4 ms·

> He shouldn't blame a community of volunteers for not fixing his personal problems for free. Please allow me to highlight this statement. I encountered it so

> He shouldn't blame a community of volunteers for not fixing his personal problems for free. Please allow me to highlight this statement. I encountered it so frequently when I created and maintained several popular open source projects. I honestly think a lot of people assume that if you're working on a project, you must be getting paid for it. Then again, many of them were totally unfazed when I pointed out that I did all the work unpaid, and that it was a hobby project.

bluGill 9y ago
I do get paid for the project I maintain, but ONLY when I am doing something that benefits my employer. I became maintainer because my employer needed a feature that wasn't there so they paid me to write it. That makes me someone who cares enough to be maintainer (the previous maintainer didn't want to be maintainer anymore). If you submit a good patch I will accept it. Submit several good patches and I'll make you co-maintainer (so far that hasn't happened). If you ask an easy support question I'll answer. If you want a new feature or have a hard support question - my employee doesn't pay me for that and I have kids to play with on my own time. Red Hat, Ubuntu and the like employee some people who will sometimes implement a new feature for you - but those companies want you to buy a support contact for features. There are a number of foundations that pay people to work on free software (FreeBSD, KDE, Mozilla, many more) and so they will be more responsive to requests - but foundations are always lacking in money so they cannot do every feature they want. There are a few "college students" (possibly retired) who work on things for fun. If they take an interest in your request they will do it. However they also have other things do to as well. I believe the majority of people working on open source projects are like me: they work on things someone pays them for but do not have the time to do anything for someone else. Note, industry coding is like this as well. They have money, but never enough to do all ideas. (and even if they did man-month issues mean they often can't do it anyway)
- jnbiche 9y ago
  > I believe the majority of people working on open source projects are like me: they work on things someone pays them for but do not have the time to do anything for someone else. To be fair, I've also occasionally had people pay me to add features to my project. However, most of the work I've done has been volunteer, at no charge. Also, I'm not sure I agree that the majority of people working on open source projects are like you. Perhaps the more popular projects have one or two individuals working like you, but even then, there are a lot of commits coming in from volunteers. At least, that's my impression from the frontend community (JavaScript) and functional programming communities (Scala, Haskell, etc.).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
hungerstrike 9y ago
I don't think comparing your hobby projects to Qt is apt here. First, the Qt company sells a commercial license for $79/month so that you can use the software without GPL restrictions. The author didn't mention if they were using that or the open source version. Either way, Qt is at least partly a commercial venture. Second, there is a huge difference in the size of the respective projects if your projects only had you as the maintainer. It's not that easy to contribute to large projects. Also IMO, it behooves the larger projects to try and make their users happy especially if they want to remain alive. Finally, upon reading the article you can see that the author is not expecting free help in any way. He is simply saying that if you want Accessibility then don't use Qt unless you can implement it yourself.

bluGill 9y ago

I do get paid for the project I maintain, but ONLY when I am doing something that benefits my employer. I became maintainer because my employer needed a feature that wasn't there so they paid me to write it. That makes me someone who cares enough to be maintainer (the previous maintainer didn't want to be maintainer anymore). If you submit a good patch I will accept it. Submit several good patches and I'll make you co-maintainer (so far that hasn't happened). If you ask an easy support question I'll answer. If you want a new feature or have a hard support question - my employee doesn't pay me for that and I have kids to play with on my own time. Red Hat, Ubuntu and the like employee some people who will sometimes implement a new feature for you - but those companies want you to buy a support contact for features. There are a number of foundations that pay people to work on free software (FreeBSD, KDE, Mozilla, many more) and so they will be more responsive to requests - but foundations are always lacking in money so they cannot do every feature they want. There are a few "college students" (possibly retired) who work on things for fun. If they take an interest in your request they will do it. However they also have other things do to as well. I believe the majority of people working on open source projects are like me: they work on things someone pays them for but do not have the time to do anything for someone else. Note, industry coding is like this as well. They have money, but never enough to do all ideas. (and even if they did man-month issues mean they often can't do it anyway)

jnbiche 9y ago
> I believe the majority of people working on open source projects are like me: they work on things someone pays them for but do not have the time to do anything for someone else. To be fair, I've also occasionally had people pay me to add features to my project. However, most of the work I've done has been volunteer, at no charge. Also, I'm not sure I agree that the majority of people working on open source projects are like you. Perhaps the more popular projects have one or two individuals working like you, but even then, there are a lot of commits coming in from volunteers. At least, that's my impression from the frontend community (JavaScript) and functional programming communities (Scala, Haskell, etc.).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

hungerstrike 9y ago

I don't think comparing your hobby projects to Qt is apt here. First, the Qt company sells a commercial license for $79/month so that you can use the software without GPL restrictions. The author didn't mention if they were using that or the open source version. Either way, Qt is at least partly a commercial venture. Second, there is a huge difference in the size of the respective projects if your projects only had you as the maintainer. It's not that easy to contribute to large projects. Also IMO, it behooves the larger projects to try and make their users happy especially if they want to remain alive. Finally, upon reading the article you can see that the author is not expecting free help in any way. He is simply saying that if you want Accessibility then don't use Qt unless you can implement it yourself.