Paying for Open Source Contributions
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Paying for Open Source Contributions
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Re: Paying for Open Source Contributions
#2TL;DR: A company pays their employees $20/hr for open source contributions done on the employees' own time with no strings attached. They also expand this to community promotion such as technical book writing and mentorships. They find this program to be wildly successful and highly encourage other companies to implement the same programs.
I for one am extremely excited that this is reaching front page of HN and entering a broader mindshare. OSS represents everything I hope the tech industry may become someday in the future- high quality work produced by intelligent, talented people for the benefit of all.
Re: Paying for Open Source Contributions
#3I'm a fan of anything that helps open source, but in my experience it's more effective if the employee is able to work on open source projects as part of their job. Then again, maybe that's just my current evening burnout talking.
Re: Paying for Open Source Contributions
#4Initiatives like this are exactly what gets me clicking on "Careers" links.
Re: Paying for Open Source Contributions
#5I'm a fan of anything that helps open source, but in my experience it's more effective if the employee is able to work on open source projects as part of their job. Then again, maybe that's just my current evening burnout talking.
Author of the post here.
Realistically, we can't pay people full engineering salaries to do random OSS. Our team can already contribute to OSS on their work time when it relates to their work, or our own projects, but for the personal interest/passion projects without direct benefit for us as a company, it doesn't scale. Doubly so when we have a pretty strict "no overtime" policy of working no more than 40 hours a week.
We have failsafes in place in case anybody gets a bit too excited about free time OSS. We limit the Sauce hours you can do in a month for this reason, but nobody has hit that max yet, so it doesn't seem to be a systemic problem.
Re: Paying for Open Source Contributions
#6My opinion is that open-source contributions stems from passion. People do it and implement something because they're passionate about it.
When you attach any money to it, it becomes tainted with responsibility and emotions. Such as, "should I work on this an extra hour and burn myself out and get those extra 40 bucks for dinner tonight?" That formula doesn't make individuals want to work more on open-source.
Sure they push them towards doing stuff in open-source but that usually almost never leads to creating great pieces of work.
One great and amazing thing that open-source thought us is that individuals can group together and work on amazing things without any economical reward. To me it was always a fascinating experiment outside the usual realms of politics, economics, social-studies.
Nobody would have ever imagined it to work without "money", but it does and it will continue to work. In fact, instead of pushing capitalism mentality inside of open-source we should be doing exactly the opposite: push open-source mentality in other parts of our society.
Re: Paying for Open Source Contributions
#7I'm a fan of anything that helps open source, but in my experience it's more effective if the employee is able to work on open source projects as part of their job. Then again, maybe that's just my current evening burnout talking.
Author of the post here. Realistically, we can't pay people full engineering salaries to do random OSS. Our team can already contribute to OSS on their work time when it relates to their work, or our own projects, but for the personal interest/passion projects without direct benefit for us as a company, it doesn't scale. Doubly so when we have a pretty strict "no overtime" policy of working no more than 40 hours a we…
Out of curiosity, what's the monthly limit?
Re: Paying for Open Source Contributions
#8My opinion is that open-source contributions stems from passion. People do it and implement something because they're passionate about it. When you attach any money to it, it becomes tainted with responsibility and emotions. Such as, "should I work on this an extra hour and burn myself out and get those extra 40 bucks for dinner tonight?" That formula doesn't make individuals want to work more on open-source. Sure th…
I think your conclusion comes a bit too quickly. Sure, open-source is about passion for everyone who doesn't do it as a day job and earning money can kill that passion. But so can other factors (e.g. communities that demand but don't contribute) and still, we see a lot of OSS projects out there.
In my opinion, an important factor here is that you earn that money for whatever OSS project you are working on. That reduces the pressure to work on that single project you would get paid to work on.
And if you are completely against the compensation, you could still not tell your company about what you are doing after 5 pm ;-)
I think it is a great opportunity for employees.
Re: Paying for Open Source Contributions
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author of the post here. Realistically, we can't pay people full engineering salaries to do random OSS. Our team can already contribute to OSS on their work time when it relates to their work, or our own projects, but for the personal interest/passion projects without direct benefit for us as a company, it doesn't scale. Doubly so when we have a pretty strict "no overtime" policy of working no more than 40 hours a we…
Out of curiosity, what's the monthly limit?
It's set at 30 hours a month. This is not for budget reasons, only to discourage excess working off-hours. This adds up to about a workday per week, which is what we feel is reasonable.
Re: Paying for Open Source Contributions
#10My opinion is that open-source contributions stems from passion. People do it and implement something because they're passionate about it. When you attach any money to it, it becomes tainted with responsibility and emotions. Such as, "should I work on this an extra hour and burn myself out and get those extra 40 bucks for dinner tonight?" That formula doesn't make individuals want to work more on open-source. Sure th…
As an active Open Source contributor I'd like to say that apart from passion being involved it also is a big responsibility depending on the project either way and being paid for it affirms my passion and beliefs.
Disclaimer: I work for Formidable