[HN Gopher] We Just Gave $155k to Open Source Maintainers
___________________________________________________________________
We Just Gave $155k to Open Source Maintainers
Author : bentlegen
Score : 384 points
Date : 2021-10-21 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.sentry.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.sentry.io)
| a_c wrote:
| This is good start. Would be great to see more companies
| following suite.
| Weryj wrote:
| I must say, I do really like sentry. Any hosted service that
| offers the option of free local hosting is always a perk. Add it
| to the home lab.
| jcuenod wrote:
| Obviously this is a good thing that we want to see more of. I
| like the approach of asking engineers what projects to support.
| My first thought was that this doesn't seem like a large amount.
| Maybe we need a thread listing large SAAS companies that have
| donated nothing to OSS projects, though.
| whit537 wrote:
| I'd love to see other companies express their open source
| donations in terms we can compare across companies. Yes, in
| absolute terms $155k (rounding up ;) is not that much, but
| Sentry is not that big. We have ~75 engineers. How much do
| other companies with 750 or 7,500 engineers donate to open
| source, per engineer?
| tnolet wrote:
| This is amazing. I'm CTO and co-founder of a (much smaller)
| monitoring company. We have as one of our core values that we
| donate 1% of MRR to non-corporate backed Open Source.
|
| We are also Sentry users BTW.
| mahalol wrote:
| That is amazing, your company rocks.
| htrp wrote:
| 1% of MRR is a huge win. Do you make one-time payments or does
| it become a monthly grant?
| maximedupre wrote:
| If all software businesses could give away 1% to OSS, what a
| difference it would make!
|
| It's only a philanthropic decision because not all businesses
| wish to do the same. Because all are benefiting from the
| philanthropic efforts of a few.
|
| If it was a standard in the industry, it would become a
| business decision, as innovations in OSS becomes innovations on
| their bottom line.
| mraza007 wrote:
| seeing this post makes me feel so good that they are really
| supporting the OSS community.
|
| I wish more companies supported OSS devs like this
| maximedupre wrote:
| I know right!
|
| However, I do feel like individuals also have their part to
| play in this situation.
|
| If a business has to dedicate 1% of revenues to OSS, why
| shouldn't the individual, who is also an indirect beneficiary?
| anyfactor wrote:
| I JUST LOVE THIS. I thought they were making donations to big
| names in OS fields but I was pleasantly surprised. neovim, axios,
| urlib3 and dark reader.
|
| I think I am going to start making a laundry list of small
| YouTubers, Projects, Browser Extensions, and Maintainers so I can
| help them out as they helped me out.
| Tycho wrote:
| Is there any such thing as 'bug bounties' that companies put out
| to get fixes for open source software?
| ssddanbrown wrote:
| Upon the suggestions from other commenters, I've had recent
| interaction with huntr.dev. I maintain an open source project
| and had a few members on there report vulnerabilities over the
| last month or two. They seem to pay out both to the finder of
| the vulnerability and the maintainer (me). The process seemed a
| janky at first but they've improved the platform since my first
| interaction and they seem to be encouraging a good thing. Had a
| few false reports but that has been outweighed by well-defined
| genuine reports.
| maximedupre wrote:
| That a great question...never heard of it for OSS
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| It seems like it would create some bad incentives for open
| source maintainers/submitters - someone submits a PR to fix a
| bug, gets rejected, maintainer commits a similar bug fix,
| claims reward. Dunno. Interesting idea, execution might have
| bad knock on effects
| maximedupre wrote:
| > It seems like it would create some bad incentives for
| open source maintainers/submitters - someone submits a PR
| to fix a bug, gets rejected, maintainer commits a similar
| bug fix, claims reward.
|
| Well that would never work
| maximedupre wrote:
| Meaning that it would be obvious what that said
| maintainer did to claim the reward lol
| zeeg wrote:
| Usually people use that term for security concerns these days,
| which definitely exist for open source. I've seen stuff over
| the years where people have attempted to do bounties for
| implementing a feature/bugfix/etc, but its never really taken
| off.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| Yes. There's the Internet Bug Bounty[0], which is administered
| by HackerOne and funded by a number of companies.
|
| It's paid out three quarters of a million dollars since its
| foundation in 2013. It was relaunched last month. The pace is
| picking up, too: $100k has been paid out in the last 90
| days[1].
|
| Disclosure: I know of it because I work for Shopify, which is
| one of the donors.
|
| [0] https://www.hackerone.com/internet-bug-bounty
|
| [1] https://hackerone.com/ibb?type=team
| evan_ wrote:
| BountySource:
|
| https://www.bountysource.com/
|
| > What is Bountysource?
|
| > Bountysource is the funding platform for open-source
| software. Users can improve the open-source projects they love
| by creating/collecting bounties and pledging to fundraisers.
| dom96 wrote:
| Really cool to see $100 donated to Nim as part of this, although
| it does pale in comparison to the $23k Rust + Rust projects have
| received.
| maximedupre wrote:
| Then the value received for Sentry most likely also pale in
| comparison.
|
| I've never heard of Nim before this comment. It looks pretty
| cool, especially the self-contained aspect. Do you know of any
| big company using Nim in production?
| whit537 wrote:
| We have no Nim usage in the company. One of our engineers
| nominated it as something they find personally interesting, and
| we wanted to give at least a little bit to every project that
| our employees nominated.
|
| By contrast, we use Rust quite heavily, including our core
| ingest component: https://github.com/getsentry/relay.
|
| That's why there's such a discrepancy in this case.
| dom96 wrote:
| That's absolutely fair and we appreciate the donation a lot.
|
| One additional thing that would have been fairly cheap: call
| out the smaller open source projects you donated to. To some
| the exposure can mean a lot in a blog post like this :)
| whit537 wrote:
| We're thinking through how to follow up on this post with
| additional signal-boosting throughout the year, point taken
| about exposure value to small projects. We'll keep that in
| mind!
|
| Thanks for Nim and keep up the great work! :^)
| wyuenho wrote:
| While I appreciate that Sentry stepped up to the plate to fund
| open source, I'd also like to point out the obvious which is this
| is just 1.5 person's salary in Silicon Valley, for a year. I hope
| that companies instead of donating money, can pool their
| resources together to start a non-profit fund invests their money
| that will grow in time, so in time, more engineers can be funded.
| capableweb wrote:
| Hopefully, these donations are going to developers outside the
| US/Silicon Valley since the value/cost ratio is much, much
| better in other parts of the world.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I think it's closer to 0.75 of a Silicon Valley developer's
| fully loaded salary than 1.5.
| duped wrote:
| This is less than 1 person's salary in SV
| bentlegen wrote:
| Adjusted for each company's market capitalization, this is
| the equivalent of Google ($1.9T market cap) directly
| injecting ~$290,000,000 into the hands of open source
| maintainers.
|
| I think instead of getting fixated on the dollar value and
| its impact, it's more meaningful to think about the message
| this sends. $2k/engineer is a more meaningful metric.
|
| Disclosure: I am a Sentry employee.
| istjohn wrote:
| Probably should disclose that you're a Sentry employee.
| bentlegen wrote:
| Done.
| OJFord wrote:
| Why is market cap relevant? Google isn't going to raise
| capital in order to make OSS donations.
| bentlegen wrote:
| It is merely an exercise to place in context the scale of
| the contribution relative to Sentry's size as a company.
|
| FWIW, Google has $136B cash in hand[1], and that figure
| has historically grown $10-20B year-over-year, so it does
| not have to raise capital to make OSS donations. The
| figure I cited - $290,000,000 - might sound like an
| insane number, but it is a rounding error on their
| balance sheet.
|
| (Also, to be clear this was not a shot at Google, their
| history of OSS contribution, or anything like that - I
| just chose some random mega cap company.)
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-plenty-
| cash-with-n...
| whit537 wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious what they donate, maybe it's
| already that much? More? Less? No idea. Also, at their
| scale cost of FTEs dedicated to upstream open source
| becomes a significant consideration. How many kernel
| hackers do they employ?
| kaelin wrote:
| Because these are maintainers that are working on projects that
| Sentry depends on for their product, and they can't write their
| rent checks with "well intended someday funds". I mean imagine
| your boss a work telling you that your not getting a paycheck
| but not to worry because he invested it and might get around to
| paying you someday.
|
| Many of these people have kids and mortgages while living off
| this work.
|
| If they can't afford to actively continue their work _now_ and
| go private sector that leaves Sentry holding the bag with
| abandoned dependencies.
|
| 150k direct donation will cover long term investment in the
| things their company needs to run.
| maximedupre wrote:
| Right. Interesting perspective. Why not invest the money and
| make it grow instead?
|
| Long term vs short term
| true_religion wrote:
| In a way they are already investing the proceeds of the open
| source into their own private company.
|
| What they pay out to maintainers is like a dividend.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| But when would you have enough to start paying people? When
| the average return on the investment is $150K/year? Do you
| start paying at $15K/year? Should you raise more money and
| wait until you can fund $1.5M/year?
| maximedupre wrote:
| Sure there are some details to iron out lol.
|
| But the point is that using a long-term approach - you will
| be able to pay people orders of magnitude more than if you
| take the short-term approach.
|
| Long-term becomes the short-term in the future ;). If some
| businesses had started such an initiative in the past,
| people would be getting paid in the present - consistently.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Why give a starving man a sandwich, when you could plant some
| wheat and an avocado tree?
| jason0597 wrote:
| Not everyone works in Silicon Valley. This donation could
| easily cover the yearly salaries of 3-4 developers in Europe.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| UK Anecdata: xe.com says $155k is currently PS112k which is,
| at best, two maybe-high mid level devs in, e.g., London
| (outside of FAANG.) Maybe 3 mid or low-senior levels outside
| of London but even then it'd be a stretch. I think.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I presume the remaining $0.11 is Office Space-style shenanigans?
| burkaman wrote:
| > As to the 11C/ offset, we have currency conversion to thank.
| whack wrote:
| I was very confused by this. Why the 11 cent offset for
| currency conversion? Are there some laws around sending $155k
| in foreign payments? From a PR perspective, that extra 11
| cents provides a pretty good ROI since you can just say that
| you've donated $155,000
|
| P.S. This isn't intended to be criticism, just curiosity.
| Kudos to Sentry for the donation. If every profitable company
| donated $2k per developer, we can expect some pretty amazing
| innovations in OSS
| awb wrote:
| On the contrary, having a bizarre number creates marketing
| buzz and curiosity. $154,999.89 got me to click. $155k can
| get lost in the shuffle of all the other numbers getting
| thrown around on HN.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I'm guessing one project required currency conversion and
| so the 11 cents is the cost of conversion for that one
| project. Maybe they gave the project $10 and 11 cents got
| eaten in conversion making it $9.89. It's possible they
| spent $155,000 but projects only got $154,999.89 so the
| note the latter.
| gowld wrote:
| If you spent $155K, that's how much you donated,
| regardless of the transfer fees.
|
| But if you spent $154,999.89 because the exchange rate
| slightly improved while you preparing the transaction,
| after you chose a number of Euros to donate, then you
| spent $154,999.89
| whit537 wrote:
| Yup, it was https://www.softwareheritage.org/, they
| accept donations in Euro only. :)
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The amount you're quoted for an international funds
| transfer often varies slightly from the amount that's
| actually charged.. So if you initiate a $500USD -> EUR
| transfer quoted at 0.8591 so the recipient receives
| EUR429.55, it might actually clear at 0.8593 meaning it
| only cost you $499.88 to send.
| arbitrage wrote:
| And a belligerent failure to understand sig-figs.
| whit537 wrote:
| :face_with_rolling_eyes:
| maximedupre wrote:
| I think they unexpectedly benefited from the shenanigans (PR
| wise)
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Accounting error due to IEEE 754 floating point error
| shenanigans, perhaps.
| amelius wrote:
| Accountants use BCD.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The sentry team is pretty cool too. Not to mention the product is
| very well made.
|
| I now almost always setup the free tiers by default on new web
| projects. I have yet to regret it.
| grzff wrote:
| Fauci funded COVID-19: https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/nih-
| admits-funding-gain-f...
|
| Everyone involved should face the firing squad.
| hanswesterbeek wrote:
| I like Sentry. I don't like boasting about virtuous deeds.
|
| 155k is nice, could be more.
| simonw wrote:
| In this case boasting about the virtuous deed is adding a great
| deal of extra value to the world, because it is likely to
| inspire other companies to step up and do the same.
| Olumde wrote:
| Bravo! Well done!!!
|
| IMO _every_ company should give something to OSS projects no
| matter how little, even if its a few hundred dollars or a small
| commit. Everyone benefits from OSS and how it does not occur to
| companies to give back is beyond me. I think us developers fail
| to educate management on how simple and vital to support OSS
| projects. I dream of the day when it becomes normal for job
| candidates to ask potential employers "how do you support OSS?"
| withcoherence wrote:
| My new startup, Coherence, also is committed to giving back to
| the open-source we all build companies on. We're going to divide
| our budget up per-engineer, and give individual devs discretion
| on what projects they want to support.
|
| Feel free to check us out, we're hiring:
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_artqGMblKQKwWMf_IZmUHJC...
| ghuntley wrote:
| Way to go Sentry! I've just finished setting up the early motions
| of a similar fund over at https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-open-
| source-sustainability.... Currently an initial amount of USD
| 30,000 has been earmarked. One day I hope to triple that (or
| more). At https://www.gitpod.io/blog/devxconf-wrap USD 10,000 was
| distributed to maintainers of LSP implementations and "digital
| infrastructure" that people use day-to-day but seldom think
| about.
| maximedupre wrote:
| I guess HN is where the people that care about OSS conglomerate
| :D
| ghuntley wrote:
| And GitHub is the place where employees of billion dollar
| companies pester unpaid maintainers because they won't
| support a 12 year old version of .NET
|
| https://github.com/Fody/PropertyChanged/issues/270#issuecomm.
| ..
| maximedupre wrote:
| Who is MarkLTX?
| ghuntley wrote:
| Someone who is internet famous on GitHub in the .NET
| community for all the wrong reasons.
| maximedupre wrote:
| What's his business?
| andrew_ wrote:
| The Rollup project appreciates and thanks Sentry for the
| contribution.
|
| I'd like to ask a question in earnest: Does $500 reflect the
| value and developer time savings you've received from the project
| over the years?
| whit537 wrote:
| It's tough, I think it depends on the framing and is definitely
| something worth talking about. Part of what we were trying to
| do with this initiative is start with some _global_ concept of
| "fair" and then allocate that amount as best we could. The
| total amount we came up with is $150,000 which is $2,000 per
| engineer on staff.
|
| Sooooo ...
|
| > Does [$155,999.89] reflect the value and developer time
| savings you've received from [all community-run open source
| projects] over the year[]?
|
| Yes. We believe that contributing $2,000 annually per engineer
| is a meaningful amount that fairly compensates the value we
| receive from open source volunteers.
|
| May I flip the question? Does $500 reflect the value and
| developer time savings you've given to Sentry over the past
| year?
| andrew_ wrote:
| Appreciate the additional insight. It wasn't something I
| gleaned from the blog post. It's something extremely
| difficult to measure, and open source funding is nebulous in
| reason and highly inconsistent due to difficulty in gauging
| value, among other reasons.
|
| The flip-question leaves me a little confused. I hope it
| wasn't asked out of irritation or to be snide, as my question
| was very much asked in earnest. I've only ever used Sentry
| through employers who had a subscription. My experience with
| the product is mostly positive and I'd say that the folks I
| worked for thought it was a good value.
| whit537 wrote:
| Not meant to be snide, no. It's something we thought about
| when allocating our budget: how are projects going to
| perceive this? Is giving $100 or $500 worse than giving
| nothing at all? So my question was also asked in earnest!
| :D
|
| Back to your original question, then:
|
| > Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings
| you've received from the project over the years?
|
| I guess the binary answer is yes, though I quite agree with
| you that it's difficult to gauge value in open source _a
| priori_.
|
| Thanks for the kind words about Sentry ... and thanks for
| making Rollup! :)
| thebean11 wrote:
| How would Rollup know how much value Sentry got out of it?
| Seems like only Sentry would have that info.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > May I flip the question?
|
| You certainly may, but without knowing how much Sentry uses
| Rollup it's hard to say.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > > Does [$155,999.89] reflect the value and developer time
| savings you've received from [all community-run open source
| projects] over the year[]?
|
| > May I flip the question? Does $500 reflect the value and
| developer time savings you've given to Sentry over the past
| year?
|
| It must be frustrating no one would have said anything if
| Sentry gave $0 instead of $500. Your response seems
| disingenuous though. They didn't ask about just this year or
| any other project. The brackets show you knew that.
| whit537 wrote:
| Right, I was intentionally reframing the question. As a
| company we wanted to arrive at a budget through a global
| view and then allocate from there. Rather than look at 100+
| projects individually and build up from "How much value did
| we get from this one? Or that one? And that one?" ... we
| wanted to reason about a fair amount overall. Is that bad?
|
| What's a good (practical, repeatable, reasonable) way to
| determine fairness?
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| > What's a good (practical, repeatable, reasonable) way
| to determine fairness?
|
| If, by magic, these OSS components you use disappeared:
| How much would it cost to build them?
|
| I'm not taking a stance here, I'm just interested.
| maximedupre wrote:
| That's a great question and I have some thoughts as an
| outsider.
|
| It's pretty much impossible to reflect/match the value received
| over time. Think about a SAAS that charges 5$ per month, even
| though the time it saves you is months, if not years.
|
| It's also impossible to accurately know what the value received
| over time is.
|
| The best we can all do is support OSS in a way in which we are
| comfortable, whether that is more or less than the objective
| received value.
| zeeg wrote:
| I'm not actually sure we use Rollup fwiw. The contributions
| were democratized via our employees - we asked them where we
| should direct funding for individual projects. So what that
| ultimately means is some person(s) at Sentry valued the project
| and your contributions :)
| bentlegen wrote:
| We do use Rollup: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-
| javascript/blob/master/p...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Appreciate you sharing the process and providing a democratic
| say to those on the Sentry team in handing out this open
| source comp.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Great insight, thanks for sharing.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've
| received from the project over the years?
|
| Nice try, people are not paid by the amount of "value" they
| add. This is a common sales tactic to find and establish an
| arguable ceiling.
| ridaj wrote:
| Likely much lower than the value and developer time savings,
| but (a) that's usually the case even with licensed software
| (nobody buys Microsoft Office nearly the amount of "developer
| time savings" coming from not having to reimplement an office
| business suite) and (b) by setting up your project as open
| source, you're essentially saying that you're not interested in
| capturing any of that value anyways, so I don't really see how
| it's relevant.
| maximedupre wrote:
| That's an amazing way to step up.
|
| It's not even about the amount, since in the grand scheme of
| things, it's nothing.
|
| It's about the leadership they are exercising and the influence
| it can have on other businesses.
|
| Most of our daily work as programmers involves us benefiting from
| OSS, yet so few of us are part of a culture that values this kind
| of support.
| ljm wrote:
| I also recommend Sentry in a lot of projects. The happy path
| they have created is fantastic, they've grown it out into
| performance metrics and it looks like they're gonna compete
| with Datadog and NewRelic on the APM front soon enough.
|
| They've not sold me on that, but their error tracking and the
| management around it is good enough. Their search interface and
| the fingerprinting sucks major ass though: most of the time
| when you click on a Sentry alert you'll actually find a
| different error.
|
| The UI is basically only good for reacting to immediate alerts.
| But when you get one of those, you get a lot of info to work
| with.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Their search interface and the fingerprinting sucks major
| ass though: most of the time when you click on a Sentry alert
| you'll actually find a different error
|
| Isn't that a scoping error on your side? We run the on-prem
| version at work, and the only time I've seen anything like
| this is when there weren't different scopes for each
| goroutine and the error messages got mixed up.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| Part of it _is_ about the amount. Symbolic gestures and token
| donations from other companies following suit don't really
| matter.
| [deleted]
| maximedupre wrote:
| Why would you assume that companies following suit would make
| symbolic gestures rather than a culture/values shift?
|
| This is a nuanced subject - companies won't just all start
| donation to OSS because of Sentry. But more and more
| companies taking leadership over time can compound into an
| industry perspective shift.
|
| The only thing relevant is the result. Even if some companies
| start to do symbolic gestures and token donations, the result
| of Sentry making a positive action is even greater.
| kiba wrote:
| I just notice that this is the same Chad Whitcare of Gratispay!
|
| RIP Gratispay.
| whit537 wrote:
| Imagine my surprise seeing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693731 surface
| serendipitously three weeks ago. That post from four years ago
| during Gratipay's final days is linked in today's announcement.
| :D
| whit537 wrote:
| <3
| remram wrote:
| You mean Gratipay? https://gratipay.com/
| krono wrote:
| For anyone else who has the domain blacklisted:
| https://outline.com/LBMvNU
|
| Also thanks Sentry!
| abfan1127 wrote:
| if you don't mind sharing, why is the domain blacklisted for
| you?
| luizfelberti wrote:
| I'd suspect it's because Sentry offers client-side telemetry
| as one of their services, and they might be using the same
| domain for both commercial and technical stuff (hosting both
| the main site and backends) so blockers have no choice but to
| block the entire thing if the enforcement is DNS based
|
| I'm only speculating though, as this is a pretty common
| mistake
| krono wrote:
| Just confirming what the others have said.
|
| Often times much more is being collected than than what would
| be required for performance monitoring, it's not at all clear
| where this data ends up ("why does Bob from marketing have an
| account on our Sentry?" is literally something I overheard),
| and opt-outs are rare.
| jordanrobinson wrote:
| I've seen sentry in a lot of analytics blocklists, so I'd
| assume it would be from that.
| TheDong wrote:
| They provide javascript / browser integration into sending
| sentry events, aka "tracking data", to their servers.
|
| Just as one might block "googleads.g.doubleclick.net" to
| avoid google tracking, it is very reasonable to blacklist
| sentry to avoid various companies tracking you.
| zeeg wrote:
| I don't want to derail this thread, but Sentry isn't
| tracking. Can you hypothetically track users with Sentry?
| Sure. Do we provide any of those capabilities? No.
|
| Treating products like Sentry the same as advertising and
| analytics companies can only be harmful for our industry.
| krono wrote:
| If it looks, walks, and quacks like a behavioural
| advertising/tracking/analytics platform... why should it
| not be treated like one? Especially when you consider
| Sentry seems to be moving towards enabling these use-
| cases even further.
|
| A way to opt out of personal data collection that is
| provided by Sentry to end-users would put Sentry back on
| track. Until then, I'll be running my own solution.
| BYK wrote:
| You mean things like these:
| https://docs.sentry.io/product/relay/#pii-data-scrubbing,
| https://docs.sentry.io/product/data-management-
| settings/scru...
| krono wrote:
| More along the lines of a client-side and end-user
| controllable way to prevent data (or specific categories)
| from being collected in the first place.
|
| Edit: A cross-domain cookie could work for this
| dpedu wrote:
| > Can you hypothetically track users with Sentry? Sure.
|
| > Do we provide any of those capabilities? No.
|
| Yes you do. When I view a bug in Sentry it tells me how
| many users have hit the particular bug and which users
| they are. I can even search by user and see what bugs
| they've hit.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I mean... that's kind of the point right?
|
| Even if you only send an event when a bug happens it's
| still handy to send some metadata along.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| It's definitely not just crashes-- your documentation
| talks all over the place about custom events, extra data
| blobs, breadcrumbs, etc:
|
| https://docs.sentry.io/product/cli/send-event/
|
| Other places discuss sending "info"-level log events:
|
| https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/python/guides/logging/
|
| These things aren't _necessarily_ bad, but they 're 100%
| the building blocks for various forms of badness, and I
| can fully understand track-free users just saying no to
| all of it.
|
| In any case, the solution for Sentry-the-company is just
| to have a separate domain for receiving events, so
| getting that blocked doesn't block your corporate landing
| page.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Why would someone use Sentry for that when stuff like
| OpenReplay exists. It's like trying to hammer your nail
| in with a screwdriver.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I don't think you would if your upfront goal was
| "telemetry" and you actually evaluated solutions for
| that. But if you had the Sentry pipeline in place already
| for crash reports, it would be very easy to slide into
| using it for tracking other kinds of custom events.
| [deleted]
| Noughmad wrote:
| But Sentry can be used for the same analytics as ads. You
| can send events manually, it doesn't have to be an actual
| error, with all the info attached.
|
| I'm a very satisfied user of Sentry, but I use it for an
| internal project. I also use LogRocket which is far more
| intrusive. For public projects, I would use Sentry but
| certainly understand that many people would block it. I
| would never use LogRocket without informing users though.
| maximedupre wrote:
| Time to innovate, then :D
| brightball wrote:
| They should seriously setup their client side metrics on a
| different domain.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| They literally have open-source projects where not a single
| Sentry employee works on it. We're not talking small projects but
| the PHP sdk and Symfony SDK. No matter what you think of PHP, it
| literally powers msot of the internet. There are as many job ads
| for PHP as any other language. So there is no denying, in my
| opinion, that the PHP ecosystem is of some value to Sentry.
| Maintained by volunteers.
|
| The CTO won't even step up when these guys are getting a hard
| time in the GitHub issues. I know he was on that ticket too
| because he left an emjoi reaction. They'll shell out
| realistically a single person salary to the entire open-source
| community act like it's a big deal but they won't even step up
| and defend people who spend hours making sure their product still
| works. Literally, I have no respect for Sentry or their
| leadership after that.
|
| We can say they're stepping up but realistically stepping up
| would be paying a salary to the folk that have been maintaining
| their product for free for ages (as far as I can tell). Nevermind
| giving them a product manager and some basic support.
| zeeg wrote:
| I'm not actually sure what you're referring to (as CTO I
| promise you I am not managing any of our GitHub repositories or
| anything at that level). If you think there are concerns with
| the PHP SDKs you seem to know where to express those, but a lot
| of our SDKs start (or are) maintained by contractors as well as
| contributors from the open source community.
|
| That said, none of this has anything to do with these donations
| to the open source community. We fund a lot of other
| initiatives outside of this one thing, and it seems you have
| some gripes with how we do that, which you're welcome to, but
| it doesn't take away from this investment.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > and it seems you have some gripes with how we do that
|
| Actually, I have a gripe with the fact you left unpaid
| volunteers to deal with an angry customer. I have a gripe
| with the fact you just left an emjoi response when a
| volunteer pointed out they were volunteers and weren't
| getting paid. I have a gripe with the fact I gave them greive
| for several replies in hope that a Sentry employee would
| finally step in and the company that I was paying money to
| would provide basic techincal support which I was told by the
| volunteers the company would be unable to do because only
| volunteers worked on it.
|
| In my opinion, open source maintainers of your offical
| products in your offical github org are part of your team.
| You didn't even stand up for them. You didn't even get a
| product manager or customer success manager to intervene.
| It's the bare minimum.
|
| And before you carry on with what issue this is. It doesn't
| matter at this point. Personally, I would just like it if in
| the future you stepped up for your maintainers.
| zeeg wrote:
| Feel free to drop me an email (david@) and I can look into
| it
| bentlegen wrote:
| Adding onto this: we've begun an internal investigation.
| whit537 wrote:
| > you left unpaid volunteers to deal with an angry
| customer.
|
| > You didn't even get a product manager or customer success
| manager to intervene.
|
| For the record, these are false statements. zeeg _did_ get
| me, a paid employee, to step in and deal with the
| situation, which I did:
|
| https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-
| symfony/issues/436#issue...
|
| It's true that we do have a lot of great volunteers working
| on our SDKs. We value them and appreciate them, and if/when
| we let them down we do our best to make it right.
|
| Sorry for letting you down as a customer. We'll keep trying
| to do better.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > For the record, these are false statements. zeeg did
| get me, a paid employee, to step in and deal with the
| situation, which I did:
|
| I stand corrected.
|
| Ah, by the time I stopped reading the issue. That took an
| extremely long time.
| fdr wrote:
| > That took an extremely long time.
|
| (three days? am I reading the issue right?)
| 0xy wrote:
| Wow this post triggered some serious PTSD. A previous employer
| got bit hard by Sentry's PHP SDK, which still (to my knowledge)
| has unresolved serious bugs. It was used as collateral by me
| and some coworkers to convince the powers that be to jump ship
| to a competitor, along with other serious problems with the
| platform.
|
| I too wish they'd invest in fixing their own broken libraries.
| whit537 wrote:
| Sorry. :^(
|
| We'll keep trying to do better!
| fouc wrote:
| Can someone shorten the dollar amount in the title to be less
| distracting/markety? $155K would be better.
|
| "$154,999.89" is as long as "$15,499,989" so it's tricking the
| brain into temporarily thinking it might be millions of dollars
| at first.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Title has been changed now unfortunately
| ljm wrote:
| I'm just a bit disappointed that HN had to simplify the title
| to satisfy the audience.
|
| I'm more disappointed that the suggestion was upvoted enough
| to distract from any substantial discussion.
|
| The title change can bring the discussion back on-topic but
| this really does feel like a massive brainfart. HN literally
| decided that a factual number was not appropriate and a
| sensational milestone is.
|
| If you want to argue, "well, they put the .99 cents on the
| end to confuse people and make it look like they donated 1.5
| million instead" then that really only speaks to your own
| desperation to twist facts and make them sound favourable to
| your agenda. You're literally admitting to jumping to a
| conclusion before even processing the information.
|
| Sorry, I'm just sad that HN decided that they needed to
| editorialise this specific title.
| fouc wrote:
| Honestly, I wasn't expecting the comment to get upvoted to
| the very top and take away attention from the more deserved
| discussion. Fortunately it seems like things have gotten
| corrected now and it's many other comments have risen above
| it.
| bentlegen wrote:
| FWIW, Sentry employee here, I promise nobody here ever
| planned to present this figure as a means of manipulating
| readers into thinking we donated millions.
|
| The original blog post draft originally had $150,000 in the
| title, but when the receipts came back and we realized that
| we "saved" 11 cents, someone jokingly updated the title and
| we thought it was a cutesy change. That's it.
| whit537 wrote:
| Next time let's go with "We Just Gave 11C/ Less Than
| $155,000 to Open Source Maintainers." :smirk:
| ehPReth wrote:
| I didn't read it that way? Unsure about others though
| [deleted]
| nateferrero wrote:
| I did... one data point!
| maximedupre wrote:
| I guess my subconscious did. It's easy to say that I didn't
| read it that way after the fact lol
|
| But after reading this comment and the title again, I see how
| that could be a possibility.
| fouc wrote:
| It's a VERY temporary effect, until I see the commas &
| period. The point is the overall length of the number looks
| to be in the millions.
| ljm wrote:
| I thought I was going to pay almost three thousand dollars
| a month for a subscription until I saw the punctuation. The
| point is the overall length of the number looks to be in
| the thousands.
|
| HN, a pretty high quality crowd at the best of times, is
| confused about numbers now? Fixed point decimals at that!
| And reacting to that temporary double-take?
| neom wrote:
| If I see a dollar sign I automatically go to the back and work
| my way forward, not sure if others who work with finance often
| do that but I'm pretty sure it's common.
| ljm wrote:
| Sentry: We just gave $154,999.89 to Open Source Maintainers
|
| HN Cynicism: No, you're donating it wrong
| martimarkov wrote:
| Sentry: include the cents so if ppl glimpse at it - it looks
| like way more HN: notices
| martimarkov wrote:
| Actually I was wrong. Sentry mentioned the reason: " As to
| the 11C/ offset, we have currency conversion to thank."
| folkrav wrote:
| $154999.89 looks like about $154999.89 to me. What is there
| to notice?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Corrected title: "Sentry: We Just Gave ~$155k to Open Source
| Maintainers"
|
| The We Company only takes.
| ehsankia wrote:
| And for those curious, the TL;DR of the 11c:
|
| > As to the 11C/ offset, we have currency conversion to
| thank.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Couldn't they have found a nearby open source maintainer
| and handed them 11 cents? Maybe they don't run a petty cash
| system.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Actually the sum is only 0.00007% away from $155k.
|
| (Before parent poster edited their post they had "$~154k").
| joecool1029 wrote:
| Muphry's law strikes again:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
| dustymcp wrote:
| Woulndnt be hackernews if someone didnt complain about a
| format.
| mikevin wrote:
| Its one of my favorite things about HN, changing titles that
| are confusing or misleading is a small but significant way to
| keep it clean.
| vmception wrote:
| Thoughts on announcing it?
|
| Some people say the best charity is anonymous. I used to believe
| that
|
| In my experience in the non-profit world I've found that its
| merely _convenient_ that there is zero public transparency if you
| dont want it and so I have a different view of its "best" "good"
| "utility", some people have an interesting in keeping the
| "anonymous good" perception
|
| The opposite is announcing
|
| It is completely amoral to me, as in it doesnt make a difference
| and I dont care and I have all options
|
| But I was wondering what others think [so I can amplify my
| standing in society, when convenient]
|
| Donate anonymously and have the collection of donations "leaked"
| in the future?
|
| Donate publicly _and_ announcing it?
|
| Do both like McKenzie Bezos where some people get to be satisfied
| and inspired by the list and never question if there are others
| done?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| On one hand, announcing one's donations can be criticized as
| trying to reap extra rewards for oneself for the donation.
|
| On the other hand, it can remind and inspire others to donate,
| causing an add-on effect which increases donations.
| maccard wrote:
| I have shared this link with my company in the hope that we can
| do something similar. It encourages people like me (I'm only an
| engineer) to bring it up with people who can make decisions in
| a small company. ,
| whit537 wrote:
| That's awesome! Good luck! :D
| simlevesque wrote:
| We need more of this. I say this as a happy Sentry customer.
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(page generated 2021-10-21 23:01 UTC)