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Give away your code, but never your time

wgross.net

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131–140 of 228 posts

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#131

Post by ianamartin »

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.

Do you think that's generally true? Or is it a facet of your experience running three of the most important Python packages around?

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#132

Post by rhizome »

5_minutes wrote: post #18

I always wonder where coders find the time to significantly contribute to Opensouce projects - which many seem to do - after their day job, having played and eaten with their kids, and were an attentful husband.

You might want to stick a debugger on your assumptions about who does and does not have children and/or a spouse.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#133

Post by imhoguy »

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…

"a bit of trust" this! Most often maintainers ego is the issue and too much control over ones baby project is the road to frustration and burnout. The way the power is shared and the shape of community structure is huge factor often neglected by tech-only focused maintainers/owners. There is a good piece of wisdom on social aspect of open-source in Social Architecture by Pieter Hintjens[0]. I recommend learning about his pov to anyone interested in open-source open-projects.

[0] https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#134

Post by btown »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #130
zzzeek wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Code style, inconsistent APIs, a feature that's barely tested by its own contributor, introducing dependencies on innards that were planned to be removed by an ongoing refactoring project, etc. So many ways contributions can go wrong.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#135

Post by hyperpallium »

> annual fee for community membership

Sleepycat did this https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software and seemed to work out for them.

But if opensource truly is infrastructure, why not nationalize it? i.e. government pays maintainers a subsistence wage (provided they meet some scale crtieria, perhaps similar to automatic royalties for pop-song airplay).

Users (i.e. big corporations) would pay a levy to fund this. Of course, it could be set up privately, independent of a government.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#136

Post by hobofan »

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.

The benefits go both ways.

As a programmer that can work with FOSS software, you have now much more employment options because frameworks/etc. are not proprietary to the company you work for, and you easily transfer your knowledge to another company. If your job is "now to glue free modules together" you are also most likely responsible for a bigger part of the product due to FOSS, which could give you a better position in salary negotiations.

FOSS also gives (not just, but more so than others) developers better non-employment options. As a freelancer, you can more or less choose your software stack and then go hunting for clients, without having to worry about licencing fees limiting your client base. As a founder, you can much more cheaply found a tech-company, because there is much smaller upfront investment necessary, and when started as a side-project can be as cheap as renting a server.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#137

Post by frozenport »

hyperpallium wrote: post #135

> annual fee for community membership Sleepycat did this https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software and seemed to work out for them. But if opensource truly is infrastructure, why not nationalize it? i.e. government pays maintainers a subsistence wage (provided they meet some scale crtieria, perhaps similar to automatic royalties for pop-song airplay). Users (i.e. big corporations) would pay a levy to fund this. O…

Well some OSS is developed by universities and research institutes, which is a form of indirect nationalization.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#138

Post by hasenj »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #8

> We also need to bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer. > 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.” So, for me, this goes against the reasons I decide to give my personal time to the community. For me, creating an open source proj…

That's a strange view of open source that borders on communism.

You don't have any duties or obligation towards any individual to assist them with their issues.

The only obligations you have is to be honest about the project. For example, if you know that the project is not written with security in mind, you must announce the fact, so that people don't go using the project assuming you took care of all potential exploits.

Beyond that, you have no obligations towards anyone. Quite the opposite. You've already done your part. You donated the product of your effort for free. The obligation is on people who use your product. If they want you to care of their issues, they are obliged to give something back in return. At the very least, appreciation.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#139

Post by ScottBurson »

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…

I built a site like this a few years ago, got absolutely no traction, and shut it down.

I'm very open to the possibility that I went about it the wrong way, but I don't really know what I should have done differently. Maybe it could have worked if I had done a lot more evangelizing -- I admittedly didn't do much, but what I did do was so poorly received that I gave up.

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