https://tidelift.com is doing something similar.
Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
#22One nice thing about free OSS is that it's not paid for. Hence, less influence by external forces, fewer obligations, no strict deadlines, etc. More often than not, this leads to better quality of such software (given that maintainers are experienced and smart). I'm not sure how establishing a direct relationship between money and work (as opposed to donations and grants) would affect the rather high standards of goo…
I would imagine that the vast majority of free/OSS is done as paid employment.
Do you have anything to back that up, because it directly contradicts my experience.
I've only seen people paid to work on the biggest projects, often only when it's become entrenched in everybody's workflow (Linux, some GCC developers, some Python devs), had the source code released after closed development (OpenSolaris, Firefox), or got taken over by corporation (Clang and Apple, khtml/webkit/Chromium with Google and Apple).
The vast majority of OSS projects IME are tiny, have few developers, and not many users outside of the developer.
Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
#23One nice thing about free OSS is that it's not paid for. Hence, less influence by external forces, fewer obligations, no strict deadlines, etc. More often than not, this leads to better quality of such software (given that maintainers are experienced and smart). I'm not sure how establishing a direct relationship between money and work (as opposed to donations and grants) would affect the rather high standards of goo…
That is a naive thing to say. Open-source work doesn’t become purer when underpaid. Making open-source pay better for everyone , not just a privileged few, will allow more people to join the open-source movement, raising the standard of software quality for everyone. Helping open-source maintainers get paid is better for open-source. I think what the Devflight people are trying to do is admirable. I hope they succeed…
Everyone who? It's highly unlikely that companies will pay an awful lot of money to these maintainers anyways, so only the less "priviled" (i.e. second/third world citizens mostly) will benefit. Moreover, while some individual maintainers will gain in short term, the developers as a workforce will definitely lose (because certain tasks are taken from freelancers, contract workers and employees and distributed to, well, public). Business does not need more developers (let alone better paid ones), it needs more work done faster and for less money.
Also, I think that most people, who maintain decent OSS projects, have well-paying jobs anyways, so they don't need more money and more work to worry about. What they really need is pull requests and bug reports. Which the business can provide by _hiring_ people, who need money and work, to do the job and send the patches. Double benefit, everyone's happy.
Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine that the vast majority of free/OSS is done as paid employment.
Do you have anything to back that up, because it directly contradicts my experience. I've only seen people paid to work on the biggest projects, often only when it's become entrenched in everybody's workflow (Linux, some GCC developers, some Python devs), had the source code released after closed development (OpenSolaris, Firefox), or got taken over by corporation (Clang and Apple, khtml/webkit/Chromium with Google a…
> Do you have anything to back that up
Have you read Berdou's PhD research on the topic?
http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/study/pdf/PhD_Berdou_2007.pdf
Paid developers are more likely to maintain critical parts of open source code bases.
Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
#25One nice thing about free OSS is that it's not paid for. Hence, less influence by external forces, fewer obligations, no strict deadlines, etc. More often than not, this leads to better quality of such software (given that maintainers are experienced and smart). I'm not sure how establishing a direct relationship between money and work (as opposed to donations and grants) would affect the rather high standards of goo…
I would imagine that the vast majority of free/OSS is done as paid employment.
Great if so. Writing OSS as part of the job is actually a good thing, because (1) there's a relatively stable entity that is responsible for this software at the end of the day (and not a single proud and starving artist, who may get ill, get married, get another project, etc.) and (2) someone actually has a _real job_
Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
#26One nice thing about free OSS is that it's not paid for. Hence, less influence by external forces, fewer obligations, no strict deadlines, etc. More often than not, this leads to better quality of such software (given that maintainers are experienced and smart). I'm not sure how establishing a direct relationship between money and work (as opposed to donations and grants) would affect the rather high standards of goo…
This is a fascinating point. I absolutely agree that injecting money into software can have unintended consequences. After speaking with a lot of maintainers, one common theme is that the widespread commercial use of open-source software has already created this direct link between money and work. Maintainers experience pressure to continue developing their project to keep up with users, issues and feature requests.…
Thank you for the reply. Let me ask you, why premium is fixed at 10%? As I see it, this would make sense only for large quantities of small payments. I.e. it seems like you're expecting exactly what you say you're hoping to eliminate: small feature requests, bugfixes, maybe some integration tasks, docs, etc. How about yearly support contracts?
Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
#27Do you have an idea about the size of your target market? What are the project requirements or qualifications necessary to sign up? What's the expected input from the developer/maintainer? How much money are maintainers expected to make? Also, what exactly does DevFlight do? What tactics do you use? How do you decide who to "target", and how (and how often) do you contact them? I'm assuming the developer sees (and ha…
Thanks for your questions. There are no project requirements to join the waitlist. Right now we’re working with maintainers of more popular projects. We’re measuring popularity in terms of users. We expect maintainers to be able to replace their current full-time salary if they want to work on their projects full-time. Some maintainers only want to allocate a percentage of their time to open-source, so the expectations for how much money they can make are different in those cases.
The primary maintainer input is getting us up to speed on their project goals, work preferences and existing communities. After we have a good understanding of their preferences, the maintainer can choose their level of involvement. Maintainers can be as involved as they like after we begin our campaign. We provide a weekly update detailing who we’ve reached out to and the status of each communication. We can provide this information on a daily basis as well.
As far as tactics, we start by collecting publicly available GitHub information related to the maintainer’s repo. This includes looking at who has engaged with projects by doing things like submitting issues, pull requests, and stars. We also use social media and any community channels the maintainer has created (Slack, Gitter, Discourse, etc.). Then we act as the maintainer’s sales team by reaching out to these leads via a variety of different channels (email, social media, phone, real-time messaging). We find the right people within an organization to discuss how the maintainer can add value to the company, and we negotiate contracts based on the custom plan we’ve developed with the maintainer.
Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
#28I really like the idea, and appreciate that there are people out there trying to solve this problem! I have struggled to financially support my open source projects through donations and support contracts, and ultimately decided on an open core model, which has yielded the most success to date. Moving to an open core model is challenging and building out a sales process and sales team can be a barrier for many developers. I was wondering if you have considered including something like reselling, for lack of a better word, in your offering. Having someone negotiate a variety of monetization options on behalf of the project, including selling licenses, would be very interesting. (note I acknowledge open core is not open source, and therefore may be contrary to the goals of this startup).
Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
#29One nice thing about free OSS is that it's not paid for. Hence, less influence by external forces, fewer obligations, no strict deadlines, etc. More often than not, this leads to better quality of such software (given that maintainers are experienced and smart). I'm not sure how establishing a direct relationship between money and work (as opposed to donations and grants) would affect the rather high standards of goo…
This is a fascinating point. I absolutely agree that injecting money into software can have unintended consequences. After speaking with a lot of maintainers, one common theme is that the widespread commercial use of open-source software has already created this direct link between money and work. Maintainers experience pressure to continue developing their project to keep up with users, issues and feature requests.…
Exactly this:
> Maintainers experience pressure to continue developing their project to keep up with users, issues and feature requests. The more popular the project, the more value is being created on top of their software, and the higher the pressure. Because maintainers are often required to work on their projects in their spare time, working around a full-time job, it’s easy to burn out and stop working on the project altogether.
Re: Launch HN: DevFlight (YC W19) – Helping open-source maintainers make money
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Co-founder here. Absolutely! We’re working with the wonderful maintainers of projects like Caddy Server ( https://github.com/mholt/caddy ) and OctoberCMS ( https://github.com/octobercms/october ). We’ll be able to share more of the maintainers we’re partnering with soon.
Funny to see caddy here, since they are already offering commercial licenses. EDIT: In fact, commercial use is only available via the commercial license, even if a company decides to build their own binaries.
You can build your own binaries for commercial use. Caddy's code is under the Apache 2.0 license.