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Give away your code, but never your time
91–100 of 228 posts
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#92I disagree. By using a small project and reporting bugs you are helping to test it, giving feedback and allowing it to grow. Also, reporting a bug sometimes saves the maintainers the effort of finding the bug themselves... something that actually takes time. A better policy is to encourage people to help fix the bugs they report, with a test case or a pull request if possible... something actionable.
maybe some sortof point system would be nice. You get points by providing good bug reports, good forum answers, good PRs, good code reviews, providing tests, donating, etc., but you can lose points by wasting people's time or being a jerk, for instance. Then maintainers can prioritize PRs by people with good points, regardless of how they got the points (be it from donating time, code, or other ways of helping the community & project).
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#93I 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…
Your employer benefits financially from the open source community. People who purchase software cheaply due to lower barrier to entry and more competition also benefit. As a coder I generally don't benefit so don't feel the need to give back.
As a coder the tsunami of FOSS is a negative. My job is now to glue free modules together rather than design stuff. I'd be quite happy to pay for a compiler if I had to.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#94About any software stack for about any computer task involves at least some open source code running for you, written by someone on their free time, mostly out of pure altruism. I wonder how many dollars has this person contributed to, say OpenSSL, or to GnuPG, or to the GNU project, or to Linux, or to the Apache Foundation, &c.
If you dont want to respond to pull requests or to emails, just ignore them or dont put your code up on a platform that allows these. Publish release tarballs. Nobody's obliged to accept patches. But what this article tells is a merely a shortcut to making someone hard-fork your project. If I have to pay to get my patch upstream, well, I'll just maintain my patchset against upstream instead, if there are no alternative projects.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#95Glad 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…
"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." This is called a 'business opportunity'. Seriously, people are going to ask you for free stuff all the time. Sometimes they'll be up front about it (as in, "we don't have budget for that, but can you still help us out?"), and…
Yes, and hence my suggestion to him.
But this is also why I introduced my only vaguely related example of the large search engine company who wanted me to work for free to help them organize 30-40 school events for Hour of Code -- a big undertaking. They just said no to my request and did not do the events, and implied I was the reason why those kids wouldn't benefit from their hour or two at each school. No "'business opportunity'".
As context I do A TON of free work already in schools around computer science education. Was I being unreasonable to ask to be paid for this work? They sure thought I was, even though the people in their CSR group who'd have been the PMs of my work sure as heck get paid. The company chose just not to do the events at all (w/ a market cap of both of $500b) - the kids lost out too.
It's actually not so that the request for free work is a negotiation technique - it's an actual expectation of more and more people in the tech community who will get angry when you won't work for free (and they'll convey that anger from the desk of their $250k/year job).
I at least am seeing this dynamic play out all over the tech world. Work in a big tech company, nominally as a software engineer but really as someone who makes a lot of PowerPoints and watches (and "likes") a lot of Ted Talks, and the ecosystem seems to be ok with you pulling down $250K (and from that comfortable seat demanding quicker response times from volunteers in the tech community of various sorts).
Work for yourself selling your time as a contractor in the "gig economy" and you've become the maintainer and/or a significant contributor to a couple OSS projects that are related to the services you sell: you're a "sell out" to the ideals of open sources for wanting to be paid for that time. Again, I exaggerate this duality, but it's starting to become a real problem, I think, for the industry.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#96What works for me is locking down the application behind a plan. Users can submit whatever feedback, bugs, suggestions, enhancements, and wishlists they want. These contributions are important, but they won't change the roadmap.
This only works when an open source application becomes ubiquitous or nearly ubiquitous and the users want it everywhere. Popularity and consumption rates are irrelevant to whether this works. This is because ubiquitous software solves an extremely common problem and takes too much effort to replace with an alternate solution. Ubiquitous software is not necessarily good software.
When somebody wants a change in the roadmap they can pay you money to compensate you for the additional time it takes to pivot into another direction. You probably aren't going to make any money like this. Then benefits of this approach is that the maintainers won't burn out. They just work to the plan and occasionally respond to issues. The software has a transparent and published trajectory.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#97As 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 l…
I've seen these kinds of things and have always been dubious that they are able to pay a full time salary for someone that is even close to what they could make with a normal full time dev job. What's the highest monthly amount your company pays a dev? What's the average and median?
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#98The 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?
No. The community around a business is their customers who dont contribute directly to the product itself, but to the general economy, knowledge and hype around it. You pay to buy the product and probably wouldnt work on it in behalf of the producer for free on your free time.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. It certainly sounds absurd on the face of it. On the other hand, I can think of at least three cases where I'd do the…
Reading this makes me wonder, though... These maintainers are often well-paid professionals. If their lifes outside of their day jobs put the pressure to limit the open source work, what is a little money going to do? If money was their main motivator to compromise their personal life, would they not already have gotten a second job (like a part-time consulting gig), maybe instead of the whole open source thing? Make…
Not every developer is a highly paid superstar in Silicon Valley. When needing to juggle family / life, I'm sure this proposed model would make it a lot easier to explain to the wife/husband/partner why they need to stay up a bit longer at night to work on their (previously) non-paying projects.
Re: Give away your code, but never your time
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thanks...this is the best attitude I've heard. Instead of making people feel they need to take sides in the open-source vs free-software debate, better to just acknowledge that both are important and aren't necessarily in conflict.
They're not in conflict, per se, and they are indeed both important - but progress towards one of these goals has the advantage of serving the goals of megacorps, while the other one does not.
FWIW, I work as an open source developer on a strategic "infrastructure" project that my employer funds because having an open source base platform serves their commercial interests - and I'm very much okay with this, it absolutely is a good thing for them to be contributing to, but at the end of the day we're also a proprietary software firm. I'd just like to see more work go towards figuring out how to fund developers whose projects aren't of strategic interest to proprietary software companies than articles that keep making the assumption that all important open source software is libraries or utility software that ultimately would line up nicely with corporate interests.