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Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

simonwillison.net

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Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#41

Post by stavros »

jpgvm wrote: post #10
munificent wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100% a simple, great idea.

What I like most about it is that it slots cleanly into the education budget bucket that is normally allocated at large corporates (atleast in my experience). It would be a ton cheaper than what that usually ends up getting spent on (generally re:Invent tickets and expenses).

> What I like most about it is that it slots cleanly into the education budget bucket that is normally allocated at large corporates (atleast in my experience).

> It would be a ton cheaper than what that usually ends up getting spent on (generally RE:Invent tickets and expenses).

While this is true, keep in mind that you probably wouldn't get a ton of education for your money, and that's kind of by design: you're supporting the maintainer, not buying education.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#42

Post by simonw »

indrora wrote: post #28

There's a company, Tidelift, that has been working on solving this issue as well. Their solution is to be a VAR on top of the open source and give updates on new versions, advice on remediation and workarounds for CVEs, and help prioritize issues for open source maintainers. The other side is that they pay the maintainers to do what they do best: maintain the software.

What Tidelift is doing is really exciting, but it requires quite significant time investment from the projects themselves to get it up and running - likely not really worth it for a single maintainer building something in their spare time.

I like the idea of having an easy mechanism outside of formal structures such as Tidelift and GitHub Sponsors that companies can use to channel money to projects they depend on that don't yet have something like that setup.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#43

Post by cestith »

knorker wrote: post #35

> Many projects don’t offer any clear mechanism for sponsoring them. One problem with that is that I don't believe you can pay me for talk to your team without approval from my current employer. It then becomes a problem not of finding the right person from the project to speak, but finding any person in the project who is currently a contractor able to bill you. Or am I overthinking it?

Evaluating who you really want doing the talking and working something out that their employer allows or gets a cut from are absolutely real concerns. That doesn't necessarily make them deal killers, but they could kill some deals.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#44

Post by simonw »

jka wrote: post #26

Following some of the spirit of open source, perhaps it could make sense to encourage companies/speakers to make recordings of these kind of discussions available under Creative Commons licenses? (that might also help to discourage these events from being used as disguised recruitment / interview / feature-request sessions)

That could be valuable, yeah. Big extra value for the company who get to promote it (and themselves) online, and value for the open source project too for the same reasons.

Would have to be figured out on a case-by-case basis though - I imagine some companies may want to be able to discuss private details in the Q&A that they don't want to go out in a video.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#45

Post by qbasic_forever »

xyst wrote: post #25

With this approach, suddenly your fun project turns into a job. Which is the exact thing most open source developers avoid.

Yeah I'd be very leery of anything saying it's a solution to open source sustainability that isn't directly involving maintainers in the conversation and decision. It might sound 'fun' to throw dollars at a project and get their core developer to speak to your team, but it's also a huge time burden and productivity sink for them. If you've gotten value from a project pay the developer how they prefer to be paid.

If maintainers just want direct financial support please give it. Don't make them jump through hoops or do tricks for you. These folks have lives, families to support, etc. and it does not scale to suddenly have their corporate users banging on their e-mail inbox demanding speaking time, etc. while shaking dollars at them.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#46

Post by simonw »

xyst wrote: post #25

With this approach, suddenly your fun project turns into a job. Which is the exact thing most open source developers avoid.

I really enjoy public speaking, so for me that wouldn't apply: if I could opt into earning $1,000 for an hour of work every now and then based on my open source work I'd be delighted.

If a company reaches out to a contributor and offers them money to talk they can always say no!

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#47

Post by simonw »

knorker wrote: post #35

> Many projects don’t offer any clear mechanism for sponsoring them. One problem with that is that I don't believe you can pay me for talk to your team without approval from my current employer. It then becomes a problem not of finding the right person from the project to speak, but finding any person in the project who is currently a contractor able to bill you. Or am I overthinking it?

Yeah, that's a good point - though I imagine that would vary enormously between different companies, countries and cultures.

In California people seem a lot more comfortable with their employees having a "side hustle" than they did when I worked in the UK!

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#48

Post by Jiejeing »

openthc wrote: post #17

We work like this and it's OK, not perfect but OK For folks in our industry that are not using our software (they are using of the closed-source competitors) we are able to show alternatives and still have conversations with operations folks about methods, ideas and other non-technical methods for businesss-process-automation. We've also got a segment of customers, they are paying us maintainers to basically do the i…

On the last case: I have received requests for consulting on my FOSS library, which I turned down because while I would love to live from it, I am currently employed in an exclusive contract and I don’t want to figure out how to declare this income to the tax office.

It is a bit of a pickle, either go full consulting on your FOSS product (which might not be realistic), or work in something unrelated for someone else, getting something in between is hard.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#49

Post by codazoda »

More than 20 years ago I had a support contract with a popular database provider. I was paying around $250 a month, if I remember correctly. A few months in I decided to ask a few questions about a problem I couldn't figure out how to solve. Their answer, however, surprised me. They let me know that the "support contract" I was paying for was an offer from me to support their project and not a contract I bought to get support from them.

Re: Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

#50

Post by dwohnitmok »

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #38
openthc wrote: post #17

We work like this and it's OK, not perfect but OK For folks in our industry that are not using our software (they are using of the closed-source competitors) we are able to show alternatives and still have conversations with operations folks about methods, ideas and other non-technical methods for businesss-process-automation. We've also got a segment of customers, they are paying us maintainers to basically do the i…

>Oddly, I've found some other FOSS projects that I wanted to get some help with -- and led with "I'll pay you to pair-program with me for like four hours and answer my dumb questions" -- I was surprised to be turned down: "we don't want to make this commercial, just file a bug" -- do you want a new bug or do you want $800? I've had multiple experience trying to pay FOSS developers where they wouldn't even accept a do…

> The rationale seems to be that they don't want the increased responsibility that comes with offering a paid service.

This is a really big deal. There's a step change in responsibility that happens from "offering free project you do whatever" to "you're paying me for a service." Even if that service is just consulting, it's still a big difference in responsibility. When it's free you can always walk away whenever you want, even if you were just in the middle of fixing something up.

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