Professional maintainers: a wake-up call • Hacker News Board

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#331

Post by Aeolun » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 4:08 AM UTC

didibus wrote: post #121

ogogmad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you add more problems, of course people struggle more. Doing something open source by yourself is basically the simplest kind of programming.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#332

Post by abathur » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

mbrodersen wrote: post #276

dilyevsky wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies usually have a reason to keep their expenses low No they don’t. That’s why they keep plowing billions into cloud infra and gazillion of saas products. They have an excuse when they think they can get it for free anyway like is the case with OSS but not an actual reason

Why should the companies pay more than $0 for code with a price tag of $0? Do you normally pay more than the asking price for things you buy?

Never tipped for good service?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#333

Post by eyelidlessness » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 4:28 AM UTC

There are a lot of replies and I can’t go through them all. But I think now is as good a time as any to start thinking about a free-as-in-speech-but-NOT-free-as-in-beer license.

Free for open source works really well for hosted pricing. I don’t know what legal barriers there are, but a free for open source/explicitly paid license for corporate use model would probably help alleviate a lot of this.

Edit: and of course such a license could waive fees for contribution, stewardship, good faith involvement that keeps the project healthy.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#334

Post by eyelidlessness » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 4:36 AM UTC

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #67

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…

Good for you. The welfare queen megacorps have been too comfortable expecting handouts like open source charity work and public bailouts. Open source software has served the elite executive class while leaving working people to depend on anti-freedom proprietary offerings. I am sick of watching it go down like that. The never-ending data leaks, dark patterns, lock-in strategies, and attacks on encryption and freedom…

I don’t share this commenter’s particular perspective but I felt it was valuable enough to the conversion to vouch for it.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#335

Post by thoraway66 » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 4:39 AM UTC

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…

Yeah my problem with Filippo’s perspective is companies aren’t delivering what they promise either.

It’s not as if altruistic motives, are what drives big corp.

Open source often originates in big corp; k8s, Rust, and all the ML … none of them are exactly wart free or blowing minds as promised. Just the next evolution of a big corp financed mess from the 90s.

The response to big corp complaints is they get what they pay for. And since austerity for the masses, all your agency are belong to us, fuck big corp

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#336

Post by seoaeu » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 4:43 AM UTC

fatcat500 wrote: post #103

If there was a button on Github that donated small amounts of money to the maintainer(s) of a project, I would press it frequently for many libraries I depend on. For example, donating 25 or 50 cents every time I visit gofiber/fiber would be fine with me. However, there is no way to feasibly charge small quantities of money without the majority of it getting raked in processing fees. For example, Stripe charges 30 ce…

You could increase your donation estimate by 10x and it probably still wouldn't be worth the effort. On GitHub, starring a repository is free and yet log4j2 was only has about 1700 of them. Even if each of those was a donation, your suggested 25 or 50 cents translates to only about a single day of a market rate developer salary.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#337

Post by rglullis » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 4:46 AM UTC

fivelessminutes wrote: post #306

rglullis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you pay for every piece of Open source software you use? How much? What is the criteria you use to determine how much you want to give them? Yes, it would be very good if more people started to contribute to software they depend on, but to call them "leeches" is not only against the spirit of free software, it is counterproductive as it will probably lead people to the idea that proprietary/closed source is better…

> pay for every No... projects want contribution more than money, the idea of paying the author is that they can then continue to contribute in the long term by proxy for the payers. But FOSS-systemwide, I give much more than I take. It just needs leechers, who systemwide, give nothing back, to do the same.

Let me try again: how do you measure how much you have given and how you have taken? If not (only) with money, how do you estimate the time and effort that you put into collaboration?

If you ask five different people to evaluate your contributions, how much would they agree? How much would these people be interested in contributing as well and/or paying for you to keep doing what you are doing?

The point I am trying to make: people express their preferences differently, and that is a Good Thing (tm). Market dynamics are a Good Thing (tm). Each of these critical RCEs work as shock on the whole ecosystem which makes it a little bit stronger. I'd rather have a dozen of RCEs on popular-but-amateurish maintained projects than a little totalitarian forcing everyone to "stop being a leech".

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#338

Post by seoaeu » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 4:47 AM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #226

I have problems raising a PO for $10, it's a massive hassle to go through to explain to people nowhere near my department how it works Spinning up an AWS instance costing $10 a month is trivial because the buisness has decided to empower employees with unlimited funds to spend on it. So how can I spin up a $10 a month "instance" which goes to say ffmpeg developers, or apache developers, or openjdk developers, or what…

One of the core points in the original article is that the invoices should be for 5 or 6 figures. $10/month = $120/year quite simply isn't worth the effort to collect

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#339

Post by raydev » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 5:03 AM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #203

DethNinja wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not change the license to a revenue share agreement with a cap on total amount of revenue? For example, if a company uses ffmpeg on their products and product generates a yearly revenue of 1m then they will pay you 1k. Current open source agreements do nothing to help smaller companies or the maintainers and honestly I find it stupid and destructive. Charge larger companies more depending on their revenue and let…

I really don't understand this mentality. This is what we've all been fighting for since the 90s. A free (as in beer) and open stack of software that anyone can pull off the shelf and use. So many commercial platforms rely not just on ffmpeg and vlc but also on nginx, php, python, nodejs, linux, mariadb, and everything else you can imagine. We also pay for some very niche things that are simply not available from the…

So your argument is that people shouldn't be paid for their labor because the companies profiting from that labor might not be able to profit?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#340

Post by mbrodersen » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 5:04 AM UTC

fivelessminutes wrote: post #310

mbrodersen wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no sympathy for maintainers who give away their work for $0 and the act all surprised when the world pays $0 for it and value it at $0. Wake up! Look around and notice how the world actually works and act accordingly. If you want people to pay real $ for your work then make that the price tag.

If you want endless unmaintained security apocalyse -ware at all levels of your organization, just keep using FOSS dependencies while explaining to yourself you don't have to contribute anything back. "Look around and notice how the world actually works"...

Yes because that is the only possible alternative. Without FOSS the planet will obviously instantly explode and turn into a black hole. Right. I've got news for you: your life depends on closed source commercial software. Every time to take a lift, drive a car, fly an airplane, use your credit card, use your bank, drink water, buy products, use electricity, is a passenger on a ship etc. you rely on commercial software. And yet somehow the planet hasn't exploded yet. So yes look around and notice how the world actually works. Having said that, I think FOSS is a good thing. But make sure companies pay $ for it. Don't give it away for $0 and then sulk when people pay you exactly that in return.