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Give away your code, but never your time

wgross.net

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Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#141

Post by hasenj »

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…

Because who decides what projects deserve how much? Who decides that a project is even worthy to receive anything at all? If there was such a government program, what would prevent masses of inexperienced developers to start pointless projects, open source them, and file a claim to receive money from the government?

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#142

Post by jondubois »

frozenport wrote: post #137
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.

That would make it unfair for indie developers... Then they'd be competing with institutions. This would actually kill open source as we know it.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#143

Post by hyperpallium »

hasenj wrote: post #141
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…

Because who decides what projects deserve how much? Who decides that a project is even worthy to receive anything at all? If there was such a government program, what would prevent masses of inexperienced developers to start pointless projects, open source them, and file a claim to receive money from the government?

> perhaps similar to automatic royalties for pop-song airplay

From http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/copyright-compulsory-...

In order to take advantage of this compulsory license, a notice must be sent to the copyright owner along with a fee set by the U.S. Copyright Office, known as the statutory fee or statutory rate. The fee for recordings is currently (as of 2017) 9.1 cents per song (or 1.75 cents per minute of playing time). To verify the current rate, check the Copyright Office's guide to compulsory licenses. On the site, you can click “Mechanical Royalty Rate.”

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#144

Post by ak39 »

IMHO, the fundamental problem of these burnout open source projects is that they are "marketed" (deliberately or otherwise) to non-decision makers and people who don't control the budgets in companies that need their software. I.e. The lowly developers of some complex hive of a deeply hierarchical group of code monkeys in a for-profit org that's typically not in technology.

Red Hat, Google, Microsoft and Oracle all know the value of open source because their big wigs are keenly aware of its value.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#145

Post by jondubois »

I run a relatively popular open source project. I think that there are some strange forces in the tech industry which make it nearly impossible to get big companies to use your project.

Maybe it's not right but I really feel like not being based in Silicon Valley has something to do with it... Related to branding, social networks, bloggers. Outside of SV, it's very tough.

Only small startups were using my project initially; literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of small startups but not one large corporation (that I knew about).

It's been 4 years though and the good thing is that now several of the startups that were using my project got really big and are growing fast. Still no big corporations but it doesn't matter anymore. Me and one other contributor are now able to make money offering consulting to those startups which grew. Also we have a sponsorship deal now.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#146

Post by sorokod »

hasenj wrote: post #138
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 expl…

Don't know about duty but I think everyone has a right to expect help and a right to give help. It makes for a better world where these rights are regularly exercised.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#147

Post by a3_nm »

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…

vim has something like this: users who pay can vote on features to be added. https://vim.sourceforge.io/sponsor/faq.php

However, the donation is about helping poor children in Uganda, not about running the project.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#148

Post by hasenj »

sorokod wrote: post #146
hasenj wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expl…

Don't know about duty but I think everyone has a right to expect help and a right to give help. It makes for a better world where these rights are regularly exercised.

> I think everyone has a right to expect help

Of the people with whom you have formed strong social bonds, yes.

Of random strangers? .. I don't think so.

Unless they are bound by some sort of a contract (employees, servants, etc).

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#149

Post by antoinevg »

xfer wrote: post #123
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?

Maintaining your own fork means you are taking de-facto responsibility for the maintenance of more projects in addition to your paying projects.

The costs of keeping them current adds up surprisingly quickly.

In fact, it adds up so quickly that my company has a standing policy in place that we will do _whatever_it_takes_ to have any pull requests we need in an upstream project integrated in order to avoid us having to maintain a fork.

What this means in practice usually is that getting the pull request accepted becomes the primary focus for one of the senior engineers for the 1-2 weeks it takes to get it into a shape that the project maintainer can work with.

As you can imagine this is also expensive, but it's a fraction of the cost of maintaining our own fork of the project.

So - here's my offer to Libré, Free and Open Source Software maintainers everywhere:

I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either:

1) do the quality control work yourself or…

2) hold the hand of one of my junior engineers while they learn how to do it.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#150

Post by Radim »

jondubois wrote: post #142
frozenport wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That would make it unfair for indie developers... Then they'd be competing with institutions. This would actually kill open source as we know it.

You misunderstood -- the parent said this is already the case. A lot of FOSS is already heavily subsidized, from grants and tax money. No "would"s needed.

And yes, it definitely makes it harder for indie developers to "compete", because these institutions run on infinite slave labour (students and postdocs). The only way to compete is on quality, which brings us back to the original "who pays for quality time" premise.

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