[HN Gopher] I'm working on open source full time
___________________________________________________________________
I'm working on open source full time
Author : asicsp
Score : 335 points
Date : 2021-09-29 11:40 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.willmcgugan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.willmcgugan.com)
| epberry wrote:
| Exciting stuff, congrats. One note, the sponsor link on
| PyFilesystem is broken,
| https://github.com/PyFilesystem/pyfilesystem2
| willm wrote:
| Well spotted. Fixed.
| coding123 wrote:
| Rich looks incredible. I wish I had known about it about a year
| ago (and was more proficient in Python which I am now). I was
| creating an app to manage running all of our companies
| microservices locally on our laptops. I started out with ink-
| react (a text renderer for console apps that uses React). It was
| pretty cool in concept, but in execution it couldn't line up
| large boxes correctly and often failed. I don't know if it fixed
| all those issues.
|
| Instead I just moved to Electron and now my app is a huge
| motherf__ing beast.
| ww520 wrote:
| Governments can encourage donation to OSS projects by structuring
| favorable tax code for donation like R&D credit.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| The problem with open source is that is over represented by
| privileged people, who have resources to work on it instead of
| having to have paying job. If you are poor, you have limited
| chances to contribute anything and thus also potentially getting
| worse jobs due to no OSS contributions in CV.
| hyproxia wrote:
| >I recently came to a decision which will have a big impact on my
| open source work. In particular Rich
|
| Why does a library for displaying pretty text on the terminal
| need a full time maintainer?
| capableweb wrote:
| https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich
|
| > Rich is a Python library for rich text and beautiful
| formatting in the terminal.
|
| > The Rich API makes it easy to add color and style to terminal
| output. Rich can also render pretty tables, progress bars,
| markdown, syntax highlighted source code, tracebacks, and more
| -- out of the box.
|
| Seems Rich is not just displaying pretty text, it seems to
| almost be a full blown UI library that can render components
| and more.
|
| Since the API surface is that big, it's possible for bugs to
| slip through, and those have to be fixed by someone.
|
| Then once companies and other people start depending on this
| library, they start being dependent on fixes to also be made to
| it as new platforms appear, new terminals get written and so
| on.
|
| Either the companies/people can start contributing their fixes
| directly upstream, or the can fund one person who can do it for
| them, and for other users of the library.
|
| Although most of us know what happens in situations like this:
| no one except the original author actually fixes stuff, until
| the author looses interests and moves on.
| seoaeu wrote:
| One of the most baffling things about HN is how commenters
| routinely and wildly underestimate the amount of resources it
| takes to build high quality software
| krono wrote:
| And for the whole story: > In particular Rich
| and Textual, but also pyfilesystem and lomond > In
| addition to working on Rich and Textual, [...] contribute to
| open source in other ways. [...] code reviews to open source
| projects
|
| His focus seems to be mostly on Textual, which looks pretty
| neat.
| nyc_pizzadev wrote:
| Having worked in a few open source based commercial businesses, I
| think the donation model can be tough and unpredictable. The only
| time I have seen it work is when businesses have commercialized
| an open source project and then give you a decent recurring
| donation back in return for your support. So the obvious move
| would be to just commercialize it yourself. The author does
| mention this at the end.
|
| If its a small product but with a lot of users, think about a
| small add on service in the few dollars a month range. If its a
| more sophisticated product that's a bit more framework oriented,
| maybe use it as the foundation for project based services and
| build a consultancy. If its a true product that can be sold, then
| make a commercial version and start selling it. A lot of times
| there is a vast vast market out there that doesn't know this is a
| free open source project, they just see a product which solves
| their problems and they buy it.
| Datenstrom wrote:
| One interesting open source funding method I stumbled on recently
| was Tidelift which I posted recently[1].
|
| Otherwise I see contributing to open source as essential for my
| company and we are still quite small but already have one dev
| that has been full time supporting a critical open source project
| for about 6 months. I'm not sure why others don't see it that
| way.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28487153
|
| Edit: Just realized he develops the package that lead me to
| discovering Tidelift, small world.
| Tycho wrote:
| Is working full-time on open source software (if you're good) for
| free or for a meagre stipend the most effective altruism there
| is? When you consider multiplier effects.
| sidlls wrote:
| Not really, no: it isn't even a very high quality act, and in
| fact can be quite negative:
|
| 1. The multiplier is net negative for software engineers: it
| advances the commoditization of our knowledge skills;
|
| 2. It does so while providing essentially free labor for large
| organizations with agendas that are rarely positive for
| society;
|
| 3. Most (>99.99%) software development is not similar to, say,
| mathematical, engineering or scientific inquiry: there's no
| similar value produced for society by working on it (open
| source or otherwise), and people who work on open source now
| thinking they're following the traditions of the hackers of
| 30-40 years ago are quite mistaken (see above two items) most
| of the time
|
| _Some_ open source software projects are altruistic. The vast
| overwhelming majority are not.
| coliveira wrote:
| This. I wonder why more people don't understand the negative
| effects of open source (at least in the way it is practiced).
| It is essentially free labor for Apple, Amazon, and pretty
| much any big company that already understood how to use open
| source to get the benefits for their paid products.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Doesn't that kind of depend on the license?
| Tycho wrote:
| If all the big companies use open source software, that
| creates a nice level playing field for the whole economy.
| Anyone with capital can start a rival enterprise.
| Competition breeds innovation and drives down prices. The
| general public benefits greatly.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| If half the carpenters decided to build houses for free,
| there would be less paid work for the other carpenters
| though... Society's needs in carpentry would be partially
| satisfied by the free work.
| Tycho wrote:
| I don't think we run out of work. People might need to
| adapt and do something else. But for software engineers
| especially, the open source stuff just gives you more
| tools to leverage for your employers/clients.
| sidlls wrote:
| Because it's the "nerdy" software engineers' version of
| social media: a way to exercise some ego/narcissism.
| trutannus wrote:
| > a way to exercise some ego/narcissism
|
| Alright, then how do you explain the folks who have
| completely anonymous open source contributor identities?
| Or folks who commit documentation improvements? I think
| flattening the entire open source world down to ego and
| narcissism is reductive to the point of being wrong.
| sidlls wrote:
| You've set up a fine strawman to burn down: I never even
| implied what you suggest.
| trutannus wrote:
| I fail to see an alternative way to interpret what you
| wrote. By all means, feel free to elaborate.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > it is essentially free labor for Apple, Amazon, and
| pretty much any big company
|
| It heavily depends on what kind of software one is
| developing, in many cases it is not applicable at all.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Companies LOVE unpaid labor and they push incessantly for
| "company-friendly" weak licenses.
|
| We need to take back FLOSS from SaaS providers and similar
| megacorps: please use AGPL.
| hyproxia wrote:
| >The multiplier is net negative for software engineers
|
| Good.
|
| >It does so while providing essentially free labor for large
| organizations with agendas that are rarely positive for
| society
|
| And? The only downside that I can see is that corporations
| might take your work without providing their modifications
| back. Copyleft licenses mitigate this issue.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > Most (>99.99%) software development is not similar to, say,
| mathematical, engineering or scientific inquiry: there's no
| similar value produced for society by working on it (open
| source or otherwise)
|
| Claiming that less than 0.01% of open source projects
| provides any value overall seems to be quite pessimistic and
| not matching reality. Really, just 1 project in 10 000?
| willm wrote:
| I'm sure its not. But this is one of the few (possibly only)
| things I'm actually good at. And it's not entirely altruistic,
| I think this work will benefit me financially in the future.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Good luck!
|
| I used to say "My dream is to work for free." At the time, I
| earned my keep as a manager, and had to do all my coding as
| extracurricular open-source projects (I've been writing open
| source for over 20 years).
|
| I am now living the dream. A few years ago, I was basically
| forced into early retirement, and it's the best thing that
| ever happened to me.
|
| I manage to keep busy:
| https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
| [deleted]
| rikroots wrote:
| I've just dedicated the best part of 2.5 years to working on my
| open source project[1] almost full-time. During that time I've
| managed to rewrite the entire library from scratch, discover a
| new purpose for its existence and (very selfishly) have a lot of
| fun with the library, pushing its boundaries and re-evaluating
| its 'API' as I discovered/explored the world of generative art.
|
| Sadly my personal funds have run out and I've not been successful
| finding sponsors etc. But the work has helped me land a
| new/exciting full-time job so I've wasted nothing through my
| endeavour. I wish Will McGugan all the best at the start of his
| adventure, and hope he has as much fun as I've had over the next
| year or two!
|
| [1] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas
| corpMaverick wrote:
| We need better ways to fund Open Source projects. We all benefit
| tremendously by them. I think, this is one way it can work.
| Companies pledge to donate $X USD amount per year per software
| engineer (SE) to a foundation (or whatever legal entity). Then
| each SE is able to choose which percentage of the money goes to
| which projects. Channeling the money to the projects that they
| themselves find more useful. It makes sense because companies
| benefit but it is the SEs that know what they are using most.
| aswinmohanme wrote:
| Note to self
| [deleted]
| goodpoint wrote:
| Donations are very unnatural for for-profit companies, unlike
| payments for services, requiring a lot of work to prove the
| legitimacy of a donation.
|
| Furthermore, funding public goods with donations creates
| ethical issues: in a competitive environment freeloaders have a
| competitive advantage over donors.
|
| Is there a way to contribute equally and fairly to public
| goods? Yes: taxation.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| > Yes: taxation.
|
| I agree. But then, how do you decide where the money goes ?
| goodpoint wrote:
| The same way it's been done when public money funded all
| the groundwork for semiconductors and early computers, GPS,
| GSM, satellites, fiber optics, LCDs, touchscreens, spread
| spectrum, particle physics, space exploration, industrial
| chemistry, nuclear power and so on.
|
| You create international projects and hire very skilled
| people to decide funding allocation and hired skilled
| people to do the work.
|
| Without the distortions caused by the interests of for-
| profit companies (or the whims of some billionaire) you
| have a more efficient innovation process.
| int_19h wrote:
| To be fair, you often end up with the whims of some
| billionaire replaced by the whims of some bureaucrat.
| Thus, a key part of any such arrangement is transparency
| and accountability before the society it's supposed to
| benefit.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> We need better ways to fund Open Source projects._
|
| Yeah well, at least in the EU, we could start funding the
| awesome OSS projects that already exist around here, like KDE,
| OpenSUSE, and many more, with some of those billions of
| taxpayer money the EU has promised for "innovation", instead of
| shoving them in the pockets of publicly traded 100-year-old
| corporations like Siemens, VW, Daimler, T-Systems, Dassault-
| Systemes, etc.
|
| But of course, that would only work if those funds were
| actually for innovation and not a hidden form of wealth
| transfer and corporate charity.
| tremon wrote:
| I feel this misses a larger point: a large chunk of valuable
| OSS work isn't about innovation, but about maintenance:
| keeping the same things working in a developing ecosystem.
|
| As long as we keep framing all software development as
| "innovation", there will never be enough money for the
| infrastructure underpinning the real innovative work, and
| that both makes it appear that innovation is much more
| expensive than it really is, and that software development is
| somehow maintenance-free.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yeah, the boring, but important work. Money would help
| there.
| nextos wrote:
| Funding bodies should consider spending money on boring
| maintenance and reimplementation of critical
| infrastructure in languages safer than C (e.g. Rust, but
| there are other interesting alternatives). We would avoid
| many future fiascos.
| sigg3 wrote:
| So true.
|
| The NTP project is symptomatic imo.
|
| So important and totally ignored until recently.
| pbourke wrote:
| Yes. It's past time to treat some software maintenance work
| as infrastructure (in the "roads and water mains" sense of
| the word)
| Vinnl wrote:
| The EU is funding lots of new projects struggling to get off
| the ground though; you'll encounter lots of them on the
| Fediverse: https://mastodon.xyz/@ngizero
| ognarb wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm working full time at Nextcloud on pure open
| source software and on my free time, I (co-)maintain many
| KDE apps, one of them currently sponsored by Nlnet.
|
| Nlnet is a very nice initiative but let's be realistic the
| funding provided by them can support one or two developers
| working part time but not a team of developers working on a
| product full time.
|
| What we need is more small companies that sell services to
| governments. But this implies sales teams, support
| contracts, and a lot of organization. It's not something
| that every one want to do and as the skills to start.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| From my experience with these projects and people running
| them, most are just grift designed to extract money from EU
| programs.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Don't know why you're being downvoted for stating the
| truth.
|
| In Brussels (and all over EU), many companies are founded
| just to leach off EU funds or to advise you how to do it,
| for a fee of course. They're basically red-tape
| companies, and it's big business in Brussels.
|
| Look around on LinkedIn and you'll see a bunch of serial
| entrepreneurs with fancy titles and pompous resumes, who
| found a new company every couple of years, each tailored
| to a new innovative way of sucking that EU grant money
| and producing zero real world results, other than a fancy
| looking website about the vision of the company, and
| writing lots documentation.
|
| And, honestly, I don't blame them, I blame the EU
| politicians for being monstrous idiots.
| jboynyc wrote:
| That may be true about the ERC, but the NGI Zero scheme
| works very differently. Take a look at the grantees and
| you'll see.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| this; govt and taxing might quickly get at least some money
| into the right hands
|
| maybe some push by OSS activists to expose how much current
| govt software relies on their projects?
| fabianhjr wrote:
| Heartbleed barely made a dent in funding.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| scaring people into paying only really works for
| criminals
|
| maybe we should place some ad-tech veterans in the EFF :)
| WJW wrote:
| Unless you can back this up with a threat of "we won't
| continue maintenance unless you pay up", this strategy is
| unlikely to make much of an impression. The OSS community
| has demonstrated to be quite willing to work for free, so
| why would you suddenly start paying them?
|
| Big organizations only change course when something is
| already broken and it is hindering the organization. In
| places where everything is just humming along, nothing
| changes. (This often applies to careers as well btw)
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Software is much like mathematics. Who is paying
| mathematicians? Both government and industry.
|
| A lot of mathematics research has no immediate
| applications but still is valuable. Software is more
| practical, governments should pay for creation and
| maintenance of "infra-structure software", which no
| single corporation is willing to pay for. Why aren't
| they? Because the end-results benefit everybody.
|
| So I think the discussion about "better models to finance
| open-source" is misguided. Government(s) should pay for
| it, as much as it has a positive return on investment in
| terms of better infra-structure.
|
| That is a matter of politics, not "better models". Will
| the government invest in infra-structure? That is a
| political question and largely depends on who you vote
| into power.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Software is _unlike_ mathematics in that mathematicians
| won 't work for free.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > so why would you suddenly start paying them?
|
| I believe governments should be different from
| corporations, and their goal should be to empower the
| people that drive the greater good in society, vs
| exploiting those same people's time for capital
|
| it's a very thin line :)
| burrows wrote:
| You've just replaced the word "empower" with "exploit".
|
| Do you have some technical definition for the word
| "exploit"?
| int_19h wrote:
| Exploitation of labor is taking all the wealth generated
| by someone's work, and giving only a portion of it back,
| while pocketing the rest.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| to define it i would focus on the contrast: the return of
| an exploit goes directly to the exploiter, the return of
| an empowerment is spread among the group of supporters
| who funded the empowerment
|
| exploitation is a one-to-one mapping, while empowerment
| is one-to-many?
|
| seems to feel like "the difference between a religion and
| a cult...."
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| adrianN wrote:
| One of my bigger wishes is that any software paid for with
| tax money needs to be FOSS. Of course you can't do the switch
| easily for with all the legacy systems running everywhere,
| but there must be some path from paying SAP and Microsoft
| Gigabucks in perpetuity to building an ecosystem of free
| software that everybody can use.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > but there must be some path from paying SAP and Microsoft
| Gigabucks in perpetuity to building an ecosystem of free
| software that everybody can use.
|
| Simply have a law that any software the state buys, if not
| OSS already, becomes time-delayed OSS: after 2 years it
| becomes open source.
|
| If Microsoft et al don't want to sell software on those
| terms, fine, then no country within the EU (or state owned
| entities) will ever buy any of their software.
|
| This idea is probably far too sensible for the EU to ever
| adopt.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Alas, I wish it was, but it's not sensible. Govts run at
| enterprise scale, and need specialised software, and
| specialised services to manage that scale. And in some
| areas that simply doesn't exist as OSS.
|
| So then you have to have your law carve out exceptions.
| Which means you need criteria to determine when you have
| to have OSS, and when you can use off the shelf.
|
| Or conversely all Govts at every level need herds of
| programmers to tweak OSS code to make it fit. My city is
| 10000 people so we need a rate calculator that matches
| our bylaws, over there is a city of 1000000 people who
| need a very different rate calculator.
|
| So every town has to hire a programmer to tailor some OSS
| program - but hey, we don't need every town to have a
| rates-calculator domain expert - we can say hire 10 of
| them between us, and split the cost. Yay, a central it
| dept, with builtin monopoly, at govt pay, can't be fired.
| What could possibly go wrong with this model.
|
| No wait, we'll make them compete, pay them only for
| success, negotiate rates, and we end up with? A
| commercial proprietary software business that's motivated
| to deliver... With experts at doing this one task at
| scale. Rinse and repeat for hundreds and hundreds of
| departments...
| asiachick wrote:
| I don't know if SAP contributes but Microsoft pays for C#,
| VSCode, and other open source projects. And further they
| support open source by providing github, github's free site
| hosting, and github's free CI.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The suggestion wasn't that the government should only buy
| from companies that _have done_ or _are doing_ some open
| source, the suggestion was that the government only
| finance FOSS.
|
| Also, nobody told them to buy Github. It wasn't a
| charitable acquisition.
| int_19h wrote:
| Microsoft also pays salary for several people who are
| core Python contributors, and sponsor PSF and PyCon.
|
| (I'm sure there are similar arrangements for other
| projects - that's just the stuff I'm familiar with.)
|
| However, Python is an example of a _large and prominent_
| OSS product. Generally speaking, stuff like that doesn 't
| struggle to find sponsors. But there are all those
| countless small OSS projects that get used by for-profit
| companies without any financial support for their
| maintenance. There needs to be some arrangement to
| accommodate those, as well.
| majormajor wrote:
| I don't think funding should be the sole determiner here.
| We don't expect any company which raises VC money to give
| 100% ownership of their code to the VCs.
|
| Labor needs to be rewarded, not just investment capital.
| indigochill wrote:
| But we do expect any company which raises VC money to pay
| out to the VCs according to their shares when a buyout
| happens. That's because VCs don't buy code, they buy a
| risky promise of future wealth.
|
| By contrast, public funding for code is buying code (at
| least in theory).
| phkahler wrote:
| >> By contrast, public funding for code is buying code
| (at least in theory).
|
| Funding developers is a risk as to weather the results
| will be what you hope. Paying for software is actually
| paying rent on something already complete. A typical
| software company uses the rent they collect on prior work
| to fund the newer risky work. The big companies are
| mostly doing the rent thing to pay shareholders.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Actually no, they don't buy code. They buy the people to
| implement a system at scale, and keep that system running
| and users trained. The code is negligible.
|
| Take Windows desktop. It's designed to run at scale, out
| the box, when you have 10 000 employees, and any
| hardware, printers, whatever. A govt isn't buying Windows
| its buying active directory, and the fact that every new
| hire knows how to use it already. And a million other
| things windows does at scale (technically and humanally).
| Zababa wrote:
| > We don't expect any company which raises VC money to
| give 100% ownership of their code to the VCs.
|
| If they sell 100% of their shares to the VCs, the VCs
| have 100% ownership of the code, because they own the
| company.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| My personal bugbear too - http://www.oss4gov.org
|
| oh noes - my domain ran out ... bugger
| zapita wrote:
| The US government has been working towards that goal: https
| ://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me...
|
| I don't know the current status of implementation since the
| policy was published mere months before the Obama/Trump
| transition. But I wouldn't be surprised to see it make
| progress again under the Biden administration.
| MayeulC wrote:
| https://publiccode.eu/
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I've long been impressed by https://simplesamlphp.org/ which
| is led by UNINETT, a state-owned company responsible for
| Norway's National Research and Education Network.
|
| It's a serious competitor to Shibboleth in the SAML space.
| Zababa wrote:
| I've been wishing for the UE to take care of the Mozilla
| Corporation for quite some time. This would reduce the
| influence of Google, and also force the Mozilla Foundation to
| stop using their money to sabotage Firefox and paying huge
| salaries to higher ups. I wish the EU would take tech
| seriously. Have people in the TC39, have people on the Rust
| board, have people working on Linux, things like that.
| nivenkos wrote:
| The EU should just invest in FOSS protectionism - money for
| FOSS if you work in the EU.
|
| Ban Microsoft and Oracle from public procurement, and invest
| the money in Europe.
|
| We have no Tech industry and pitiful wages because we've
| bowed down to this US colonisation for decades via neoliberal
| policies.
| adamdusty wrote:
| Are you trying to say that Siemens MES on silverlight isn't
| innovative?
| gitgud wrote:
| Good companies fund open-source, great companies contribute.
| simonw wrote:
| Disagree.
|
| The problem with companies contributing to existing open
| source projects is that it creates even more unpaid labor for
| the maintainers, who now have to review and discuss and
| commit to future maintenance of those contributions.
|
| Meanwhile they still aren't learning any money to allow them
| to commit more of their own time to the projects!
| gitgud wrote:
| Okay then, how about:
|
| Good companies fund, great companies maintain
|
| The point is; contributions to the Open-Source ecosystem
| are usually much more valuable than paying random open-
| source projects a small donation.
|
| An engineer submitting a bug fix might be worth
| hundreds/thousands of dollars of labour donated to the
| project.
| zaphar wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by contribute. If you contribute
| by hiring the maintainer to do maintainer work then that
| falls in the great company category. If you contribute by
| just shoveling a bunch of patches at already overworked
| maintainers then not so much.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > If you contribute by hiring the maintainer to do
| maintainer work then that falls in the great company
| category.
|
| No. This allows companies to seize control of FOSS
| projects.
|
| FLOSS is used by everybody and should not be driven a
| single corporation.
|
| Just like cities vs company town.
| zaphar wrote:
| If money is donated you can bet that the giver will have
| some input on the work. It's human nature. If you want
| FOSS maintainers to be paid a living wage the likely
| outcome is that some percentage of the givers will have
| sway or defacto control of the project. At least
| employing the Maintainer makes that plainly visible
| instead of hidden behind a screen of deniability.
|
| Besides because of the license FLOSS has a built in
| escape hatch if you don't like the direction a
| corporation is going. I recognize your concern I just
| think the risk is far lower than you do.
| allset_ wrote:
| I see it the opposite way. If a company hires a core
| maintainer (often the only maintainer), they have huge
| amounts of power over the direction of the project as
| they can threaten to fire the maintainer who is now
| dependent on the company for income.
|
| Contributing improvements externally allows the project
| to remain independent. And if the maintainer is
| overburdened they can decline the patches or postpone
| review. Nobody is forcing them to accept the changes.
| asiachick wrote:
| Do you any evidence this is is common? Plenty of heads of
| open source projects are hired by large companies. I've
| seen zero evidence of them not remaining independent but
| maybe I'm just unaware of those cases.
| simonw wrote:
| Gave you really seen that happen a lot? I can't think of
| many examples off the top of my head of open source
| project heads being hired by a company and given free
| reign to continue working exclusively on their project.
|
| I don't know how you would see the evidence of the
| company imposing their will on the project - that's not
| likely to happen in public. It's also very likely to
| happen without any explicit influence taking place at
| all.
|
| If a company hired me to work full-time on one of my
| projects, and I had to pick between two competing
| priorities for my time, I would naturally take my
| employer's own preferences and current challenges into
| account when making that decision. I wouldn't even
| consider that to be a bad thing.
| int_19h wrote:
| It doesn't have to be full-time. The maintainer can be
| hired as a part-time contractor, or even consultant, and
| the contract can be specific to the project in question.
|
| The problem with money translating to power is not unique
| to this arrangement, in any case. Donations can be
| similarly withdrawn, after all, so they also create an
| implicit bias. The only way to fix this is to make it so
| that people don't have to rely on such sources of income
| to sustain themselves.
| rectang wrote:
| Many projects have a governance structure which allows for
| contributors to become maintainers.
|
| Projects which don't have such governance are self-limiting
| in terms of [popularity x complexity]. At some point,
| tensions arise as a complex project which cannot scale its
| maintainers and cannot service all of its users.
|
| Open source devs don't owe anybody support, but the
| marketplace doesn't owe them popularity either.
| aseipp wrote:
| I just think this isn't true. The reality of the
| situation is almost nobody actually _wants_ to maintain
| anything unless they are paid to do so; people just want
| to throw you patches and have you accept them and then
| never contribute again. Very, very few developers
| actually want to maintain anything. The trust barrier is
| also typically high. I don 't just hand out a commit bit
| for no reason. This is all cultural, sure, but it is what
| it is. Maintenance isn't fun and people don't like it.
|
| From experience the ratio of random drive-by contributors
| to people who regularly contribute high-quality code to
| the point of qualifying as a "maintainer" is something
| like 20:1 or worse. That doesn't mean they _become_
| maintainers, just that 1 out of every 20 might have the
| chops, if they dedicated to it. This is true even of
| corporate contributors from well staffed companies; they
| only want me to accept the patch so they can do something
| else. I have literally had corporate engineers file
| reports to me saying "Please do this" (not maliciously,
| mind you) and when I respond "I don't have time", but
| actually knew the person in question enough to follow up
| with "But I would trust you to do this if I added you as
| a maintainer, since it's not hard", and they _still_
| rejected it as, effectively, "too much responsibility."
| Didn't even get to the point of whether their work would
| let them have time for it or not. They have no interest
| beyond that, I can't blame them in a sense.
|
| The idea that most projects actually have enough well-
| intended, frequent, sufficiently informed contributors to
| merit any actual "governance" structure at all beyond
| "Whatever the one or two authors do to make it all work"
| is completely detached from the reality of my own
| experience, is all I can say. And that's the reality for
| most open source projects that aren't stupidly famous,
| have literally zero monetary funding, and are still very
| important.
| rectang wrote:
| Counterexample: Apache Software Foundation projects, and
| projects elsewhere which have adopted ASF style
| governance or something similar.
|
| While there is surely a long tail of Open Source projects
| which don't have (and shouldn't have) such a governance
| structure, many of the most widely used projects do. The
| bargain that project founders make is giving newcomers a
| real governance stake and thus ceding some control over
| the project, in order to make it worthwhile for
| contributors (and their employers) to invest -- with some
| contributors eventually becoming maintainers.
|
| > _The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually
| wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so_
|
| True. And that's perhaps why ASF-style governance has
| found a niche in Open Source: it provides one solution to
| a problem often seen as intractable.
| bipvanwinkle wrote:
| I just convinced the company that i work for to do exactly
| this. We're small so there isn't a lot of extra cash lying
| around, but we just started with a low number and we'll
| increase it as we go along.
| tagolli wrote:
| I had the same idea! https://pay.builders/
| cryptica wrote:
| I keep hearing this narrative about "We need to help open
| source developers" but it feels as empty as the narrative
| around gender and race diversity in corporate environments.
|
| People within big corporations talk about the problem as a
| substitute for actually solving it. They could easily solve it.
| It would cost them very little. They just don't want to solve
| it.
|
| Big corporate directors hate open source developers. They think
| we're all a bunch of communists.
|
| They don't want to incentivize value creation via open source.
|
| Instead of trying to figure out how to leverage network effects
| to capture some value from open source and help grow innovative
| ecosystems, they'd rather smother innovation and incentivize
| cronyism, dirty politics and bureaucracy instead.
| bruce511 wrote:
| For 30 years I've been hearing how open source needs proper
| funding, so far with little success.
|
| Everyone agrees that open source is valuable, but at the same
| time its very model removes the most direct way of extracting
| that value from the user - ie by primarily selling the code (in
| source or binary format).
|
| Compare this to proprietary binary software which has
| identified "this software has value, this is the price..." for
| them it's not complicated - create value, sell value.
|
| Conversely with open source it's create value, give value away,
| try and get customers to pony up cash for some other reason
| (support, donations, whatever) which is a hard sell because
| that is minimal added value.
|
| In my career I found a balance - I ship code not compiled
| binaries, so users are free to do whatever they like, they can
| ship binaries, but not my source code. That works at personal
| scale, and I make enough to keep working. It's not ideal, but I
| charge for the value, and there are lots of honest users.
|
| Big projects, Linux etc, get enough volunteers and funding.
| Some (chromium et al) are corporate sponsored. But for the long
| tail of one-man projects perhaps a pure open source model is
| not the best idea. Maybe there's space for something between
| closed binaries and source code for free?
| kdasme wrote:
| This resonates with me so much. Yes, we absolutely need better
| ways to support FOSS. The companies I've worked with never
| contributed any funds to FOSS, and very rarely contributed the
| code back. It felt so unjust, I started working on (what I
| think might be) a decent solution for some FOSS projects --
| https://srv.io/open-source-developers. The MVP is up and
| running, not taking any payments yet, but feedback from
| developers has been nothing but positive. If you'll have a
| moment to check this out, please let me know what you think. :)
| divbzero wrote:
| Could we popularize versions of popular open source licenses
| (MIT, LGPL, etc) for which commercial entities with positive
| revenue are _required_ to donate X amount?
| sokoloff wrote:
| So, support open-source by creating and pushing for the use
| of non-open-source licenses?
| Unklejoe wrote:
| I like the model of charging for open source software, perhaps
| with slightly better support in return. It doesn't have to be
| as serious as the RedHat model either.
|
| Something like how Bitwarden does it seems reasonable to me.
| You can run your own server if you buy a license, or you could
| just take their source and comment out the license check, but
| the license is so cheap so why bother?
|
| I do wish they had a lifetime license though. I hate
| subscriptions.
| RNCTX wrote:
| Companies could pay taxes rather than pay politicians less to
| not-pay-taxes (1).
|
| 1. Taxes could fund grants that instead of being passed around
| among friends of friends at certain universities are paid to
| those who provide the tools most useful to the most people (2).
|
| 2. People could be defined as actual living, breathing people,
| not corporations (3).
|
| 3. Corporations that complain about #2 could have their
| executives held personally liable for crimes, frauds, etc.
|
| These things are human problems, not technical problems or
| infrastructure problems. There is nothing stopping the US and
| UK from doing them (as for other countries, there's the US and
| UK intelligence services mulling around in their back yards to
| stop anyone from doing them...)
| prancer_or_vix wrote:
| "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house"
| -Audre Lorde
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| I can't think of a more inefficient way of paying for OSS
| than giving more money to congress to have them divy it up
| between various pork barrel/military spending and _hoping_ it
| eventually finds it 's way into a competent programmer's
| hands.
|
| Maybe just giving random people money in hopes one of them
| could become an OSS programmer, but even then, debatable.
|
| I think it makes a lot more sense to have the companies just
| hire people to work on OSS more often.
| david_allison wrote:
| > Companies pledge to donate $X USD amount per year per
| software engineer (SE) to a foundation (or whatever legal
| entity).
|
| The tides are slowly changing
|
| Indeed have a fund[0] for this, and other companies seem to be
| taking the same approach. The disadvantage is that funds are
| restricted to projects used by the business, therefore this
| focuses more on infrastructure and development tooling rather
| than end user applications.
|
| Google has an Open Source Peer Bonus[1], where a Google
| Employee can nominate external OSS contributors to receive a
| payment
|
| [0] http://opensource.indeedeng.io/FOSS-Contributor-Fund/
|
| [1] https://opensource.google/docs/growing/peer-bonus/
| tombert wrote:
| I also wish companies would just adopt the even simpler
| solution: just "donate" developer resources to a project that
| that engineer thinks is cool.
|
| If the tech giants would budget N days per month for developers
| to contribute to projects they like, I think that would a) help
| morale, and b) help the open source world.
| mattbk1 wrote:
| As articulated four years ago: https://gratipay.news/your-
| company-should-probably-pay-2000-...
| kosasbest wrote:
| RIP Gratipay:
|
| https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981
| otoburb wrote:
| Tidelift[1] is one such approach to encourage cashflows in a
| sustainable manner for open source projects.
|
| [1] https://tidelift.com/
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I love the idea of tidelift, and wish I could convince my org
| to use them. Unfortunately, $1500/month is pretty steep. It's
| a hard sell when competitors are an order of magnitude
| cheaper.
| tibbon wrote:
| I keep trying to bring this up at work.
|
| We use a ton of FOSS software. We pay thousands per month to
| AWS, Datadog, etc... but nothing for the "free" software we
| use.
|
| People are generally in support of the idea, but then it falls
| away as a priority, and there's the question of which projects
| to fund and for how much. We'd have to talk to the finance
| department, figure out a budget, etc. So it doesn't happen.
| rectang wrote:
| Hire the core maintainers of projects which are mission-
| critical.
|
| It's an old idea, and a proven one. Anecdotally, I made my
| living as a such a hire for nearly a decade.
|
| Another good plan, mentioned elsethread: have your current
| devs contribute. Opportunities to contribute always arise,
| and contributing is in the company's interest. The only thing
| typically standing in the way is codifying an open source
| policy (which is a good idea for large organizations.)
| pgeorgi wrote:
| If you have a particular project to support, ask a dev if
| they can offer a "support contract" (even if that only means
| "clients can send me, the developer, an email if they have
| issues and I'll reply within 3 business days, I'll also take
| care of releasing at least once every 6 months"). That way
| there's something for the finance department to work with.
|
| Once the dust settled, do the same with the next project.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| Yeah, this ends up being compelling from the business side
| as well. If you have mission-critical systems running on
| OSS software then it is absolutely worth it to have access
| to the maintainers in case you run into serious issues or
| need a bugfix prioritized.
|
| From the maintainer side it can be a bit tricky though.
| Typically the finance will want to pay another corporation,
| so the maintainer would need to create some sort of legal
| entity to bill with. The other potential issues would be
| around legal liability in case something goes sideways. You
| run the risk of getting sued if you don't provide a level
| of support that some corporate client is expecting.
| maccard wrote:
| In my experience finance don't care as long as there's an
| invoice and the tax is correct.
| acdha wrote:
| That question of targeting is important: I would argue that
| the most effective way most companies support open source is
| by buying Red Hat or Ubuntu licenses simply because it's a
| model which every accountant understands and you can make a
| single payment which will filter to tons of projects either
| in the form of direct employment of maintainers or patch
| contributions.
|
| I'm aware of various attempts to collect payments or offer
| support plans but I don't think anyone's hit a combination
| which is as corporate-friendly. Everyone understands the idea
| of paying for support and it's usually much easier to give
| six figures to one party than 3 figures to a dozen projects,
| _especially_ when the latter doesn't get you some kind of
| guaranteed benefit easily explained to the accountants.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| Agree. At the very least. Companies should buy support
| contracts for the free software they use. But there is not an
| easy way to do this either.
| pbiggar wrote:
| I wrote a post about this! the problem is not that there is no
| money, or that they don't want to donate, it's that there isn't
| a good way for them to donate.
|
| https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-source-8790e...
| mch82 wrote:
| You're on target with this. Companies can't contribute to
| random OSS on GitHub. In order to receive donations from
| large corporations (money and/or commits), OSS must be
| affiliated with a nonprofit that is properly structured and
| has recognized governance practices in place.
|
| My sense is that a large company prefer, and feel more
| comfortable, partnering with organizations like the Linux
| Foundation or Apache Software Foundation.
| rglullis wrote:
| I like the idea (and even asked for something similar at some
| previous jobs), but it can be easily gamed. I could for
| instance just send the funds to myself or to a friend.
|
| I am currently favoring the https://gitcoin.co model:
| individuals make donations to the projects they want to
| support, companies contribute to the fund only to _match_ the
| individual donations, and quadratic voting rules determine how
| much each project ends up receiving in the end. Quadratic
| voting works to ensure that no single whales benefit from the
| matching funds and that the distribution is more even.
|
| I've also have been contributing some of the BAT I receive from
| Brave to creators that are registered and I'd like to support
| (hi @geerlingguy!). It seems that if more people did that we
| could put some of the money from the ad industry into good use.
| fgonzag wrote:
| I've lately become convinced of the same thing. An idea i've
| had is instituting some sort of digital marketing tax (which
| doesn't reach consumers directly) and using the money raised to
| directly fund open source projects (especially desktop OSS
| projects which have much less resources than server oriented
| ones). I'm thinking straight up paying for developers salaries
| directly as long as you can prove you are working full time on
| a OSS project that has a minimum user base, as long as the
| project is completely non-commercial.
|
| Obviously each country would only hire their citizens /
| permanent residents, so it can also be considered a jobs
| programs of sorts. 200 billion dollars were spent on
| advertising last year. A 1% tax would net 2 billion a year,
| assuming your average OSS developer will work for 150,000,
| that's 13,000 developers you could fund with that tax. This
| also avoids Mozilla type situations who need 300 million a year
| to develop a browser by directly paying for developers instead
| of funding companies which spend on marketing, executives, and
| god knows what else.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Many companies get their engineers to contribute to the open
| source projects they use as a normal part of their
| responsibilities.
|
| That's how it should work - users contributing back.
| kosasbest wrote:
| Well there's a few services to help[0], and I see many Github
| projects with a link in the readme asking for donations and
| such.
|
| But then the project is basically `donationware` and the income
| is unreliable.
|
| I think we need more /reliable/ streams of income instead of
| digital panhandling.
|
| [0] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/
|
| [0] https://www.patreon.com/
|
| [0] https://liberapay.com/
| [deleted]
| relaunched wrote:
| I would hate to see the future of open source go the way of the
| open core model. Open source has become a very popular way for
| startups to get traction and lead gen, for their revenue
| generating, fully-featured, open-core version. I understand why
| this exists, and there's nothing wrong with it, but I'd love a
| Richard Stallman rant on the subject.
|
| I think it would be a good idea for open-core startups to grant
| options to EFF or the equivalent, at the beginning. I'd very much
| like to see the community directly benefit from the corporations
| that bootstrap themselves off of the communities back.
| dimal wrote:
| I gotta admit, I like the open core model. When it's done
| right, it seems like a reasonable way to monetize while still
| getting development done and encouraging a community and
| ecosystem. I've been looking at how Ghost[0] set things up[1]
| and it seems to be working very well. The company is non-profit
| and has certain restrictions in place to ensure that they don't
| become evil. Still, it won't work for everything and it can't
| work for smaller libraries.
|
| [0] https://ghost.org/ [1]
| https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a...
| IshKebab wrote:
| I agree. Open core is the least objectionable way to deal
| with the fact that properly developing _most_ open source
| projects costs money.
|
| Obviously there are exceptions (Firefox, popular programming
| languages, etc.).
|
| I especially like that you can often put enterprisey features
| like LDAP integration and auditing into the "paid" bit which
| gives a nice way to encourage companies to pay without
| affecting hobbyists.
| platz wrote:
| > The end-goal with Textual is to make it the best way to create
| applications in the terminal (with Python or any other language).
|
| how would this be able to support languages other than python?
| tobr wrote:
| I'm not sure that's how you should read it. It can be a better
| way to create a terminal application than any other way you can
| do it in any language, and still be limited to Python.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| FOSS is strange to me, some are trying hard to raise money to
| fund open source, while others appear to be asleep at the wheel.
| I have reached out to one large project we use a lot at work,
| multiple times, looking to make a donation, never heard anything
| back. I guess some are doing so well they don't need any money?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| I would start from projects looking for money and providing way
| to gave them (I bet that at least one heavily used FOSS project
| matches that description).
|
| > some are trying hard to raise money to fund open source,
| while others
|
| I am not so surprised by diversity here
| IshKebab wrote:
| Accepting money can be a pain. Now you have to do accounts and
| taxes, and possibly argue about who actually gets the money and
| what it is used for. I can see why some projects might not care
| about small donations.
|
| Maybe try offering a few million and see what happens. :-)
| amatecha wrote:
| I wonder if for some people there's the aspect of, once they
| receive money, they have to deal with extra complexity for
| income tax and whatnot? Just a guess, only thing I could think
| of (other than, like you say, pre-existing financial
| stability)...
| mlang23 wrote:
| The title made it already clear that this is an instance of "I am
| fighting the good fight, so please give me your money." I am an
| open source/FLOSS enthusiast since 25 years, but such calls still
| sound pathetic to me. These days even more then 10 years ago. Its
| a bit like going "I volunteer as an ambulance driver, do you have
| a few dollars?" I can see that some people dream of becoming
| financially independent from just coding open source. I have
| dreams as well. But the truth is, only a very select few ever
| reach that point. Joey Hess with git-annex comes to mind. I guess
| he just hit a nail at the right time, and wrote something that
| many people actually use. But if you're just that tad below the
| "everyone knows your tool"-line, you will never ever make your
| living from donations.
| willm wrote:
| Sounds like you only read the title. The OP is planning on
| living off his savings for a while. I'm sure he would love for
| sponsorship to make his work self-sustaining, but he would
| settle for paying a few bills.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Nonetheless, you do seem to acknowledge that it's possible
| while saying one should not even try. And yet this is oblivious
| to the fact that the only people who succeeded were among the
| people who tried in the first place.
| [deleted]
| mlang23 wrote:
| OK, lets put it another way. If everyone who deserves support
| for their work is going to be posted on HN, its going to take
| a long time until the last one gets their money.
| danShumway wrote:
| Does Will have an obligation to create a sustainable
| funding solution for every person who is doing important
| work? Or does Will just have an obligation to make _their_
| personal niche within the world sustainable?
|
| To me, if Will is trying to build software that is
| genuinely valuable to people, and if people are willing to
| give them money so that software continues to exist, then
| that's enough. I don't think Will is also obligated to
| solve Open Source funding on a systemic level. "Do things
| that don't scale" is still often sound business advice.
| ironmagma wrote:
| They will get money faster that way than by not asking
| anyone for support.
| shadycuz wrote:
| I didn't get this vibe. I read through like 3 or 4 pagaraphs
| and money was never mentioned.
| echelon wrote:
| This is shifting rapidly. We are not living 25 years ago.
|
| Kickstarter initiated a trend of paying for things we want by
| funding people that are creating in our niche areas of
| interest.
|
| Platforms like Patreon and Ko-fi let you support the creators
| you want directly. You can do it on a subscription basis and
| have a 1:1 channel to talk with the creator. You can get custom
| work, support, advice, etc.
|
| Github introduced recurring donations directly on user pages,
| making it seamless to contribute to open source creators. I
| chip in $5-30/mo to my favorite projects. I'm not the only one
| doing this, and the money adds up.
|
| Twitch and YouTube introduced subscriptions, bits, and channel
| points, which gamify contributions and make you feel involved.
| These have resulted in a massive windfall for creators, and
| that same technique will propagate into open source. "Get your
| name in the README", etc., distributed on millions of machines
| is a compelling technique.
|
| The world is changing.
| mlang23 wrote:
| If I were to give $1 monthly to everyone who substantially
| contributed to the software I am using on a daily basis, I
| believe my salary wouldn't suffice and I'd have to go live on
| the street. I know about Patreon, yes. But I also know that
| only the most prominent figures will actually earn enough to
| make it worthwhile. And in a sense, they are making money off
| the fact that the other 99% does not try to get payed for
| what they volunteered for.
| amatecha wrote:
| I give a couple bucks a month to a few creative people I
| appreciate. I don't get anything for it, and I don't care. I
| just want to support them. There's nothing majorly
| controversial about any of this. I read the article and the
| guy seems super humble and there's no degree of "pathetic
| begging" whatsoever. Great post (with a nice clean site
| design I should add).
| hyproxia wrote:
| >I am an open source/FLOSS enthusiast
|
| What does "enthusiast" mean here exactly?
|
| >if you're just that tad below the "everyone knows your
| tool"-line, you will never ever make your living from
| donations.
|
| I wouldn't be so sure. https://awesomekling.github.io/I-quit-
| my-job-to-focus-on-Ser...
| Honno wrote:
| The dudes got savings and career to fallback on--he might be
| dreaming but it's not like it'll hurt to try. Not to mention
| he's already popular in Python circles (i.e. tech workers with
| disposable income) and has an existing group of sponsors.
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