3 ms·

The point is, like with almost all open source work, the funding has to come from somewhere. If I'm an open source software maintainer, and I make a project th

The point is, like with almost all open source work, the funding has to come from somewhere. If I'm an open source software maintainer, and I make a project that is used by 3,000 companies, helping them generate $Xmm in revenue... how much of that money ever trickles back to the maintainers? The typical answer is $0. Some maintainers are lucky to have some form of corporate sponsorship, others spend many cycles on some form of marketing to build up some kind of financial support (tip jars, Patreon, etc), but the pricing for Travis is astronomical for non-enterprise usage. But as I said in the post, I'm grateful for what I got for the 8 years I had it. And I'm happy that GitHub/MS is now running with that gauntlet.

mtlynch 6y ago
Reading your post, I realized that I'm a company (albeit a very small one) that profits from your work and doesn't pay you.[0] I use your Nginx role in my open source product[1], and I use several of your other roles in my development environment. I just signed up as a monthly sponsor. Thanks for your fantastic contributions to the Ansible ecosystem and to open source in general. Apologies for my past freeloading! [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/ https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/ [1] https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c18aedc46415785853848ddf6de9d372ed490/meta/main.yml#L36L82 https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c1...
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Ha, thanks so much! I'm trying (and having at least moderate success) to make it so I can devote half my weekly 'work' hours to pure OSS work, and the sponsorships are getting me close!
renewiltord 6y ago
Interesting. You put in work, Travis CI puts in work, but the surplus accrues to a third-party. Hmm. Unfortunate. It's possible that most OSS won't have CI servers in the future. I don't imagine that's the end of the world but it does suck.
tasogare 6y ago
Then your are in a position similar to Travis until now: offering a lot of value for free. You need to find a way to monetize the project(s). Only one of all those companies need to give 100 bucks a month to pay for the CI + extras.

mtlynch 6y ago

Reading your post, I realized that I'm a company (albeit a very small one) that profits from your work and doesn't pay you.[0] I use your Nginx role in my open source product[1], and I use several of your other roles in my development environment. I just signed up as a monthly sponsor. Thanks for your fantastic contributions to the Ansible ecosystem and to open source in general. Apologies for my past freeloading! [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/ https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/ [1] https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c18aedc46415785853848ddf6de9d372ed490/meta/main.yml#L36L82 https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c1...

geerlingguy 6y ago
Ha, thanks so much! I'm trying (and having at least moderate success) to make it so I can devote half my weekly 'work' hours to pure OSS work, and the sponsorships are getting me close!

renewiltord 6y ago

Interesting. You put in work, Travis CI puts in work, but the surplus accrues to a third-party. Hmm. Unfortunate. It's possible that most OSS won't have CI servers in the future. I don't imagine that's the end of the world but it does suck.

tasogare 6y ago

Then your are in a position similar to Travis until now: offering a lot of value for free. You need to find a way to monetize the project(s). Only one of all those companies need to give 100 bucks a month to pay for the CI + extras.