151–160 of 229 posts
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What do you do that you charge 200 eur/hr?
Thats the fee for my part-time freelance consulting. 200 is on the low end.
I guess that's the difference between consulting and contracting.
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.
I had to look it up in a dictionary: to take someone up on something = to accept an offer or invitation from someone
For what it's worth, in our work on the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks [1], we have received a great deal of positive feedback and gratefulness. We really appreciate it since it makes the project so much more fun and meaningful for us when we hear that people have found it useful (or at least interesting). We never cease to be amazed at the generosity of the community. All of this often makes me wish we could spend more time on the project. (We're working on getting Round 15 out soon!)
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…
Unless of course, you say you are non profit - then they have to accept that, complicated, yes.
But if you want small donation money for a webpage, it is very easy. You register a small company for it (cost 20-30€, time 20 minutes at the finance agency. and you can use that company for many other similar things). And then you are legally good to receive money in all forms, bitcoins or not. They don't care how you got that money. All that matters to them is how much profit you made in a year. If it is below 16000€ you don't pay (company) taxes - and they totally ignore you for being not important. If you make higher income, well, then you start having a serious business, with taxation and probably more regulation, true.
But for small things I found it not so hard.
Personally I would "thank" someone for example by upvoting their post, commenting on it, or posting their project here or on Lobster, staring their GitHub project, etc. Those are more concrete stuff and personally I would appreciate this kind of actions more than a thank you note.
As an author of dozens of open-source projects, I was really surprised how entitled / rude people can be. I was even told f-word just because I used babel for compiling JS. I was like WTF. Some people act as if they are my paying customers when I get zero compensation from my open source projects. I just share my work because I think they can be useful for some. I don't have any obligations to solve their problems.
This exists everwhere. Just today I heard it from a member of the archery club. He thought he didn't have to help for free, he wants to get salary for helping with preparation for competitions and other things we do. The egoistic culture is here more than ever.
Just because YOU haven't encountered it so much doesn't mean human culture suddenly got spoiled.
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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…
I run a support forum for an open source project. The maintainer does something similar and it can annoy some people to get no for an answer but it keeps things sane. The software has been going well for 8+ years now (with one change of maintainer in that time). We also implemented a Feature Request forum and people generally use it. Plus 'Issues' are turned off on GitHub. So things generally funnel very well through…
That helps address the under appreciated mental cost for dealing with an open ended inbox.
If you don't know whether the new message is related to 1.) expression of gratitude, 2.) complaining, 3.) feature request, etc., you have an added amount of anxiety when opening the message to figure out which kind it is.
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…