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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#121

Post by didibus »

ogogmad wrote: post #60
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.

I'm not sure I fully agree. Doing open source doesn't mean you do it well. You have no sense of how quickly, efficiently and independently they managed to achieve it. I'd much rather hear from prior experience, and probe about situations and scenarios they were in, projects and problems they contributed too, and hear the story of how they went about it, how long it took them, what they did in the face of setbacks and pressure, etc.

I have seen first hand developer that are just okay or below average successfully deliver on open source, because you have infinite time, no constraints, no stress and get to choose exactly what you do or contribute. But in a work environment they struggle, given ambiguous problems they struggle, given time constraints they struggle, given changing needs and demands they struggle, working within a team they struggle, given something outside their area of knowledge they struggle, etc.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#122

Post by candiddevmike »

wpietri wrote: post #107
mfer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? A while back I bought a cheap robot vacuum. Their scheduling feature didn't meet my needs, so I reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced a cron-friendly CLI tool and a library so people could do other things with it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks Honestly, this was a mistak…

IMO, I think the golden age of completely FOSS apps (no open core) is ending/has ended as users expect more features and apps struggle to meet demands without effective monetization. I think open source will always have a place for libraries and tools, but end user applications will either become open core or no longer open source.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#123

Post by wpietri »

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…

I would be fascinated to see your evidence that in-house code is any better on average than open-source code.

I haven't done a lot of consulting lately, so I haven't seen much in-house code in the last few years. But my experience is that the average in-house codebase is worse. And that makes sense from the incentives. Open-source projects that want more than one contributor need to be approachable enough that people join in. Whereas with most in-house code, people commit to working on it without ever seeing it. Switching to work on another open-source project is easy; switching to another job is hard. Open-source authors get to decide when to release; in-house code is generally driven by execs. And so on.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#124

Post by KarlKemp »

mfer wrote: post #84
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?

In strictly economic terms, it rarely makes sense for all but the largest users of some upstream project, putting that proposition squarely in tragedy-of-the-commons territory: it’s better to hope for others to support it.

That applies even to existing sponsorships, however. Their existence thus points at more than cold-blooded short-term business interests being at play here. While corporations are in theory seeking only shareholder value, corporations happen to be (made up of) people, who are capable of altruism, and should be encouraged to use it. Just because US capitalism has managed to build a not-entirely-failing system on unadulterated selfishness does not turn that mindset into a virtue, or even reality: as far as I can tell, the dominant reason for sponsorship is that some person with a bit of authority likes the idea.

They may consider it good for marketing, or recruitment, or to secure their supply chain, or just morally called for, or they want to be the fat cat at this years TINYTEC-CON. If you asked them, they’ll give you a reason that totally makes sense for a business and has little to do with reality. And, no, nobody ever got sued or fired for these decisions. So go ahead, do it! You got all the left-padding you needed, it’s right to pad their wallet in return.

(recycled from earlier comment on the topic)

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#125

Post by philosopher1234 »

There should be an umbrella company that takes ownership of a large number of major projects, charges a single licensing fee and grants access to all of them or none of them. It should remain free to amateurs and should be free or cheaper for small businesses.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#126

Post by DarylZero »

mfer wrote: post #84
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?

Right. Mostly they wouldn't even pay employees if they could get away with it. We have to make laws about it.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#127

Post by DarylZero »

watwut wrote: post #109
skinkestek wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes they are a public company with fiscal responsibilities. Public companies also have accounts for goodwill in their books, don't they? Also, I'd even say that depending on volunteers for everything when you aren't in dire straits isn't to responsible.

No, the companies are supposed to generate value for shareholders. They are supposed to have infinite financial growth and that is pretty much it.

That's how it is most of the time but I don't see how you can say it's "supposed to" be that way. It's pathological. Essentially it's a form of group sociopathy.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#128

Post by mfer »

skinkestek wrote: post #99
mfer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Sometimes they are a public company with fiscal responsibilities. Public companies also have accounts for goodwill in their books, don't they? Also, I'd even say that depending on volunteers for everything when you aren't in dire straits isn't to responsible.

> Public companies also have accounts for goodwill in their books, don't they?

I've worked for multiple public companies and have yet to see this. I have seen different models. For example, when they want a feature in an open source project they may contract with maintainers to pay for work. Or, they may have a maintainer for a project on staff.

> Also, I'd even say that depending on volunteers for everything when you aren't in dire straits isn't to responsible.

Responsible to whom?

People choose to be volunteers. Being a volunteer and hoping for hand outs from companies it's working out well for most folks. Maybe it's time to look at other ways of doing things.

Note, I'm not suggesting what the right way to do things is. I'm just looking at how people are doing things. Expecting them to behave differently isn't likely going to bring about a change in them.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#129

Post by bawolff »

Companies barely spend money on their own internal security dept. It seems like it would be a hard sell to convince them to spend money on improving an external projects security posture. Maybe if it was core to their business, but investing to imorove the security posture of a logging library seems like a hard sell.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#130

Post by imachine1980_ »

DarylZero wrote: post #126
mfer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Right. Mostly they wouldn't even pay employees if they could get away with it. We have to make laws about it.

like dual licensees?qt?
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