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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

281–290 of 464 posts

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#281
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…

The answer is to use a license that require companies to pay. If you ask for $0 then people will gladly pay you $0. It is naive to expect anything else.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#282
post #2

Unpopular opinion: Maybe there is nothing wrong with the "status quo", maybe we don't need yet another attempt to finance small FOSS projects where it's hard to explain how money will actually solve any of these issues. Maybe people just need to be more considerate of what they depend upon. And in the case that a popular yet well maintained project has a CVE on day, maybe we need to accept that popularity does not ma…

"Being considerate" and "accepting" can't fix bugs. Time and money can fix bugs. We need to get these projects more time and more money.

Here is an interesting idea: change the license so that companies have to pay. Sue the companies that don’t.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#283

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.

That’s fine. But don’t then complain when nobody sends any $ your way.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My point is this, if the OSS remuneration situation were better would we have seen HeartBleed or other CVE's? There are a lot of falsehoods in the OSS domain, like its better for security. https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-product-cvssscore-distribu...

Just looking at paid out Bug Bounties gives you an idea of how hard it is to get appropriate levels of remuneration as a vendors own bug bounty is outbid.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/08/11/exodus_intelligence_5...

So whilst the call to arms to get paid for OSS submissions is noble, its still a flawed business model for most "professional" maintainers. I know there is a culture at Uni's to maintain OSS but they dont have the experience which we see in the quality of the code output.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#285
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source developers can still release things to everyone for free. Seems fair to say that companies derive value from open source in proportion to their scale. How about a $1m value generated threshold before it's considered impolite for a company to not at least give a little something back?

Ultimately these tools have already been released for free so asking for a rent seeking style payment after the fact is a little bit like sour grapes. What stops me from just forking the project? Really nothing. If anything open source maintainers that want to get paid should look into a model that mirrors the bug bounty programs. Have bounties for features. Generally these projects only really need security updates.

Is it "sour grapes" if I bring a big dish to a potluck to share and I get mildly irritated if someone walks over and takes the whole thing to their table, ensuring nobody else gets any of it? Is it fine if a crowd of strangers shows up to my potluck without bringing anything, takes all the food, and leaves? Should I be able to go to a food-bank-for-the-poor and walk out with a big crate full of food since it's free?

At some point you have to recognize that a lot of our society operates on the expectation that people will behave in accordance with norms so that we don't have to bake every single thing down into extreme rules and have them enforced by armed goons. You're certainly free to ignore norms and do whatever benefits you the most at expense of others, but if other people did that to you constantly you'd probably end up pretty grumpy. There are lots of ways you can inconvenience someone without breaking the law.

Personally, I gave away a very useful free software package for ~4 years that I maintained solo, and multiple corporations repackaged it to sell to people without ever contributing fixes. Then when I stopped maintaining it for free, they all sent me emails offering to sponsor it (at pathetic rates). Seems like my free labor was worth something after all!

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#286
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…

People give away their work with a price tag of $0. So people/companies pay $0. Are you surprised? Do you normally pay more than the asking price for things you buy? If you want people/companies to pay $ then you need to put that in the license and sue companies that don’t do it. Or get a company to do it on your behalf in return for a %

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#287

All this crap is not maintainers fault. Companies do not want to pay, this is the reason they use FOSS code in the first place. Do you want to force every single company that rely on FOSS to pay? Change your license. Stop using permissive licenses like MIT or BSD and license your project with GPL. Companies will have 3 choices: use your GPL licensed code and make their software GPL too, which they don't want to; pay…

or maybe they will stay on an older version, which would be covered by the permissive license or just switch to another software

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#289
I am in a minority but I really like buying professional open source software libraries compared to FOSS - there's someone for support is the main thing, and if you count you're time trying to get FOSS to work, then paid software is superior. I use a commercial IDE, with professional libraries for development, it's so much easier.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#290

Oh, yes, open source economics. Everyone wants to use open source, no one wants to pay for it, a large number of entitled people get angry when you don’t provide support or implement their feature request for free...I’m sure anyone here who has done an open source project notable enough to make the Wikipedia has seen all of this. To keep my sanity, I had to enforce strong boundaries: No, you are not a customer until…

You provide your work with a price tag of $0. So people/companies pay $0. What’s so hard to understand about that? You give away BMW’s for $0 and the same thing will happen. You are signaling that your work is worth nothing. So people then expect you to do more work for nothing. Yes of course! You yourself value your work at $0! And the world then agrees. Don’t be naive and expect otherwise.
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