14 ms·

The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

241 points by BerislavLopac 6y ago

pmoriarty 6y ago
How much better the world would be if open source was fully funded by some of those tech billionaires whose fortunes were made by sitting on its shoulders.
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  And the news outlets that give them lip service.
  - DesiLurker 6y ago
    or rather the organization(s) benefiting from OSS and the ad-revenue that formerly used to belong to the news organizations.
- techwizrd 6y ago
  I agree. I would love to see more things like Summer of Code or grants towards open-source software. Is there a sustainable way to fund open-source work apart from corporate benefactors who "own" the software?
  - pabs3 6y ago
    There are lots of internship, grants, bounty and patronage programs for open source, check out the FOSSjobs resources wiki page: https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources
  - marcandre 6y ago
    The three main players imo are Github Sponsors, Tidelift and Open Collective.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- noahtallen 6y ago
  That’d be awesome! Should note that a lot of popular software is (at least in part) paid for by the large companies. For example, Google probably has several engineers working on chromium. Facebook has several working on React and React Native. Apple has several working on Swift. Automattic (where I work), has several working on WordPress.
- Kinrany 6y ago
  How much would it cost to fund, say, all Github projects with 1000 stars or more?
  - me_again 6y ago
    Not much... until you get rings of fake accounts going around giving stars to each others' projects. Think Hacktoberfest but 1000x worse
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  I would prefer crowd funding because with corporate sponsorships often come subtle obligations for corporate friendly adaptations and sometimes weird expectations. https://www.business.com/articles/john-rampton-open-source-software-risks/ https://www.business.com/articles/john-rampton-open-source-s... While there is some truth to it and describes what you should be careful about, it fundamentally doesn't understand the different motivations behind open source. Creators know that individual users can also create horrible expectations not restricted to software development, but you aren't suddenly half dependent on a company in which there is probably one guy calling the shots about your project and maybe it is better not to marry him.
- okareaman 6y ago
  I said essentially the same thing 10 days ago and this is what Walter Bright, creator of D, said: "There are a number of generous corporations and individuals helping us out in various ways, including cash contributions to the D Foundation." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25040397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25040397
mraza007 6y ago
I have huge respect for open source developers They have made significant contributions
compycom 6y ago
Open source has become yet another way for big tech companies to exploit laborers. If you are an independent developer working on an open source project without a copy-left license, you are a fool.
- dasil003 6y ago
  Even with copyleft it's now a situation where AWS will do a cleanroom implementation of your API and neuter your market.
  - dunce2020 6y ago
    Oracle might "fix" that?
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  The language is a bit too extreme in my view. You release OSS knowing that anyone can come and pick it up. Even if they make a dime off your sweat. Pick your license, fine, but there's no reason for the devs to get upset about it because there's no lack of information out there. That being said, companies should kick down some love to the OSS projects they use. Especially big companies for which it's just a charitable write-off anyway.
  - cageface 6y ago
    At every company I've worked I've lobbied for us to make donations to open source projects we depend on. Every single time it quietly dies in legal. There must be a better way.
    - iRomain 6y ago
      OSS could use similar licensing as some SaaS where it's free for personal use or commercial use up to certain limits and then you have to pay. This would ensure developers can use it freely but at some time a company would have to either pay it or ditch it. However I see two issues with this model: - the community will shit on it like it's not real OSS - big companies will start banning the use of such licenses The other alternatives many are doing are paid support, priority issues for sponsors, paid for issues, etc.
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
I can’t read the article. I’m very interested, but Wired has become such a cesspool of popovers, pop ups, advertising, tracking, and general dark patterns that I just can’t go there... even with an ad blocker the experience is annoying and sucky. What happened to them?
- generalizations 6y ago
  Only thing I saw with uBlock Origin was the thing about 'running out of free articles'.
- fabianhjr 6y ago
  I don't know what ad blocker you are using but uBlock Origin did got everything.
- Groxx 6y ago
  The cure for insufficient ad blocking is more ad blocking. ! row for wired ##.itemlist .athing:has(.sitestr:contains(wired.com)) ! the following comments/etc links ##.itemlist .athing:has(.sitestr:contains(wired.com)) + tr ! the following spacer ##.itemlist .athing:has(.sitestr:contains(wired.com)) + tr + tr.spacer
- hinkley 6y ago
  I’m using reader mode more and more, but at some point I’ll be setting up a proxy server.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    How will a proxy server block anything?
    - atdt 6y ago
      You can rewrite responses from upstream servers and omit the parts you don't like, like ads.
- jmnicolas 6y ago
_greim_ 6y ago
It isn't so much that companies are unfairly using others' work. It's that if you're going to use an open source tool in your business's codebase, you'll inevitably need support, upgrades, and bug-fixes, which translates into you putting pressure on the maintainers to do more work. By all means, use those people's previous work to put something amazing out into the world quickly. However, when you inevitably need help, be prepared to either: 1) Have people on staff ready and capable of contributing to the project in non-trivial ways; 2) be willing to either hire or pay the maintainer(s) market value for their time, just like with actual employees.
- floren 6y ago
  I go for #1 pretty frequently but my biggest frustration with trying to contribute to open source projects is: the repository whose owner pops in every 6 months or so to merge a PR or two, then disappears. Just enough activity to hope that they might eventually merge my outstanding PRs, not quite dead enough for me to just fork and move on with my life...
  - _greim_ 6y ago
    Merging a PR is work too, assuming the maintainer cares enough to review the code. Why not sponsor the project by placing a $300 bounty on the PR merge? As an OSS maintainer who's been on the other side of this in the past, that would have been quite a motivation for me.
    - rectang 6y ago
      Most pull requests are crap. They are drive-by fixes that do not take maintainability into account, because they only solve the problem that the PR submitter needs solved right now. Transforming a sloppy drive-by patch into something which doesn't pile on technical debt is hard. For all but the most brilliantly architected projects, it requires someone who can keep the entire project in their head — a core maintainer. The expectation that unlimited PRs will be reviewed for free is corrosive and contributes to the core-maintainer burnout described in the article.
generalizations 6y ago
> “I couldn't grab dinner with someone after work,” he says, because he felt like he'd be letting users down: I shouldn't be out enjoying myself. I should be working on Bootstrap! That's an attitude problem on the part of the developer. He shouldn't feel guilty for providing insufficient free support.
- daenz 6y ago
  It's easy for you to say "he shouldn't feel that way." But it's a different thing to be in the position yourself of having hundreds of thousands of people depending solely on you to fix a problem (even to just review and merge). The pressure is real, and there aren't a lot of healthy outlets to relieve that pressure.
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    I think the only thing you can do is to be up front about setting expectations very clearly and prominently in the project. If it is a large project relied upon by a lot of people or businesses, that's when you start charging for support when the issue is mission critical, or you encourage others to do so and provide a link to their support business. The demand for free skilled labor is huge, and always greater than the supply.
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    > But it's a different thing to be in the position yourself of having hundreds of thousands of people depending solely on you to fix a problem (even to just review and merge). They chose to depend solely on me. They, and not I, are responsible for their decisions.
kayson 6y ago
This is really evident even in small projects. Many (most?) open source developers have full time day jobs often in software development. Adding the responsibilities of not only the software but also project management and customer service can be a huge burden. I think it's the combination that leads to a lot of dead projects. Then of course you have the other end of things with projects like Docker or Ansible that have large teams and often corporate funding but just can't keep up with the sheer firehose of issues and PRs.
sien 6y ago
For anyone interested in this topic Nadia Eghbal previously wrote a book called 'Roads and Bridges' that is freely available on the internet. It's well worth a read: https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...
floren 6y ago
> While you're surfing the web, you ought to thank Jacob Thornton for making it so pretty. He's a programmer who, along with web designer Mark Otto, created Bootstrap, free software that the pros use to make their sites look spiffy. If you've ever noticed that a lot of websites have the same big chunky buttons, or the same clean forms, that's likely because an estimated one-fifth of all websites on the planet use Bootstrap. I don't blame Jacob, but man the WWW would probably be better without Bootstrap. Again, it's not Jacob's fault, he made a product that was so good everyone wanted to use it... so everyone used it. It feels like the Demolition Man future, where Taco Bell is the only survivor of the Franchise Wars.
- joshu 6y ago
  is it really necessary to complain about this?
- shp0ngle 6y ago
  I very much disagree. Bootstrap is good and makes making websites quickly easy. The ideas of Bootstrap now live in Tailwind and other CSS frameworks. I haven’t used Bootstrap proper when I switched to Tailwind in new projects though.
  - ehwhyreally 6y ago
    Bootstrap is nothing like tailwind. nor their ideals. You look at 2 websites made in tailwind and they look completely different. Look at bootstrap and its the same bloody site.
    - shp0ngle 6y ago
      The ideals are same - the CSS classes are not named by the semantic content, but by what they actually do. Tailwind just take it more to the extremes.
- dageshi 6y ago
  If bootstrap didn't become the de facto standard, something else would've, nobody wants to design every site in the world from scratch.
macawfish 6y ago
Open source hackers suffer the same fate as other creatives. What's the software industry analog of gigging at some shit bars that rake in money getting people who like your music drunk but not paying you all while working a day job so you can do what you love? Really it's this whole stupid capitalist setup. It's not just open source programmers and artists who suffer this. It's everyone. Have you ever met a single parent who works full time just so they can be a parent full time? Which, by the way, is probably the most important work someone can do, parenting.
- nullsense 6y ago
  Yeah it's a bummer capitalism just hasn't really worked out...
- Shared404 6y ago
  > Open source hackers suffer the same fate as other creatives. What's the software industry analog of gigging at some shit bars that rake in money getting people who like your music drunk but not paying you all while working a day job so you can do what you love? Agree. > Really it's this whole stupid capitalist setup. Disagree. Capitalism is a viable prospect, perhaps the only one that won't be bastardized by randoms at some level of economic activity. However, it should be kept in check in some form. I like the idea of UBI personally, but there are other alternatives. In addition to UBI, which would give labourers more bargaining power with employers, some regulation is needed (Environmental, GDPR), but should be written with input from subject matter experts. I'm open to having my mind changed on any of the above, but this is the conclusion I've drawn at this point.
Diesel555 6y ago
I'm curious about when open source coders transition from enjoying sharing their product to feeling obligated to support their product to wanting some form of monetization when supporting their product becomes a job. Is it normally companies causing this or unrealistic expectations? I know myself, when I put something in open source I feel a responsibility to maintain it for no reasonable reason.
- koolba 6y ago
  It usually happens after a series of poor life choices lead the developer down a path of financial destitution. They spend their personal time curating PRs to fix typos or expand their CI matrix to support N x M combinations of runtimes and cpu archs. Then one day they lose their day job, realize they have no savings, and that none of their FOSS contributions will help pay their rent.
allenu 6y ago
There's a great Strange Loop talk by Evan Czaplicki (of Elm fame) where he alludes to the challenges of maintaining an open source project.[1] In it he describes how feedback often starts as an innocuous "Why don't you just...?" where the person making the request doesn't have the full understanding of the system as a whole and may see their request as a simple one-off that can be done quickly. To answer them fully, the open source maintainer has to respond with a long explanation of why their suggestion isn't an option. Or, maybe they don't respond and now the original poster doesn't feel the community is supporting them. This asymmetry can lead to poor communication in the community. I've been working on an app and was reading about the pros and cons of going freemium vs. pay up-front. I was surprised to read that people suggested the pay model is better for indie devs because with free, you'll have more users, but you'll also get worse feedback from the free users. Maybe there's a correlation between seeing something as free and feeling that the work behind it is trivial? [1] https://youtu.be/o_4EX4dPppA https://youtu.be/o_4EX4dPppA
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Interestingly, that comment was made by an HN user who laments that Elm was mocking them and is one contributing factor to them leaving Elm, due to having such a dictatorial style where Evan thought he knew better than the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22824899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22824899
- noncoml 6y ago
  This is not unique to open source. If you are writing any kind of code that somebody else is using at your work you get this questions ALL the time.
andrew_ 6y ago
https://liberamanifesto.com/ https://liberamanifesto.com/
gonational 6y ago
If you’re part of some group (e.g., OSS contributors), and a mass media propaganda company, like Wired, which is run by a Vanderbilt, comes along and starts saying things about “this poor lil feller is being abused”, etc., you should be extremely worried; they work for somebody who’s coming after you. The first step in taking advantage of a group else is convincing that group that they’re victims.
- throwaway1723 6y ago
  Well my friend, the soil where you're trying to plant your sensible words is just totally barren. Here on HN you'll most probably face feedback only from those who work exactly for somebody who's coming after some group as you say, or zealous dupes who follow the former for free. And that feedback will never be positive. When there are only vipers and toads in a barrell, warm-blooded creatures are few and go by throwaway accounts :)
- throwaway1723 6y ago
  Well my friend, the soil where you're trying to plant your sensible words is just totally barren. Here on HN you'll most probably face feedback only from those who work exactly for somebody who's coming after some group as you say, or zealous dupes who follow the former for free. And that feedback will never be positive!
  - gonational 6y ago
    Well I at least found one sensible person! Thank you for your reply.
    - throwaway1723 6y ago
      Fortunately yet sadly there are many more remaining silent or ignoring HN altogether... Thank you for commenting against the grain too!
rectang 6y ago
I predict that the problem of overburdened open source maintainers will be solved by adjusting expectations, rather than new funding or new business models. Open Source maintainers owe nothing to non-paying users. The norm should be that only those that pay get support.
- pabs3 6y ago
  Requiring payment for support would mean that poor people who switch to open source are going to have a bad time. A better option would be to create a community of users and contributors that are willing to support each other and improve the project at the same time. The new GitHub discussions feature can help facilitate creating such a community for those projects that use GitHub.
  - rectang 6y ago
    How do you differentiate leechers from contributors? "Github discussions" looks to me like Github discovering user forums. It's not an innovation — user forums have been around for decades. The expectation that maintainers will provide unlimited support to poor people illustrates exactly why maintainers burn out. Maintainers don't owe poor people anything, any more than they owe corporations anything.
    - pabs3 6y ago
      The "leechers" are part of the ecosystem of the project too, putting down people who haven't yet started to contribute is a sure way to sour your project in their minds and prevent them from ever trying to answer other folks support questions, let alone contribute code to the project. So don't try to divide the community like that, instead treat everyone as future contributors and create spaces for them to start contributing in their preferred way, one step at a time.
      - rectang 6y ago
        What has become clear over time is that most users don't contribute meaningfully to open source projects. The burden falls almost entirely on core maintainers. From the article: > But, with the exception of some big projects—like Linux—the labor involved isn't particularly communal. Most are like Bootstrap, where the majority of the work landed on a tiny team of people. Offering unlimited free support is guaranteeing that either the project will fail when the core maintainers burn out, or that the core maintainers will live in perpetual misery.
ozborn 6y ago
Would love if governments could better appreciate the value of open source and free software. Some sort of granting process that could determine which projects are worth funding on a sustainable basis would be wonderful. It's a great opportunity for access to technical expertise, avoiding vendor lock in, lowering costs and international collaboration if done right. Done poorly, it's throwing good money down a drain - but I would think the ROI would at least be as good as scientific grants (for which it is usually hard to get any type of sustainable infrastructure funding).
- jabl 6y ago
  I love science, but man, the way science is funded is a damn trainwreck.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
Rather than developing UBI, we should be working on figuring out how to solve this issue. Maybe ask ourselves how best to pay people for the work they have already done on Open Source. That would be a better way to create a future in which people do what they love and are good at. That would reward the right things. That would make people feel good about the social justice angle. It might even improve our code. "Random acts of open source compensation." (comment has been edited for clarity)
networkimprov 6y ago
The article fails to mention new companies that are trying to solve this problem, e.g. https://tidelift.com https://tidelift.com
- Radim 6y ago
  Last I checked with Tidelift, they target primarily web OSS that's truly ubiquitous – think vue.js, Angular, Python requests and similar. Their $$$ reward is based on installation numbers across Tidelift's subscriber base, not value added or cost saved. Definitely not a model that would help most (read: more niche) open source developers. For example, I maintain a Python library with 10k+ Github stars and millions of monthly downloads, and was told by Tidelift it's not even on their radar. Zero reward in Tidelift's reward system. Which is not to say they're not helpful to others, they might be. Just to manage your expectations vs their marketing.
PradeetPatel 6y ago
As someone who grew up in India, contributing to OSS has always been the best way for junior developers to get noticed by recruiters. Due to the sheer number of applicants, recruiters are only interested in the ones that are truly passionate about coding - exemplified by OSS involvement or side projects. I'm not saying that it is right, but it does give the much needed exposure to junior talents in order to foster their growth.
- eesmith 6y ago
  "passion" often seems like code for "will work more for free". From a business standpoint, it makes sense as it shifts risk to the potential employee. But like having unpaid interns, it biases the employment pool toward those who have extra money and time to work for no income.
  - jabl 6y ago
    This so much. I can understand the motivation from the perspective of recruiters, but I'd really hate to see STEM fields be infiltrated with the filth of unpaid internships that is unfortunately so common in many other fields.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I’ll be honest: I do appreciate devs who love programming so much they sometimes do it for free. I still pay them (inc interns), but everyone I’ve known who was great at programming did some amount of it for free somewhere along the way (because they can and they like it), whether it was open source, programming contests, or just checking out some new tech on their own and never shipping the code anywhere. Even though every line you’ll ever write for me will be paid, the fact that you did something worthwhile for free is a positive signal to me. You don’t have to show that specific signal to be hired, but if you do, I’m not going to ignore it.
    - eesmith 6y ago
      If you see that something did some programming for free, is it because they love programming? Or they love the increased chances of getting a job/money? What do you think the ratio is? The recent Hacktoberfest/ pull-request/ T-shirt fiasco (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052 among many) shows that signal is definitely gameable.
YousefED 6y ago
What about automatically "crowdfunding" open source projects? Idea: would it be possible to design a system where we distribute a membership fee to open source projects used? Let's say NPM would cost $10 / month per end-user. This would be redistributed to all the packages you use. (Or, similarly, cumulative membership fees will be distributed according to # of projects that re-use your package). Have there been experiments like this? Any thoughts?
- jessedhillon 6y ago
  That idea needs a bit more baking IMO. It seems obvious to me that the immediate consequence of this would be that we'd be rewarding trivial but widely used packages like left-pad[0], and thereby incentivizing the creation of a hundred clones of every trivial feature. 0: https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad
- mrpotato 6y ago
  I think that would have a negative effect on individuals and open source developers. Have a dependency on npm, 10$/m. Have a dependency on Nuget, 10$/m.. I'm at 20$/m for my project which may or may not be a commercial product. With this model, the fees could increase with each distribution platform your project depends on.
noncoml 6y ago
There are TONS of people out there writing code and opening the source. These people don’t do it for company sponsorship or money or to improve their CV. They do it purely for the pleasure of someone else using it. It’s just that only a very tiny fraction becomes popular. That’s when the problems start. Some may see their software being adopted by millions and may start feeling envious of those that make money using it. Maybe unpopular opinion here, but I don’t see why they should get sponsored by a company. They made the software open source for a reason, and others used it based on the terms it was licensed. No foul play here. On the other hand it’s well within their rights to ask for money to continue supporting it and developing it. Just because they made something open source in the past doesn’t mean they signed up to be forced to support and develop it indefinitely.
- didibus 6y ago
  I agree with you. If you chose a license you regret, its kind of just your fault. Why would you pick MIT license for example, if you didn't want to allow free commercial use? If you "make it free" and choose a very relaxed and unencumbered license to encourage adoption of your project and make it more popular. And then you do get popular, and start thinking people should now pay you, it seems like a bit of a lure. There are often alternative open source or closed source solutions. Yours might have reached this popularity not because it is the best, but because it is a good one that is also free and unencumbered. And now like you said, you're free to change the license for all new code to something else, make it paid, closed, or any other restrictions. And that's fine. That said, this is about licenses and having companies use your stuff and renumeration and all that. I think a bigger issue, one that is justified, is the toxic interactions you might need to deal with if your open source project becomes big. People can act really entitled, when you don't owe them nothing. And I find it kind of weird how people will actually act more entitled to something that is offered to them free and open source, than if it was something they'd been paying for. Which kind of baffles me why that is.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > If you chose a license you regret, its kind of just your fault Agree. The only possible exception I can think of it if you make major contributions to an existing project, and of course use the licence they chose. Even then though, you've voluntarily agreed to those licence terms.
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throwaway1723 6y ago
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
pelasaco 6y ago
Being Open Source developer myself, i know the feeling/stress of a community. However, being able to work on my working time almost exclusively on my projects, helped me to have a normal life after the working hours. So I guess the problem is not being able to sell your idea to your company internally. I'm sure Twitter would support this idea.
norwegianwhale 6y ago
The funniest part is when there are accusations upon them for discriminating / not hiring women. Not only they do a selfish contribution to society for next to nothing in return, they also need to share whatever credit they earn with some self-appointed victims of sexual discrimination.
marvinblum 6y ago
It's important to set boundaries early on. I'm working on this analytics library [0] and this game server management app [1] at the moment. I started the first one with my own website in mind and as it gained some popularity, decided to try to make a commercial product out of it. Instead of making everything open-source, I develop the platform closed-source and keep the core (this library) open-source, but set limits to what can be contributed and under what conditions. This isn't clearly communicated in the repo yet, but it helps to stay sane. For the game server project, which is older, I see a lot of feature requests and small contributions, because people actually depend on it. But boy, the support requests drive my crazy sometimes. Even if you only have a hand full of users, they can get demanding some days, when a new DLC for the game is released for example. I really want to support it and keep it up-to-date, but I sometimes have to ignore them. This week someone asked me if I could support them setting it up as they had trouble making it work for their drivers. Turns out they're a professional e-sports team. As soon as I asked for compensation, they didn't write back (after sending them 4-5 emails, taking half an hour to write). This is when it gets frustrating... I don't know how to fix the issue, but we, as open-source maintainers, should value our time. [0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch [1] https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb
- b0rsuk 6y ago
  Have you tried a FAQ?
  - marvinblum 6y ago
    Not yet, but I will add something along the lines.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
Is it actually feasible to just say "no contributions or support requests will be accepted for this project"? Or to have an hourly rate for support requests right up front? ("if you want me to fix this project for your use-case then I will charge you $100/hour to do that") And in the case of abusers, can you add a list of specific indivuals to the licence that are specifically disallowed from using the code in any form for any purpose? e.g. ("anyone is allowed to use this project for any purpose, except the people listed in the shit_list.txt file, who are not allowed to use any of this code for any purpose at any time").
- saagarjha 6y ago
  As someone who works on open source, sure, you can totally do that–but for me, personally, those aren't really things I would want to do. The first locks out people who want to contribute, which kind of removes half the reason you'd open source something in the first place, the second feels like you could leave in bugs and ransom them for support money, and in the third you are introducing your own subjectivity in ways which frequently do not go as planned. I totally understand why people would do all three, but for me personally they just aren't for me, and I hope you can understand why some people would be turned off by such projects.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Thanks, that's useful. I guess I'm happy to open-source my code for other people to use, but I'm not at all interested in acquiring an unpaid job as "maintainer" (and I really don't care how many other people use my code).
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  You can always choose to just say those things, but if it's worth doing, the language and approach should make it more likely that the general community response will be better for you than saying nothing at all. To me that means being gentle and professional about wording and boundaries, (which is easier provided one is not absolutely shattered by their work experience). Examples: - We are currently backlogged and may be unable to accept contributions or support requests. - Need support? We may be able to help. Contact us for bespoke personal or commercial support and development rates. (Packages start at...) - We are evaluating license revocations for those who violate our clearly-written and frequently reviewed community standards, which you can review at this link. Support abuse situations are often best dealt with situation-by-situation, though, and unfortunately I didn't see a specific, real-world example in the article. Sometimes just the possibility of someone taking advantage is a turn-off for a good project owner, so I would add that at the very least it's a good idea to have a general communication plan & principles in place before that happens.
iamericfletcher 6y ago
Nadia's book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, which is mentioned in the article, inspired me to become a GitHub sponsor. Nothing big, just $10 per month to one of my favorite open source developers. If you can afford it, I recommend others' do the same.
kodah 6y ago
These problems are complex. If companies start putting together tiger teams to support open source then they never really get to everything they use, just what open source projects are most important to them. When companies fork/adopt/insert themselves we have concerns over corporate influencing, sustainability, and independence. When companies just throw willy nilly money at big hunking shells like the CNCF it gates projects into this very corporatized world that is quite distinct from open source culture, and again damages open source. This just touches on the contribution model, this doesn't even touch on the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of license violations (if you're behind on updates who has time to go enforce licenses?) It mentions but doesn't touch on corporatization or undue influence. I'm not sure I know what to do but it's a problem worth solving.
- mfer 6y ago
  > When companies just throw willy nilly money at big hunking shells like the CNCF it gates projects into this very corporatized world that is quite distinct from open source culture, and again damages open source. How does giving money to something like the CNCF gate projects? How is the world those are developed in differ culturally from open source culture? I've developed for CNCF projects and random projects (some of which have become popular). I didn't notice a culture difference. I did notice an outside support difference. I'm curious what you mean.
  - kodah 6y ago
    The CNCF is pretty distinct from organizations like Debian or The Linux Foundation, and even Debian comes under the same sort of fire I'm about to lay down here. At this time, I think it's more skepticism than the understanding of what the problem is, but it boils down to corporate influence and what level of influence companies are allowed to have on projects. Companies have several methods of influence: - Financial contributions (and the projects nature of dependence) - Developer interest and representation (eg: when a mega-corp installs a developer and combines that with things like funding) - Board representation A quick anecdotal example was the whole kerfuffle about Google using it's influence to insert kustomize into kubectl. [0] Big organizations like Debian or the CNCF are attractively large targets for the above concerns. [0] https://goteleport.com/blog/kubernetes-kustomize-kep-kerfuffle/ https://goteleport.com/blog/kubernetes-kustomize-kep-kerfuff...
ThinkBeat 6y ago
>Studies suggest that about 9.5 >percent of all open source code >is abandoned, This does not seem reasonable to me. I would think the number of abandoned open source projects to be closer to 70% or higher. Even projects that have reached popularity. So many times I have found references to libraries I wanted to use (C#/F# .Elixir). In the end I find a link to sourceforge or similar to find it has been abandoned-ware for a long time. Then we have the vast majority of open source code that never reached much of an audience and have been abandoned long ago. I am sure if one ran a query over all public GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, SourceForge, Codeproject the vast majority are abandoned.
throwaway936482 6y ago
I have a very simple rule when it comes to doing work, be it on open source software or otherwise. If you want me to do something for you, (and you are not a close friend or relative) you will pay me appropriately for it. Want me to fix a bug for you? Pay me. Want me to merge your drive by pull request? Pay me. Want "to arrange a zoom call between me and your team to discuss how we can better use your project to add value to our business". Pay me. This idea that we should all be giving away our labour in the name of the great God's FLOSS and freedom is bollocks and one of the great con jobs of late stage capitalism.

241 points by BerislavLopac 6y ago

How much better the world would be if open source was fully funded by some of those tech billionaires whose fortunes were made by sitting on its shoulders.

brodouevencode 6y ago
And the news outlets that give them lip service.
- DesiLurker 6y ago
  or rather the organization(s) benefiting from OSS and the ad-revenue that formerly used to belong to the news organizations.
techwizrd 6y ago
I agree. I would love to see more things like Summer of Code or grants towards open-source software. Is there a sustainable way to fund open-source work apart from corporate benefactors who "own" the software?
- pabs3 6y ago
  There are lots of internship, grants, bounty and patronage programs for open source, check out the FOSSjobs resources wiki page: https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources
- marcandre 6y ago
  The three main players imo are Github Sponsors, Tidelift and Open Collective.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
noahtallen 6y ago
That’d be awesome! Should note that a lot of popular software is (at least in part) paid for by the large companies. For example, Google probably has several engineers working on chromium. Facebook has several working on React and React Native. Apple has several working on Swift. Automattic (where I work), has several working on WordPress.
Kinrany 6y ago
How much would it cost to fund, say, all Github projects with 1000 stars or more?
- me_again 6y ago
  Not much... until you get rings of fake accounts going around giving stars to each others' projects. Think Hacktoberfest but 1000x worse
raxxorrax 6y ago
I would prefer crowd funding because with corporate sponsorships often come subtle obligations for corporate friendly adaptations and sometimes weird expectations. https://www.business.com/articles/john-rampton-open-source-software-risks/ https://www.business.com/articles/john-rampton-open-source-s... While there is some truth to it and describes what you should be careful about, it fundamentally doesn't understand the different motivations behind open source. Creators know that individual users can also create horrible expectations not restricted to software development, but you aren't suddenly half dependent on a company in which there is probably one guy calling the shots about your project and maybe it is better not to marry him.
okareaman 6y ago
I said essentially the same thing 10 days ago and this is what Walter Bright, creator of D, said: "There are a number of generous corporations and individuals helping us out in various ways, including cash contributions to the D Foundation." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25040397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25040397

mraza007 6y ago

I have huge respect for open source developers They have made significant contributions

compycom 6y ago

Open source has become yet another way for big tech companies to exploit laborers. If you are an independent developer working on an open source project without a copy-left license, you are a fool.

dasil003 6y ago
Even with copyleft it's now a situation where AWS will do a cleanroom implementation of your API and neuter your market.
- dunce2020 6y ago
  Oracle might "fix" that?
brodouevencode 6y ago
The language is a bit too extreme in my view. You release OSS knowing that anyone can come and pick it up. Even if they make a dime off your sweat. Pick your license, fine, but there's no reason for the devs to get upset about it because there's no lack of information out there. That being said, companies should kick down some love to the OSS projects they use. Especially big companies for which it's just a charitable write-off anyway.
- cageface 6y ago
  At every company I've worked I've lobbied for us to make donations to open source projects we depend on. Every single time it quietly dies in legal. There must be a better way.
  - iRomain 6y ago
    OSS could use similar licensing as some SaaS where it's free for personal use or commercial use up to certain limits and then you have to pay. This would ensure developers can use it freely but at some time a company would have to either pay it or ditch it. However I see two issues with this model: - the community will shit on it like it's not real OSS - big companies will start banning the use of such licenses The other alternatives many are doing are paid support, priority issues for sponsors, paid for issues, etc.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago

I can’t read the article. I’m very interested, but Wired has become such a cesspool of popovers, pop ups, advertising, tracking, and general dark patterns that I just can’t go there... even with an ad blocker the experience is annoying and sucky. What happened to them?

generalizations 6y ago
Only thing I saw with uBlock Origin was the thing about 'running out of free articles'.
fabianhjr 6y ago
I don't know what ad blocker you are using but uBlock Origin did got everything.
Groxx 6y ago
The cure for insufficient ad blocking is more ad blocking. ! row for wired ##.itemlist .athing:has(.sitestr:contains(wired.com)) ! the following comments/etc links ##.itemlist .athing:has(.sitestr:contains(wired.com)) + tr ! the following spacer ##.itemlist .athing:has(.sitestr:contains(wired.com)) + tr + tr.spacer
hinkley 6y ago
I’m using reader mode more and more, but at some point I’ll be setting up a proxy server.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  How will a proxy server block anything?
  - atdt 6y ago
    You can rewrite responses from upstream servers and omit the parts you don't like, like ads.
jmnicolas 6y ago

_greim_ 6y ago

It isn't so much that companies are unfairly using others' work. It's that if you're going to use an open source tool in your business's codebase, you'll inevitably need support, upgrades, and bug-fixes, which translates into you putting pressure on the maintainers to do more work. By all means, use those people's previous work to put something amazing out into the world quickly. However, when you inevitably need help, be prepared to either: 1) Have people on staff ready and capable of contributing to the project in non-trivial ways; 2) be willing to either hire or pay the maintainer(s) market value for their time, just like with actual employees.

floren 6y ago
I go for #1 pretty frequently but my biggest frustration with trying to contribute to open source projects is: the repository whose owner pops in every 6 months or so to merge a PR or two, then disappears. Just enough activity to hope that they might eventually merge my outstanding PRs, not quite dead enough for me to just fork and move on with my life...
- _greim_ 6y ago
  Merging a PR is work too, assuming the maintainer cares enough to review the code. Why not sponsor the project by placing a $300 bounty on the PR merge? As an OSS maintainer who's been on the other side of this in the past, that would have been quite a motivation for me.
  - rectang 6y ago
    Most pull requests are crap. They are drive-by fixes that do not take maintainability into account, because they only solve the problem that the PR submitter needs solved right now. Transforming a sloppy drive-by patch into something which doesn't pile on technical debt is hard. For all but the most brilliantly architected projects, it requires someone who can keep the entire project in their head — a core maintainer. The expectation that unlimited PRs will be reviewed for free is corrosive and contributes to the core-maintainer burnout described in the article.

generalizations 6y ago

> “I couldn't grab dinner with someone after work,” he says, because he felt like he'd be letting users down: I shouldn't be out enjoying myself. I should be working on Bootstrap! That's an attitude problem on the part of the developer. He shouldn't feel guilty for providing insufficient free support.

daenz 6y ago
It's easy for you to say "he shouldn't feel that way." But it's a different thing to be in the position yourself of having hundreds of thousands of people depending solely on you to fix a problem (even to just review and merge). The pressure is real, and there aren't a lot of healthy outlets to relieve that pressure.
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  I think the only thing you can do is to be up front about setting expectations very clearly and prominently in the project. If it is a large project relied upon by a lot of people or businesses, that's when you start charging for support when the issue is mission critical, or you encourage others to do so and provide a link to their support business. The demand for free skilled labor is huge, and always greater than the supply.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > But it's a different thing to be in the position yourself of having hundreds of thousands of people depending solely on you to fix a problem (even to just review and merge). They chose to depend solely on me. They, and not I, are responsible for their decisions.

kayson 6y ago

This is really evident even in small projects. Many (most?) open source developers have full time day jobs often in software development. Adding the responsibilities of not only the software but also project management and customer service can be a huge burden. I think it's the combination that leads to a lot of dead projects. Then of course you have the other end of things with projects like Docker or Ansible that have large teams and often corporate funding but just can't keep up with the sheer firehose of issues and PRs.

sien 6y ago

For anyone interested in this topic Nadia Eghbal previously wrote a book called 'Roads and Bridges' that is freely available on the internet. It's well worth a read: https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-reports/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

floren 6y ago

> While you're surfing the web, you ought to thank Jacob Thornton for making it so pretty. He's a programmer who, along with web designer Mark Otto, created Bootstrap, free software that the pros use to make their sites look spiffy. If you've ever noticed that a lot of websites have the same big chunky buttons, or the same clean forms, that's likely because an estimated one-fifth of all websites on the planet use Bootstrap. I don't blame Jacob, but man the WWW would probably be better without Bootstrap. Again, it's not Jacob's fault, he made a product that was so good everyone wanted to use it... so everyone used it. It feels like the Demolition Man future, where Taco Bell is the only survivor of the Franchise Wars.

joshu 6y ago
is it really necessary to complain about this?
shp0ngle 6y ago
I very much disagree. Bootstrap is good and makes making websites quickly easy. The ideas of Bootstrap now live in Tailwind and other CSS frameworks. I haven’t used Bootstrap proper when I switched to Tailwind in new projects though.
- ehwhyreally 6y ago
  Bootstrap is nothing like tailwind. nor their ideals. You look at 2 websites made in tailwind and they look completely different. Look at bootstrap and its the same bloody site.
  - shp0ngle 6y ago
    The ideals are same - the CSS classes are not named by the semantic content, but by what they actually do. Tailwind just take it more to the extremes.
dageshi 6y ago
If bootstrap didn't become the de facto standard, something else would've, nobody wants to design every site in the world from scratch.

macawfish 6y ago

Open source hackers suffer the same fate as other creatives. What's the software industry analog of gigging at some shit bars that rake in money getting people who like your music drunk but not paying you all while working a day job so you can do what you love? Really it's this whole stupid capitalist setup. It's not just open source programmers and artists who suffer this. It's everyone. Have you ever met a single parent who works full time just so they can be a parent full time? Which, by the way, is probably the most important work someone can do, parenting.

nullsense 6y ago
Yeah it's a bummer capitalism just hasn't really worked out...
Shared404 6y ago
> Open source hackers suffer the same fate as other creatives. What's the software industry analog of gigging at some shit bars that rake in money getting people who like your music drunk but not paying you all while working a day job so you can do what you love? Agree. > Really it's this whole stupid capitalist setup. Disagree. Capitalism is a viable prospect, perhaps the only one that won't be bastardized by randoms at some level of economic activity. However, it should be kept in check in some form. I like the idea of UBI personally, but there are other alternatives. In addition to UBI, which would give labourers more bargaining power with employers, some regulation is needed (Environmental, GDPR), but should be written with input from subject matter experts. I'm open to having my mind changed on any of the above, but this is the conclusion I've drawn at this point.

Diesel555 6y ago

I'm curious about when open source coders transition from enjoying sharing their product to feeling obligated to support their product to wanting some form of monetization when supporting their product becomes a job. Is it normally companies causing this or unrealistic expectations? I know myself, when I put something in open source I feel a responsibility to maintain it for no reasonable reason.

koolba 6y ago
It usually happens after a series of poor life choices lead the developer down a path of financial destitution. They spend their personal time curating PRs to fix typos or expand their CI matrix to support N x M combinations of runtimes and cpu archs. Then one day they lose their day job, realize they have no savings, and that none of their FOSS contributions will help pay their rent.

allenu 6y ago

There's a great Strange Loop talk by Evan Czaplicki (of Elm fame) where he alludes to the challenges of maintaining an open source project.[1] In it he describes how feedback often starts as an innocuous "Why don't you just...?" where the person making the request doesn't have the full understanding of the system as a whole and may see their request as a simple one-off that can be done quickly. To answer them fully, the open source maintainer has to respond with a long explanation of why their suggestion isn't an option. Or, maybe they don't respond and now the original poster doesn't feel the community is supporting them. This asymmetry can lead to poor communication in the community. I've been working on an app and was reading about the pros and cons of going freemium vs. pay up-front. I was surprised to read that people suggested the pay model is better for indie devs because with free, you'll have more users, but you'll also get worse feedback from the free users. Maybe there's a correlation between seeing something as free and feeling that the work behind it is trivial? [1] https://youtu.be/o_4EX4dPppA https://youtu.be/o_4EX4dPppA

cercatrova 6y ago
Interestingly, that comment was made by an HN user who laments that Elm was mocking them and is one contributing factor to them leaving Elm, due to having such a dictatorial style where Evan thought he knew better than the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22824899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22824899
noncoml 6y ago
This is not unique to open source. If you are writing any kind of code that somebody else is using at your work you get this questions ALL the time.

andrew_ 6y ago

https://liberamanifesto.com/ https://liberamanifesto.com/

gonational 6y ago

If you’re part of some group (e.g., OSS contributors), and a mass media propaganda company, like Wired, which is run by a Vanderbilt, comes along and starts saying things about “this poor lil feller is being abused”, etc., you should be extremely worried; they work for somebody who’s coming after you. The first step in taking advantage of a group else is convincing that group that they’re victims.

throwaway1723 6y ago
Well my friend, the soil where you're trying to plant your sensible words is just totally barren. Here on HN you'll most probably face feedback only from those who work exactly for somebody who's coming after some group as you say, or zealous dupes who follow the former for free. And that feedback will never be positive. When there are only vipers and toads in a barrell, warm-blooded creatures are few and go by throwaway accounts :)
throwaway1723 6y ago
Well my friend, the soil where you're trying to plant your sensible words is just totally barren. Here on HN you'll most probably face feedback only from those who work exactly for somebody who's coming after some group as you say, or zealous dupes who follow the former for free. And that feedback will never be positive!
- gonational 6y ago
  Well I at least found one sensible person! Thank you for your reply.
  - throwaway1723 6y ago
    Fortunately yet sadly there are many more remaining silent or ignoring HN altogether... Thank you for commenting against the grain too!

rectang 6y ago

I predict that the problem of overburdened open source maintainers will be solved by adjusting expectations, rather than new funding or new business models. Open Source maintainers owe nothing to non-paying users. The norm should be that only those that pay get support.

pabs3 6y ago
Requiring payment for support would mean that poor people who switch to open source are going to have a bad time. A better option would be to create a community of users and contributors that are willing to support each other and improve the project at the same time. The new GitHub discussions feature can help facilitate creating such a community for those projects that use GitHub.
- rectang 6y ago
  How do you differentiate leechers from contributors? "Github discussions" looks to me like Github discovering user forums. It's not an innovation — user forums have been around for decades. The expectation that maintainers will provide unlimited support to poor people illustrates exactly why maintainers burn out. Maintainers don't owe poor people anything, any more than they owe corporations anything.
  - pabs3 6y ago
    The "leechers" are part of the ecosystem of the project too, putting down people who haven't yet started to contribute is a sure way to sour your project in their minds and prevent them from ever trying to answer other folks support questions, let alone contribute code to the project. So don't try to divide the community like that, instead treat everyone as future contributors and create spaces for them to start contributing in their preferred way, one step at a time.
    - rectang 6y ago
      What has become clear over time is that most users don't contribute meaningfully to open source projects. The burden falls almost entirely on core maintainers. From the article: > But, with the exception of some big projects—like Linux—the labor involved isn't particularly communal. Most are like Bootstrap, where the majority of the work landed on a tiny team of people. Offering unlimited free support is guaranteeing that either the project will fail when the core maintainers burn out, or that the core maintainers will live in perpetual misery.

ozborn 6y ago

Would love if governments could better appreciate the value of open source and free software. Some sort of granting process that could determine which projects are worth funding on a sustainable basis would be wonderful. It's a great opportunity for access to technical expertise, avoiding vendor lock in, lowering costs and international collaboration if done right. Done poorly, it's throwing good money down a drain - but I would think the ROI would at least be as good as scientific grants (for which it is usually hard to get any type of sustainable infrastructure funding).

jabl 6y ago
I love science, but man, the way science is funded is a damn trainwreck.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Rather than developing UBI, we should be working on figuring out how to solve this issue. Maybe ask ourselves how best to pay people for the work they have already done on Open Source. That would be a better way to create a future in which people do what they love and are good at. That would reward the right things. That would make people feel good about the social justice angle. It might even improve our code. "Random acts of open source compensation." (comment has been edited for clarity)

networkimprov 6y ago

The article fails to mention new companies that are trying to solve this problem, e.g. https://tidelift.com https://tidelift.com

Radim 6y ago
Last I checked with Tidelift, they target primarily web OSS that's truly ubiquitous – think vue.js, Angular, Python requests and similar. Their $$$ reward is based on installation numbers across Tidelift's subscriber base, not value added or cost saved. Definitely not a model that would help most (read: more niche) open source developers. For example, I maintain a Python library with 10k+ Github stars and millions of monthly downloads, and was told by Tidelift it's not even on their radar. Zero reward in Tidelift's reward system. Which is not to say they're not helpful to others, they might be. Just to manage your expectations vs their marketing.

PradeetPatel 6y ago

As someone who grew up in India, contributing to OSS has always been the best way for junior developers to get noticed by recruiters. Due to the sheer number of applicants, recruiters are only interested in the ones that are truly passionate about coding - exemplified by OSS involvement or side projects. I'm not saying that it is right, but it does give the much needed exposure to junior talents in order to foster their growth.

eesmith 6y ago
"passion" often seems like code for "will work more for free". From a business standpoint, it makes sense as it shifts risk to the potential employee. But like having unpaid interns, it biases the employment pool toward those who have extra money and time to work for no income.
- jabl 6y ago
  This so much. I can understand the motivation from the perspective of recruiters, but I'd really hate to see STEM fields be infiltrated with the filth of unpaid internships that is unfortunately so common in many other fields.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I’ll be honest: I do appreciate devs who love programming so much they sometimes do it for free. I still pay them (inc interns), but everyone I’ve known who was great at programming did some amount of it for free somewhere along the way (because they can and they like it), whether it was open source, programming contests, or just checking out some new tech on their own and never shipping the code anywhere. Even though every line you’ll ever write for me will be paid, the fact that you did something worthwhile for free is a positive signal to me. You don’t have to show that specific signal to be hired, but if you do, I’m not going to ignore it.
  - eesmith 6y ago
    If you see that something did some programming for free, is it because they love programming? Or they love the increased chances of getting a job/money? What do you think the ratio is? The recent Hacktoberfest/ pull-request/ T-shirt fiasco (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24658052 among many) shows that signal is definitely gameable.

YousefED 6y ago

What about automatically "crowdfunding" open source projects? Idea: would it be possible to design a system where we distribute a membership fee to open source projects used? Let's say NPM would cost $10 / month per end-user. This would be redistributed to all the packages you use. (Or, similarly, cumulative membership fees will be distributed according to # of projects that re-use your package). Have there been experiments like this? Any thoughts?

jessedhillon 6y ago
That idea needs a bit more baking IMO. It seems obvious to me that the immediate consequence of this would be that we'd be rewarding trivial but widely used packages like left-pad[0], and thereby incentivizing the creation of a hundred clones of every trivial feature. 0: https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad
mrpotato 6y ago
I think that would have a negative effect on individuals and open source developers. Have a dependency on npm, 10$/m. Have a dependency on Nuget, 10$/m.. I'm at 20$/m for my project which may or may not be a commercial product. With this model, the fees could increase with each distribution platform your project depends on.

noncoml 6y ago

There are TONS of people out there writing code and opening the source. These people don’t do it for company sponsorship or money or to improve their CV. They do it purely for the pleasure of someone else using it. It’s just that only a very tiny fraction becomes popular. That’s when the problems start. Some may see their software being adopted by millions and may start feeling envious of those that make money using it. Maybe unpopular opinion here, but I don’t see why they should get sponsored by a company. They made the software open source for a reason, and others used it based on the terms it was licensed. No foul play here. On the other hand it’s well within their rights to ask for money to continue supporting it and developing it. Just because they made something open source in the past doesn’t mean they signed up to be forced to support and develop it indefinitely.

didibus 6y ago
I agree with you. If you chose a license you regret, its kind of just your fault. Why would you pick MIT license for example, if you didn't want to allow free commercial use? If you "make it free" and choose a very relaxed and unencumbered license to encourage adoption of your project and make it more popular. And then you do get popular, and start thinking people should now pay you, it seems like a bit of a lure. There are often alternative open source or closed source solutions. Yours might have reached this popularity not because it is the best, but because it is a good one that is also free and unencumbered. And now like you said, you're free to change the license for all new code to something else, make it paid, closed, or any other restrictions. And that's fine. That said, this is about licenses and having companies use your stuff and renumeration and all that. I think a bigger issue, one that is justified, is the toxic interactions you might need to deal with if your open source project becomes big. People can act really entitled, when you don't owe them nothing. And I find it kind of weird how people will actually act more entitled to something that is offered to them free and open source, than if it was something they'd been paying for. Which kind of baffles me why that is.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > If you chose a license you regret, its kind of just your fault Agree. The only possible exception I can think of it if you make major contributions to an existing project, and of course use the licence they chose. Even then though, you've voluntarily agreed to those licence terms.

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throwaway1723 6y ago

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure

pelasaco 6y ago

Being Open Source developer myself, i know the feeling/stress of a community. However, being able to work on my working time almost exclusively on my projects, helped me to have a normal life after the working hours. So I guess the problem is not being able to sell your idea to your company internally. I'm sure Twitter would support this idea.

norwegianwhale 6y ago

The funniest part is when there are accusations upon them for discriminating / not hiring women. Not only they do a selfish contribution to society for next to nothing in return, they also need to share whatever credit they earn with some self-appointed victims of sexual discrimination.

marvinblum 6y ago

It's important to set boundaries early on. I'm working on this analytics library [0] and this game server management app [1] at the moment. I started the first one with my own website in mind and as it gained some popularity, decided to try to make a commercial product out of it. Instead of making everything open-source, I develop the platform closed-source and keep the core (this library) open-source, but set limits to what can be contributed and under what conditions. This isn't clearly communicated in the repo yet, but it helps to stay sane. For the game server project, which is older, I see a lot of feature requests and small contributions, because people actually depend on it. But boy, the support requests drive my crazy sometimes. Even if you only have a hand full of users, they can get demanding some days, when a new DLC for the game is released for example. I really want to support it and keep it up-to-date, but I sometimes have to ignore them. This week someone asked me if I could support them setting it up as they had trouble making it work for their drivers. Turns out they're a professional e-sports team. As soon as I asked for compensation, they didn't write back (after sending them 4-5 emails, taking half an hour to write). This is when it gets frustrating... I don't know how to fix the issue, but we, as open-source maintainers, should value our time. [0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch [1] https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb

b0rsuk 6y ago
Have you tried a FAQ?
- marvinblum 6y ago
  Not yet, but I will add something along the lines.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

Is it actually feasible to just say "no contributions or support requests will be accepted for this project"? Or to have an hourly rate for support requests right up front? ("if you want me to fix this project for your use-case then I will charge you $100/hour to do that") And in the case of abusers, can you add a list of specific indivuals to the licence that are specifically disallowed from using the code in any form for any purpose? e.g. ("anyone is allowed to use this project for any purpose, except the people listed in the shit_list.txt file, who are not allowed to use any of this code for any purpose at any time").

saagarjha 6y ago
As someone who works on open source, sure, you can totally do that–but for me, personally, those aren't really things I would want to do. The first locks out people who want to contribute, which kind of removes half the reason you'd open source something in the first place, the second feels like you could leave in bugs and ransom them for support money, and in the third you are introducing your own subjectivity in ways which frequently do not go as planned. I totally understand why people would do all three, but for me personally they just aren't for me, and I hope you can understand why some people would be turned off by such projects.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Thanks, that's useful. I guess I'm happy to open-source my code for other people to use, but I'm not at all interested in acquiring an unpaid job as "maintainer" (and I really don't care how many other people use my code).
themodelplumber 6y ago
You can always choose to just say those things, but if it's worth doing, the language and approach should make it more likely that the general community response will be better for you than saying nothing at all. To me that means being gentle and professional about wording and boundaries, (which is easier provided one is not absolutely shattered by their work experience). Examples: - We are currently backlogged and may be unable to accept contributions or support requests. - Need support? We may be able to help. Contact us for bespoke personal or commercial support and development rates. (Packages start at...) - We are evaluating license revocations for those who violate our clearly-written and frequently reviewed community standards, which you can review at this link. Support abuse situations are often best dealt with situation-by-situation, though, and unfortunately I didn't see a specific, real-world example in the article. Sometimes just the possibility of someone taking advantage is a turn-off for a good project owner, so I would add that at the very least it's a good idea to have a general communication plan & principles in place before that happens.

iamericfletcher 6y ago

Nadia's book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, which is mentioned in the article, inspired me to become a GitHub sponsor. Nothing big, just $10 per month to one of my favorite open source developers. If you can afford it, I recommend others' do the same.

kodah 6y ago

These problems are complex. If companies start putting together tiger teams to support open source then they never really get to everything they use, just what open source projects are most important to them. When companies fork/adopt/insert themselves we have concerns over corporate influencing, sustainability, and independence. When companies just throw willy nilly money at big hunking shells like the CNCF it gates projects into this very corporatized world that is quite distinct from open source culture, and again damages open source. This just touches on the contribution model, this doesn't even touch on the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of license violations (if you're behind on updates who has time to go enforce licenses?) It mentions but doesn't touch on corporatization or undue influence. I'm not sure I know what to do but it's a problem worth solving.

mfer 6y ago
> When companies just throw willy nilly money at big hunking shells like the CNCF it gates projects into this very corporatized world that is quite distinct from open source culture, and again damages open source. How does giving money to something like the CNCF gate projects? How is the world those are developed in differ culturally from open source culture? I've developed for CNCF projects and random projects (some of which have become popular). I didn't notice a culture difference. I did notice an outside support difference. I'm curious what you mean.
- kodah 6y ago
  The CNCF is pretty distinct from organizations like Debian or The Linux Foundation, and even Debian comes under the same sort of fire I'm about to lay down here. At this time, I think it's more skepticism than the understanding of what the problem is, but it boils down to corporate influence and what level of influence companies are allowed to have on projects. Companies have several methods of influence: - Financial contributions (and the projects nature of dependence) - Developer interest and representation (eg: when a mega-corp installs a developer and combines that with things like funding) - Board representation A quick anecdotal example was the whole kerfuffle about Google using it's influence to insert kustomize into kubectl. [0] Big organizations like Debian or the CNCF are attractively large targets for the above concerns. [0] https://goteleport.com/blog/kubernetes-kustomize-kep-kerfuffle/ https://goteleport.com/blog/kubernetes-kustomize-kep-kerfuff...

ThinkBeat 6y ago

>Studies suggest that about 9.5 >percent of all open source code >is abandoned, This does not seem reasonable to me. I would think the number of abandoned open source projects to be closer to 70% or higher. Even projects that have reached popularity. So many times I have found references to libraries I wanted to use (C#/F# .Elixir). In the end I find a link to sourceforge or similar to find it has been abandoned-ware for a long time. Then we have the vast majority of open source code that never reached much of an audience and have been abandoned long ago. I am sure if one ran a query over all public GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, SourceForge, Codeproject the vast majority are abandoned.

throwaway936482 6y ago

I have a very simple rule when it comes to doing work, be it on open source software or otherwise. If you want me to do something for you, (and you are not a close friend or relative) you will pay me appropriately for it. Want me to fix a bug for you? Pay me. Want me to merge your drive by pull request? Pay me. Want "to arrange a zoom call between me and your team to discuss how we can better use your project to add value to our business". Pay me. This idea that we should all be giving away our labour in the name of the great God's FLOSS and freedom is bollocks and one of the great con jobs of late stage capitalism.