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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#51

Post by qnsi »

Can someone help me find whos idea was it?

Basically kill free open source. Make every "new open source" (NOS) program dual licensed, free for non commercial use and paid for conmercial use.

He proposed companies paying 1% of revenue to license this software. But it would all go through a proxy company that would gather payment and send it to participating companies, I dont remember how it would be split.

I think this is actually a way forward. I would feel better building on top of this kind of stack vs npm ecosystem

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#52

Post by throwaway894345 »

b3morales wrote: post #27
throwaway894345 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have software licenses and yet every open source project doesn’t employ a lawyer. The solution is probably the same: canned, off-the-shelf contracts. If a company wants to negotiate a custom contract, then the maintainer can decide whether or not it’s worth hiring a lawyer.

Even if the contract itself might be commodified, the relationship won't be. Business will want what it wants, regardless of what the contract says. Maintainers will certainly be subject to influence campaigns by business, which will sometimes conflict with other "clients". Even saying "no, read the contract" to a persistent VP has a psychological and social cost. I can't really imagine this decreasing the pressure o…

I think the idea is to provide a middle ground option between full-on startup and doing free work for corporations. That implies meeting in the middle both on compensation and on work delivered, but it's possible that we'll find new non-zero-sum opportunities.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#53

Post by daenz »

javajosh wrote: post #49
daenz wrote: post #26

I'm an open source author and maintainer of a somewhat-popular python package[0] (~1M downloads/month) that I've maintained for over 10 years. I don't recall ever receiving a donation. I am still maintaining it, but I just don't have time to add the improvements that it needs to keep up with the ecosystem (asyncio, for example). If organizations who use it got together and chipped in some non-negligible amount, I wou…

First, I don't use it, but thanks. (I know, being a maintainer is a thankless job, but I'm a rebel.) Second, the OP addresses this issue directly. He's talking about "making OSS maintenance legible " (emphasis mine) to BigCorps via 5-6 figure invoices "on letterhead". It's a grand idea, and I hope it works. The path to not working is too achingly obvious though. Budgets are always tight (even if you're Apple and you…

If I could figure out for certain which big companies were using my software, I might try the invoice idea for fun. I expect it would be ignored, but I would send it anyways to prove the idea one way or the other.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#54

Post by F6F6FA »

I feel this is a problem of companies being cheapskates, not of OSS maintainers. So do not make it their problem. I do not make OSS for companies, but for enthusiasts, contributing to building cool stuff, students and researchers.

Don't really want a commercialization of OSS maintainers. Does not seem in the spirit of OSS, but a convoluted way to contract a single dev to work on your stack. If you are this big company, ping your developer advocate, set aside a budget, and have them go through your dependancies and reward accordingly.

What bothers me way more, is when companies take OSS and then do not adhere to the license. Not as in forgetting to attribute you, but publishing a patent based on your code and approaches. That's easy enough to kill your motivation if you are doing it for free in the first place.

If money becomes an incentive for OSS maintainers, then they will start replying to the emails they constantly get, to buy their extension or use their CDN. Your company bet the house on a poor Polish CS student for logging or useragent parsing? Your, and only your, problem. OSS keeps on working.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#55

Post by wakeupcall »

As a maintainer of several OSS projects, I could work full time on them and have time for nothing else. Yet, I'm pretty sure that even if these projects would be 100x more popular, the donations I would receive wouldn't even pay my daily expenses.

I refuse all donations/tips for three reasons:

- as per above, your donation is generally insignificant. it's just overhead in tax accounting

- people donate "with strings attached": AKA "here's $2, but I'd really love this feature"

- receiving donations wouldn't be fair to any current or past contributors that made the projects what it is

The last point is especially true in the OSS landscape. The most front-facing programs get the donations, but the low-level libraries and infrastructure that make them possible get nothing. Heck, I've seen forks with a few superficial tweaks receiving donations and reaping the benefits while the original projects is chugging along slowly at the hard-to-build infrastructure that nobody else wants to do.

Bug bounty sites fall almost universally in the last category in my eyes.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#56

Post by daemonhunter »

1_player wrote: post #7
daemonhunter wrote: post #3

Side note: dang there are salary discrepancies in the SWE community.

There are salary discrepancies everywhere in the world. If you mean the salaries across countries, you're comparing apples and oranges. €100k in Berlin goes much further than $100k in Houston (a random big city in the US, I don't think Berlin is comparable to NYC)

There are big discrepancies in the US alone. I'm comparing mine (L6+) to those.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#57

Post by [deleted] »

fivelessminutes wrote: post #16
the_gipsy wrote: post #5

Please define "unsustainable". It has worked great for decades, both for the free market side, and for the FOSS community.

It has certainly 'worked great' for leeches, if you ignore bombs like this logging bug destroying Western civilization. Can you explain a bit more how it worked great for the bulk of maintainers / authors who don't see any return on their work, burn out and have to do something else?

[deleted]

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#58

Post by WJW »

tobltobs wrote: post #33
didibus wrote: post #12

I feel like the examples of log4j and ua-parser aren't that great, because it would be relatively easy for any other similar lib to take their place, as it's mostly straightforward to implement, even though it still takes time. But there are some things like Kafka, PostgressSQL, Spring Boot, Tomcat, Apache Math, ZooKeeper, the OpenJDK, and all that which are definitely non-trivial and a huge amount of time and effort…

First those developers don't get any money for their work, now you also telling them that the work they are doing isn't really valuable anyway? Did you consider the fact that half of your examples of worthy things are using the unworthy log4j?

Quite a few managers I have spoken to will use the exact reasoning ("we could rewrite this in two weeks or so, why should we worry if it disappears?") and do indeed seem to think that the fact that because the OSS dev did not get paid for their work implies that it is low value work. If it was in fact high value, they would have gotten paid for it you see.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#59

Post by heisenbit »

Good maintenance requires skills and a steady hand but nobody is going to pay for it. New software is valued much more and thus is the resource allocation. If maintenance is done at all and not shifted to some lower cost organization or country. The Apple App Shop puts a premium on new over working a long time.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#60

Post by ogogmad »

lumost wrote: post #42

Once upon a time, the best way to get a software job was to demonstrate your ability to build useful open source projects. 10 years ago the Principal Engineers I would work with had super sized open source portfolio's which leant them both credibility and experience building products people liked. Junior devs would search (sometimes in vain) for issues where they could contribute a few PRs Now the best way to get a j…

> Now the best way to get a job is leet code, leet code, and more leet code. Rather than spending Maybe more broadly: The only way to prove that you're good at X, is to do X well. An artist is only as good as his portfolio. The same is true for all creative jobs.

I'm thinking that these proxies (see all attempts at standardised testing) are a disease of our time.

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