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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#61

Post by WJW »

geerlingguy wrote: post #38

No thanks. Maintaining business relationships with $megacorp is one of the primary reasons OSS maintainers (maybe just speaking for myself, but I don't think so) do their OSS work, and don't develop proprietary software and market and sell it around a business venture. If you start writing up contracts or accepting direct payments with any strings attached at all, the dynamic is completely changed.

Not to mention that the dynamic would completely shift in terms of community contributions. If I submit a patch to a free project where the maintainers make nothing, I wouldn't even think of asking for anything in return (even if it is a project used by bigcorps, such as Redis or GHC). If I know that the maintainers get paid a full salary for maintaining the software, it becomes a much weirder thing to send them bugfixes for free.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#62

Post by ignoramous »

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…

Neither of those make for good filters; though they are decent enough indicators. Most engs can't be bothered with leetcode, let alone F/OSS.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#63

Post by andreineculau »

> Professionalizing the role of maintainer

My 2c are that the problem is there, not specifically to OSS. The whole industry is looking down on maintenance and maintainers.

Keeping things working might not be a great career, but it's equally important as creating new stuff, and guess what: some people don't want to create but like to debug and maintain.

A parallel might be drawn with the right to repair electronics. When we will get back the culture of repairing stuff, then we will value more the act of repairing. Because now, it's an art of repairing that very few afford.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#64

Post by nobodyandproud »

For businesses, “free, as in speech” is equivalent to “free, as in beer” because I as a company developer can build it and use it. Even better if it’s a non-viral copy-left license.

Why pay for the cow when you get the milk for free? There’s no incentive for anyone to pay and this has become best practice.

Anyone remember the uproar over CentOS being retired?

There’s this unrealistic expectation that maintainers be paid without a real business model, but that’s what needs to be done.

Become a business or being part of a business, and find a cost model that is both appealing to customers and self-sustainable.

All which comes with non-engineering headaches, but there’s no avoiding it.

What may help here—and the missing ingredient—-is the lack of a professional, trade organization.

In fact, this would solve a number of pressing problems in our industry.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#65

Post by neilwilson »

There is of course another way to do this.

The state offers a guaranteed job and collects tax.

Just as it does to maintain the roads.

Toll roads became public roads .

Earning six figures is a chore and frankly gets boring after a while. But if you had enough to keep the wolf from the door …

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#66

Post by indymike »

F6F6FA wrote: post #54

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 compan…

> 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.

I'm starting to do something different at my company. I'm finding the package maintainers for the non-commercial stuff we use in our product and making a donation. I'm also going to start asking the maintainers to invoice my company for support where that is possible to do.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#67

Post by nopenopenopeno »

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…

Good for you. The welfare queen megacorps have been too comfortable expecting handouts like open source charity work and public bailouts. Open source software has served the elite executive class while leaving working people to depend on anti-freedom proprietary offerings. I am sick of watching it go down like that. The never-ending data leaks, dark patterns, lock-in strategies, and attacks on encryption and freedom of speech, are all exacerbated by this tendency to yield the commons to the ruling class. If open source doesn’t serve working people, I don’t care a lick for it anymore. Cheers to Stallman and all, but this is where his proposals fell short.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#68

Post by usrbinbash »

jakear wrote: post #36
usrbinbash wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the person in Berlin has access to state funded medical support, a state funded pension, paid sick leave, paid ma/paternity leave, ... Salaries are lower, but expenses for essential services are simply A LOT less in most of Europe.

Tech companies also pay for health insurance, sick leave, and ma/pa leave. Sure pensions aren't a big thing, but increased savings from increased salary can make up for that (not to mention 401k).

The difference: It's not up to the companies in most of western Europe. These services are guaranteed by law, and provided by the state.

>but increased savings from increased salary can make up for that (not to mention 401k).

And huge medical bills can quickly eat up even substantial savings...that doesn't happen as easily when medical services are provided by universal coverage.

Also, state guaranteed pensions aren't lost if some company in a portfolio crashes.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#69

Post by creamytaco »

moksly wrote: post #48

The alternative to what we have now is not going to be a healthy OSS community. The alternative is going to be big companies insourcing more of their libraries. The only reason why OSS has seen the up-pick it has is because major companies profit from it. Microsoft didn’t embrace open source because it had a change or morals, it embraced open source because it started making so much more money from enterprise orgs sw…

Reviewing code is the elephant in the room. Filosotile -perhaps out of ignorance or disconnect- fails to mention that the vast majority of open source projects (log4j being a great recent example) are absolute shit. Nobody should be building anything on top, nevermind giving the maintainers more money.

In-house development, software BOMs, rising of standards and multiple rounds of code review are the processes that the industry is shifting towards and for good reason.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#70

Post by nopenopenopeno »

moksly wrote: post #48

The alternative to what we have now is not going to be a healthy OSS community. The alternative is going to be big companies insourcing more of their libraries. The only reason why OSS has seen the up-pick it has is because major companies profit from it. Microsoft didn’t embrace open source because it had a change or morals, it embraced open source because it started making so much more money from enterprise orgs sw…

The welfare queen megacorps have been too comfortable expecting handouts like open source charity work and public bailouts. Open source software has served the elite executive class while leaving working people to depend on anti-freedom proprietary offerings. I am sick of watching it go down like that. The never-ending data leaks, dark patterns, lock-in strategies, and attacks on encryption and freedom of speech, are all exacerbated by this tendency to yield the commons to the ruling class. If open source doesn’t serve working people, I don’t care a lick for it anymore. Cheers to Stallman and all, but this is where his proposals fell short.
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