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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#421

Post by KronisLV »

spixy wrote: post #390
KronisLV wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just have an intermediate company that handles the donation/support aspects? I mean, we already have Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/ and for other content creators the likes of Patreon also work out nicely. Two examples, off the top of my head: 1) Here's how Open Collective looks, for jMonkeyEngine (a lovely Java game engine that's also a bit underfunded and underutilized): https://opencollective…

Well not using Patreon or Open Collective is exactly what article also talks about.

This is also exactly what my problem is:

> But! Maintainers need to be legible to the big company department that approves and processes those invoices. Think about it: no company pays their law firm on Patreon. You'd be amazed how much harder it is to explain "what the fuck is an open collective?" for a $10k donation, compared to paying a $100k invoice to an LLC that filed a W-9 or W-8BEN and takes payment through ACH. The trick is that you can easily incorporate a pass-through US LLC and open a business account for it even if you're not a US citizen, it's not rocket science.

And yet, these companies basically pay monthly to AWS, which isn't all that different on a conceptual level. Needing a LLC just to receive donations of any sort is ridiculous, why can't these companies just be more humane, instead of drown the idea of doing anything good into needless bureaucracy?

It's like a scene out of Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

The mission of Open Collective is clear even on the main page: https://opencollective.com/

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#422

Post by hodgesrm »

Jupe wrote: post #152

I don't know... I just don't see how OSS will ever be a real, sustainable business. The moment it does, someone else will simply subvert the paid-for software with a look-alike that does 90% of what the original does, but for free. In my view, this is the birth story of OSS. And I don't see any real market there. Even if you manage to find a "niche", like some sustainable software-as-a-service with subscription, ther…

Successful pure play open source businesses are rare. As in RedHat; most others I can think of were successful in the sense they had good exits.

On the other hand if you look at companies that build value-adds on top of open source, then the number is huge. It starts Facebook and includes a wide number of enterprise software companies like VMware, companies like Cloudflare, etc. They owe a lot of their success to open source and are major contributors in the aggregate.

It's therefore really limiting to assume that open source necessarily has to be maintained by for profit, enterprise software companies. Most successful companies build SaaS or other value adds over their open source projects that actually solve business problems. The reason: that's what enterprise customers want to buy. I've run two companies in the database space that take this approach. We're not very worried about competition from Amazon.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#423

Post by colinmhayes »

another_story wrote: post #372
colinmhayes wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies use Leetcode because it tests for the 2 things that are required to become a successful developer, above average critical thinking skills and willingness to spend hundreds of hours improving. Companies figure if you have those two things they can make you into a decent developer, figuring out if someone is already a good developer is much harder.

Or does it test for someone who in the hope of passing these tests will spend hundreds of hours dedicated to pointless exercises that produce no real value? If by harder, you mean sitting down and having a real conversation, then yes, I suppose it's harder. Edit: Value is a poor word here, now that I think about it. Let's say mostly pointless activities that generally don't apply to work they'll be doing with that sk…

Well the idea is if they're willing to waste all that time trying to get the job they'll spend even more time working and improving.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#424

Post by javajosh »

oauea wrote: post #194
javajosh wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We all opted for centralized package repos though, so now only they know. And they’re not telling us. I'm sympathetic to the view, but there really are some things that are better centralizing. Reducing code into binaries is something that a "fair" 3rd party is going to be better at than the 1st party. Why? The 3rd party central source is (presumably) mechanically cloning and building, whereas the 1st party is doin…

> ohmyzsh phones home every time I open a terminal are you talking about the update check that by default runs once every 14 days[1], or is there something else? [1]: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh#getting-updates

I did some double checking and it looks like I had a bad interaction between little snitch and zsh.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#425

Post by hiq »

amelius wrote: post #404
hiq wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying that they should make their software proprietary to solve the problem of FOSS maintenance. That's forgetting the implicit requirement that it should remain FOSS.

It's still FOSS, except if you are making millions using it and the entire issue becomes a luxury problem. That's what FOSS should mean anyway. The old definition can be renamed into exploitationware .

> It's still FOSS, except if you are making millions using it and the entire issue becomes a luxury problem.

I guess we can discuss what should be, but AFAICT it's just not FOSS according to the OSI or the FSF.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#426

Post by ipaddr »

hparadiz wrote: post #359
ipaddr wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops a company from forking and paying 200,000 a year for someone to maintain vs paying 20,000 back? Money.. cheaper to support than fork.

Most of the open source tools used could be forked and used as is with no need to change them for years. Sure you could say they need security updates but I could also just silo off that stuff from anything important.

In those cases they could take the tool as is and incorporate it into their workflow..make local changes or not.

The problem happens when you want to maintain your version with the current version (for security / features) or push those local changes to the project so you can stop maintaining. At that point you have to assign local resources or hope your patches are accepted which takes usually requires a relationship.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#427

Post by bee_rider »

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…

I really don't think there's an answer. The ideal form of Free Software is just people sharing their solutions out into the world. We should just be thankful that you've decided to share it rather than keeping it private. If people thought a customer service relationship was something they needed from you, they'd pay you enough for you to start a company based on this.

I would be pretty skeptical of projects that try to keep up with the ecosystem, if they are adding things just to keep up (rather than because they need them). The fundamental advantage of Free Software is that the people writing it are doing the ultimate dogfooding. A Free Software project that is adding functionality they don't need is no better than a company in terms of knowing what "customers" want or how to evaluate whether they did it right.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#428

Post by jlevers »

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…

I maintain a much, much smaller PHP library[0] (~1-2k downloads/month), and I've made a few thousand dollars in sponsorships, donations, and paid improvements to the library over the past year. I don't try all that hard to solicit donations, but I do have a donate button and a request for people to sponsor the library right near the top of the README. I noticed you don't have any visible donate button -- I'm guessing if you added one, and a little blurb about why people might want to donate, you'd up your donations quite a bit.

(Usual disclaimer, n=1, etc)

[0] https://github.com/jlevers/selling-partner-api

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#429

Post by jedberg »

rightbyte wrote: post #72
jedberg wrote: post #43

When I worked at eBay, our policy was that we had to use RedHat and that any open source we used had to be provided by RedHat or we had to get a support contract from someone else who would be willing to 1)Support the software and 2)Accept legal liability if it failed. #2 was the big sticking point. RedHat made a lot of money accepting that legal responsibility, but very few others were willing to do so. It made usin…

Heh ... I recall somewhere in a Emacs manual it says "prints the non-warranty, or the warranty if you version of Emacs comes with one". I thought that was a joke. What did the warranty disclaimers say on your system?

Not sure, never looked. :)

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#430

Post by dilyevsky »

mbrodersen wrote: post #352
dilyevsky wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone pay for business class airline tickets instead of (subsidized) coach? They both get to the destination at the same time!

That's a good question! However I am not sure what that has to do with what I am saying? People pay for over priced luxury goods all the time. There are psychological reasons for that (signaling wealth among other things).

Not just psychological but convenience, reliability and status all of which can apply to oss consulting/patronage
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