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Sorry everybody, I failed with you

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Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#111

Post by glangdale »

unreal37 wrote: post #105
glangdale wrote: post #98

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…

You didn't have any way of knowing who was using your library? Any way of communicating with them? A survey even? Download numbers?

Once it's up on Github and out there, you don't really have any control. It's not like we were keen to put big barriers on the 'try it out' side. I didn't have some mad keen quest to be able to communicate to management "hey, someone from A----- or H----- downloaded our library". That's not that interesting. A lot of people kick the tires.

What I did kinda want to know is if a major Intel customer put our library into production. Sometimes we figured this out by detective work - e.g. one of our staff had a bunch of custom standing google searches hooked up to an RSS feed that would often find big vendors handing out paraphrased versions of our documentation to explain which regex patterns were supported.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#112

Post by stevoski »

andrewstuart wrote: post #34

The pattern is familiar: * open source project * success * no monetary reward, maybe just cost * burnout * project abandoned This is why I don't try to make any open source projects - what's the gain? I'd only do it if it paid money. If people aren't willing to pay then I'm not willing to work.

Add to the pattern:

* Write to high profile companies that use your OSS work asking them to contribute. * Get a very polite and convoluted "no" in response.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#113

Post by matkoniecz »

joeblau wrote: post #83

I’ve seen few OSS burn out posts lately. I created gitignore.io and I’m thankful it wasn’t that successful because even the 5 hours a month I put in didn’t yield much financial compensation. There should really be a more transparent way that projects like this, canihazip, gitignore, redis, and a bunch of other projects can be sustainably run.

Looking at https://gitignore.io - there is plenty of empty space and nothing, even subtle and small like "I would appreciate donations" with link/button.

I also see nothing in https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io and GitHub sponsoring seems to be not enabled.

(just mentioning in case you would make it more clear that you would be happy about donations)

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#114

Post by muyuu »

chii wrote: post #104
muyuu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

monetising OSS is not as trivial as starting all these extra fronts and just hope it somehow pays off, people need to survive in the meantime success in terms of usage doesn't necessarily lead to success in these ancillary efforts - take for instance docz which is the project in question, its very main selling point is that it's simple enough you don't need support and it generates output without dependencies that is…

> very main selling point is that it's simple enough you don't need support and yet there's mention of lots of people pressuring him to add new features or fix issues. So i say, OSS developers should actually have a standard set of ultimatums for all projects ; namely, pay up, or don't get any support that the developer doesn't feel like providing.

one-off changes don't make for a revenue stream, you'll find that people are prepared to ask for features a lot more often than they'd pay for them

also, tenuous conditions are inherent to that model - typically you have a couple people paying a few dollars and asking for the moon every other day, and you already said "yes"

doing that sort of thing solo is certainly not for everybody, the overlap of people good at producing software and good at customer management + PR is extremely slim

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#115

Post by altf4 »

glangdale wrote: post #98

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…

I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for that, even without financial support.

I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project. Maybe that'd even help to get into contact with your users and the companies building solutions on top of your product. Maybe it's just me, but I often feel blind to how and where your project is being used.

EDIT: Typo.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#116

Post by usrusr »

glangdale wrote: post #98

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…

Oh, that scenario, retreating corporate sponsor would probably not have retreated if only usage was more visible, that must have been very frustrating. Almost seems as if the odd occasional visibility boost from some heavy bug or exploit could have saved it. Were Oscar Wilde and PT Barnum secretly open source visionaries?

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#117

Post by pjmlp »

fxtentacle wrote: post #40
radarsat1 wrote: post #7

Of course it's terrible to become burnt out and it feels awful not having enough time to work on an open source project that you love. But, is it just me or has it become rarer for open source project maintainers to feel free to let projects go? I don't mean to let them die, I mean, to find like-minded individuals to which you can defer some or all of the work? I realize that as the original author one feels a sense…

In my opinion, there's just a shortage of experienced engineers. Everyone these days is chasing the latest Javascript framework hype and practicing the next big modern language, e.g. Rust or Go. But most important infrastructure open source is written in C++ and to maintain a cross-platform library linked into hundreds of apps, you need years of practical working experience to accurately estimate the side effects dow…

As greybeard, I see the golden age of FOSS like disco/hippie days, eventually the majority that was against the man ended up working at wall street like jobs during the 80's and early 90s.

Same will happen when everyone that actually made BSD and GNU happen is no longer around, it will be business as usual.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#118

Post by glangdale »

jiofih wrote: post #102
glangdale wrote: post #98

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…

> there needs to be a way of getting paid You said you worked on the library at Intel . Doesn’t that qualify as getting paid for your work? That’s not the usual setup when developers talk about getting paid for their OSS contributions, usually off the clock, so its not clear what the lesson is here besides politics/resourcing at big co (which is a real but distinct problem). This situation was supposed to be where OS…

Fair enough - my complaint is a bit too compressed. The point here is that my experience at Intel led me to realize that corporate OSS users will take your library in secret and not even tell you - much less publicly acknowledge it, much less contribute or help support it. Obviously I'm not expecting to be paid extra while at Intel because folks are using a library.

It's just rather discouraging from the perspective of working on anything else OSS as an independent developer - unless it's a pure passion project. Given that the stuff I'm interested in often tends to wind up being hauled into high-performance infrastructure that's kind of important to bigcos, it's a bit depressing.

The whole multiple contributors thing is a great theory and works for some high-gloss, high-profile projects. There's a huge tail of OSS where the expertise just isn't there and most companies just want to free ride.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#119

Post by mncharity »

bawolff wrote: post #39
arkitaip wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the insane entitlement that many devs have when it comes to open source? Getting bombarded with requests and angry emails from people who demand free support and bug fixes can burn anyone out. I think Github can be a positive force for change here. Redesign the UI to encourage donations, to encourage people to get involved in project work, to write less hostile issues, etc. If devs and designers can weaponi…

I wonder if this is a back-firing of the push for people to be "nice" and "professional". Open source maintainers used to have the sterotype of being rather harsh, and basically telling people to f off if they had stupid questions, didn't RTFM or didn't follow cultural norms. And dont get me wrong, there's a lot wrong with that, but maybe it was also that way for a reason.

In the 1990s, the perl and python communities both had to cope with an endless stream of novice confusion. One grew community norms which included recreational disparagement. The other, in part in reaction, was explicit and firm: if you can't be polite and professional just now, your contribution to the community can wait. The contrast between the two cultures was very dramatic.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#120

Post by tester34 »

glangdale wrote: post #98

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…

that's why telemetry is imporant

If I were doing serious OSS I'd really hard consider adding just something like a once-a-week ping just to be aware of users count

ofc with an ability to disable it

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