151–160 of 228 posts
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.
> 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…
I haven't seen any large scale, long-term open source projects succeed with a 'pay to play' process; what usually happens is the original maintainers realize that even with some amount of compensation, they still don't like scratching other people's itch when it comes to their project. And then they realize that the amount of people/companies even willing to pay at all is a tiny fraction of 1% of their potential targ…
Some people can be quite belligerent about their FOSS entitlement. I've also seen folk publicly bash open source projects just because the license wasn't permissive enough, in their opinion (GPL vs. their darling I'll-bend-over-do-what-you-will-with-me BSD or MIT).
It can be hard to maintain poker face with "not my problem"... as hard as the "fuck you, pay me" proposed by the OP. The social pressure to give away your work for free is real, and humans are social animals. Just look at this thread.
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.
Honestly, I disagree with your statement. The tsunami of FOSS is sometimes an advantage as well, because people can easily migrate off of legacy architecture that they were hired to fix in the first place and pick one to our liking. Since I do not know your niche or how much experience you have, it's hard for me to guess whether you have worked as a contractor somewhere, but...
I had a guy re-inventing his own Celery with a single worker in the same thread as main process. Of course it failed spectacularly :) I then also had an example of someone deliberately not using already battle-tested auth libraries for social auth but creating his own and of course he managed to expose things that were not needed to the client app and the company got hacked. He spent a month building it, instead of just plugging in an already built library that is used in production by millions of people.
Another developer yet built his own framework which was never stable and costed the company tens of thousands of dollars for the three months it was in production (plus three for development).
These are not some small start-ups or dev-shops, but rather serious companies that had devs that were alumni of Big 4. I think I am not the only one with this experience.
For me that is heresy - similar to not using a great standard library in a any language, but rather building your own libs/wrappers. Now, I have nothing against modifying a library or optimizing it for your use case, however starting things from scratch is in my opinion a huge cost, unless your company has time and money to throw.
* pay for support, like ardour
* pay for additional features, like gitlab on-premise
* pay for hosting, like piwik, or gitlab.com
I'm not a big fan of paying for support, like mentioned in the article, because support is not just something you give to your users, it's also useful for you: if someone spotted a big bug (possibly a security issue) but is not paying for support, don't you want to know it? Asking to pay for support is also creating a lot of tension, because people will ask for help anyway, and you have to tell them they won't receive it if they don't pay.
Paying for features is an obvious and efficient way. But I also like the idea that someone in a country where what I consider a decent price is actually a big part of the income can still manage to use my product to its full extent, provided they make an effort to use it.
That's why pay for hosting seems the best way to me for opensource products : everybody can use the product to the full extent, no issue is ignored, people pay for comfort.
Obviously, this works for the products I mentioned because they are ... products, and not libs. But I think it can apply to libs as well:
* pay for support : the idea mentioned in the article
* pay for features : this is something Sidekiq is doing, would love to know how it goes for them
* pay for hosting : this one is tricky, maybe offer to help implementing the lib in customer product? Hardly scalable, though
I would say that for libraries, paying for additional features is what makes the most of sense for me.
Why does the text on this website have 52% transparency?
> 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…
I disagree. Creating an open source project is a gift to the community.
Expecting further time and attention from somebody who gave you a gift, out of a sense of entitlement from having received the gift, is just being rude.
Pay for my time and I'll help you with your issues. Demand my time because you're somehow my "community" and I'll just re-explain the above.
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.
This might make sense when asking a stranger for directions or for someone to help with your car problem, because the relationship is 1:1.
But this breaks down in contexts where scale is a factor.
When assisting users of your project, the relationship is 1:many. And if the project is popular, it is unfair to expect the author to be helping so many people.
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…
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".
Many moons ago I developed a moderately successful shareware program. My licensing terms were simple: If you owned the computer where you installed and used it no license was needed, but if someone else owned the machine, you owed me money. It allowed students, hobbyists and freelancers to use the software for free, for any purpose, but companies, institutions and governments had to pay to play. This idea does not se…