I had a similar moment where I almost gave up on Read the Docs, going as far as writing a similar post but never publishing it. I wrote about that experience here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-neve...
Sorry everybody, I failed with you
221–230 of 357 posts
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#222> big companies are using the project and need a lot of things as well from it in order to keep their projects healthy, but in most of the cases this is a talk in just one way. This is everything with what's wrong with open source. Many companies treat open source as something they have a right to consume and no obligation to support financially or with dev time. Some poor schlub is on the other end working their but…
Yes, I've seen corporate presentations on that matter, which basically focused on the zero-cost aspect. Well, you get what you pay for, I guess.
Well, often you get way more than you pay for, and it would be stupid not to acknowledge that. For example almost all Linux users never pay for nor support Kernel development in any way or form. And I think the people who do the development and create the value for the rest of us mostly are ok with that.
That doesn't negate the fact that when you rely on open source software for your business and need more than just read access to the repo it would be polite to wise up on the maintainership status of the project and ask if you can contribute back in any form.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#223Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…
I feel like Github and co could do a LOT more to help open source project maintainers and contributors rewarded. They can offer a new subscription model for people with expendable income and companies with benefits, on a per user basis instead of a per project one. They can offer monetizing issues, e.g. promoting a question or issue report with an X amount of currency. OS maintainers can create a bot that asks people…
Monetizing issues would be a great move.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#224Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…
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Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#225One of the observations I have had is supporting opensource on donations is not a model that works long term. It could have been true back in the 90s and early 2000s. But these days the tech shift happens at very fast rate. So if your opensource product or concept is successful in the market, you cannot compete with another product or a startup cloning you idea on donations.
As coding and software development is getting democratized, if you have a concept that definitely has a market even though you are first to market. Other developers will build similar product and saturate the market, essentially diluting your value. For instance, I have been tracking Heroku style deployment tools in the market, there is like tons of opensource platform doing the same thing built by startup as well as individual developers. Same for opensource airtable clones.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#226At my last gig I got budget to bring in the maintainer of an open-source testing library we using for some really important stuff. We paid him $1500 for a couple of days consulting. He showed us how to fix a couple of tricky bugs and gave a talk to the eng team. At this point we've more than recouped the investment. He was psyched to see his tool being used and I feel the visit contributed to him continuing to mainta…
This is exactly how it's done. People are willing to pay for modifications and consulting. The only danger here is turning into Oracle where little effort is put towards usability in order to protect your consulting revenue stream. Just build great tools and libraries and people will come to you for help.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#227I think this is the kind of problem that might be solved by tokenomics. Gitcoin (https://gitcoin.co/) seems like a good step forward.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if this is a back-firing of the push for people to be "nice" and "professional". Open source maintainers used to have the sterotype of being rather harsh, and basically telling people to f off if they had stupid questions, didn't RTFM or didn't follow cultural norms. And dont get me wrong, there's a lot wrong with that, but maybe it was also that way for a reason.
You can be harsh in a nice and professional way though.
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Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#229Of course it's terrible to become burnt out and it feels awful not having enough time to work on an open source project that you love. But, is it just me or has it become rarer for open source project maintainers to feel free to let projects go? I don't mean to let them die, I mean, to find like-minded individuals to which you can defer some or all of the work? I realize that as the original author one feels a sense…
Often a project, a club, or even a company only hold because of one passionate individual. Once he is gone, it is the end. It is very hard to find someone with the same level of motivation. Projects stop being maintained, clubs cease activities, and companies get taken over for short term profit. It is particularly apparent in schools. Students start something, then they graduate and do something else. Most of the ti…
I don't know how the idea that people are replaceable got so popular. Yeah, I know why some people tried to make it so, but it's so blatantly false that I don't understand how those people were successful.
Anyway, nobody ever simply gets replaced. When you change the people, things change. Some times it's a disaster, other times it's an improvement, but the result is never exactly like the beginning.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#230Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…
I've actively resisted open sourcing some things I've written at work - including stuff that I'm sure others would like - precisely because of fears that it would be a career-limiting move. For my employer, these libraries are only valuable to the extent that they help us build things for which we can charge money. An open source library would not be one of those things, but it would take time (and therefore company…
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