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Reading this makes me wonder, though... These maintainers are often well-paid professionals. If their lifes outside of their day jobs put the pressure to limit

Reading this makes me wonder, though... These maintainers are often well-paid professionals. If their lifes outside of their day jobs put the pressure to limit the open source work, what is a little money going to do? If money was their main motivator to compromise their personal life, would they not already have gotten a second job (like a part-time consulting gig), maybe instead of the whole open source thing? Makes me feel as if this article misunderstands the motivations of maintainers.

sundvor 9y ago
Not every developer is a highly paid superstar in Silicon Valley. When needing to juggle family / life, I'm sure this proposed model would make it a lot easier to explain to the wife/husband/partner why they need to stay up a bit longer at night to work on their (previously) non-paying projects.
- xfer 9y ago
  You need to show income to justify your hobby?
  - jancsika 9y ago
    As a potential contributor I need to know whether there's a professional process or a guy "playing with trains" on the other end of the wire. The problem is that the FLOSS ecosystem doesn't give you an easy way to tell. So if I misjudge and hit a wall of dysfunction, the general response would be, "Well, the maintainer just wants to play with trains. Leave them alone and fork the project if you want it to be some other way." At least with paying to contribute, it would force the FLOSS ecosystem general response to be, "Those maintainers are just playing with trains, but they're taking money as if they are professional engineers. That's bad." Of course that's worst case scenario-- best case is that they really are engineers and I'm funding their development. Either way, it's potentially better than the status quo which is that you have no idea until you submit the patch.
- sverhagen 9y ago
  I'm not saying that's what they are, but somehow I got the impression that maintainers of projects that are good enough to attract payments for pulls, would have marketable skills, and be ahead, regardless of the market they live in.

sundvor 9y ago

Not every developer is a highly paid superstar in Silicon Valley. When needing to juggle family / life, I'm sure this proposed model would make it a lot easier to explain to the wife/husband/partner why they need to stay up a bit longer at night to work on their (previously) non-paying projects.

xfer 9y ago
You need to show income to justify your hobby?
- jancsika 9y ago
  As a potential contributor I need to know whether there's a professional process or a guy "playing with trains" on the other end of the wire. The problem is that the FLOSS ecosystem doesn't give you an easy way to tell. So if I misjudge and hit a wall of dysfunction, the general response would be, "Well, the maintainer just wants to play with trains. Leave them alone and fork the project if you want it to be some other way." At least with paying to contribute, it would force the FLOSS ecosystem general response to be, "Those maintainers are just playing with trains, but they're taking money as if they are professional engineers. That's bad." Of course that's worst case scenario-- best case is that they really are engineers and I'm funding their development. Either way, it's potentially better than the status quo which is that you have no idea until you submit the patch.
sverhagen 9y ago
I'm not saying that's what they are, but somehow I got the impression that maintainers of projects that are good enough to attract payments for pulls, would have marketable skills, and be ahead, regardless of the market they live in.