Paying for Open Source Contributions

You're an employee so you can answer the question: does Formidable take copyright ownership of the open source contributions provided by you? Do you have to ask your employer if you want to change licenses for your open source projects?

In my personal experience this effect has much more to do with expectations than compensation.

As soon as it's my job to work on something, and there are deadlines and expectations looming, all of a sudden I'm more interested in every other side project I've ignored for the past several years.

But in this case, there's no expectations set, pre-approval process (after which you'd be expected to meet your goals), or anything like that. If you find yourself affected by the extrinsic motivation, you can simply not log the work afterward, and then it's like you weren't offered any money for it in the first place.

I feel like this will end up cannibalizing their engineers effort.

I would help my neighbor move some furniture for free, and I'd still do it if he offered to pay me $5. I wouldn't accept the money (because it's socially unacceptable to do so), but his offer wouldn't get in the way of me helping him. If he offered me a drink after, I wouldn't say no. It's understood that this offer is in direct response to me helping him, but I'm still motivated out of altruism. I'm simply receiving a greater reward for my altruism, and this time it's socially acceptable to take this.

The time of the people eligible for this program is worth more than $20/hr. This amount of money is never going to be a primary source of motivation for them. As the article said, "A side effect of building a company culture around OSS is that the kind of people who gravitate to work at Formidable are passionate about their open source work, and won’t stop contributing when they clock out at 5 pm." I did a bit of volunteer work in high school as part of a program, and upon graduation the program granted everyone a small, $250 "scholarship". I spent ~10 hours per week, for a year, as part of this program, thus making my "wage", if you will, about $2/hr. I can promise you, nobody participated in that program for the "scholarship". It showed that our time was appreciated, but wasn't nearly enough to incentivize the program to anyone who wasn't going to do it anyways.

I see nothing wrong with a token payment like this. It makes contributing to open source a more attractive option, but still only a viable option to those who were already motivated to contribute out of altruism. Obviously 20/hr isn't a token payment for a lot of us, but the concept itself of a token payment isn't something that necessarily invalidates altruistic intentions, in my view. I'll contribute to open source projects irregardless of whether or not they have a Bountysource, but I'll still accept a reward if it's offered. The purpose of this program is to reward people who are already motivated to contribute to open source, which in turn signals to its employees that Formidable appreciates open source contributions.

I think the parent's point is that for a lot of people, especially those outside of SV, $20/h is more than a token payment.

Sure, it's not going to make a westerner rich, but if we think to happiness instead of just money - it could well enable someone to make a living doing something that makes them happy.

And of course there are several countries in which $20/h is a great wage.

The OSS vs money problem is a hard one to crack, and it's entirely possible that there isn't a solution that suits everyone; there are the originators, currently active maintainers, occasional contributers and end users to keep happy - and each group has their own priorities and goals.

And if that wasn't enough, each project is different. Some are more or less zero-touch, "completed software", while others are under heavy development; some wish to follow copy-left, some wish to follow copy-right; some view their work as merely a hobby, some view it as their job, and some view it as purely altruistic. There are even those who are diametrically opposed to receiving any payment for their OSS work.

There simply isn't a one size fits all solution, so let's not be too negative when ideas are put forward.