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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

#121

Post by gbuk2013 »

brooklynrob wrote: post #36

Glad 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…

Your friend's been played for a tool, but I think you know this already. It happens all the time, especially with naive and insecure developers but not limited to them - our corporate overlords are always looking for some new way to encourage people to work more for the same amount of money. Hooking people on their ego is a very easy and common technique. Often people will just do it to themselves just fine with no help.

Personally, I either code for money or for a cause. The latter will almost always require some sort of GPL licence.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#122

Post by xfer »

notamy wrote: post #114
hartator wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This this this. If you provide a service for free, the vast majority of your user base will never care about giving you money, and will just stop using your service and find another one if you try to start charging them for it instead of keeping it free. One of my side-projects has ended up here and it's been a huge pain to deal with.

We are not talking about a service here, we are talking about OSS codebase and in my experience it does work.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#123

Post by xfer »

isaaclyman wrote: post #29

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 g…

Paying for PR? really? Why would anyone do that rather than maintain their own copy if it is an OSS project?

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#125

Post by xfer »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #93
bkovacev wrote: post #21

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…

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.

I mean if you are genius who has written all parts of OS/compiler/whatever software you use, then maybe it is a negative for you. But most people can't do so and FOSS is actually a blessing. If you like to pay for wall-gardens, where you can't read any code without an NDA/paying a million dollars, they exist. Feel free to use them.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#126

Post by bartread »

zzzeek wrote: post #107
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…

Bad commits are the absolute most difficult thing to reverse when they get released and the userbase codes to them. When I don't pay super close attention to what's being contributed, it creates three times as much work after I let it through.

Superficially, that sounds more like a release process issue than a bad commit issue.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#127

Post by hartator »

xfer wrote: post #122
notamy wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This this this. If you provide a service for free, the vast majority of your user base will never care about giving you money, and will just stop using your service and find another one if you try to start charging them for it instead of keeping it free. One of my side-projects has ended up here and it's been a huge pain to deal with.

We are not talking about a service here, we are talking about OSS codebase and in my experience it does work.

What's your experience?

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#128

Post by xfer »

sundvor wrote: post #99
sverhagen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need to show income to justify your hobby?

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#129

Post by xfer »

hartator wrote: post #127
xfer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not talking about a service here, we are talking about OSS codebase and in my experience it does work.

What's your experience?

In my experience, i donate to projects, which i use often/or build upon.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#130

Post by nextlevelwizard »

zzzeek wrote: post #107
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…

Bad commits are the absolute most difficult thing to reverse when they get released and the userbase codes to them. When I don't pay super close attention to what's being contributed, it creates three times as much work after I let it through.

How often is commit bad enough to require revert, yet made it through testing and got released?
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