16 ms·

Give away your code, but never your time

430 points by brakmic 9y ago

firasd 9y ago
The key suggestion: "bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer... If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails."
- unimpressive 9y ago
  Right, so are there any examples of successful projects which do this? The idea is certainly plausible given that the vast majority of initial contributions to an open source project are based on need: http://climate-action.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Library/Shah_open_source_governance_2006.pdf http://climate-action.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Library/S... However continued involvement seems to be usually based on hobbyist motivations, so you might be setting yourself up to not see anybody else jump on board with you long term.
  - innocentoldguy 9y ago
    https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/ https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/ I'm not sure how successful it is, but Crystal seems to have the right idea.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  There's probably a compromise, but often non paying users do contribute in the form of bug reports and user feedback via the very same issue tracker that that they are to be locked out of. I also wander if paying entities have different objectives then non paying entities in such a way that paying entities will corrupt projects or alienate future contributors.
innocentoldguy 9y ago
I like the idea of donating to projects that benefit me, so the developers working on those projects have a financial incentive to continue doing so. For example, I'm interested in the Crystal language, so I give the project $10 a month. Yeah, it isn't much, but if enough people did this, it would allow open-source developers to make a living out of these projects, rather than being enslaved by them to the point they burn out.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  Something like Gratipay is good for facilitating that use case but I don't know that there are enough other devs out there willing to fund these projects themselves. At least I haven't seen one yet where the maintainer pulls in anything like a normal developer salary for their experience level.
outoftacos 9y ago
I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.
- cabaalis 9y ago
  Nor have I. As a manager/co-owner I can't think of a reasonable business-friendly way to allow my developers to spend work time on OSS. I would love to, of course, but our systems really do not facilitate community involvement.
  - rcfox 9y ago
    The majority of my contributions have been around projects I use for work. Bug fixes, extending functionality, performance enhancements, etc.
    - adekok 9y ago
      That's the real answer. If you spent 1/10 of an engineer on an open source product, and 100 other companies do the same, your company gets much more than it puts in. And because it's open source, you know how to fix it, and you can fix it. I know of multiple billion-dollar companies who can't get the time of day from Cisco, HP, etc. for bug fixes or new features. The vendors attitude is: Bought 10M of product in the past year? Meh... piss off. We're working on important customers.
  - Deestan 9y ago
    > I would love to, of course If you did, you'd have found a way for it to work. Making a pretty cool deploy script? Document it and put it out there as OSS. Making a class/module to sort items semantically? Make it OSS. Someone made an IDE extension to syntax highlight WebVTT files? Make i OSS. Made a file lister/selector for JQuery? OSS. Integrating 3rd party X with 3rd party Y? Opensource your module for it. Unless all your developers do is hack stuff badly together in a monolithic mess, some of it can be opensourced.
LeoNatan25 9y ago
> We also need to bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer. > The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” So, for me, this goes against the reasons I decide to give my personal time to the community. For me, creating an open source project is a contract with the community, and part of that contract is to assist members of this community that might require features or have issues. Statements such as the ones quoted above go wholeheartedly against my idea of an open source community, and I have a feeling most of the open source community shares this sentiment. Breaking this contract would be, for me, a cease and desist of the project. For me, it is very simple, if a personal project is stagnated, that’s acceptable as no one owes anyone here anything. If a company’s open source projects go stagnant, but the company continues to boast how pro-OSS they are, it is a cardinal sin, as they have broken this contract with their users. This may be a naive look, but I don’t think a company should be able to have it both ways—boast about its OSS projects, lure people in and then ignore them and move on to their next PR OSS project. Donations are a different proposition than the suggestions in the article, and should definitely be encouraged.
- hartator 9y ago
  The issue is donations don't work even if you have a large user base.
  - notamy 9y ago
    This this this. If you provide a service for free, the vast majority of your user base will never care about giving you money, and will just stop using your service and find another one if you try to start charging them for it instead of keeping it free. One of my side-projects has ended up here and it's been a huge pain to deal with.
    - xfer 9y ago
      We are not talking about a service here, we are talking about OSS codebase and in my experience it does work.
partycoder 9y ago
I disagree. By using a small project and reporting bugs you are helping to test it, giving feedback and allowing it to grow. Also, reporting a bug sometimes saves the maintainers the effort of finding the bug themselves... something that actually takes time. A better policy is to encourage people to help fix the bugs they report, with a test case or a pull request if possible... something actionable.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  maybe some sortof point system would be nice. You get points by providing good bug reports, good forum answers, good PRs, good code reviews, providing tests, donating, etc., but you can lose points by wasting people's time or being a jerk, for instance. Then maintainers can prioritize PRs by people with good points, regardless of how they got the points (be it from donating time, code, or other ways of helping the community & project).
  - partycoder 9y ago
    The problem I see with that is that people gain and lose interest in a project over time. Some other people become disenchanted with how the project is going and try to fork it when it doesn't go their way. This is not inherently bad... many good projects come from forks... but it is not an ideal situation to have.
ef4 9y ago
Color me deeply skeptical of the suggestion to try to lock people out of community participation unless they pay. The real secret to not burning out is to scale up the set of maintainers in proportion to the users. You do that by lowering the barriers to involvement, not raising them. Most maintainers err on the side of controlling too much. Which makes them into bottlenecks. One or two good PRs is enough for me to give you commit bit on my repos. This has never yet resulted in abuse, and has brought in a many helpful co-maintainers. Bad commits can be easily reverted. Whereas giving people a bit of trust often inspires them to help more.
- asdfasdfasd333 9y ago
  Absolutely this. This applies to engineering at software companies as well.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  I completely agree, the only thing I still like to keep to myself (or to a very select group) is the ability to cut a release. If you want commit access, just ask. But I still want to validate releases that get pushed out to a bunch of people.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    My policy is to never ask, and to only accept if I think I can be worthy of the work at the time (so I might accept at a later date if I feel I don't have the bandwidth today).
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      And I tend to try and offer if i start to notice the name in a few issues or PRs.
- zzzeek 9y ago
  Bad commits are the absolute most difficult thing to reverse when they get released and the userbase codes to them. When I don't pay super close attention to what's being contributed, it creates three times as much work after I let it through.
5_minutes 9y ago
I always wonder where coders find the time to significantly contribute to Opensouce projects - which many seem to do - after their day job, having played and eaten with their kids, and were an attentful husband.
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  A lot of companies encourage open source contributions and maintenance. Some companies even have departments of engineering dedicated to open source. And yes, when people like the community and technology, contributing does not feel like work. Some contribute because of more “practical” reasons—still, completely legitimate—such as improving their visibility for job hiring. It is always impressive to get a résumé with a GitHub and StackOverflow links.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  My company's platform is built on open source tech, a lot of which isn't mature yet, so we end up fixing bugs and adding features to it at our day job. Upstreaming them to the community is another story, and even when the code is finished and tested, things like backwards compatibility on old versions of the package and running on platforms you don't use can be a bear to support. It's definitely time consuming even when you can do the development at work. My experience on other open source projects has also been when you put the work in to open a relevant PR and the maintainers just never respond to it. That's definitely frustrating.
- boyter 9y ago
  I have a solid 1 hour train trip to and from work. Because of where I live I get a single train and always have a seat. Thats where I get the majority of it done.
- franciscop 9y ago
  I did a lot during University years (while in a different major). I learned, I taught people, it was really fun. Now I only have the time/energy for 2-3 simultaneous side projects, with only 1 being open source at the moment. There's no way I could be doing the same was I married and with kids.
- 9y ago
davidgerard 9y ago
> When I say “open source”, I mean code licensed in a way that it can be used to build proprietary things. This redefinition of a basic term should have been at the beginning, not the end.
- ajdlinux 9y ago
  And so should "open-source code is utility software". Stallman was right when he said that the Open Source movement would eventually abandon any conceptions of software freedom - it seems to me that we now have a whole generation of "open source" contributors for whom the only type of freedom that matters is the freedom of downstream developers, rather than users, and who seem to think that the role of open source in the world is just to provide a base on top of which one can write proprietary applications. Where do developers of open source end-user applications fit into this picture?
  - walterbell 9y ago
    This year's LinuxCon has been rebranded under the umbrella "Open Source Summit". Maybe it's time to fork the term "open source", as was done to "free software".
  - burntsushi 9y ago
    I maintain both types of open source projects. I, for one, am happy that we are trending towards more so-called "developer freedom" in open source. I never actually abandoned the concept of "software freedom" as defined by Stallman because I never bought into it in the first place.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      Thanks...this is the best attitude I've heard. Instead of making people feel they need to take sides in the open-source vs free-software debate, better to just acknowledge that both are important and aren't necessarily in conflict.
      - 9y ago
bkovacev 9y ago
I dislike the key suggestion. What's the point of open-source - if not to give back? It's a developer's codex/morale to answer. It seems the author is salty about the fact he doesn't make money from open source, but is investing a lot of time. Well my dear colleague, offer support to the bigger companies that use your software in production or use that software to sell another. Simple. Open source was never meant to be for-profit, at least from my understanding. Something you give back to the community, because you have taken a lot from it in the first place. You dislike new issues by non-payees? Well, write better docs. Someone is also giving YOU time by submitting that issue or by finding a bug - so should you pay them money for testing? Be grateful. Should we all pay for the open source tools/frameworks we use? I can guarantee this would cause riots. If you don't want to contribute to OSS don't, but please do not whine about it.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Your employer benefits financially from the open source community. People who purchase software cheaply due to lower barrier to entry and more competition also benefit. As a coder I generally don't benefit so don't feel the need to give back. As a coder the tsunami of FOSS is a negative. My job is now to glue free modules together rather than design stuff. I'd be quite happy to pay for a compiler if I had to.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - xfer 9y ago
    I mean if you are genius who has written all parts of OS/compiler/whatever software you use, then maybe it is a negative for you. But most people can't do so and FOSS is actually a blessing. If you like to pay for wall-gardens, where you can't read any code without an NDA/paying a million dollars, they exist. Feel free to use them.
    - quickthrower2 9y ago
      I've been plenty happy working in Windows/.NET land. As a developer. As a home tinkerer I do agree with you. And glad Haskell and Linux are available for free.
panic 9y ago
I think a crowdfunding site specifically designed for software projects would go a long way toward solving this problem. Something like this: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2017-05-11-plan-for-foss-maintainers.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2017-05-11-plan-for-foss-mai...
ApolloFortyNine 9y ago
>If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails. People who don’t pay should feel like they are missing out on the party. This could be the dumbest thing I have ever heard of it. I mean seriously, you want people to pay even for PRs they have already written? >Also charge contributors for the time it takes to merge nontrivial pull requests. If a particular submission will not immediately benefit you, charge full price for your time. Be disciplined and remember YAGNI. This sounds like a great way to lose all your real contributors. The article mentions "get paid for your time" over and over again, yet who is paying me for the time to write the code for the PR? You expect me to both dedicate my time to writing the code for a PR, and then pay you for the privilege. Perhaps what projects worrying about work for commits should require rigorous testing (integration tests at the very least) on unknown PRs if they ever feel the need to do something like this. And limiting feature requests is understandable, but most projects already ignore overly specific feature requests. Charging for PRs though seems like the fastest way to have your project forked, and have you lose control of it, or for it to split the development talent and die completely.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  Merging PRs isn't as simple as clicking a button. I wrote this months ago in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13231590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13231590 > most people are only willing to contribute to open source to the extent that it scratches their itch. They feel that their obligation ends as soon as the code is written, and the maintenance of their code falls on you. > So from a maintainer perspective, you have to act like people's contributions are your contributions. You have to evaluate the code as if you have to maintain it later, you have to understand the circumstances surrounding it, etc. You have to be aware of everyone's concerns at the same time and make sure you don't end up messing up other people's use cases without good reason. And more often than not PRs reflect a "selfishness" of sorts wherein it solves their problem but breaks the general case.
- 9y ago
isaaclyman 9y ago
Devil's advocate: How about an issue/PR tracker that lets users pay for priority? A simple bidding system. If BigCorp International is willing to pay $200/hour for IE10 support, they can be next on your list. And afterward, an bug with significant community support totalling $50/hour, pledged by 50 different users. With allowances for your own preferences as maintainer and the needs of the community, of course, but giving people who care the most the opportunity to put their money where their pain is.
- bocklund 9y ago
  Something like this could work, but I worry that it would create competitiveness and animosity among users.
  - sand500 9y ago
    This is the point of having a seperate buisness license. Sell to big companies along with support.
    - mjevans 9y ago
      I think the point was to have a one time option limited to the scope of work instead of yet another subscription model that tries to pay for the work as a form of insurance.
- sbov 9y ago
  Someone did that, back in 2003! It looks like its changed over time (and its security certificate is recently expired). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bountysource https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bountysource
  - broodbucket 9y ago
    Bountysource is definitely still active, though not as utilised as it should be. The cert expiring is obviously dodgy but it's only expired by a few hours and assumedly will be fixed soon
Retr0spectrum 9y ago
Why does the text on this website have 52% transparency?
- lugg 9y ago
  You gotta pay to get 100% opaque.
- Vendan 9y ago
  It's actually 52% opaque, so 48% transparent. But yeah, that's crappy as heck.
- dghf 9y ago
  I just assumed they'd chosen an annoyingly faint shade of grey. For some reason, the transparency seems even more perverse. I had to zoom quite severely to be able to read it.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
walterbell 9y ago
In the proposed approach, what would happen to a high-quality and desirable code contribution from someone who cannot afford to pay for their code to be reviewed?
brooklynrob 9y ago
Glad to see other ideas and operating models being proposed and tried. Most of us live in countries where you need money to pay rent and buy food. Unless you're already wealthy, that means you need to work (trade time for money) or find a way to trade time for an ownership stake that will, you hope, generate income (and in the process that stake becomes itself more valuable). A buddy of mine in a maintainer for a popular Drupal module. A very large, well known, social media platform uses it. One day he got an email from someone - likely someone making $150-$200k- more or less demanding that he review and accept some PRs, as well as do some work himself, for a feature they needed. I told this friend "Ok, did you ask them about their budget to pay you for that?" My friend, more idealistic than me, looked at me like I had 3 heads at first. But he got my question. Nonetheless he decided to "honor" their request and proceeded to work several weeks unexpectedly - for free - so the large for-profit company could stick with its plan and the person requesting this, who is paid, could meet her/his commitment to their boss. His rationale was afraid he'd criticized by the community for not dropping his paid work (!) to do this, since he was the maintainer. He did not want to be a "sell out". I think his decision was insane but such is the pressure to stay true to the ideals. These stories are all to common and similar to what Willian describes. I do work around expanding computer science in schools. I do work around mobilizing tech communities to lend their tech skills to disaster relief. A lot of folks in the "startup tech" and open sources communities (different communities with overlap) do the same -- I'm seeing them show up in big numbers for Irma volunteering right now for example. I view these efforts as akin to open course - they are contributions people make of their (unpaid) time to the greater good. The big tech companies by contrast, many who got their start using open source software and many of whom still power much of their systems with it, could do much much much more on any number of fronts - CS in schools, supporting civic hacking, etc - than they do now. I am sure folks within those companies think they do a lot, but it's not, in my opinion, 5% of what they could do. And when they do get involved in causes they make huge, often unreasonable expectations of unpaid volunteers in order to minimize their donation, whether that's a donation in time or money. (Case in point: last year a large tech company that provides search and email services asked me to organize Hour of Code events at 30-40 schools around NYC at which their staff to volunteer for an hour or two -- planning and logistics work that would have taken me 1-2 days a week for 4-6 weeks at least. They balked at the idea of paying me for my time since this was a "cause" and I should do it for free, though of course the people who would have been working on this project with me from said company would have been paid.) Sound similar? Expect a ton from volunteers to minimize your own investment. I bring this up because the LEAST that people who work on open source projects - at least those who aren't pulling in $300K at one of the big tech companies - and ESPECIALLY maintainers, should expect is to get paid somehow. Seriously, how are people supposed to pay rent? William is right on with his piece. Ideals are great but people need to eat. This emerging duopoly in tech where on one side there is a group of people who are entitled to make massive wealth and demand huge salaries and, on the other, are the open source maintainers, civic hackers, and computer science teachers who are being disloyal to the noble ideals of tech for not wanting to eat cat food is serves the industry poorly. I engage in this hyperbole to make a point -- an industry that was built by many idealists who saw tech as being an engine to democratization and equality is now becoming exaggerated mirror of society large. And if you're one of those making $250k, $300k, $500k at some tech company and demanding people work for free or else you'll accuse them of being sellouts for wanting to pay their rent -- well, look in the mirror before you cast that stone.
jamiesonbecker 9y ago
The author seems to believe contributions of code or contributions of bug reports are a net negative for the project, while the only thing that the project needs to survive is money to pay for the author's time. That is exactly backwards. Nearly all open source projects actually do not need any money at all to grow and prosper. They simply need contributions.. of time. In the form of bug reports and code. Take care of your users, first, and the money will follow.
- franciscop 9y ago
  They do not need it, but it'd help quite a lot. If I got a bunch of money for doing open souce I could: - Not find random jobs to be able to live, so more time for open source. - Have more energy for open source (so important it has to be a separated point from the previous).
  - jamiesonbecker 9y ago
    Cause vs effect. Money is the latter ;)
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  This is true for some. Though I'm not sure it always applies. OpenSSL developers needed money to guarantee their time, yet for years it was not much money.
paxys 9y ago
I don't get the jump the author makes from "your time is valuable" (understandable) to "you should have to pay to contribute to open-source projects" (umm, what).
c3534l 9y ago
Maybe write your article after you've done this and tell us how it worked.
jamiesonbecker 9y ago
Here are a few ideas off the top of my head for a purely open source (non-commercial) project: * custom features * prioritization * training * enterprise support * sponsorships * invites to free conferences and swag * t-shirts and swag sales * commercial software integrations/partnerships * brand sponsorship/inclusion on docs/websites/etc. * professionally managed and scalable hosting What did I miss?
- Temasik 9y ago
  err ICO?
metafunctor 9y ago
I led a small open source project more than a decade ago. Most people involved had more time than money. I'm quite certain that trying to charge an annual fee from members would have killed the entire project before it was even born. Introducing money to the equation changes everything. People start to look at the project as a product they are buying, instead of a cause they are contributing to. I believe the author of this article is deeply misguided. Money is not a way to make open projects work, but it is a good way to kill them.
- imtringued 9y ago
  As soon as money is involved there is a certain expectation of quality and the work being done properly. If you start depending on that money then you are under the control of your customers and your hobby will quickly degrade into a regular job.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    "Degrade"? Getting a job contributing to FOSS projects sounds pretty good to me.
    - lunchables 9y ago
      Depends, turning a hobby into work can be either wonderful or horrible.
zzzeek 9y ago
I shudder to think of the sense of entitlement some of my users would have towards getting me to fix their pet issues that they had to pay to tell me about. This article got a lot right but then charging for community membership is a super bad idea.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
I think what open source needs is some very deliberate price discrimination. Have the license be free to the vast majority of users, and cost money for large corporations that can damn well afford it. Not, like, large amounts of money, just something vaguely close to the all-in cost of one full time developer. Basically, "BSD, unless you're a $1B+ valued company that is not paying our software foundation $10k/mo".
- ghthor 9y ago
  This is pretty much exactly how I feel about this issue. The contributors you really want are the youth that are young and ambitious, setting a price to contribute would hinder this growth. The contributors you probably don't want are the large corps who will try to push the project based on there income, charge them a lot for the privilege of dealing with their bias.
- doozy 9y ago
  Many moons ago I developed a moderately successful shareware program. My licensing terms were simple: If you owned the computer where you installed and used it no license was needed, but if someone else owned the machine, you owed me money. It allowed students, hobbyists and freelancers to use the software for free, for any purpose, but companies, institutions and governments had to pay to play. This idea does not seem to translate in an obvious way to software released under an open source license.
  - tripa 9y ago
    I love the idea, but can't help wondering: did it actually convert into "sales"?
    - doozy 9y ago
      As I said, it was a moderately successful side business. I know of many cases in which the sale came from someone buying this on behalf of his employer years after he had first used the software as a student. I was never after the nickles and dimes of users, always had my eyes in the deep pockets of major players. 99% of my sales came from multi-billion dollar corporations, universities and government.
morgante 9y ago
The notion of charging people to be part of the community seems like a terrific way to immediately kill any semblance of community. Realistically, the only people who will pay a membership fee are those who can charge it to a company. That means you'll lose all the people hacking on the project in their free time. Personally, I contributed a lot more to open source when I was in college and had more free time than money. There's no way I would have paid to be able to contribute. The solution is really just to have lower expectations on maintainers, both around timely responses/support (want fast support, pay for it) and improvements. They can and should also be more liberal with adding maintainers.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  Are you sure? If what you're saying is true, wouldn't that mean it would be impossible for any business to have a "sense of community" around it?
  - gkya 9y ago
    No. The community around a business is their customers who dont contribute directly to the product itself, but to the general economy, knowledge and hype around it. You pay to buy the product and probably wouldnt work on it in behalf of the producer for free on your free time.
  - peterwwillis 9y ago
    To be part of a community you need to have the same stake as everyone else. Businesses don't have communities, they have customers.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      A community can still be formed amongst your customers, and make your product better. Game mods are a good example.
cavneb 9y ago
As much as I agree with the sentiment behind this post, I disagree with the implementation. The nature of open source code is collaboration. Paying for collaboration seems like it would hinder progress altogether and possibly direct the project into a direction that is not suitable for the poor majority not paying. One more thing that bothers me is that money for maintenance should not come from developers. This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul. Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Code Sponsor (https://codesponsor.io https://codesponsor.io) Code Sponsor is trying to help provide those who are maintaining OSS projects with untethered sponsorship funds. They can go about doing their business on the projects and be making money through sponsor-based ad revenue. This provides them with the incentive and finances to justify continued support on those projects that end up being abandoned when unfunded. I agree that this is a HUGE problem that needs to be addressed. Code Sponsor's approach is to go where money can scale: marketing budgets.
- mjibson 9y ago
  I've seen these kinds of things and have always been dubious that they are able to pay a full time salary for someone that is even close to what they could make with a normal full time dev job. What's the highest monthly amount your company pays a dev? What's the average and median?
  - cavneb 9y ago
    Most of those using Code Sponsor are very new. I can tell you that so far this month (Sept 11) we are payout out $511 USD to developers. Last month we paid one developer over $130. It's not life changing, but it's excellent supplemental income.
- vjeux 9y ago
  You're likely going to be shut down by GitHub. They have a special section in their ToS that prohibits advertising. https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#k-advertising-on-github https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#k-... > Short version: We do not generally prohibit use of GitHub for advertising. However, we expect our users to follow certain limitations, so GitHub does not become a spam haven. No one wants that.
lap42 9y ago
It still is fake news.
TCM 9y ago
The social contract of open source is to give away code and time to open source to enhance the community and software. The problem that open source projects really have is that raising and or selling a product is a goal that not every person with a successful project has. If you want to actually have people pay for open source you should look into making a grant style system for people in open source that is targeted to maintainers. Google Summer of Code and Aigrant are good examples of this.
pharrington 9y ago
>> Don't give away your time. >> But do give away your time and money to work on my projects. Come on.
qaq 9y ago
The dude's key project has a total of 4 contributors (working at the same company?) 0 forks and 0 stars. I am sure we should all follow his guidance on the subject.
normalocity 9y ago
I hope the OP doesn't seriously believe that charging for open source work will somehow "fix the diversity problem", rather than magnify it. I'm hoping that was just an off-handed line that didn't get much thought before being added to the post.
geerlingguy 9y ago
I haven't seen any large scale, long-term open source projects succeed with a 'pay to play' process; what usually happens is the original maintainers realize that even with some amount of compensation, they still don't like scratching other people's itch when it comes to their project. And then they realize that the amount of people/companies even willing to pay at all is a tiny fraction of 1% of their potential target market. The better advice is to do what you want, know your limits, consider sharing some maintainance responsibility with another committer or two, and don't ever feel obligated to do anything with other people's issues and PRs. It's nice to do, but if it's interfering with anything else, or taking away valuable time, ignore them or just blanket close them, with a note that it's not something you'd be interested in maintaining. The great thing about open source is someone can fork your code and do what they need. You have no obligation to help them, it's just nice if you can. And if they don't get that, that's not your problem.
- Radim 9y ago
  It's not your problem only in the sense that it shouldn't be your problem. E.g., in theory. Some people can be quite belligerent about their FOSS entitlement. I've also seen folk publicly bash open source projects just because the license wasn't permissive enough, in their opinion (GPL vs. their darling I'll-bend-over-do-what-you-will-with-me BSD or MIT). It can be hard to maintain poker face with "not my problem"... as hard as the "fuck you, pay me" proposed by the OP. The social pressure to give away your work for free is real, and humans are social animals. Just look at this thread.
- slashdotdash 9y ago
  Sidekiq by Mike Perham is following the open core, paid subscription for a "pro" version containing extensions. His single founder company has a monthly recurring revenue in excess of $80k, as featured on Indie Hackers[1]. [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gkya 9y ago
About any software stack for about any computer task involves at least some open source code running for you, written by someone on their free time, mostly out of pure altruism. I wonder how many dollars has this person contributed to, say OpenSSL, or to GnuPG, or to the GNU project, or to Linux, or to the Apache Foundation, &c. If you dont want to respond to pull requests or to emails, just ignore them or dont put your code up on a platform that allows these. Publish release tarballs. Nobody's obliged to accept patches. But what this article tells is a merely a shortcut to making someone hard-fork your project. If I have to pay to get my patch upstream, well, I'll just maintain my patchset against upstream instead, if there are no alternative projects.
austincheney 9y ago
What works for me is locking down the application behind a plan. Users can submit whatever feedback, bugs, suggestions, enhancements, and wishlists they want. These contributions are important, but they won't change the roadmap. This only works when an open source application becomes ubiquitous or nearly ubiquitous and the users want it everywhere. Popularity and consumption rates are irrelevant to whether this works. This is because ubiquitous software solves an extremely common problem and takes too much effort to replace with an alternate solution. Ubiquitous software is not necessarily good software. When somebody wants a change in the roadmap they can pay you money to compensate you for the additional time it takes to pivot into another direction. You probably aren't going to make any money like this. Then benefits of this approach is that the maintainers won't burn out. They just work to the plan and occasionally respond to issues. The software has a transparent and published trajectory.
- brooklynrob 9y ago
  That's the right approach. The question is whether you can keep enforcing that - sticking to the product roadmap and release plan - if/when a large software company becomes a "customer" of your open source project. That's when it requires a tremendous amount of discipline to stick to this. But the right approach.
mperham 9y ago
Yep, that agrees with one rule I've found very helpful in my Sidekiq project: All free/OSS work/discussion is done in public. Never private email, never Slack. Always open an issue. Security issues are the exception here. No one should get to monopolize my time without paying.
throw2016 9y ago
The open source community defies definition. It's a diverse multitude of people with different motivations. This will ensure its survival even under challenging circumstances. There is a risk, maybe significant, of the generational hand off. A lot of folks who built this rich legacy were academics and pioneers motivated by ideology. Software has moved on from early pioneers motivated by liberty and freedom issues to being subsumed by establishment interests. At the moment there is also widespread cynicism about ideology in general and a lot of open source is increasingly developed by corporate interests. This could have repercussions for the 'nature' of open source as institutions and a connection to individuals beyond their identity as 'users' has not really been built.
gandutraveler 9y ago
Alt currency is an option for open source project. I think GitCoin is on these lines
kalat 9y ago
The author has many good points however it's either his writing style (thinking), ideas, or conceptual mental model where he is missing the point of open source. It is actually a bit confusing. His title doesn't correlate with what he writes later which contains several somewhat vacuous statements. People love to work together and produce something for the common good, humanity wouldn't be here without that good feeling and collaborative spirit. open source comes from people's time, time has led us to a point where open source is everywhere. Not all people are greedy, every coder owes another coder their livelihood. I think this draft just needed like 100 more edits. Also, "Many" does not equal 3.
justinjlynn 9y ago
"Do you want to get forks? Because this is how you get forks."
hyperpallium 9y ago
> annual fee for community membership Sleepycat did this https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software and seemed to work out for them. But if opensource truly is infrastructure, why not nationalize it? i.e. government pays maintainers a subsistence wage (provided they meet some scale crtieria, perhaps similar to automatic royalties for pop-song airplay). Users (i.e. big corporations) would pay a levy to fund this. Of course, it could be set up privately, independent of a government.
- frozenport 9y ago
  Well some OSS is developed by universities and research institutes, which is a form of indirect nationalization.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    That would make it unfair for indie developers... Then they'd be competing with institutions. This would actually kill open source as we know it.
    - Radim 9y ago
      You misunderstood -- the parent said this is already the case. A lot of FOSS is already heavily subsidized, from grants and tax money. No "would"s needed. And yes, it definitely makes it harder for indie developers to "compete", because these institutions run on infinite slave labour (students and postdocs). The only way to compete is on quality, which brings us back to the original "who pays for quality time" premise.
- hasenj 9y ago
  Because who decides what projects deserve how much? Who decides that a project is even worthy to receive anything at all? If there was such a government program, what would prevent masses of inexperienced developers to start pointless projects, open source them, and file a claim to receive money from the government?
ak39 9y ago
IMHO, the fundamental problem of these burnout open source projects is that they are "marketed" (deliberately or otherwise) to non-decision makers and people who don't control the budgets in companies that need their software. I.e. The lowly developers of some complex hive of a deeply hierarchical group of code monkeys in a for-profit org that's typically not in technology. Red Hat, Google, Microsoft and Oracle all know the value of open source because their big wigs are keenly aware of its value.
jondubois 9y ago
I run a relatively popular open source project. I think that there are some strange forces in the tech industry which make it nearly impossible to get big companies to use your project. Maybe it's not right but I really feel like not being based in Silicon Valley has something to do with it... Related to branding, social networks, bloggers. Outside of SV, it's very tough. Only small startups were using my project initially; literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of small startups but not one large corporation (that I knew about). It's been 4 years though and the good thing is that now several of the startups that were using my project got really big and are growing fast. Still no big corporations but it doesn't matter anymore. Me and one other contributor are now able to make money offering consulting to those startups which grew. Also we have a sponsorship deal now.
oelmekki 9y ago
I've considered opensourcing some business products and researched the various models for doing so. I found three main ones: * pay for support, like ardour * pay for additional features, like gitlab on-premise * pay for hosting, like piwik, or gitlab.com I'm not a big fan of paying for support, like mentioned in the article, because support is not just something you give to your users, it's also useful for you: if someone spotted a big bug (possibly a security issue) but is not paying for support, don't you want to know it? Asking to pay for support is also creating a lot of tension, because people will ask for help anyway, and you have to tell them they won't receive it if they don't pay. Paying for features is an obvious and efficient way. But I also like the idea that someone in a country where what I consider a decent price is actually a big part of the income can still manage to use my product to its full extent, provided they make an effort to use it. That's why pay for hosting seems the best way to me for opensource products : everybody can use the product to the full extent, no issue is ignored, people pay for comfort. Obviously, this works for the products I mentioned because they are ... products, and not libs. But I think it can apply to libs as well: * pay for support : the idea mentioned in the article * pay for features : this is something Sidekiq is doing, would love to know how it goes for them * pay for hosting : this one is tricky, maybe offer to help implementing the lib in customer product? Hardly scalable, though I would say that for libraries, paying for additional features is what makes the most of sense for me.
madprops 9y ago
Maybe not lock non-paying users, but give paying users a bigger priority and the ability to promote non-paying user's requests if they're good.
cdaven 9y ago
I just stumbled on a note from the abandoned project [History.js](https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/ https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/): > Despite History.js being one of the most popular JavaScript libraries there is, and has been used by even multi-million-user companies in its time - the reality of economy and company practices seems to be that companies prefer to fork their own internal versions and fix locally with their own devs rather than fund open-source maintainers what they would pay their own devs to make things better for everyone, including themselves, which would be cheaper - but no, that would require too many tiers of company approval that don't understand the need. > As such, if you are an open-source developer, I'd recommend just working on open-source projects that are paid for by your own consulting work or your own company (e.g. every successful open-source project). As otherwise, when they become popular, you better hope they are easily maintainable and testable, otherwise the cost of maintenance is higher than the free time of the maintainers.
arisAlexis 9y ago
Would be nice if projects were organized with the Aragon project

430 points by brakmic 9y ago

The key suggestion: "bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer... If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails."

unimpressive 9y ago
Right, so are there any examples of successful projects which do this? The idea is certainly plausible given that the vast majority of initial contributions to an open source project are based on need: http://climate-action.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Library/Shah_open_source_governance_2006.pdf http://climate-action.engin.umich.edu/figures/Rood_Library/S... However continued involvement seems to be usually based on hobbyist motivations, so you might be setting yourself up to not see anybody else jump on board with you long term.
- innocentoldguy 9y ago
  https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/ https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/ I'm not sure how successful it is, but Crystal seems to have the right idea.
ben_jones 9y ago
There's probably a compromise, but often non paying users do contribute in the form of bug reports and user feedback via the very same issue tracker that that they are to be locked out of. I also wander if paying entities have different objectives then non paying entities in such a way that paying entities will corrupt projects or alienate future contributors.

innocentoldguy 9y ago

I like the idea of donating to projects that benefit me, so the developers working on those projects have a financial incentive to continue doing so. For example, I'm interested in the Crystal language, so I give the project $10 a month. Yeah, it isn't much, but if enough people did this, it would allow open-source developers to make a living out of these projects, rather than being enslaved by them to the point they burn out.

tedmiston 9y ago
Something like Gratipay is good for facilitating that use case but I don't know that there are enough other devs out there willing to fund these projects themselves. At least I haven't seen one yet where the maintainer pulls in anything like a normal developer salary for their experience level.

outoftacos 9y ago

I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.

cabaalis 9y ago
Nor have I. As a manager/co-owner I can't think of a reasonable business-friendly way to allow my developers to spend work time on OSS. I would love to, of course, but our systems really do not facilitate community involvement.
- rcfox 9y ago
  The majority of my contributions have been around projects I use for work. Bug fixes, extending functionality, performance enhancements, etc.
  - adekok 9y ago
    That's the real answer. If you spent 1/10 of an engineer on an open source product, and 100 other companies do the same, your company gets much more than it puts in. And because it's open source, you know how to fix it, and you can fix it. I know of multiple billion-dollar companies who can't get the time of day from Cisco, HP, etc. for bug fixes or new features. The vendors attitude is: Bought 10M of product in the past year? Meh... piss off. We're working on important customers.
- Deestan 9y ago
  > I would love to, of course If you did, you'd have found a way for it to work. Making a pretty cool deploy script? Document it and put it out there as OSS. Making a class/module to sort items semantically? Make it OSS. Someone made an IDE extension to syntax highlight WebVTT files? Make i OSS. Made a file lister/selector for JQuery? OSS. Integrating 3rd party X with 3rd party Y? Opensource your module for it. Unless all your developers do is hack stuff badly together in a monolithic mess, some of it can be opensourced.

LeoNatan25 9y ago

> We also need to bury the idea that any developer who submits an issue or pull request is automatically entitled to the attention of a maintainer. > The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” So, for me, this goes against the reasons I decide to give my personal time to the community. For me, creating an open source project is a contract with the community, and part of that contract is to assist members of this community that might require features or have issues. Statements such as the ones quoted above go wholeheartedly against my idea of an open source community, and I have a feeling most of the open source community shares this sentiment. Breaking this contract would be, for me, a cease and desist of the project. For me, it is very simple, if a personal project is stagnated, that’s acceptable as no one owes anyone here anything. If a company’s open source projects go stagnant, but the company continues to boast how pro-OSS they are, it is a cardinal sin, as they have broken this contract with their users. This may be a naive look, but I don’t think a company should be able to have it both ways—boast about its OSS projects, lure people in and then ignore them and move on to their next PR OSS project. Donations are a different proposition than the suggestions in the article, and should definitely be encouraged.

hartator 9y ago
The issue is donations don't work even if you have a large user base.
- notamy 9y ago
  This this this. If you provide a service for free, the vast majority of your user base will never care about giving you money, and will just stop using your service and find another one if you try to start charging them for it instead of keeping it free. One of my side-projects has ended up here and it's been a huge pain to deal with.
  - xfer 9y ago
    We are not talking about a service here, we are talking about OSS codebase and in my experience it does work.

partycoder 9y ago

I disagree. By using a small project and reporting bugs you are helping to test it, giving feedback and allowing it to grow. Also, reporting a bug sometimes saves the maintainers the effort of finding the bug themselves... something that actually takes time. A better policy is to encourage people to help fix the bugs they report, with a test case or a pull request if possible... something actionable.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
maybe some sortof point system would be nice. You get points by providing good bug reports, good forum answers, good PRs, good code reviews, providing tests, donating, etc., but you can lose points by wasting people's time or being a jerk, for instance. Then maintainers can prioritize PRs by people with good points, regardless of how they got the points (be it from donating time, code, or other ways of helping the community & project).
- partycoder 9y ago
  The problem I see with that is that people gain and lose interest in a project over time. Some other people become disenchanted with how the project is going and try to fork it when it doesn't go their way. This is not inherently bad... many good projects come from forks... but it is not an ideal situation to have.

ef4 9y ago

Color me deeply skeptical of the suggestion to try to lock people out of community participation unless they pay. The real secret to not burning out is to scale up the set of maintainers in proportion to the users. You do that by lowering the barriers to involvement, not raising them. Most maintainers err on the side of controlling too much. Which makes them into bottlenecks. One or two good PRs is enough for me to give you commit bit on my repos. This has never yet resulted in abuse, and has brought in a many helpful co-maintainers. Bad commits can be easily reverted. Whereas giving people a bit of trust often inspires them to help more.

asdfasdfasd333 9y ago
Absolutely this. This applies to engineering at software companies as well.
Klathmon 9y ago
I completely agree, the only thing I still like to keep to myself (or to a very select group) is the ability to cut a release. If you want commit access, just ask. But I still want to validate releases that get pushed out to a bunch of people.
- mjevans 9y ago
  My policy is to never ask, and to only accept if I think I can be worthy of the work at the time (so I might accept at a later date if I feel I don't have the bandwidth today).
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    And I tend to try and offer if i start to notice the name in a few issues or PRs.
zzzeek 9y ago
Bad commits are the absolute most difficult thing to reverse when they get released and the userbase codes to them. When I don't pay super close attention to what's being contributed, it creates three times as much work after I let it through.

5_minutes 9y ago

I always wonder where coders find the time to significantly contribute to Opensouce projects - which many seem to do - after their day job, having played and eaten with their kids, and were an attentful husband.

LeoNatan25 9y ago
A lot of companies encourage open source contributions and maintenance. Some companies even have departments of engineering dedicated to open source. And yes, when people like the community and technology, contributing does not feel like work. Some contribute because of more “practical” reasons—still, completely legitimate—such as improving their visibility for job hiring. It is always impressive to get a résumé with a GitHub and StackOverflow links.
tedmiston 9y ago
My company's platform is built on open source tech, a lot of which isn't mature yet, so we end up fixing bugs and adding features to it at our day job. Upstreaming them to the community is another story, and even when the code is finished and tested, things like backwards compatibility on old versions of the package and running on platforms you don't use can be a bear to support. It's definitely time consuming even when you can do the development at work. My experience on other open source projects has also been when you put the work in to open a relevant PR and the maintainers just never respond to it. That's definitely frustrating.
boyter 9y ago
I have a solid 1 hour train trip to and from work. Because of where I live I get a single train and always have a seat. Thats where I get the majority of it done.
franciscop 9y ago
I did a lot during University years (while in a different major). I learned, I taught people, it was really fun. Now I only have the time/energy for 2-3 simultaneous side projects, with only 1 being open source at the moment. There's no way I could be doing the same was I married and with kids.
9y ago

davidgerard 9y ago

> When I say “open source”, I mean code licensed in a way that it can be used to build proprietary things. This redefinition of a basic term should have been at the beginning, not the end.

ajdlinux 9y ago
And so should "open-source code is utility software". Stallman was right when he said that the Open Source movement would eventually abandon any conceptions of software freedom - it seems to me that we now have a whole generation of "open source" contributors for whom the only type of freedom that matters is the freedom of downstream developers, rather than users, and who seem to think that the role of open source in the world is just to provide a base on top of which one can write proprietary applications. Where do developers of open source end-user applications fit into this picture?
- walterbell 9y ago
  This year's LinuxCon has been rebranded under the umbrella "Open Source Summit". Maybe it's time to fork the term "open source", as was done to "free software".
- burntsushi 9y ago
  I maintain both types of open source projects. I, for one, am happy that we are trending towards more so-called "developer freedom" in open source. I never actually abandoned the concept of "software freedom" as defined by Stallman because I never bought into it in the first place.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    Thanks...this is the best attitude I've heard. Instead of making people feel they need to take sides in the open-source vs free-software debate, better to just acknowledge that both are important and aren't necessarily in conflict.
    - 9y ago

bkovacev 9y ago

I dislike the key suggestion. What's the point of open-source - if not to give back? It's a developer's codex/morale to answer. It seems the author is salty about the fact he doesn't make money from open source, but is investing a lot of time. Well my dear colleague, offer support to the bigger companies that use your software in production or use that software to sell another. Simple. Open source was never meant to be for-profit, at least from my understanding. Something you give back to the community, because you have taken a lot from it in the first place. You dislike new issues by non-payees? Well, write better docs. Someone is also giving YOU time by submitting that issue or by finding a bug - so should you pay them money for testing? Be grateful. Should we all pay for the open source tools/frameworks we use? I can guarantee this would cause riots. If you don't want to contribute to OSS don't, but please do not whine about it.

quickthrower2 9y ago
Your employer benefits financially from the open source community. People who purchase software cheaply due to lower barrier to entry and more competition also benefit. As a coder I generally don't benefit so don't feel the need to give back. As a coder the tsunami of FOSS is a negative. My job is now to glue free modules together rather than design stuff. I'd be quite happy to pay for a compiler if I had to.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- xfer 9y ago
  I mean if you are genius who has written all parts of OS/compiler/whatever software you use, then maybe it is a negative for you. But most people can't do so and FOSS is actually a blessing. If you like to pay for wall-gardens, where you can't read any code without an NDA/paying a million dollars, they exist. Feel free to use them.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    I've been plenty happy working in Windows/.NET land. As a developer. As a home tinkerer I do agree with you. And glad Haskell and Linux are available for free.

panic 9y ago

I think a crowdfunding site specifically designed for software projects would go a long way toward solving this problem. Something like this: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2017-05-11-plan-for-foss-maintainers.html http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2017-05-11-plan-for-foss-mai...

ApolloFortyNine 9y ago

>If you’re the leader of one of these projects, charge an annual fee for community membership. Open source, closed community. The message to users should be “do whatever you want with the code, but pay us for our time if you want to influence the project’s future.” Lock non-paying users out of the forum and issue tracker, and ignore their emails. People who don’t pay should feel like they are missing out on the party. This could be the dumbest thing I have ever heard of it. I mean seriously, you want people to pay even for PRs they have already written? >Also charge contributors for the time it takes to merge nontrivial pull requests. If a particular submission will not immediately benefit you, charge full price for your time. Be disciplined and remember YAGNI. This sounds like a great way to lose all your real contributors. The article mentions "get paid for your time" over and over again, yet who is paying me for the time to write the code for the PR? You expect me to both dedicate my time to writing the code for a PR, and then pay you for the privilege. Perhaps what projects worrying about work for commits should require rigorous testing (integration tests at the very least) on unknown PRs if they ever feel the need to do something like this. And limiting feature requests is understandable, but most projects already ignore overly specific feature requests. Charging for PRs though seems like the fastest way to have your project forked, and have you lose control of it, or for it to split the development talent and die completely.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
Merging PRs isn't as simple as clicking a button. I wrote this months ago in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13231590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13231590 > most people are only willing to contribute to open source to the extent that it scratches their itch. They feel that their obligation ends as soon as the code is written, and the maintenance of their code falls on you. > So from a maintainer perspective, you have to act like people's contributions are your contributions. You have to evaluate the code as if you have to maintain it later, you have to understand the circumstances surrounding it, etc. You have to be aware of everyone's concerns at the same time and make sure you don't end up messing up other people's use cases without good reason. And more often than not PRs reflect a "selfishness" of sorts wherein it solves their problem but breaks the general case.
9y ago

isaaclyman 9y ago

Devil's advocate: How about an issue/PR tracker that lets users pay for priority? A simple bidding system. If BigCorp International is willing to pay $200/hour for IE10 support, they can be next on your list. And afterward, an bug with significant community support totalling $50/hour, pledged by 50 different users. With allowances for your own preferences as maintainer and the needs of the community, of course, but giving people who care the most the opportunity to put their money where their pain is.

bocklund 9y ago
Something like this could work, but I worry that it would create competitiveness and animosity among users.
- sand500 9y ago
  This is the point of having a seperate buisness license. Sell to big companies along with support.
  - mjevans 9y ago
    I think the point was to have a one time option limited to the scope of work instead of yet another subscription model that tries to pay for the work as a form of insurance.
sbov 9y ago
Someone did that, back in 2003! It looks like its changed over time (and its security certificate is recently expired). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bountysource https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bountysource
- broodbucket 9y ago
  Bountysource is definitely still active, though not as utilised as it should be. The cert expiring is obviously dodgy but it's only expired by a few hours and assumedly will be fixed soon

Retr0spectrum 9y ago

Why does the text on this website have 52% transparency?

lugg 9y ago
You gotta pay to get 100% opaque.
Vendan 9y ago
It's actually 52% opaque, so 48% transparent. But yeah, that's crappy as heck.
dghf 9y ago
I just assumed they'd chosen an annoyingly faint shade of grey. For some reason, the transparency seems even more perverse. I had to zoom quite severely to be able to read it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

walterbell 9y ago

In the proposed approach, what would happen to a high-quality and desirable code contribution from someone who cannot afford to pay for their code to be reviewed?

brooklynrob 9y ago

Glad to see other ideas and operating models being proposed and tried. Most of us live in countries where you need money to pay rent and buy food. Unless you're already wealthy, that means you need to work (trade time for money) or find a way to trade time for an ownership stake that will, you hope, generate income (and in the process that stake becomes itself more valuable). A buddy of mine in a maintainer for a popular Drupal module. A very large, well known, social media platform uses it. One day he got an email from someone - likely someone making $150-$200k- more or less demanding that he review and accept some PRs, as well as do some work himself, for a feature they needed. I told this friend "Ok, did you ask them about their budget to pay you for that?" My friend, more idealistic than me, looked at me like I had 3 heads at first. But he got my question. Nonetheless he decided to "honor" their request and proceeded to work several weeks unexpectedly - for free - so the large for-profit company could stick with its plan and the person requesting this, who is paid, could meet her/his commitment to their boss. His rationale was afraid he'd criticized by the community for not dropping his paid work (!) to do this, since he was the maintainer. He did not want to be a "sell out". I think his decision was insane but such is the pressure to stay true to the ideals. These stories are all to common and similar to what Willian describes. I do work around expanding computer science in schools. I do work around mobilizing tech communities to lend their tech skills to disaster relief. A lot of folks in the "startup tech" and open sources communities (different communities with overlap) do the same -- I'm seeing them show up in big numbers for Irma volunteering right now for example. I view these efforts as akin to open course - they are contributions people make of their (unpaid) time to the greater good. The big tech companies by contrast, many who got their start using open source software and many of whom still power much of their systems with it, could do much much much more on any number of fronts - CS in schools, supporting civic hacking, etc - than they do now. I am sure folks within those companies think they do a lot, but it's not, in my opinion, 5% of what they could do. And when they do get involved in causes they make huge, often unreasonable expectations of unpaid volunteers in order to minimize their donation, whether that's a donation in time or money. (Case in point: last year a large tech company that provides search and email services asked me to organize Hour of Code events at 30-40 schools around NYC at which their staff to volunteer for an hour or two -- planning and logistics work that would have taken me 1-2 days a week for 4-6 weeks at least. They balked at the idea of paying me for my time since this was a "cause" and I should do it for free, though of course the people who would have been working on this project with me from said company would have been paid.) Sound similar? Expect a ton from volunteers to minimize your own investment. I bring this up because the LEAST that people who work on open source projects - at least those who aren't pulling in $300K at one of the big tech companies - and ESPECIALLY maintainers, should expect is to get paid somehow. Seriously, how are people supposed to pay rent? William is right on with his piece. Ideals are great but people need to eat. This emerging duopoly in tech where on one side there is a group of people who are entitled to make massive wealth and demand huge salaries and, on the other, are the open source maintainers, civic hackers, and computer science teachers who are being disloyal to the noble ideals of tech for not wanting to eat cat food is serves the industry poorly. I engage in this hyperbole to make a point -- an industry that was built by many idealists who saw tech as being an engine to democratization and equality is now becoming exaggerated mirror of society large. And if you're one of those making $250k, $300k, $500k at some tech company and demanding people work for free or else you'll accuse them of being sellouts for wanting to pay their rent -- well, look in the mirror before you cast that stone.

jamiesonbecker 9y ago

The author seems to believe contributions of code or contributions of bug reports are a net negative for the project, while the only thing that the project needs to survive is money to pay for the author's time. That is exactly backwards. Nearly all open source projects actually do not need any money at all to grow and prosper. They simply need contributions.. of time. In the form of bug reports and code. Take care of your users, first, and the money will follow.

franciscop 9y ago
They do not need it, but it'd help quite a lot. If I got a bunch of money for doing open souce I could: - Not find random jobs to be able to live, so more time for open source. - Have more energy for open source (so important it has to be a separated point from the previous).
- jamiesonbecker 9y ago
  Cause vs effect. Money is the latter ;)
paulryanrogers 9y ago
This is true for some. Though I'm not sure it always applies. OpenSSL developers needed money to guarantee their time, yet for years it was not much money.

paxys 9y ago

I don't get the jump the author makes from "your time is valuable" (understandable) to "you should have to pay to contribute to open-source projects" (umm, what).

c3534l 9y ago

Maybe write your article after you've done this and tell us how it worked.

jamiesonbecker 9y ago

Here are a few ideas off the top of my head for a purely open source (non-commercial) project: * custom features * prioritization * training * enterprise support * sponsorships * invites to free conferences and swag * t-shirts and swag sales * commercial software integrations/partnerships * brand sponsorship/inclusion on docs/websites/etc. * professionally managed and scalable hosting What did I miss?

Temasik 9y ago
err ICO?

metafunctor 9y ago

I led a small open source project more than a decade ago. Most people involved had more time than money. I'm quite certain that trying to charge an annual fee from members would have killed the entire project before it was even born. Introducing money to the equation changes everything. People start to look at the project as a product they are buying, instead of a cause they are contributing to. I believe the author of this article is deeply misguided. Money is not a way to make open projects work, but it is a good way to kill them.

imtringued 9y ago
As soon as money is involved there is a certain expectation of quality and the work being done properly. If you start depending on that money then you are under the control of your customers and your hobby will quickly degrade into a regular job.
- icebraining 9y ago
  "Degrade"? Getting a job contributing to FOSS projects sounds pretty good to me.
  - lunchables 9y ago
    Depends, turning a hobby into work can be either wonderful or horrible.

zzzeek 9y ago

I shudder to think of the sense of entitlement some of my users would have towards getting me to fix their pet issues that they had to pay to tell me about. This article got a lot right but then charging for community membership is a super bad idea.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

I think what open source needs is some very deliberate price discrimination. Have the license be free to the vast majority of users, and cost money for large corporations that can damn well afford it. Not, like, large amounts of money, just something vaguely close to the all-in cost of one full time developer. Basically, "BSD, unless you're a $1B+ valued company that is not paying our software foundation $10k/mo".

ghthor 9y ago
This is pretty much exactly how I feel about this issue. The contributors you really want are the youth that are young and ambitious, setting a price to contribute would hinder this growth. The contributors you probably don't want are the large corps who will try to push the project based on there income, charge them a lot for the privilege of dealing with their bias.
doozy 9y ago
Many moons ago I developed a moderately successful shareware program. My licensing terms were simple: If you owned the computer where you installed and used it no license was needed, but if someone else owned the machine, you owed me money. It allowed students, hobbyists and freelancers to use the software for free, for any purpose, but companies, institutions and governments had to pay to play. This idea does not seem to translate in an obvious way to software released under an open source license.
- tripa 9y ago
  I love the idea, but can't help wondering: did it actually convert into "sales"?
  - doozy 9y ago
    As I said, it was a moderately successful side business. I know of many cases in which the sale came from someone buying this on behalf of his employer years after he had first used the software as a student. I was never after the nickles and dimes of users, always had my eyes in the deep pockets of major players. 99% of my sales came from multi-billion dollar corporations, universities and government.

morgante 9y ago

The notion of charging people to be part of the community seems like a terrific way to immediately kill any semblance of community. Realistically, the only people who will pay a membership fee are those who can charge it to a company. That means you'll lose all the people hacking on the project in their free time. Personally, I contributed a lot more to open source when I was in college and had more free time than money. There's no way I would have paid to be able to contribute. The solution is really just to have lower expectations on maintainers, both around timely responses/support (want fast support, pay for it) and improvements. They can and should also be more liberal with adding maintainers.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
Are you sure? If what you're saying is true, wouldn't that mean it would be impossible for any business to have a "sense of community" around it?
- gkya 9y ago
  No. The community around a business is their customers who dont contribute directly to the product itself, but to the general economy, knowledge and hype around it. You pay to buy the product and probably wouldnt work on it in behalf of the producer for free on your free time.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  To be part of a community you need to have the same stake as everyone else. Businesses don't have communities, they have customers.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    A community can still be formed amongst your customers, and make your product better. Game mods are a good example.

cavneb 9y ago

As much as I agree with the sentiment behind this post, I disagree with the implementation. The nature of open source code is collaboration. Paying for collaboration seems like it would hinder progress altogether and possibly direct the project into a direction that is not suitable for the poor majority not paying. One more thing that bothers me is that money for maintenance should not come from developers. This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul. Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Code Sponsor (https://codesponsor.io https://codesponsor.io) Code Sponsor is trying to help provide those who are maintaining OSS projects with untethered sponsorship funds. They can go about doing their business on the projects and be making money through sponsor-based ad revenue. This provides them with the incentive and finances to justify continued support on those projects that end up being abandoned when unfunded. I agree that this is a HUGE problem that needs to be addressed. Code Sponsor's approach is to go where money can scale: marketing budgets.

mjibson 9y ago
I've seen these kinds of things and have always been dubious that they are able to pay a full time salary for someone that is even close to what they could make with a normal full time dev job. What's the highest monthly amount your company pays a dev? What's the average and median?
- cavneb 9y ago
  Most of those using Code Sponsor are very new. I can tell you that so far this month (Sept 11) we are payout out $511 USD to developers. Last month we paid one developer over $130. It's not life changing, but it's excellent supplemental income.
vjeux 9y ago
You're likely going to be shut down by GitHub. They have a special section in their ToS that prohibits advertising. https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#k-advertising-on-github https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/#k-... > Short version: We do not generally prohibit use of GitHub for advertising. However, we expect our users to follow certain limitations, so GitHub does not become a spam haven. No one wants that.

lap42 9y ago

It still is fake news.

TCM 9y ago

The social contract of open source is to give away code and time to open source to enhance the community and software. The problem that open source projects really have is that raising and or selling a product is a goal that not every person with a successful project has. If you want to actually have people pay for open source you should look into making a grant style system for people in open source that is targeted to maintainers. Google Summer of Code and Aigrant are good examples of this.

pharrington 9y ago

>> Don't give away your time. >> But do give away your time and money to work on my projects. Come on.

qaq 9y ago

The dude's key project has a total of 4 contributors (working at the same company?) 0 forks and 0 stars. I am sure we should all follow his guidance on the subject.

normalocity 9y ago

I hope the OP doesn't seriously believe that charging for open source work will somehow "fix the diversity problem", rather than magnify it. I'm hoping that was just an off-handed line that didn't get much thought before being added to the post.

geerlingguy 9y ago

I haven't seen any large scale, long-term open source projects succeed with a 'pay to play' process; what usually happens is the original maintainers realize that even with some amount of compensation, they still don't like scratching other people's itch when it comes to their project. And then they realize that the amount of people/companies even willing to pay at all is a tiny fraction of 1% of their potential target market. The better advice is to do what you want, know your limits, consider sharing some maintainance responsibility with another committer or two, and don't ever feel obligated to do anything with other people's issues and PRs. It's nice to do, but if it's interfering with anything else, or taking away valuable time, ignore them or just blanket close them, with a note that it's not something you'd be interested in maintaining. The great thing about open source is someone can fork your code and do what they need. You have no obligation to help them, it's just nice if you can. And if they don't get that, that's not your problem.

Radim 9y ago
It's not your problem only in the sense that it shouldn't be your problem. E.g., in theory. Some people can be quite belligerent about their FOSS entitlement. I've also seen folk publicly bash open source projects just because the license wasn't permissive enough, in their opinion (GPL vs. their darling I'll-bend-over-do-what-you-will-with-me BSD or MIT). It can be hard to maintain poker face with "not my problem"... as hard as the "fuck you, pay me" proposed by the OP. The social pressure to give away your work for free is real, and humans are social animals. Just look at this thread.
slashdotdash 9y ago
Sidekiq by Mike Perham is following the open core, paid subscription for a "pro" version containing extensions. His single founder company has a monthly recurring revenue in excess of $80k, as featured on Indie Hackers[1]. [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gkya 9y ago

About any software stack for about any computer task involves at least some open source code running for you, written by someone on their free time, mostly out of pure altruism. I wonder how many dollars has this person contributed to, say OpenSSL, or to GnuPG, or to the GNU project, or to Linux, or to the Apache Foundation, &c. If you dont want to respond to pull requests or to emails, just ignore them or dont put your code up on a platform that allows these. Publish release tarballs. Nobody's obliged to accept patches. But what this article tells is a merely a shortcut to making someone hard-fork your project. If I have to pay to get my patch upstream, well, I'll just maintain my patchset against upstream instead, if there are no alternative projects.

austincheney 9y ago

What works for me is locking down the application behind a plan. Users can submit whatever feedback, bugs, suggestions, enhancements, and wishlists they want. These contributions are important, but they won't change the roadmap. This only works when an open source application becomes ubiquitous or nearly ubiquitous and the users want it everywhere. Popularity and consumption rates are irrelevant to whether this works. This is because ubiquitous software solves an extremely common problem and takes too much effort to replace with an alternate solution. Ubiquitous software is not necessarily good software. When somebody wants a change in the roadmap they can pay you money to compensate you for the additional time it takes to pivot into another direction. You probably aren't going to make any money like this. Then benefits of this approach is that the maintainers won't burn out. They just work to the plan and occasionally respond to issues. The software has a transparent and published trajectory.

brooklynrob 9y ago
That's the right approach. The question is whether you can keep enforcing that - sticking to the product roadmap and release plan - if/when a large software company becomes a "customer" of your open source project. That's when it requires a tremendous amount of discipline to stick to this. But the right approach.

mperham 9y ago

Yep, that agrees with one rule I've found very helpful in my Sidekiq project: All free/OSS work/discussion is done in public. Never private email, never Slack. Always open an issue. Security issues are the exception here. No one should get to monopolize my time without paying.

throw2016 9y ago

The open source community defies definition. It's a diverse multitude of people with different motivations. This will ensure its survival even under challenging circumstances. There is a risk, maybe significant, of the generational hand off. A lot of folks who built this rich legacy were academics and pioneers motivated by ideology. Software has moved on from early pioneers motivated by liberty and freedom issues to being subsumed by establishment interests. At the moment there is also widespread cynicism about ideology in general and a lot of open source is increasingly developed by corporate interests. This could have repercussions for the 'nature' of open source as institutions and a connection to individuals beyond their identity as 'users' has not really been built.

gandutraveler 9y ago

Alt currency is an option for open source project. I think GitCoin is on these lines

kalat 9y ago

The author has many good points however it's either his writing style (thinking), ideas, or conceptual mental model where he is missing the point of open source. It is actually a bit confusing. His title doesn't correlate with what he writes later which contains several somewhat vacuous statements. People love to work together and produce something for the common good, humanity wouldn't be here without that good feeling and collaborative spirit. open source comes from people's time, time has led us to a point where open source is everywhere. Not all people are greedy, every coder owes another coder their livelihood. I think this draft just needed like 100 more edits. Also, "Many" does not equal 3.

justinjlynn 9y ago

"Do you want to get forks? Because this is how you get forks."

hyperpallium 9y ago

> annual fee for community membership Sleepycat did this https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepycat_Software and seemed to work out for them. But if opensource truly is infrastructure, why not nationalize it? i.e. government pays maintainers a subsistence wage (provided they meet some scale crtieria, perhaps similar to automatic royalties for pop-song airplay). Users (i.e. big corporations) would pay a levy to fund this. Of course, it could be set up privately, independent of a government.

frozenport 9y ago
Well some OSS is developed by universities and research institutes, which is a form of indirect nationalization.
- jondubois 9y ago
  That would make it unfair for indie developers... Then they'd be competing with institutions. This would actually kill open source as we know it.
  - Radim 9y ago
    You misunderstood -- the parent said this is already the case. A lot of FOSS is already heavily subsidized, from grants and tax money. No "would"s needed. And yes, it definitely makes it harder for indie developers to "compete", because these institutions run on infinite slave labour (students and postdocs). The only way to compete is on quality, which brings us back to the original "who pays for quality time" premise.
hasenj 9y ago
Because who decides what projects deserve how much? Who decides that a project is even worthy to receive anything at all? If there was such a government program, what would prevent masses of inexperienced developers to start pointless projects, open source them, and file a claim to receive money from the government?

ak39 9y ago

IMHO, the fundamental problem of these burnout open source projects is that they are "marketed" (deliberately or otherwise) to non-decision makers and people who don't control the budgets in companies that need their software. I.e. The lowly developers of some complex hive of a deeply hierarchical group of code monkeys in a for-profit org that's typically not in technology. Red Hat, Google, Microsoft and Oracle all know the value of open source because their big wigs are keenly aware of its value.

jondubois 9y ago

I run a relatively popular open source project. I think that there are some strange forces in the tech industry which make it nearly impossible to get big companies to use your project. Maybe it's not right but I really feel like not being based in Silicon Valley has something to do with it... Related to branding, social networks, bloggers. Outside of SV, it's very tough. Only small startups were using my project initially; literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of small startups but not one large corporation (that I knew about). It's been 4 years though and the good thing is that now several of the startups that were using my project got really big and are growing fast. Still no big corporations but it doesn't matter anymore. Me and one other contributor are now able to make money offering consulting to those startups which grew. Also we have a sponsorship deal now.

oelmekki 9y ago

I've considered opensourcing some business products and researched the various models for doing so. I found three main ones: * pay for support, like ardour * pay for additional features, like gitlab on-premise * pay for hosting, like piwik, or gitlab.com I'm not a big fan of paying for support, like mentioned in the article, because support is not just something you give to your users, it's also useful for you: if someone spotted a big bug (possibly a security issue) but is not paying for support, don't you want to know it? Asking to pay for support is also creating a lot of tension, because people will ask for help anyway, and you have to tell them they won't receive it if they don't pay. Paying for features is an obvious and efficient way. But I also like the idea that someone in a country where what I consider a decent price is actually a big part of the income can still manage to use my product to its full extent, provided they make an effort to use it. That's why pay for hosting seems the best way to me for opensource products : everybody can use the product to the full extent, no issue is ignored, people pay for comfort. Obviously, this works for the products I mentioned because they are ... products, and not libs. But I think it can apply to libs as well: * pay for support : the idea mentioned in the article * pay for features : this is something Sidekiq is doing, would love to know how it goes for them * pay for hosting : this one is tricky, maybe offer to help implementing the lib in customer product? Hardly scalable, though I would say that for libraries, paying for additional features is what makes the most of sense for me.

madprops 9y ago

Maybe not lock non-paying users, but give paying users a bigger priority and the ability to promote non-paying user's requests if they're good.

cdaven 9y ago

I just stumbled on a note from the abandoned project [History.js](https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/ https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/): > Despite History.js being one of the most popular JavaScript libraries there is, and has been used by even multi-million-user companies in its time - the reality of economy and company practices seems to be that companies prefer to fork their own internal versions and fix locally with their own devs rather than fund open-source maintainers what they would pay their own devs to make things better for everyone, including themselves, which would be cheaper - but no, that would require too many tiers of company approval that don't understand the need. > As such, if you are an open-source developer, I'd recommend just working on open-source projects that are paid for by your own consulting work or your own company (e.g. every successful open-source project). As otherwise, when they become popular, you better hope they are easily maintainable and testable, otherwise the cost of maintenance is higher than the free time of the maintainers.

arisAlexis 9y ago

Would be nice if projects were organized with the Aragon project