Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 464 posts

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#81

Post by H8crilA »

jbk wrote: post #74

> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices. Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone…

You need a proper "asshole" in such organizations that will go and threaten complete lack of support if the bill isn't paid. Of course there is a lot more detail in such negotiations, but the fact is that he/she will be facing similar "assholes" from the side of the copros. The entire thing is essentially just a game of standard capitalism. You have to know how to play that game, though.

FFmpeg should be able to pull multiple $M per year easily from all the major corporations that use it. For comparison, $1M is the total yearly cost of ~3 average engineers at FAANGs. And most, if not all of them, use FFmpeg quite seriously.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#83

Post by watwut »

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…

I don't think there was ever such time. Only a tiny minority of developers ever has open source projects and some companies even actively discouraged that.

Moreover, with industry moving towards agile, having project and developing in a company are massively different kind of work.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#84

Post by mfer »

jbk wrote: post #74

> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices. Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone…

> So, large SV companies and startup should also start agreeing to pay for open source, when it's the core of the tech.

Companies usually have a reason to keep their expenses low. Sometimes they are a public company with fiscal responsibilities. A startup will only have so much runway and is likely trying to reduce expenses.

Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#85

Post by ttyprintk »

indymike wrote: post #66
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…

What do you think of hiring maintainers to audit? Answer specific questions about usage and security, with some visibility into your codebase? We’ve talked this over and hit risks concerning access to code where we’d like an NDA that a consultant may dislike.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#86

Post by kam »

WJW wrote: post #61
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 bugf…

"Sending them bugfixes for free" is both a benefit and a burden to an open source project. It takes maintainer time and effort to review the fix, test, make releases, etc, and that's a thankless job. When a company pushes their patches upstream, they're gaining a benefit for themselves (avoiding maintaining a fork), and potentially benefiting any other users who might be affected by the bug or want the same feature. But they're also adding to a maintainer's workload, and that's often the scarcest resource in open source.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#87

Post by indymike »

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…

Oh, wow. I've used this before. I think the python community needs to work out how to make it easier for us to identify and donate to maintainers. When I pip install, I never get a donate here: some url. When I npm install, I do (arguably too much). Anyhow, sh is handy. Thanks!

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#88

Post by jeffbee »

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…

I don't know if that is objectively true. There are numerous small companies who will leetcode every candidate. Then there are Google and Microsoft and the other bigs who hire thousands of people every week, where the best way to get hired is to have a Ph.D and get referred by insiders.

Mediocre candidates getting leetcoded by mediocre companies may be a highly visible pattern but on industry scale I am not convinced it is the dominant mode.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#89

Post by watwut »

creamytaco wrote: post #69
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 t…

The industry is nor moving towards multiple rounds of code review. Nor towards in house development nor away from using open source.
Post reply on HN