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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#251

Post by matkoniecz »

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…

For start, https://github.com/amoffat/sh seems to not even mention this problem.

No idea whether it would help but clearly staying exactly

> 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 would be much more serious about keeping up with it, but $0, or $5-20/month, is just not realistic incentive to compete with other priorities in my life.

may be a good idea.

Even if that would not help this project then making people aware about problem in general would help.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#252

Post by matkoniecz »

alecthomas wrote: post #248
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…

You should set up GitHub Sponsors if you haven't already.

It is setup, what can be easily checked.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#253

Post by mbarbar »

foothall wrote: post #100
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.

+1. This can lead to corporate capture. We see this in some projects already.

>This can lead to corporate capture. We see this in some projects already.

Could you share some examples that weren't corporate projects to begin with?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#254

Post by spaetzleesser »

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…

“Getting 30-50k$ from those companies for support for one year can be very challenging, long or leading to nowhere at all.”

Do you have reps that can wine and dine high level people? From my observation this is where the money is.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#255

Post by f1refly »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #186
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…

It aint going to happen, have you read some of the contracts linked to opensource, it will be a minority who make money from it. For example, I could use opensource internally, add features to it but I dont have to submit those changes back to the main source for others to use. Not only that who is going to police it? Its not like there is some magic open source police who will police my computer is there?!? So sure…

> For example, I could use opensource internally, add features to it but I dont have to submit those changes back to the main source for others to use. Not only that who is going to police it? Its not like there is some magic open source police who will police my computer is there?!?

There is nothing to police. You making changes and not releasing them is perfectly within your rights. You can even distribute binaries with your changes legally.

> So sure whilst the statement is true that Open Source runs most of the internet, the companies using it like Facebook or Google are not under any legal obligation to submit any changes back to the public domain for the greater good under some of those contracts.

That depends. Both named companies have a global ban for anything using the AGPL license family. Except from that, you might be right that they aren't obligated to distribute their changes. You might find, however, that they do so anyways. It's much easier to merge your changes upstream than to maintain an internal fork indefinetly. And by merging the changes upstream everyone else profits.

You seem to have a very warped view of what open source software and free software is about, and what rights the users may have or not have.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#256

Post by midasuni »

StreamBright wrote: post #241
coldpie wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You run into problems when there are contributors other than yourself.

Could you elaborate?

Ffmpeg’s code is owned by hundreds of people, you’d have to get them all to agree to relicense.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#257

Post by quicklime »

I built and maintain a small open source tool. It's a very niche tool that is useful for some big enterprises, but not really useful anywhere else.

When I built it, it was great to learn about some interesting new tech, and scratch a personal itch. But by far the biggest reason I keep maintaining it is the community. Every once in a while (maybe once a month or so) someone randomly comes up to me (in person, or in a chat) and says thanks, and tells me about how this tool saves them a huge amount of time and makes their life so much easier.

Would I want to be paid by a company, in exchange for providing features and support to them? Fuck no. That would kill any joy I had in doing this. Why would I want to ruin the fun by having to adhere to a timeline set by some corporate project manager?

If a company wants to help, what I'd much prefer is that they help out with the boring stuff. Pay someone smart to triage bugs for me, provide first-line support, write user docs, all that stuff so I can focus on the fun parts.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#258

Post by bfung »

nerdponx wrote: post #218
bscphil wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the point, they don't pay, and they don't get support. But they still complain You've put your finger on the core of the issue with FiloSottile's suggestion. The problem is that to sell something to a big corporation, you need to have something tangible you can sell. What you have are enormous pieces of widely used software, being given away for free. Many companies are going to take that and run with it, an…

Would it be unethical to refuse to fix bugs reported by employees of large corporations, unless those corporations pay a support contract or contribute a patch themselves?

It’s not unethical. In fact, why not!?

Sure, someone else may start a competing project…

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#260

Post by saghm »

donw wrote: post #247
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. Making something open source is about granting freedoms for users of that thing. One of those freedoms is usually "you owe nothing and can do with it what you wish: sell it, fork it, modify it" in exchange for "the author provides no guarantees and is not liable for this software". Open source authors that expect some benefactor to appear and sprinkle mo…

I'm not sure to whom you are replying. I can't think of anyone I've ever met that started an open-source project expecting it to become their day job in short order. When your project blows up and mints a herd of new gazillionaires, yes, it's reasonable to ask those companies to fund what is now an important community project. Anybody that says "nope, their money, they do what they want" is spouting the same flavor o…

I think the point is that while it would be awesome to just have everyone pay open source maintainers what they can afford to when they use their project, in practice relying on people's (or worse, companies') good will is a losing strategy. It seem wildly unrealistic to just expect that everyone will just naturally give back to open source in a meaningful way absent any actual incentives or requirements, and even if it did start happening there would be nothing the situation from returning to the way it was before. I think most of the arguments you'll see against the idea of "just give back to open source maintainers even though you aren't required to" aren't skeptical of the idea that people should be compensated for their work, but just skeptical that peer pressure is the only thing needed to turn the current open source model into one where all maintainers are fairly compensated.
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