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What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

andrej.sh

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Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#51

Post by andrybak »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #31

For anyone interested in this (and certainly for OP) I highly highly recommend the book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal. When I was raising my profile on my open source farming robot, this book really helped me understand the types of projects one might want to foster, how to think about users, and generally gave me very helpful guidance on becoming an open source…

"Uncurled" by Daniel Stenberg, maintainer of curl, is a great resource for FOSS maintainers as well:

https://un.curl.dev/

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#52

Post by digi59404 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #47
carlosjobim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, stop with this slave mentality please. You can make invoices without funding any company and without the tax office getting in your hair. It's not illegal to charge for your services and never has been. You can declare that income just fine, or skip it. The tax office won't bother you.

The IRS will definitely bother you if they figure out you have unreported income. Will they find out? Maybe not if it’s a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars. More than $10K? Then it gets more likely. If a client sends you a 1099 then they’ll certainly know.

They’ll know because in the US and abroad the banks send the balances and transactions to the IRS. I get letters every year/6 months that I’m subject to additional withholding because they haven’t gotten any $$ but they show I have.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#53

Post by SoftTalker »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #37
mtlynch wrote: post #15

> maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected. > people run kaneo on setups i never imagined: > behind corporate proxies > ... > in kubernetes with custom networking It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in…

> if you purchase a $500/yr support contract 500/hr more like.

I mean you might have to negotiate a bit but yeah, a simple professional statement like “My rate for custom enhancements is $X/hr” is not going to ruffle any feathers. They might not bat an eye.

The thing is if you agree, now you have to deliver. Be sure it’s something you want to do. If the project is open source because you don’t want to be a business, then be careful about letting a little quick cash change your mind.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#54

Post by Klonoar »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #44
Klonoar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year. I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them .

[flagged]

Well not every country is Germany. Dunno what to tell you there.

The second half of that also sounds unhinged.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#55

Post by burnished »

venturecruelty wrote: post #46

>but here's the thing: people come from different backgrounds. what's obvious to me after building the thing isn't obvious to someone installing it for the first time. Sure, but you're also not obligated to do... well, anything. And people are also allowed to read documentation and code and put in the effort to build and install things themselves. What happened to the oldschool hacker spirit that rewarded learning an…

Ah, the classic hacker spirit of commercializing every interaction?

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#56

Post by SoftTalker »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #28
dylan604 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about being a tradesman on a forum dedicated to software and maybe making a company out of said software? If people liked the idea of being outside in the weather, doing manual labor as you've described, there is a very large chance they would not be on this forum.

It's very often that people here lament the fact that they're not outside being outside, in the weather, doing manual labor. How may of us don't dream, at least once a week, of walking out into the woods, or taking up woodworking instead, or wondering how long it would take to retrain as a plumber? I channel that into my gardening during the appropriate seasons, but now that it's November, all that woodworking equipm…

> how long it would take to retrain as a plumber

Yeah people have thoughts like this but then you hear a story about lying on your back in a muddy 3’ crawl space cutting into a blocked sewer line to install a cleanout and hoping you can roll away when the liquid starts pouring out.

Then your desk job writing code starts to sound a little better.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#57

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Klonoar wrote: post #54
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Well not every country is Germany. Dunno what to tell you there. The second half of that also sounds unhinged.

> The second half of that also sounds unhinged.

Since Hacker News also centers on entrepreneurship: I know quite some entrepreneurs in Germany who think this way about the bureacratic chicanery that companies have to handle, and already thought about whether hiring a hitman for these politicians would be a good idea. The hate for the political caste in Germany among many people is insane.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#58

Post by bigstrat2003 »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #50
amarant wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much doubt it. Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example. The style is efficient in a way that just screams software dev to me. AI's are needlessly verbose. This guy is bordering on needlessly concise. Rather like the style actually. I do hate that if you publish anything online these days, someone will accuse you of having used AI to write it. We're at the p…

There's a bunch of typical ChatGPT catch phrases in the post "Here's the thing", "but honestly". You can't know for sure but it really does look like OP wrote it then stuck it in ChatGPT but told it to not fix the capitalisation for some reason.

I say those things all the time, and I'm most certainly not ChatGPT. You can't infer someone is using an LLM from that.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#59

Post by nickff »

illusive4080 wrote: post #34
mtlynch wrote: post #15

> maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected. > people run kaneo on setups i never imagined: > behind corporate proxies > ... > in kubernetes with custom networking It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in…

I wish. In my company that is an instant no. The amount of legal contracting bull we have to go through for that would quite literally take 9 months.

If a company is unwilling to jump through its self-imposed barriers to paying for things it wants, then it obviously doesn't value those features/items. This is definitely a case of 'voting with [one's] dollars'.

Re: What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

#60

Post by ipaddr »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #44
Klonoar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year. I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them .

[flagged]

OpenCollective Europe

You receive the money as contractor wages

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