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Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

simonwillison.net

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Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#21

Post by zozbot234 »

simonw wrote: post #2

Paid consulting has always been a thing - the idea that's new here (I think) is encouraging companies to deliberately reach out to and book talks from maintainers who aren't good at marketing or selling their time - almost as an accounting hack to help get their company to send some money in the right direction.

I don't think that's new either. Companies have always reached out to FLOSS maintainers for "pay for support" or "pay for work on feature X" arrangements - and video presentations about the software are a kind of support. It was common enough in the late 1990s that people would remark on it as an unexpected funding source for (otherwise hobbyist-driven) FLOSS development.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#22

Post by simonw »

zozbot234 wrote: post #21
simonw wrote: post #2

Paid consulting has always been a thing - the idea that's new here (I think) is encouraging companies to deliberately reach out to and book talks from maintainers who aren't good at marketing or selling their time - almost as an accounting hack to help get their company to send some money in the right direction.

I don't think that's new either. Companies have always reached out to FLOSS maintainers for "pay for support" or "pay for work on feature X" arrangements - and video presentations about the software are a kind of support. It was common enough in the late 1990s that people would remark on it as an unexpected funding source for (otherwise hobbyist-driven) FLOSS development.

Sounds like we should try and turn it into an expected funding source instead then!

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#23

Post by zozbot234 »

openthc wrote: post #17

We work like this and it's OK, not perfect but OK For folks in our industry that are not using our software (they are using of the closed-source competitors) we are able to show alternatives and still have conversations with operations folks about methods, ideas and other non-technical methods for businesss-process-automation. We've also got a segment of customers, they are paying us maintainers to basically do the i…

You could file a bug/feature request and then pay a dev internally to work on implementing it. It would amount to much the same thing.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#24

Post by simonw »

999900000999 wrote: post #18

I would love a bounty system built in to GitHub. If I find an issue in an open source project, I should be able to offer up to whatever amount of money for the maintainer to fix it. Assuming said maintainer accepts it, they'd be obligated to at least try and fix the issue. Issue. If the issues insurmountable, then maybe give me half my money back. When someone opens an issue on your open source project, there's no wa…

The thing that makes me a bit nervous about bounties is that they can add some weird incentives: maintainers may feel that NOT promptly fixing a bug that affects big companies is a strategic way to get a bounty to fix it!

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#26

Post by jka »

Following some of the spirit of open source, perhaps it could make sense to encourage companies/speakers to make recordings of these kind of discussions available under Creative Commons licenses?

(that might also help to discourage these events from being used as disguised recruitment / interview / feature-request sessions)

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#27

Post by gnabgib »

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #15
haunter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are giving updates https://krita.org/en/item/funding-kritas-development/ https://krita.org/en/item/funding-krita-2017/

First link is a 404 and second link is from 2017 and doesn't have the information I want which is how much money they are making from storefronts.

First link has a typo (an errant á), should be: https://krita.org/en/item/funding-kritas-development/ .. however it's even older (from 2016)

Their windows store buy page[0] (also from 2017) suggests they'd prefer you donate than buy.. so it's probably not a viable model.

[0]: https://krita.org/en/item/krita-available-from-the-windows-s...

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#28

Post by indrora »

There's a company, Tidelift, that has been working on solving this issue as well.

Their solution is to be a VAR on top of the open source and give updates on new versions, advice on remediation and workarounds for CVEs, and help prioritize issues for open source maintainers. The other side is that they pay the maintainers to do what they do best: maintain the software.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#29

Post by wanderingmind »

There is a fantastic opportunity for an aggregator (Microsoft you) to be a middleman between the open source maintainers and businesses. They can even take a 30% cut but make the interaction/consulting between business and maintainers seamless and smooth by providing a platform and payment system.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#30

Post by 999900000999 »

simonw wrote: post #24
999900000999 wrote: post #18

I would love a bounty system built in to GitHub. If I find an issue in an open source project, I should be able to offer up to whatever amount of money for the maintainer to fix it. Assuming said maintainer accepts it, they'd be obligated to at least try and fix the issue. Issue. If the issues insurmountable, then maybe give me half my money back. When someone opens an issue on your open source project, there's no wa…

The thing that makes me a bit nervous about bounties is that they can add some weird incentives: maintainers may feel that NOT promptly fixing a bug that affects big companies is a strategic way to get a bounty to fix it!

It could cause that, but I'm more thinking about strange edge cases .

If I write a quick utility in my spare time, and your multi-billion dollar company needs to deploy it on 1,000 devices, I don't want to fix your issues for free.

To be honest, it's about time for these big companies to write a check.

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