Filippo, I think that what you are proposing is an unusual, even radical idea. I hope you are able to follow through on it for yourself and that you can inspire others to do so by seeing the path you are marking.
Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
41–50 of 464 posts
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#42Once upon a time, the best way to get a software job was to demonstrate your ability to build useful open source projects. 10 years ago the Principal Engineers I would work with had super sized open source portfolio's which leant them both credibility and experience building products people liked. Junior devs would search (sometimes in vain) for issues where they could contribute a few PRs
Now the best way to get a job is leet code, leet code, and more leet code. Rather than spending Not many people patch esoteric software that's been around for 10+ years because it's particularly fun or because there is specific business value in it.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#43When I worked at eBay, our policy was that we had to use RedHat and that any open source we used had to be provided by RedHat or we had to get a support contract from someone else who would be willing to 1)Support the software and 2)Accept legal liability if it failed.
#2 was the big sticking point. RedHat made a lot of money accepting that legal responsibility, but very few others were willing to do so. It made using software difficult (and a lot of us just ignored the policy).
But if you follow this advice, you may end up accepting legal responsibility for the software, and that may be bad.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#44That edit to the XKCD image is pointless since it's the same joke but worse.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#45I maintain a tiny, tiny, unimportant open source package. It gets about 10K downloads a month. Assuming that each of those downloaders saved one minute of their time on average, and their time is worth $15/hr, I'm providing a service worth $2500/month.
I'm starting to think, how could my next project provide the same value, and get paid for it?
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#46Unpopular opinion: Maybe there is nothing wrong with the "status quo", maybe we don't need yet another attempt to finance small FOSS projects where it's hard to explain how money will actually solve any of these issues. Maybe people just need to be more considerate of what they depend upon. And in the case that a popular yet well maintained project has a CVE on day, maybe we need to accept that popularity does not ma…
I would say that this is different from "hard to explain". What is being proposed is essentially "OSS with a paid model for premium support / feature development." It shifts the language from "donations", which companies don't understand, to "consulting", which companies do understand.
It's not completely novel, projects such as openssl and sqlite do offer paid consulting, but it's not normalized among companies to pay for doing so. If Filippo can normalize having OSS be treated as paid consulting engagements I think that would be wonderful for the community.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#47This post didn't go the way I thought it would. When these discussions get going, I always feel a little guilty because my tiny company doesn't pay for all the open-source software we use. I suppose we should, but it would be hard to make a business case for that, since the software is already free. It would be easy to conclude that this is a problem for the big, rich companies to solve, but I'm suspicious of advocat…
I don't know if this makes sense: sponsoring one of the open source projects your business depends on, could that work as PR?
Perhaps this could work for any company size, but I guess it depends on what is your core business.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#48The alternative to what we have now is not going to be a healthy OSS community. The alternative is going to be big companies insourcing more of their libraries.
The only reason why OSS has seen the up-pick it has is because major companies profit from it. Microsoft didn’t embrace open source because it had a change or morals, it embraced open source because it started making so much more money from enterprise orgs switching to Azure compared to selling us licenses for on-prem alternatives. Facebook and Google don’t share their massive front end-libraries and extensive tools because they are nice, they do so because it helps them dictate web-development and being able to on-board new hires who are already familiar with their tech.
If anything, I think it’s more likely that we are going to see a big player pick up a NPM alternative and make sharing packages much harder. I think the fact that no one has done this, should tell you all about how little the enterprise industry worries about the status que.
I don’t think it’s necessarily healthy, and I sympathise with OSS maintainers who don’t get paid for their work, but I don’t think it’s a massive issue either. The OSS world is still better than it ever was, and your tech stack isn’t actually in danger if you review that code you use.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#49I'm an open source author and maintainer of a somewhat-popular python package[0] (~1M downloads/month) that I've maintained for over 10 years. I don't recall ever receiving a donation. I am still maintaining it, but I just don't have time to add the improvements that it needs to keep up with the ecosystem (asyncio, for example). If organizations who use it got together and chipped in some non-negligible amount, I wou…
First, I don't use it, but thanks. (I know, being a maintainer is a thankless job, but I'm a rebel.) Second, the OP addresses this issue directly. He's talking about "making OSS maintenance legible" (emphasis mine) to BigCorps via 5-6 figure invoices "on letterhead".
It's a grand idea, and I hope it works. The path to not working is too achingly obvious though. Budgets are always tight (even if you're Apple and you have to artificially make money feel tight). What corp officer with budgetary discretion is going to greenlight a 5-6 figure payment to someone who's not doing work directly for the company? I think the key here is that that person is going to have to a) be principled, and b) smart about selling it, by emphasizing the fact that the changes were beneficial to our company, and leave out the fact that those changes were beneficial to every company. It wouldn't hurt if BigCorp got a measurable recruitment bump from it, too.
Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call
#50MANGA should pay them. They have enough money