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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#311

Post by autarch »

I'm the creator (often with others) and maintainer of some very popular Perl distributions that are used either by many other libraries, many applications, or both. The most notable are probably DateTime (https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime), Log-Dispatch (https://metacpan.org/dist/Log-Dispatch), and Exception-Class (https://metacpan.org/dist/Exception-Class), among many others.

The first release of DateTime was in 2003. In 2008, I added a "DONATIONS" section to the docs, and around that time I started adding it to everything I released. It was basically just a link to web page with a PayPal button it, so not very professional.

Over the years since I started doing this, I'd estimate I've gotten somewhere between $1,000 and $5,000 (PayPal doesn't offer historical data far enough back to know for sure). On the one hand, that's a lot of "free" money. OTOH, this is software that has been used by absolutely massive companies, including Amazon (which I know for a fact used a lot of Perl in the early days, including things I worked on). So even $5,000 is an incredibly small fraction of the value this software generated.

Almost all of these donations were $100 or less and seemed to come from individuals. I can only recall one instance where someone asked for an invoice first, after which their company donated $500 (or maybe 500 euros), which was nice.

So this is just another data point.

And then I realized that this link has been broken since some time in 2018. Doh!

I'm fixing it and adding a "email me for an invoice" bit as well. It can't hurt.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#312

Post by pabs3 »

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…

Not just not adhering to the license, but rejecting the entire philosophy of OSS and changing the culture of the entire software developer community such that the philosophy is disappearing and developers no longer appreciate copyleft.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#313

Post by pabs3 »

mbarbar wrote: post #253
foothall wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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?

The Linux kernel, take a look at the LWN stats about who develops it; mostly large corporations.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#314

Post by F6F6FA »

mbrodersen wrote: post #286
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…

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 %

Not surprised. Sometimes give a tip for good service. If you want people/companies to pay $ then you are not working on OSS.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#315

Post by wpietri »

mbrodersen wrote: post #272
saghm wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are absolutely right. The naivety of most open source developers when it comes to understanding how people/companies/markets work is jaw dropping. If you ask people to pay $0 for your work then that is exactly what they will pay. Wishing for things to be different is a waste of time. Accept how the world works and act accordingly.

That isn't "the world". It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history that see themselves as entitled to make endless profit without ever worrying about where that comes from or who it hurts. It's not a sustainable mindset, so it never lasts.

Look at the shift in attitudes toward the environment in the last 100 years as an example. There was a point where executives thought it absolutely fine to pollute wildly. That consequences were for the little people. Through a mix of culture change and improved regulation, that has changed, and it continues to change.

A more recent example is the trend toward corporate social responsibility, which looks at a broad set of problems and devotes corporate resources toward fixing them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibilit...

Do they put in enough money? Surely not. But it's indicative of the kind of culture shift we can push for here.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#317

Post by naveen99 »

Klonoar wrote: post #162
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…

Wasn't there some YC company that was trying to act as a sales agent/middle-entity for this kind of situation? If not YC, they at least were on HN at one point. Curious if anyone knows.

Not yc, but there is http://openteams.com/ by the founder of numpy. disclaimer, I invested in it out of a fund.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#318

Post by Aeolun »

eyegor wrote: post #305
pxc wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the text of the tweet: > Log4j maintainers have been working sleeplessly on mitigation measures; fixes, docs, CVE, replies to inquiries, etc. Yet nothing is stopping people to bash us, for work we aren't paid for, for a feature we all dislike yet needed to keep due to backward compatibility concerns. Why don't they 'resolve' the security issue by removing the feature and then set up a bug bounty for backporting fixes…

So your proposed solution is for the open source maintainers to release a hotfix build and to put up their own money to host a bug bounty program so someone else can fix it?

I think what they mean is: If you want this misfeature back, pay us $50k to do it properly.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#319

Post by wpietri »

mbrodersen wrote: post #273
phkahler wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support. That's true. The problems brought up in the article all stem from companies relying on open source and then getting into trouble when there are problems with it. They would pay if they had to. The core problem is that everyone wants something for nothing. Sure companies appreciate that they can get billions of doll…

It is not a problem. It just is how humans function. So act accordingly. Trying to change how humans work is a waste of times. You are fighting millions of years of evolution. Good luck with that. Try not to be bitter when you fail.

That is one of those evo-psych just-so stories. American corporate culture in the late 20th/early 21st century is not representative of all humans at all times.

I get that it's the dominant experience for you, but please don't confuse that with some sort of deep evolutionary imperative. One of the things that distinguishes humans as a species is how extremely social, how extremely cooperative we are. See, for example, E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of the Earth" for more on where we fit in evolutionarily.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#320

Post by wpietri »

mbrodersen wrote: post #275
wpietri wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren't the only answers. The notion that people only respond to direct incentives is incorrect and ahistorical. It's a convenient dogma for the selfish to promote, but I don't have to take it seriously at all. Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right her…

Good luck with that. I for one am not holding my breath. Meanwhile, perhaps accept the world for what it is and act accordingly? Just make the companies pay for it by licensing the code correctly. It isn’t rocket science.

Oh? Shame nobody's ever tried that. But since you've had a brand new idea that you're sure will solve the problem, how about you take a swing at it? Show us how easy it is.
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