[HN Gopher] Jumpstarting new careers in open source
___________________________________________________________________
Jumpstarting new careers in open source
Author : mooreds
Score : 114 points
Date : 2022-12-14 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (accelerator.github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (accelerator.github.com)
| kristoff_it wrote:
| That's not a lot of runway for you to build critical mass and
| have your project become self-sustaining. I feel the GitHub
| people who worked on this project saw this as a more meaningful
| way to give money to OSS people than the usual grants, but in
| practice I don't think this will have a different effect at all.
|
| This is kinda sad because GitHub really hit the nail on the head
| with Sponsors. They are in a unique position to really make a
| difference, but this ain't it IMO.
| wildcow wrote:
| 8 in the committee, 2 women :(
|
| I really want to do it full time but i can't compete with all the
| persons out there that has more traction than me.
| mintaka5 wrote:
| "Tell us about your project"?
|
| NOPE!
| smeej wrote:
| What? If it's open source, what are you protecting by not
| telling somebody about it?
| koolhead17 wrote:
| This is like google summer of code.
| david_allison wrote:
| GSoC forbids maintainers from participating (but provides orgs
| $500/student for the 12 weeks).
|
| I'd strongly consider participating in this. It's 40x more
| money than GSoC for a similar time commitment and ~50x more
| than the money I'd personally make as a full time maintainer
| (I've been an org admin & mentor for GSoC for the past couple
| years).
|
| > To participate in the Program, a GSoC Contributor must: be a
| student or a beginner to open source software development.
|
| https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/rules - 7) 7.1) a) iv)
| terminal_d wrote:
| Bingo. It's the latest MSFT poster-child that'll be gently
| strangled / frankensteined in a few years, when people start
| gaming it.
|
| Really, I don't think it'll take a few years.
| kneebonian wrote:
| My first thought on seeing that is that who needs a career in
| open source? Open source is all about freedom, and not free as in
| beer free as in speech. It's that simple, the idea behind open
| source is that you are also provided the source code of whatever
| you are purchasing so you actually own it, it has nothing to do
| with price.
|
| Open source was never about getting things free it was always
| about making sure that the bullhockey that is currently
| happening, where the OEMs and software vendors own your device
| and allow you to use it, never happens, because you have the
| source you know what it is doing and you can change it.
|
| Some billion dollar company likes your library and uses it,
| that's fine, because you gave them the freedom to. You can also
| give instead demand they pay you $10,000 for it if they want to
| use it, and that is totally okay to. Because Open Source is not
| about money it's about FREEDOM!
| ignoramous wrote:
| FSF v OSI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493140
| whydat_whodat wrote:
| Does anyone know if this is focused on projects which are open
| source developer tools or similar sorts of projects?
|
| Or is it "open source" in general, such as a non-profit or
| business web application, which is open sourced (for example, so
| it can be used by anyone in any country).
|
| I ask because I am interested in creating an agriculture-oriented
| localized social network, based on shared physical resources
| (tools, agricultural inputs).
|
| That's just one example of what I mean by a non-profit web
| application. Not sure if it's the sort of project which this
| program is looking for-- thought I'd ask here to see if anyone
| knows.
| Palomides wrote:
| I'm curious who this is going to help--open source projects that
| would be profitable if only the maintainer had $20,000 of runway
| and some advice on finding revenue streams? is that really a
| niche that exists?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| $20,000 can be a lot of money or very little money depending on
| cost of living.
| quechimba wrote:
| USD$20,000 would last me a really long time in the Peruvian
| Amazon. It's almost 75 times the minimum salary. That's 6
| years. During that time maybe it will be possible to get some
| other funding.
| bogwog wrote:
| I wonder if it could help connect open source projects with
| potential sponsors, including teaching some basic
| business/sales skills that the average dev probably lacks.
| jujube3 wrote:
| With that kind of money, you could hire a developer for one
| month, or pay for half of a new car! Truly a princely sum.
| mooreds wrote:
| tl;dr, you can get $2k/week for up to 10 weeks to work on open
| source.
|
| There's an application process and you'll get selected by a
| committee. You have to have a GH profile and you can't work for
| GitHub or any of their affiliated companies. They are biased
| toward selecting applicants who: Have an active
| and growing set of users Understand how you want to grow
| and maintain your project Wish to pursue open source work
| full-time
| smeej wrote:
| It's not just "work on open source." It's "work on _your_ open
| source project, for which you 're already a maintainer."
|
| You don't just get paid to work on whatever project(s) you want
| for 10 weeks.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Drop to 25% pay and have to jump through the Microsoft-GitHub
| selection committee?
|
| Can't say I'm excited for the 'offer' despite having lots of
| FOSS repos... or is it a side-hustle type arrangement?
| wartijn_ wrote:
| I don't think it's up to 10 weeks, but $20k if you participate
| in the entire program. 0 if you don't.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| The economics of open source needs to change if developers are
| going to be able to actually make a living spending most of their
| time on it. There are just too few dollars coming into the front
| end of the pipe.
|
| People who don't bat an eye at paying $10 for lunch will balk at
| paying $10 for a software license for some tool or app that saves
| them a ton of time and effort. Until this changes, open source
| contributors will continue to struggle to capture some of the few
| dollars floating around. Too many will just decide that it just
| isn't worth it.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Open Source is usually $0 cost because I believe there is a
| problem with Stallman's guidelines. They fail to show how
| developer's can protect price:
|
| > When we call software "free," we mean that it respects the
| users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and
| change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes.
| This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of "free
| speech," not "free beer."
|
| There are two problem I see here, 1) totally free
| redistribution means price cannot be protected, as resellers
| can make a too-easy profit giving out discounts, and 2)
| unrestricted access leads to theft, people will eventually
| steal once they learn there are no impediments.
|
| I think Open Source needs to move to a Low Cost model similar
| to the modern media industry. A $10/month subscription to sites
| like Github. Limited access to projects for non-subscribers.
| Subscribers can download as much as they want. Fees are
| redistributed to projects based on subscriber downloads.
| License prohibits anyone but project owner from re-hosting on
| other sites. Developers are free to modify your source, and get
| compensated for it, but just because they touch a small part of
| it, they don't then get all your revenue, instead rather than
| project forks, they can do project patches or do their own
| rewrites. Copyright is protected but the definition for
| copyright of source code should be softened to be more aligned
| with standards for other media, so copyright for source should
| be simply defined as 'obviously equivalent to an average
| programmer'. So then any programmer is allowed to superficially
| rewrite code, just as authors superficially rewrite articles,
| it needs to have some originality to an average programmer.
|
| This would both incentivize/support developers and keep away
| restrictions from improving code.
| carapace wrote:
| > Open Source is usually $0 cost because I believe there is a
| problem with Stallman's guidelines
|
| "Open Source" is not RMS's thing, he is the "Free" software
| guy. By getting that wrong you kinda disqualify yourself from
| being taken seriously by those of us who consider ourselves
| "Free" software fanatics and who see the whole "Open Source"
| movement as a distraction from the main point.
|
| Not that that matters, because effectively no one cares. Most
| people, like you, seem to not even realize there's any
| difference.
|
| Speaking as a self-described "Free" software fanatic, I feel
| like we failed nearly completely. At least socially and
| politically (technically GNU software runs half the planet,
| eh? You're using some right now, no doubt.)
|
| - - - -
|
| Still speaking as a "Free" software fanatic, it seems like
| there's no point in Open Source except to benefit people who
| don't want to share their improvements, and so this effort,
| coming from Microsoft, seems like a tricky way to get devs to
| work for them for free (paradoxically by dangling the idea of
| a paid career in front of them, eh?)
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| But they showed a big slide that said: Microsoft <3 Open
| Source
|
| Clearly that makes them trustworthy.
| bogwog wrote:
| > People who don't bat an eye at paying $10 for lunch will balk
| at paying $10 for a software license for some tool or app that
| saves them a ton of time and effort. Until this changes, open
| source contributors will continue to struggle to capture some
| of the few dollars floating around. Too many will just decide
| that it just isn't worth it.
|
| That's never going to change (how would it?). People have been
| saying similar things in every industry since the dawn of the
| dollar. It's just human nature, and anybody waiting for that
| change are going to die waiting.
| gabereiser wrote:
| The psychology of "want" vs "need". People need to eat and so
| the cost of it is justified and people will pay. The wants
| are weighed against the needs and are rarely justified unless
| the individual's needs are met.
| somrand0 wrote:
| counterpoint: open source is fine. what needs to change is
| economics themselves
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Licenses imply Software-As-A-Service and that's a ridiculous
| model. If I buy a tool at a hardware store, I don't need to
| 'renew the license' on a monthly or yearly basis in order to
| keep using that tool. It's also designed to reduce the useful
| lifetime of hardware, as old software versions that work with
| old hardware lose support fairly quickly.
|
| That's why I quit Microsoft Office after they moved to a
| subscription model, for example. Open-source tools may have
| fewer bells and whistles, but they can be run on essentially
| any hardware that Linux can run on, there's always a minimalist
| solution, they don't have all the telemetry overhead, etc.
|
| As far as the economics, well, it's not a cash cow for
| investors, certainly, but individuals can make a living within
| the open source world by providing paid technical assistance.
| j1elo wrote:
| The thing is, most software nowadays is expected to
| _integrate_ well with the outside world. A simple calculator
| or a full-fledged photo editor can and probably should run in
| its own bubble isolated from the world, so a single full-
| value price makes sense; but a lot of progress and innovation
| (and creation of new needs, aka. new software) is happening
| at a level where systems need to talk with each other.
|
| It does make sense to pay recurring money _if_ the tool needs
| to be constantly updated to keep up with 3rd-party services.
| I agree that a text processor does not make sense, though;
| albeit they are probably justifying themselves due to the
| online features it provides (whatever they are; I haven 't
| used MS Office in 10 years)
| soiler wrote:
| I don't love the proliferation of SAAS, but your analogy
| isn't very solid. You don't pay upkeep on your hammer because
| it doesn't change. If it gets damaged, you do pay for repairs
| (although you probably don't go to the manufacturer). And if
| the manufacturer came out every X months to replace the head
| with some new alloy, you'd have to pay for that, too.
|
| The point is that it's difficult to get software that is
| static anymore. The reason it's considered a service isn't
| _because_ it has a subscription model, it's because a product
| owner and an engineering team are constantly making bug
| fixes, improvements, security updates, etc. The problem with
| the model isn't that it exists - the problem is that we don't
| have a choice. When security is not an issue (like with MS
| Word), I'd take the single purchase almost every time.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| > You don't pay upkeep on your hammer because it doesn't
| change
|
| You do. Hammers rust, the handle may break. Practically all
| things have some kind of upkeep.
| 9dev wrote:
| And so what; the hammer manufacturer comes around and
| gives you fresh handles and a nice rust treatment every
| other month? That's precisely the difference between
| tools that you buy once and SaaS subscriptions, and why
| the analogy is flawed.
| 0xAFFFF wrote:
| End users are one thing, but what about multi-billion dollars
| companies that leverage high-quality open-source components
| mostly for free?
| bityard wrote:
| Yes, what about them?
|
| If the open source licenses contained exceptions saying "you
| can't use this for free if you make more than x amount of
| money," then it isn't really open source...
| PeterisP wrote:
| Open source will be perfectly fine if developers are not able
| to actually make a living spending most of their time on it,
| this is how this has always worked and nothing _needs_ to
| change.
|
| People and organizations who want to make a particular
| improvement to some piece of open source software will. If
| there are no dollars comming into the front end of the pipe,
| then those who don't want or need that change, won't make it -
| and that is perfectly okay. Open source can be quite successful
| even living off of people writing that code as part of their
| job or as a hobby. There is no need for it to be a separate
| career path - if an open source tool can't do X well, then
| whenever somebody needs or wants or gets paid to do X, that can
| be committed to that tool by the people whose career involves
| _applying_ that tool. Sure, extra money helps, but open source
| communities work reasonably well also without it.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Altruism is alive and well in all aspects of society and
| software development is no exception. Good developers are
| often willing to spend some time and effort to build
| something and give it away for nothing. A great deal of our
| software infrastructure is built on such contributions.
|
| But as a developer myself, I know that altruism only goes so
| far. There are many 'fun' tasks associated with making good
| software, but there are also many aspects that are quite
| unpleasant for the average developer. There is quite a bit of
| open source software out there with bugs, bad documentation,
| and bad design; simply because fixing those problems is a
| real hassle.
|
| Some people are willing to dig in and do some of the dirty
| work for no pay, but the majority will take a pass. Nothing
| gets you out of bed on a cold day to go work in the trenches
| like a steady paycheck. If we are satisfied with the status-
| quo, then you are right and 'nothing needs to change'; but if
| you want stable software with good documentation and quick
| bug fixes, then some improvements need to happen.
| floweronthehill wrote:
| >There is quite a bit of open source software out there
| with bugs, bad documentation, and bad design; simply
| because fixing those problems is a real hassle.
|
| Onboarding is a barrier to entry too. For example,
| yesterday I read a blog article saying that the Rust
| project Cargo doesn't have enough volunteers. Learning Rust
| at the moment and looking for a new project, I checked out
| the "how to contribute" section and looked at the issues on
| their github repo, but honestly it's daunting. I've
| submitted a few fixes to some project documentation in the
| past because those are some of the easiest tasks, but I'm
| yet to found a small enough crack in a big open source
| project to jump in and submit a pull request.
| whomst wrote:
| IMO QEMU is a nice spot between important,
| straightforward to contribute and relatively understaffed
| compared to how widely it is used. I have found multiple
| behavior/stability issues that I've fixed on my own
| (exposed though OSdev-adjacent work) and submitted to the
| mailing list
| kneebonian wrote:
| > but if you want stable software with good documentation
| and quick bug fixes, then some improvements need to happen.
|
| If you want stable software with good documentation you can
| make do it yourself. If you don't want to do the work then
| you don't really want it that badly. Open source is about
| freedom. If a billion dollar company finds out they have a
| show stopping bug because of an Open Source library they
| are dependent on they can fix it.
|
| Nothing does need to change, what "status quo" are you
| talking about, if you don't like a piece of open source
| software don't use it, if you have to use it for your job
| then thank the stormfather that it is open source so you
| can go in and fix it.
|
| Honestly people seem to think that the software will become
| better if we just start paying for it and that is the
| stupidest idea I've ever heard, in fact often the crappiest
| software I've ever had to work with is proprietary. I
| always try and push my company to use open source not
| because I think it is always better but because if I run
| into a problem I can inspect the source and find out what
| is going on and why, and if I need to I can submit a patch.
|
| Open source != free as in beer Open source = free as in
| speech.
|
| The way things work now is fine, Linux works fine, Emacs
| works fine, if you're complaint is that some third party
| node library that you pulled off of Github to calculate the
| length of a string isn't working how you want my suggestion
| is submit a pull request or fork it.
|
| This idea that open source software should meet some sort
| of standard of quality is entitled and noxious, the only
| guarantee and promise you ever got with open source was
| that you had the source code, if you want more than that,
| then do it yourself.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I could also grow all my own food, do all my car repairs
| myself, and build my own house; but I would rather pay
| people who specialize in those things to do them for me.
|
| I don't want to have to learn all the code for every
| single open source project I use and have to try and
| figure out how to build new features I want; fix a
| nagging bug I found without breaking something else; or
| rewrite the documentation. I would rather pay a few bucks
| (along with the other users of the software) so that
| collectively the developers most familiar with the code
| can do that and be compensated for doing so. Without that
| incentive, the maintainer may get around to fixing your
| issue sometime next year, if ever.
|
| Sure the source is open so if I REALLY, REALLY wanted to
| I could go dig into the unfamiliar code and try to figure
| out how to make it do what I want; but that just seems a
| little inefficient to me...but maybe that is just me.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm with you, re: do it yourself if you want it that
| badly.
|
| But there's if there's an opportunity to motivate an
| increase in the amount of money that goes to people that
| are doing what's best for the OSS projects e.g. guarding
| against supply chain attacks via open source
| contributions, then I think we should take that
| opportunity.
| kjok wrote:
| And how do you propose we do this? Pay developers for
| "secure" contributions?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Find developers who are scrutinizing inbound commits for
| free on their off time and pay them to quit their jobs so
| they can sleep more and scrutinize better while rested.
| If we can find a way to make being a professional
| youtuber a thing, we can find a way to make being a
| professionally unemployed open source developer a thing.
| xapata wrote:
| If open source software is a public good, then it should be
| funded like other public goods. Unfortunately, there are
| some laws in the US that prevent government organizations
| from creating software that competes with software created
| by private companies, so the legal situation is awkward.
| specialist wrote:
| Of course. Not surprised, just dissappointed. I'd like to
| learn about this; maybe you can point me in the right
| direction.
|
| (I worked on election integrity during the aughts,
| advocated citizen-owned software. I now feel I missed
| an(other) explanation for the bias towards the commercial
| stuff.)
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > if an open source tool can't do X well, then whenever
| somebody needs or wants or gets paid to do X, that can be
| committed to that tool by the people whose career involves
| applying that tool.
|
| More recently it seems like the plan is to fork the project,
| apply your change, and offer it an AWS branded alternative
| specialist wrote:
| Yup. If someone's profitting from my work, I want my cut.
|
| That's why I keep asking about royalty schemes. Common for
| all other forms of IP. Curiously absent from FOSS.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Well, nothing "curiously" about it, it's because "FOSS"
| is a label we explicitly made to refer to the forms of IP
| where this is absent, where it's free as speech and they
| don't need to ask your permission to run the code for any
| purpose. You definitely can have a royalty scheme that
| ensures you get a cut if someone's profiting from your
| work, that's a reasonable desire, but then we wouldn't
| say that your work is FOSS.
| specialist wrote:
| What about dual licensing? That's already pretty common.
|
| I'd like someone smart about these things to create the
| boilerplate royalties license complimenting, or
| compatible with, or whatever, some FOSS licenses. Say
| Apache License v2.0.
|
| IIRC, it was ElasticSearch that recently tried to thread
| this needle.
|
| Maybe I'm overthinking this. I tried to read up about
| royalties, find some model language, etc. Alas, IANAL, so
| got lost pretty quickly.
| tristor wrote:
| Some context, I am an open source advocate and someone that has
| contributed to open source software projects off and on for
| about 20 years.
|
| I disagree entirely with your proposition. The economics of
| open source are built directly into the license agreement
| structure of the model. When you give a user of your software
| free and complete permission to do whatever they wish with that
| software as long as they appropriately credit you (or similar
| terms), that is /exactly/ what you are doing.
|
| The economics of open source are exactly what they should be,
| pretty piss poor. Because you don't offer something for free if
| you have the expectation of being paid for it. This should be
| basic common sense. The challenge is that the software
| community has created a weird social order around this that
| open source is somehow ethically superior to commercial
| software, and so many developers feel socially obligated to
| open source software even when they have the expectation of
| being paid. This is a social challenge though, not an economic
| one. If your software produces a significant enough ROI above
| it's cost, you can sell it and be economically fruitful,
| otherwise you can't, this is is the basic nature of any
| business.
|
| Where I do agree to some extent with you is that this has a
| negative impact on open source contributions, because the BATNA
| (Best Alternative to the Negotiated Agreement) for a software
| developer between contributing their time and energy to open
| source vs working for a big tech company for $$$$ is to ditch
| open source if it isn't economically viable for them. That
| said, I think this is an extraordinarily privileged position to
| be in, that a lot of developers lack perspective on. The
| average person, even in Western economies, makes nowhere near
| what the average software developer makes in income, and the
| expectation that you can clear $100k/yr+ by giving away
| software for free is a bit daft and entitled in a world where
| the average person in "wealthy countries" makes less than half
| of that.
|
| Open source partly results in innovative, creative, and
| valuable ideas being implemented exactly because the
| relationship provides no real expectations of value on either
| side and allows developers the freedom to experiment and throw
| something out there. The reward for you releasing your software
| to the world for free is that someone found it useful which
| validated your idea and your creative expression as being
| valuable. It is not, and should not be, a job, other than as an
| employee of a company maintaining said project because they
| rely on it in their core infrastructure and necessarily and
| rightly take the cost upon themselves to maintain those things
| which they rely on without any expectation on the original
| author to do so for their hobby project.
| kijin wrote:
| > Because you don't offer something for free if you have the
| expectation of being paid for it.
|
| Actually, lots of companies offer services for free with the
| expectation that, at some point in the future, they will paid
| for it.
|
| Likewise, many open-source projects offer the core software
| for free and make money by selling themes/plugins, offering
| paid support, building other services on top of the open-
| source software, etc.
|
| Whether you can pull it off depends a lot, of course, on what
| kind of software it is and who the target users are. Maybe
| this is feasible only for a small subset of open-source
| projects. But it's doable. It's been done. Heck, I'm doing it
| myself. So please don't dismiss this kind of business model
| too quickly.
| ozim wrote:
| I get the feeling that software community created bunch of
| "wanapreneurs" whose ultimate goal was to struck some gold
| mine easy way by making OSS.
|
| This massive OSS devs burnout seems like reality hitting hard
| those who thought "I am going to write this piece of software
| and someone will shower me with money". Reality being
| companies simply not paying, getting others to contribute to
| your idea is much more work than expected, amount of entitled
| users increasing as popularity of software piece grows.
|
| I believe these "wanapreneurs" are ones that mostly shout out
| that economics of open source should change.
|
| In the end I totally agree that "the economics of open source
| are exactly what they should be, pretty piss poor.". Just
| that I have a bit less charitable view of the "social order
| around open source".
| soulofmischief wrote:
| This makes sense until you consider how much time many open
| source devs spend maintaining popular products, and the kind
| of ungrateful people they often have to deal with.
| acedTrex wrote:
| They don't have to spend that time nor do they have to
| entertain rude people/requests. The beauty of open source
| is that it is an expectationless expedition
| tristor wrote:
| The beauty of not being paid for your time and releasing
| something as an unwarranted open source project, is that
| you can choose of your own volition without obligation how
| much time to dedicate to it and how you wish to respond to
| ungrateful people.
|
| You cannot, however, change human nature. There are many
| people that wish you could change human nature, and that
| money was sufficiently powerful to do so, but it is not. In
| fact, when people pay for something, they become even more
| entitled while still remaining ungrateful. I would like to
| dissuade you from the notion that customer service is
| somehow easier and more reasonable than dealing with non-
| paying randos on the Internet.
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| Reading the rules
|
| > Who can apply?
|
| > Not be a current employee of GitHub and/or any of its
| parent/subsidiary companies
|
| So no Microsoft, npm, bethesda(ZeniMax), linkedin employees can
| apply.
|
| But if you are activision, this might be your last ticket out ;)
| kstenerud wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand how this project is supposed to help
| OSS devs?
|
| 20k over 10 weeks is fine and all, but then what? I've been
| writing open source software and maintaining projects for
| decades, and have in total received less than $500 from
| thoughtful donors.
|
| Don't get me wrong; I'd LOVE to be able to do open source work
| full time, as my list of projects to benefit humanity extend far
| beyond what I could do in a lifetime where I must support myself
| with fulltime work. But the problem is how to maintain a steady
| income stream so that I can focus my attention on the projects...
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| In addition it says people that receive it will have to
| participate in GitHub events for it (they say a 10 hour per
| week commitment) and provide material/info for GitHub to share
| about the program. So they're going to waste your time (which
| is already scarce, overworked and limited) so you can do
| marketing for them.
|
| Just cut checks, don't make people act out reality show or
| circus tricks. Ask maintainers what they need and give it to
| them--that's how you help, not by adding to their workload.
| ignoramous wrote:
| $20K for 10 weeks is decent change for folks in the Global
| South.
|
| I got a much smaller-sized grant for a FOSS project from
| Mozilla in July 2020 (a bit more than $4K), and that helped pay
| the bills for over a _year_.
| david_allison wrote:
| Even in the US. Minimum wage is $7.25
|
| That's 2759 hours, (a 9-5 for over a year). The opportunity
| cost is obviously massive, but it's a sacrifice a lot of
| people will happily take.
| a_bored_husky wrote:
| Its life-changing money here. Unfortunately a lot of places
| where thats the case are not supported by Github Sponsors.
| terminal_d wrote:
| Github, proudly paving the way for the "open source" to open
| source.
|
| If there was funding, people wouldn't attend a marketing seminar.
| This is just a microsoft acquisition with extra steps. Big Tech
| has been looking to exploit free software for a while now.
| Microshit's VSCode was a starting point. They'll gatekeep
| competent devs into mundane tasks for $$$$, and they'll pay "open
| source" devs pittances to lock them into something they intend on
| controlling the direction of.
|
| The way out is pretty clear: stop using Github.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I'm almost 100% certain this will go to maintainers that already
| have good visibility and possibly good funding. This isn't a bad
| thing inherently, as they are deserving. Rather, I wish an
| explicit goal of the program was to specifically highlighted
| active projects that clearly don't have _any_ resources but are
| still very popular in their communities.
|
| What would be _even more cool_ is if GitHub had a residency
| program for top OSS contributors / maintainers where they could
| work - with benefits pay etc - on their projects under GitHubs
| employ. Kind of like how some Journalist outfits (e.g. Mother
| Jones) have their fellowship programs.
|
| Big tech companies do have the resources to do this, and its not
| like there isn't precedent for it in the industry. This would
| just take it to a whole new level.
|
| I also imagine the marketing positivity would be pretty strong
| for them.
| terminal_d wrote:
| > I'm almost 100% certain this will go to maintainers that
| already have good visibility and possibly good funding
|
| In my opinion, most of this will turn into a way to game the
| system. Like another comment said, this is Microsoft's "Summer
| Of Code".
|
| For a successful open source funding story, take a look at
| Mkdocs-Material, which recently crossed $10k/mo:
|
| https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/
| no_wizard wrote:
| This is interesting. I have noticed something, about certain
| communities, and where (often but not exclusively) these
| success stories come from. It seems to be that the general
| following:
|
| - The frontend ecosystem is one of the worst ecosystems for
| OSS funding, despite its enormous size
|
| - Python, C#, C/C++ communities seem very much okay paying
| for licenses to packages and seem to have a better uptick in
| funding OSS. I've seen _alot_ of Python success stories in
| particular
|
| - If you aren't in a mainstream language either your
| community funds you very closely or its not funded at all,
| there seems to be little middle ground. Wish I could think of
| two direct comparative examples but I think looking at ocaml
| vs haskell is telling (idk if their userbase is similar in
| size or not, I am almost certain ocaml is bigger but not sure
| by how much)
|
| Regardless, its still only the top 1-2% of projects,
| regardless of ecosystem, that get most of the funding. The
| sad reality is often its OSS maintainers paying other OSS
| maintainers most of the time.
| [deleted]
| swayvil wrote:
| I gave up my massive awesome sci-fi-smelling project about a year
| ago in preference for horticulture. But 2000/week is mighty
| tempting.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I'll be excited when they make a program for people with kids or
| other time limiting situations. With every program I see like
| this, it's designed for single, childless individuals who have
| all the free time in the world.
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