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This is a type of discussion that comes up often. There are some very important things to consider to avoid causing unintentional harm. First, understand the d

This is a type of discussion that comes up often. There are some very important things to consider to avoid causing unintentional harm. First, understand the difference between social norms and market norms (I like this overview: http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-4-%E2%80%93-the-cost-of-social-norms/ http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-4-%E2%...) and how the introduction of market norms crowd out social norms (this is a good overview: https://natewkratzer.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/market-norms-are-crowding-out-social-norms-and-society-is-poorer-as-a-result/ https://natewkratzer.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/market-norms-a...). Now that you have the necessary context, you can understand why I'm extremely doubtful that VC's can realistically have a large positive impact on the open source community. Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. There isn't enough money available to compensate for the man-hours invested in open source projects. Open source projects are successful because they motivate contributors with social capital rewards of some kind and because they allow many different actors to combine human resources to eliminate shared costs/problems. If some kind of wealthy supervillain wanted to destroy open source the best way to do it would be to inject a lot of money into the system, get everyone to start thinking in terms of how much they will be paid per hour to contribute to the project. It would be peanuts. Now the market norms would eclipse the social ones and they would mostly stop contributing. It would probably also be useful to use the funding power to steer projects towards architectures useful to you and less useful to others, if some of those others are your competitors then it may be your duty to do so. This overlaps quite a bit with the existing naive view of the open source community as a big group of untapped future unpaid interns to exploit as well. This, of course, doesn't mean that there isn't promise in funding infrastructure projects developed by paid contributors that are donated to the public on completion. Just that mixing the two models almost certainly won't work.

adekok 11y ago
> Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. I'm willing to believe that most open source projects could make substantial improvements if they had funding. See how Patreon has made a huge difference for Youtube videographers.
- lazaroclapp 11y ago
  For a lot of large open source projects, funding may come in the form of companies paying their engineers to dedicate a significant amount of their time to working on existing open source projects. Or even open source projects that are part of a company's "products" (e.g. https://facebook.github.io/react/ https://facebook.github.io/react/ , http://llvm.org/ http://llvm.org/ ). Plenty of startups that use open source spend time improving open source projects (although, naturally, focused on the features they care to use, given how precious of a resource developer time is for a startup).
jldugger 11y ago
> Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. As a infra provider to many open source projects, I have a very solid way of converting money into engineer time: I hire and train them.
- freshhawk 11y ago
  Sounds right to me, I was talking more about Patreon or bounty type methods of converting money to engineer time. Since you have the experience I am very curious about one aspect of this, does the fact that some fellow contributors are paid have a noticeable effect on volunteer contributors. As in "Why would I do this for free when Alex gets paid?" or "Fuck this, I'll let the paid guys do this annoying part" or even just a cultural divide between paid/unpaid or a drop in volunteer contributors in general? The theory says there would be a small but noticeable effect along those lines if people are thinking about it. I've seen similar effects with Patreon type contributions, once the money comes once things change and once the money is spent work stops completely until there is more money. Most never come back. That and you get promising fun projects dropped in favour of the stagnant projects with better name recognition, which doesn't last because fixing legacy bugs for less than minimum wage is not a fulfilling way to spend your personal time. I'd also be interested in how you'd feel having a donation of skilled engineer 20% time compared to money to hire someone less experienced but full-time.
  - jldugger 11y ago
    > Since you have the experience I am very curious about one aspect of this, does the fact that some fellow contributors are paid have a noticeable effect on volunteer contributors. I realize now that we're talking about different meanings of the term infrastructure. My organization offers co-location and hosting services to a variety of open source projects. You can think of us as sysadmin to the open source community. And for all the talk about funding developer time, discussion about the operations side is notoriously quiet. There's a few good actors that help us out, and we're trying to raise awareness of the issue. Within our org, we try to contribute to open source as we go, and we have a software development team, but we're not paying people to write software for specific external projects. AFAIK, nobody is demotivated by our existence. You just don't see a lot of volunteers to get paged in the middle of the night when the website is down. The open source software we fund development of is largely to suit our operations team needs. They're not the sort of software projects you'd expect people to volunteer for, which is why we allocated student developers to start them. It's hard to separate the compensation effects on volunteers from the general 'I don't run this software' effects, and since we didn't inject money into existing projects, there's no debates about the inequity. There's another unstated funding challenge: if you want to maximize value your money brings to open source, you want to find someone who can escalate their contribution. If you assume the Steve Hansons of OSS are already spending all their time contributing, handing them money supports the status quo, but handing money to students who would otherwise be flipping burgers brings new faces, and additional effort to projects. In a sense, it matters whether your charitable goal is to reward lifetime contributions, or to gift the community better software, and in small ways these can be contradictory. Especially if continued funding relies on demonstrating return on the gifts, merely perpetuating the status quo is a problem. > I'd also be interested in how you'd feel having a donation of skilled engineer 20% time compared to money to hire someone less experienced but full-time. So our model is to hire student employees. They're cheap, and we can be flexible around their schedules in ways other potential employers cannot. We participate in GSoC, and are open to contributions, but generally speaking what we develop is not relevant for home use. On the operations side of things, we participate in the Chef ecosystem, but there's a level of access and such that open source infra teams prefer to control access to. Do you want to publish what exact version of nginx you're running?

adekok 11y ago

> Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. I'm willing to believe that most open source projects could make substantial improvements if they had funding. See how Patreon has made a huge difference for Youtube videographers.

lazaroclapp 11y ago
For a lot of large open source projects, funding may come in the form of companies paying their engineers to dedicate a significant amount of their time to working on existing open source projects. Or even open source projects that are part of a company's "products" (e.g. https://facebook.github.io/react/ https://facebook.github.io/react/ , http://llvm.org/ http://llvm.org/ ). Plenty of startups that use open source spend time improving open source projects (although, naturally, focused on the features they care to use, given how precious of a resource developer time is for a startup).

jldugger 11y ago

> Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. As a infra provider to many open source projects, I have a very solid way of converting money into engineer time: I hire and train them.

freshhawk 11y ago
Sounds right to me, I was talking more about Patreon or bounty type methods of converting money to engineer time. Since you have the experience I am very curious about one aspect of this, does the fact that some fellow contributors are paid have a noticeable effect on volunteer contributors. As in "Why would I do this for free when Alex gets paid?" or "Fuck this, I'll let the paid guys do this annoying part" or even just a cultural divide between paid/unpaid or a drop in volunteer contributors in general? The theory says there would be a small but noticeable effect along those lines if people are thinking about it. I've seen similar effects with Patreon type contributions, once the money comes once things change and once the money is spent work stops completely until there is more money. Most never come back. That and you get promising fun projects dropped in favour of the stagnant projects with better name recognition, which doesn't last because fixing legacy bugs for less than minimum wage is not a fulfilling way to spend your personal time. I'd also be interested in how you'd feel having a donation of skilled engineer 20% time compared to money to hire someone less experienced but full-time.
- jldugger 11y ago
  > Since you have the experience I am very curious about one aspect of this, does the fact that some fellow contributors are paid have a noticeable effect on volunteer contributors. I realize now that we're talking about different meanings of the term infrastructure. My organization offers co-location and hosting services to a variety of open source projects. You can think of us as sysadmin to the open source community. And for all the talk about funding developer time, discussion about the operations side is notoriously quiet. There's a few good actors that help us out, and we're trying to raise awareness of the issue. Within our org, we try to contribute to open source as we go, and we have a software development team, but we're not paying people to write software for specific external projects. AFAIK, nobody is demotivated by our existence. You just don't see a lot of volunteers to get paged in the middle of the night when the website is down. The open source software we fund development of is largely to suit our operations team needs. They're not the sort of software projects you'd expect people to volunteer for, which is why we allocated student developers to start them. It's hard to separate the compensation effects on volunteers from the general 'I don't run this software' effects, and since we didn't inject money into existing projects, there's no debates about the inequity. There's another unstated funding challenge: if you want to maximize value your money brings to open source, you want to find someone who can escalate their contribution. If you assume the Steve Hansons of OSS are already spending all their time contributing, handing them money supports the status quo, but handing money to students who would otherwise be flipping burgers brings new faces, and additional effort to projects. In a sense, it matters whether your charitable goal is to reward lifetime contributions, or to gift the community better software, and in small ways these can be contradictory. Especially if continued funding relies on demonstrating return on the gifts, merely perpetuating the status quo is a problem. > I'd also be interested in how you'd feel having a donation of skilled engineer 20% time compared to money to hire someone less experienced but full-time. So our model is to hire student employees. They're cheap, and we can be flexible around their schedules in ways other potential employers cannot. We participate in GSoC, and are open to contributions, but generally speaking what we develop is not relevant for home use. On the operations side of things, we participate in the Chef ecosystem, but there's a level of access and such that open source infra teams prefer to control access to. Do you want to publish what exact version of nginx you're running?