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The one thing I would never do is advocate internally for 'supporting' or 'sponsoring' OSS. Managers will just hear 'we should pay for something we already get
by alangibson 6y ago
The one thing I would never do is advocate internally for 'supporting' or 'sponsoring' OSS. Managers will just hear 'we should pay for something we already get free'.
The best way to sell the idea is to make it transactional. 'We need feature X. It'll cost us N to pay the core devs for it, or we can do it in house for N^2.'
Then put together a spreadsheet of those examples and send them up the food chain come budget time.
- detaro 6y agoAlso why it makes sense for maintainers that have the capacity to offer some token "premium support" or something along those lines. "Just give this person money because we like them" is not in the vocabulary for people approving/checking expenses, "Give this person money in exchange for a service we say we want" is totally normal. Even if the "premium" is just something relatively minor like a guaranteed response (not solution) within X working days or private submission of bug reports (and thus not having to worry about redacting logs etc posted in public).
- alangibson 6y agoI think recurring support contracts or subscriptions are actually very problematic in the case because the gains will naturally go the projects highest up the dependency tree because they are the most visible. However, if we payed for change requests in individual projects there would be the possibility for 1. money to trickle down from well sponsored projects to their dependencies when those higher level projects need changes 2. teams to spread money around by directly requesting changes to more obscure projects they depend on.
- detaro 6y agoGood point, hadn't thought about the trickle-down aspect.