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Why we never thank open source maintainers

windsooon.github.io

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Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#101

Post by notzorbo3 »

StavrosK wrote: post #65
notzorbo3 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The higher you charge, the more horrible your consultancy job will be generally ;-) I've found €200 to be the sweet spot between actually doing useful tech work and being in nonsense meetings all day.

What sort of tech work do you do, though? Nobody is going to pay 200 EUR for frontend development, say.

All kinds really. From transitioning companies to modern CI/CD practices to security counseling to integration work to helping out with automation and such. It's about 50% low level tech stuff and %50 advisements.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#102

Post by dboreham »

wolfgke wrote: post #20
SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #12

I think maintainers would definitely love more some monetary support rather than just a thank you, specially those doing it in their free time (since some maintainers of big open source projects are well established paid employees).

The problem is that it is hard to transfer money over the internet. I just wanted to know what bureaucratic hurdles one has to jump in Germany to even be able to receive donations on your webpage. I don't want to go into the gory details, but just come with something that I say for years very often: The surest way to become a terrorist very fast is to read up into law. And this is only for being legally able to recei…

You can use PayPal. You'll pay a fee if course.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#103

Post by vonnik »

naturalgradient wrote: post #5

As the maintainer of a reasonably popular library, I actually get irritated by a lot of 'thanks', because they are in the form of this sentence: 'Hi, can you implement ? Thanks!' Usually from people who have never contributed anything. Honestly, being thanked in any shape or form does nothing for me, Id rather have users be more considerate of our time and not abuse issues and the community for supporting their lazin…

Thanks not what the post is about. It’s about “thanks” without an ask. As someone involved with a big open source project, Deeplearning4j.org, I can say that spontaneous thanks mean a lot, even years after you built something.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#104

Post by StavrosK »

notzorbo3 wrote: post #101
StavrosK wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of tech work do you do, though? Nobody is going to pay 200 EUR for frontend development, say.

All kinds really. From transitioning companies to modern CI/CD practices to security counseling to integration work to helping out with automation and such. It's about 50% low level tech stuff and %50 advisements.

Ah, I see, thank you.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#105

Post by dictum »

jcbrand wrote: post #86
dictum wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but even without the requested feature, the existing code also took time, mental effort and opportunity costs to come into existence — the user sees it and naturally imagines, "there's more where this came from". Not all users are at the same level of experience as you (a maintainer); this doesn't make them lesser people or even lesser developers (sometimes they're just good in a different p…

Stating your price for a given feature is not "offloading your annoyance" and I didn't see anybody implying that people asking for feaures are "lesser people" or "lesser developers". You seem to be setting up a few strawmen here.

> I didn't see anybody implying that people asking for feaures are "lesser people" or "lesser developers".

I admit that I may be reading too much into the dynamic at play here.

To be precise, naturalgradient did not say anything about the intrinsic value of users, but his/her comment says "people who have never contributed anything" and "supporting their laziness", both valid sentiments. The complaint is that the user is inconsiderate; I'm positing that it's better long-term to teach those users to be better users and eventually good maintainers. It's wishy-washy, but the good attitude of maintainers and other users is what taught me how to behave in open source.

If your policy is to charge for features, please disclaim it in your README. It's not a wrong practice, but you should set up the correct expectations.

-

Because this is HN: For anyone looking for brass, this problem is muck and there's a product opportunity here.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#106

Post by [deleted] »

notzorbo3 wrote: post #101
StavrosK wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of tech work do you do, though? Nobody is going to pay 200 EUR for frontend development, say.

All kinds really. From transitioning companies to modern CI/CD practices to security counseling to integration work to helping out with automation and such. It's about 50% low level tech stuff and %50 advisements.

[deleted]

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#107

Post by davidjnelson »

notzorbo3 wrote: post #14
rsync wrote: post #8

Anytime I find a very useful tool[1] or get help from a maintainer or author I always offer them a lifetime, free rsync.net account. A fair number of them have taken me up on it. [1] Some examples of useful tools include: TextBar for OSX, git-annex assistant ... someone wrote a great encfs tutorial ... etc.

That's an awesome way to reward people! I've gotten offers for money, but actually getting to money to me is more of a hassle than it's worth, so I just decline.

What makes receiving money difficult?

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#108

Post by [deleted] »

notzorbo3 wrote: post #11
naturalgradient wrote: post #5

As the maintainer of a reasonably popular library, I actually get irritated by a lot of 'thanks', because they are in the form of this sentence: 'Hi, can you implement ? Thanks!' Usually from people who have never contributed anything. Honestly, being thanked in any shape or form does nothing for me, Id rather have users be more considerate of our time and not abuse issues and the community for supporting their lazin…

Ways I deal with this as an open source maintainer of various projects: 1. Severely restrict the scope of the project (i.e. do one thing and do it well) 2. Don't feel guilty about saying "no" 3. Realize that people have no malicious intent or are lazy when they request . It's just like a normal customer in a business: they often have no idea of the cost and difficulties in implementing things. That's okay, it's my du…

[deleted]

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#109

Post by [deleted] »

wolfgke wrote: post #20
SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #12

I think maintainers would definitely love more some monetary support rather than just a thank you, specially those doing it in their free time (since some maintainers of big open source projects are well established paid employees).

The problem is that it is hard to transfer money over the internet. I just wanted to know what bureaucratic hurdles one has to jump in Germany to even be able to receive donations on your webpage. I don't want to go into the gory details, but just come with something that I say for years very often: The surest way to become a terrorist very fast is to read up into law. And this is only for being legally able to recei…

[deleted]

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#110

Post by jaymzcampbell »

nulagrithom wrote: post #46
sheetjs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People _pay_. From our experience ( http://sheetjs.com/ , our major open source library is https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx ), even with multinational corporations, they move heaven and earth to find another free solution, or spend in-house time to hack together a solution and try to sucker you into helping them, but paying is by and large the last option.

From my experience in the medium business world (maybe 500 people total?), paying is the only option. Open source is evil. Maintaining things is evil. Writing your own code is evil. Just shell out $x,000 for support. If I could find a way to say "Yeah, we can get 'support' for this open source library for $xxx per month" my life would be much easier.

The Django Rest Framework library has taken this very approach [1] offering both corporate and individual monthly subscriptions which is then used to fund development. It appears to be quite successful in that it's allowed the lead developer to work on the project full time (at a salary of £50k [2]).

[1] https://fund.django-rest-framework.org/topics/funding/

[2] http://www.encode.io/reports/february-2017

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