if I feel I don't have the bandwidth today).
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