Would love to speak to companies using urllib3! Excellent idea.
Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
11–20 of 65 posts
Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
#12We just did this with OPNSense.
We wanted to use their product for educational purposes. They gave us free licenses...
I went to my management team and argued for finding a way to get them money... So now we're working on a one-time professional service to talk to their devs on stuff we could probably figure out on our own.. but "might save money/time just asking them"... and a yearly subscription for "any support needs we might need" (up to 10 hours/year)
Though their model was a bit easier to work in... A bit harder to do with things like Apache projects...
Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is 100% a simple, great idea.
What I like most about it is that it slots cleanly into the education budget bucket that is normally allocated at large corporates (atleast in my experience). It would be a ton cheaper than what that usually ends up getting spent on (generally re:Invent tickets and expenses).
That's a great thought - I just added that to the post, thanks:
> Your company likely has an existing education budget which might be a good source of funds for this kind of engagement.
Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
#14I wonder when will more projects do what Krita does perfectly, selling the software in storefronts for a one time purchase. https://krita.org/en/download/krita-desktop/ >Paid versions of Krita on other platforms. You will get automatic updates when new versions of Krita come out. After deduction of the Store fee, the money will support Krita development. This is honestly one of the perfect way to do it imo
Is Krita transparent about their finances? Because I would love to know how much money Krita makes on this front. My guess is not much at all.
Yes they are giving updates
Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Krita transparent about their finances? Because I would love to know how much money Krita makes on this front. My guess is not much at all.
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.
Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
#16As a former Developer Relations engineer at Google, I can also say with confidence that companies want to speak to the creators of things. They want to talk to engineers and PMs of the project rather than other people teaching on those things. For example, it was great when I held a meeting to talk about Android Camera APIs. However, partners would get really excited when I could bring those camera engineers into the meeting or talk. I am not saying one is superior to the other. However, I know for sure that companies would pay $$$ to have direct engagement with the "authority" on a project.
Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
#17We 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 install and a crash-course for the in-house development teams.
We've even been able to work with some groups who "just wanted to prototype some ideas around our platform" -- which sounded like custom-development right? So, naturally we just bill for the time -- like regular old consulting business. Because our core offering is FOSS we've had a few folks push back "I thought the software was free". Oh it is...however, our time spent with you at your behest is not.
Oddly, I've found some other FOSS projects that I wanted to get some help with -- and led with "I'll pay you to pair-program with me for like four hours and answer my dumb questions" -- I was surprised to be turned down: "we don't want to make this commercial, just file a bug" -- do you want a new bug or do you want $800?
Sometimes it's tough to get folk to understand that our FOSS thing needs money to survive and that free-software is not the same as free-consulting. And another side is that some FOSS folk are actively pushing money away.
Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
#18I 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 way to tell if it's some 19-year-old trying to write her first script or a 38-year-old FAANG engineer who doesn't want to do their own job.
Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
#19Github sponsor feels like they could push their efforts a little further - by using some "logic" when github users open an issue or PR on an OSS project.
I am always in awe of people like Sindre Sorhus [1]. They make a living off open-source - but obviously these are outliars in the vast world of open-source. This is just an example but, just looking at the number of $1000/month supporters you can live pretty comfortably off open-source if you know what you're doing....and are good at getting sponsors!
Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team
#20PAYME.md
If you'd like to help support this project you can ...
If you'd like to hire me to speak or to provide support you can ...