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Give away your code, but never your time

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Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#161

Post by imtringued »

metafunctor wrote: post #48

I led a small open source project more than a decade ago. Most people involved had more time than money. I'm quite certain that trying to charge an annual fee from members would have killed the entire project before it was even born. Introducing money to the equation changes everything. People start to look at the project as a product they are buying, instead of a cause they are contributing to. I believe the author…

As soon as money is involved there is a certain expectation of quality and the work being done properly. If you start depending on that money then you are under the control of your customers and your hobby will quickly degrade into a regular job.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#162

Post by diggan »

btown wrote: post #134
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often is commit bad enough to require revert, yet made it through testing and got released?

Code style, inconsistent APIs, a feature that's barely tested by its own contributor, introducing dependencies on innards that were planned to be removed by an ongoing refactoring project, etc. So many ways contributions can go wrong.

All those things should and hopefully would have been caught when the PR was made, not after the commits made it into master.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#163

Post by thinkloop »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #8

> We also need to bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer. > The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” So, for me, this goes against the reasons I decide to give my personal time to the community. For me, creating an open source proj…

> creating an open source project is a contract with the community, and part of that contract is to assist members of this community that might require features or have issues.

If this were strictly enforced, there would be much fewer open source projects, as not all authors would be able to meet the obligations.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#164

Post by notamy »

xfer wrote: post #122
notamy wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This this this. If you provide a service for free, the vast majority of your user base will never care about giving you money, and will just stop using your service and find another one if you try to start charging them for it instead of keeping it free. One of my side-projects has ended up here and it's been a huge pain to deal with.

We are not talking about a service here, we are talking about OSS codebase and in my experience it does work.

> We are not talking about a service here, we are talking about OSS codebase

IMVHO, these are the same thing for the purpose of this discussion -- providing something to others, free of charge.

> and in my experience it does work.

Good for you (no sarcasm meant). But sadly this doesn't really seem to 'scale' that well.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#165

Post by CM30 »

doozy wrote: post #85
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #53

I think what open source needs is some very deliberate price discrimination. Have the license be free to the vast majority of users, and cost money for large corporations that can damn well afford it. Not, like, large amounts of money, just something vaguely close to the all-in cost of one full time developer. Basically, "BSD, unless you're a $1B+ valued company that is not paying our software foundation $10k/mo".

Many moons ago I developed a moderately successful shareware program. My licensing terms were simple: If you owned the computer where you installed and used it no license was needed, but if someone else owned the machine, you owed me money. It allowed students, hobbyists and freelancers to use the software for free, for any purpose, but companies, institutions and governments had to pay to play. This idea does not se…

Interesting idea, but two things struck me here:

1. Does that mean a student would have to pay to install it on their school computer? Or maybe a school provided laptop?

2. What about personal installs for other people? Not as a business or service, but merely on a friend or relative's computer?

Because in theory, both of those would come under 'someone else owning the machine', but they'd also be seen as personal usage by any rational person.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#166

Post by CM30 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #93
bkovacev wrote: post #21

I dislike the key suggestion. What's the point of open-source - if not to give back? It's a developer's codex/morale to answer. It seems the author is salty about the fact he doesn't make money from open source, but is investing a lot of time. Well my dear colleague, offer support to the bigger companies that use your software in production or use that software to sell another. Simple. Open source was never meant to…

Your employer benefits financially from the open source community. People who purchase software cheaply due to lower barrier to entry and more competition also benefit. As a coder I generally don't benefit so don't feel the need to give back. As a coder the tsunami of FOSS is a negative. My job is now to glue free modules together rather than design stuff. I'd be quite happy to pay for a compiler if I had to.

As a coder, it also means I don't have to code everything myself from scratch. Surely that's better than having to reinvent the wheel for every single project, especially where larger requirements like a full site CMS or framework are concerned. It also means new coders can join in without having to learn a new codebase for every role, that we're not paying a fortune for software licenses for every project and that we still have access to the source code to make improvements or have them rolled back into the original project.

If you feel it's better without those things, good on you. But I'm sure you'll find it harder to get help for a project than you would with open source, spend far longer on every project than you would by merely using an existing framework or end up at the whims at a large corporation with no interest in letting you make your own modifications to the code.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#167

Post by CM30 »

outoftacos wrote: post #5

I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while as well. All these companies with regularly updated blogs, super active social media feeds, employees sent to present/attend every week or so and open source project development being done in house...

Do they ever do any actual work? Because every company I've seen or worked for has wondered just how they have the free time to do all this stuff with bill paying client work to attend to or a product/service to maintain.

Or do they simply have a one hour work week like a fictional character would?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneHourWorkWeek

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#168

Post by skosch »

ajdlinux wrote: post #51
davidgerard wrote: post #19

> When I say “open source”, I mean code licensed in a way that it can be used to build proprietary things. This redefinition of a basic term should have been at the beginning, not the end.

And so should "open-source code is utility software". Stallman was right when he said that the Open Source movement would eventually abandon any conceptions of software freedom - it seems to me that we now have a whole generation of "open source" contributors for whom the only type of freedom that matters is the freedom of downstream developers, rather than users, and who seem to think that the role of open source in…

You make a good point.

Still, as enthusiastic as I am about the purity of Stallman's pure goals, let's not have the perfect be the enemy of the good. Freedom for developers isn't hurting anyone – if anything, it has resulted in so much software that, while free, also doesn't need to be astronomically expensive. Imagine how much you would have to charge for a web app if you had to rely on non-free software only. What would a stack like that even look like? Windows, IE, ASP, IIS, Oracle, a paid UI library (or equivalent dev hours) ... the tools itself would be expensive enough to make most of the software market disappear.

I'm self-employed, and I know my job wouldn't exist without free dev tools.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#169

Post by ATsch »

ef4 wrote: post #13

Color me deeply skeptical of the suggestion to try to lock people out of community participation unless they pay. The real secret to not burning out is to scale up the set of maintainers in proportion to the users. You do that by lowering the barriers to involvement, not raising them. Most maintainers err on the side of controlling too much. Which makes them into bottlenecks. One or two good PRs is enough for me to g…

A gitlab feature I miss on Github is "protected branches" and being able to add contributors that can only push to unprotected branches. This way you can give people access to the main repo while still being able to check code before it goes into master

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#170

Post by icebraining »

sorokod wrote: post #146
hasenj wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strange view of open source that borders on communism. You don't have any duties or obligation towards any individual to assist them with their issues. The only obligations you have is to be honest about the project. For example, if you know that the project is not written with security in mind, you must announce the fact, so that people don't go using the project assuming you took care of all potential expl…

Don't know about duty but I think everyone has a right to expect help and a right to give help. It makes for a better world where these rights are regularly exercised.

I upvoted you because I think it's an interesting position, but you should realize that adding duties will discourage people from doing any contributions at all. It starts to feel like a case of "no good deed going unpunished".
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