I wonder if there is a way to sustainably fund individual contributors too, most FOSS funding mechanisms seem to focus on maintainers.
Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
#12This is what I was envisioning when I wrote this: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro... .
Have the updates to the CRA since that post changed your opinion on it at all?
https://opensource.org/blog/the-european-regulators-listened...
Re: Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
#13This is what I was envisioning when I wrote this: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/11/how-to-fund-foss-save-it-fro... .
Have the updates to the CRA since that post changed your opinion on it at all? https://opensource.org/blog/the-european-regulators-listened...
Mostly.
I still wish that there would be no liability until money changes hands between the parties.
According to your link, liability still may exist if the FOSS project is a "commercial beneficiary." Does this mean that there could be liability even if the third party doesn't pay for it, just because others do?
Re: Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
#14I personally like Sentry's approach more, their program focused on supporting the breadth and depth of their dependency tree rather than just the critical components https://blog.sentry.io/we-just-gave-500-000-dollars-to-open-... Disclaimer: I work for thanks.dev
I got a DM from a maintainer asking to elaborate so here's my personal opinion "The Geomys model feels a lot like the Tidelift model but it doesn't really create an eco-system that's more inclusive & exciting to be a part of. We want to create a community where more maintainers are excited by contributing to open source instead of them saying ohh this is too hard lets pass it onto someone else with the resource. The…
Did I misread something? I don't think Geomys is in the business of deciding what is or isn't critical.
Re: Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
#15This is a fascinating idea. However, I wonder how it fits with the fact that the target type of project is still maintained by one person / project expert. Where is the redundancy for the proverbial maintainer-run-over-by-a-bus? While the three engineers necessary for maintaining a critical dependency is expensive, a company is unlikely to lose them all at once.
It would be interesting if Geomys promoted some form of cross-pollination among its associate maintainers, but it sounds like they're trying not to direct the work.
Re: Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have the updates to the CRA since that post changed your opinion on it at all? https://opensource.org/blog/the-european-regulators-listened...
Mostly. I still wish that there would be no liability until money changes hands between the parties. According to your link, liability still may exist if the FOSS project is a "commercial beneficiary." Does this mean that there could be liability even if the third party doesn't pay for it, just because others do?
My understanding, tempered quite a bit from LWN comments on its coverage of the CRA, is that without money transferring for the parties involved, there is no liability.
I suspect you're in the US (I think I saw a US location in your Twitter bio before the login page replaced it), the rules for Europe are different and applying an American viewpoint on how business relationships occur gives an inaccurate perception of things.
Re: Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
#17I wonder if there is a way to sustainably fund individual contributors too, most FOSS funding mechanisms seem to focus on maintainers.
The team at frontend masters are doing that well https://frontendmasters.com/blog/how-were-supporting-open-so...
Re: Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
#18I wonder if there is a way to sustainably fund individual contributors too, most FOSS funding mechanisms seem to focus on maintainers.
The team at frontend masters are doing that well https://frontendmasters.com/blog/how-were-supporting-open-so...
Thats still contributing to the maintainers of projects, not to the people writing pull requests etc.
Re: Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open-source maintenance firm
#19I wrote a bash script before anything existed for node.js to run a process on a server...people were just doing `node ./index.js` -- my script created and init.d/start-node.sh script and suprisingly its my most popular project even today -- that was back in 2010 I wrote that shit. SHortly after it got picked up by some js newsletters and HN I found nodemon and switched to that.
For what its worth now I use systemd scripts.