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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

#211

Post by slashdotdash »

geerlingguy wrote: post #90

I haven't seen any large scale, long-term open source projects succeed with a 'pay to play' process; what usually happens is the original maintainers realize that even with some amount of compensation, they still don't like scratching other people's itch when it comes to their project. And then they realize that the amount of people/companies even willing to pay at all is a tiny fraction of 1% of their potential targ…

Sidekiq by Mike Perham is following the open core, paid subscription for a "pro" version containing extensions. His single founder company has a monthly recurring revenue in excess of $80k, as featured on Indie Hackers[1].

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#212

Post by doozy »

tripa wrote: post #160
doozy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I love the idea, but can't help wondering: did it actually convert into "sales"?

As I said, it was a moderately successful side business. I know of many cases in which the sale came from someone buying this on behalf of his employer years after he had first used the software as a student.

I was never after the nickles and dimes of users, always had my eyes in the deep pockets of major players. 99% of my sales came from multi-billion dollar corporations, universities and government.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#213

Post by doozy »

CM30 wrote: post #165
doozy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

You'll always have a corner case or another. I wouldn't care about personal usage users.

Case 2 clearly falls into the free usage policy, but in case 1 if the school is requiring students to install this software in their school-provided hardware as a way of sidestepping licensing fees I think they are stretching it a bit.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#214

Post by floatboth »

rhizome wrote: post #132
5_minutes wrote: post #18

I always wonder where coders find the time to significantly contribute to Opensouce projects - which many seem to do - after their day job, having played and eaten with their kids, and were an attentful husband.

You might want to stick a debugger on your assumptions about who does and does not have children and/or a spouse.

And/or a day job.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#215

Post by Chris2048 »

thinkloop wrote: post #163
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.

There are some areas where fewer projects would be a good think. There is a burden of choice that can be solved by filtering for authors ready and willing to meet more requirements.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#216

Post by floatboth »

brooklynrob wrote: post #95
chevman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One day he got an email from someone - likely someone making $150-$200k- more or less demanding that he review and accept some PRs, as well as do some work himself, for a feature they needed." This is called a 'business opportunity'. Seriously, people are going to ask you for free stuff all the time. Sometimes they'll be up front about it (as in, "we don't have budget for that, but can you still help us out?"), and…

Yes, and hence my suggestion to him. But this is also why I introduced my only vaguely related example of the large search engine company who wanted me to work for free to help them organize 30-40 school events for Hour of Code -- a big undertaking. They just said no to my request and did not do the events, and implied I was the reason why those kids wouldn't benefit from their hour or two at each school. No "'busine…

> you're a "sell out" to the ideals of open sources for wanting to be paid for that time

Who the hell unironically uses the word "sellout" anymore? Especially in this context?

I really don't think this is, like, a common opinion or anything. I haven't ever encountered anyone criticizing people for getting paid to work on open source software. Many projects I like (RPCS3, mGBA, libretro/RetroArch, GhostBSD, Redox OS, Godot Engine, Matrix.org) are funded on Patreon. In large projects such as FreeBSD, many commits are sponsored by either various companies or the project's Foundation. And specifically contractors contributing to projects related to their services, as you mentioned? That's how a ton of javascript libraries are developed :D And everyone is mostly just thankful that these projects exist.

What the hell are those "ideals of open source" anyway?

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#217

Post by gopalv »

snakeanus wrote: post #208
btown wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Code style How is that an issue in this day and age? Just run astyle or indent.

> Just run astyle or indent.

"Style" is more than indentation - my favourite example is something I worked with very closely, but always needed a cheat-sheet on my desk - the PHP arrays api.

Just look at the docs for array_search and array_replace.

This is much worse in managed memory languages - do you allocate memory, who frees it, who can use a buffer in zero-copy mode, who can't ... whether the functions are always re-entrant.

All that said - any originating coder who burns out due to support issues, killing the community is measurably worse off than someone who has thousands of users who demand that you support such "legacy" APIs for another six months.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#218

Post by nextlevelwizard »

btown wrote: post #209
diggan wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The entire context of this thread is that adding committers can introduce risk in the quality of accepted contributions. Building a trusted network of gatekeepers is hard.

Just because stuff gets to master doesn't mean they get to the release.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#219

Post by makapuf »

hasenj wrote: post #141
hyperpallium wrote: post #135

> annual fee for community membership Sleepycat did this https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software and seemed to work out for them. But if opensource truly is infrastructure, why not nationalize it? i.e. government pays maintainers a subsistence wage (provided they meet some scale crtieria, perhaps similar to automatic royalties for pop-song airplay). Users (i.e. big corporations) would pay a levy to fund this. O…

Because who decides what projects deserve how much? Who decides that a project is even worthy to receive anything at all? If there was such a government program, what would prevent masses of inexperienced developers to start pointless projects, open source them, and file a claim to receive money from the government?

Maybe we can try finding useful metrics then. And of course they could be gamed but then we can adapt and improve. By example start with number of stars on github or number of forks or even views (with verified users). Actually, we have such kind of measure, it's called advertising. It's one of the few working business models on the net but it works with a kind of bizarre tax on physical goods. Why not with a levy ? Edit: typos

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#220

Post by burntsushi »

ajdlinux wrote: post #100
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks...this is the best attitude I've heard. Instead of making people feel they need to take sides in the open-source vs free-software debate, better to just acknowledge that both are important and aren't necessarily in conflict.

They're not in conflict , per se, and they are indeed both important - but progress towards one of these goals has the advantage of serving the goals of megacorps, while the other one does not. FWIW, I work as an open source developer on a strategic "infrastructure" project that my employer funds because having an open source base platform serves their commercial interests - and I'm very much okay with this, it absol…

> I'd just like to see more work go towards figuring out how to fund developers whose projects aren't of strategic interest to proprietary software companies than articles that keep making the assumption that all important open source software is libraries or utility software that ultimately would line up nicely with corporate interests.

To be clear, I do agree with that goal. I just tend to diverge with others on the means. That is, I don't agree with hacking the IP system to achieve that end. I'd rather see the IP system done away with entirely. (IP and software is near and dear to my heart, but IP itself is so much bigger than just software.)

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