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Hi toyg. You clearly haven't tried raising money for an Open Source project. It's really really difficult and the amounts of money you get range a lot. Usually

by fijal 11y ago

Hi toyg. You clearly haven't tried raising money for an Open Source project. It's really really difficult and the amounts of money you get range a lot. Usually you also want to underpromise and overdeliver, so it's about raising 10-20k USD to deliver a project that will take three to six months of full time work to deliver, ADDITIONALLY to fixing bugs, maintaining infrastructure and doing things for which you can't possible raise money at any rate. Contact me privately I can share more of the details, but it sounds like you're quite detached from the open source reality. PS. We work on PyPy and cffi

toyg 11y ago
I have no doubt that this is your experience (for which there might be many causes - my email is in profile unlike yours ;), but there are also extremely successful examples like the ones I and others have posted. They stand out not because they succeeded, but because they're the few who tried -- and succeeded spectacularly quickly, almost accidentally. Working in the enterprise/financial world, I can tell you that boatloads of cash get wasted on the most absurd items, so there must be ways to funnel some of this to the right places. Even VC-backed "lean" startups would/should rate publicity "in the right places" more than a lot of other things, let alone direct benefits from actual productivity gains. For example, I often don't know whom awesome_oss_developer works for; if I did, I would be inclined to rate their products and services way higher, and would probably want to work for them more. Every single OSS release from major projects should carry a sponsor highlighted in README and release notes. Advertising somehow pays for billion-dollar companies in the real world, but the same companies don't rate it enough to sustain their own infrastructure? I'm not doubting that reality is dire, what I'm doubting is the effort placed on changing it. There are many elements of the engineering culture dominant in OSS that are just not right from a commercial perspective and could/should be fixed with brutal honesty.
- fijal 11y ago
  Uh, the lack of email was an omission - fixed. I worked for the past few years on making PyPy & satellite projects more business friendly. We've established a company (baroquesoftware.com), I went to conferences, advertised it etc. Granted, I'm not the right person to do the job - I'm generally a technically-oriented nerd. The community is welcoming for both commercial interest and newcomers and if there are hiccups, we're trying to fix them. This is not an easy project to get your hands dirty, we definitely don't need extra barriers to entry, for example it's extremely easy to get a commit bit on pypy. There are some spectacular success stories, but even Django had a hard time raising money for someone to work full time on fixing bugs, while noone doubted usefulness of that. Now PyPy is far less successful than django, but it does save companies tons of money. I would welcome advice/help/whatever in how we can make PyPy more commercial friendly in a way that brings revenue - I'm not interested in making businesses happy for free all that much.

by fijal 11y ago

toyg 11y ago

I have no doubt that this is your experience (for which there might be many causes - my email is in profile unlike yours ;), but there are also extremely successful examples like the ones I and others have posted. They stand out not because they succeeded, but because they're the few who tried -- and succeeded spectacularly quickly, almost accidentally. Working in the enterprise/financial world, I can tell you that boatloads of cash get wasted on the most absurd items, so there must be ways to funnel some of this to the right places. Even VC-backed "lean" startups would/should rate publicity "in the right places" more than a lot of other things, let alone direct benefits from actual productivity gains. For example, I often don't know whom awesome_oss_developer works for; if I did, I would be inclined to rate their products and services way higher, and would probably want to work for them more. Every single OSS release from major projects should carry a sponsor highlighted in README and release notes. Advertising somehow pays for billion-dollar companies in the real world, but the same companies don't rate it enough to sustain their own infrastructure? I'm not doubting that reality is dire, what I'm doubting is the effort placed on changing it. There are many elements of the engineering culture dominant in OSS that are just not right from a commercial perspective and could/should be fixed with brutal honesty.

fijal 11y ago
Uh, the lack of email was an omission - fixed. I worked for the past few years on making PyPy & satellite projects more business friendly. We've established a company (baroquesoftware.com), I went to conferences, advertised it etc. Granted, I'm not the right person to do the job - I'm generally a technically-oriented nerd. The community is welcoming for both commercial interest and newcomers and if there are hiccups, we're trying to fix them. This is not an easy project to get your hands dirty, we definitely don't need extra barriers to entry, for example it's extremely easy to get a commit bit on pypy. There are some spectacular success stories, but even Django had a hard time raising money for someone to work full time on fixing bugs, while noone doubted usefulness of that. Now PyPy is far less successful than django, but it does save companies tons of money. I would welcome advice/help/whatever in how we can make PyPy more commercial friendly in a way that brings revenue - I'm not interested in making businesses happy for free all that much.