8 ms·

Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects?

24 points by sant0sk1 18y ago

gm 18y ago
This guy is absolutely, positively, dead wrong about OSS projects and money. First of all, money is nothing but a resource. Get that word in your head. Resource. It means you can use it towards a goal. You can administer it. So this guy gave $5K to someone that does not know how to manage it. At least the administrator is smart enough not to touch it (when in doubt, do nothing, some people say). But he is also a bad enough administrator not to touch it. What would I do with $5K on a OSS project? Hire developers for a beginning. Hire a full-time guy for 3-6 months (depending on where the programmer is) and set a very clear goal as to what is to be accomplished during this time. The goal will vary depending on the project, but the idea is to have a person deadly-focused on a goal. This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money) because of a bad project admin/lead. The conclusion this guy makes is that time matters more than money. Duh! Of course it does. Money, however, buys time. Therein lies the missed connection.
- pchristensen 18y ago
  It wouldn't be the first time Atwood made a generalization based on one data point.
  - xlnt 18y ago
    How is it possible to "generalize" from one data point? The normal method of generalizing is finding a similarity shared across many data points, and proposing it applies more widely. Perhaps one could generalize badly with 2 data points, but isn't it just impossible with 1, and therefore he must actually be doing something else?
    - pchristensen 18y ago
      That logical impossibility is exactly what I meant when I made the comment. If generalization doesn't work for you, how about this: "This wouldn't be the first time that Atwood came up with a theory that only had to fit one data point." He could just as easily have said that all open source developers are Italian or that Italians can't spend money, and he would have been just as wrong.
      - xlnt 18y ago
        ok i agree
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    I used to work with Chemical engineers (I was an elec eng) - they had a saying: "one point is a line, two points is a trend" when trying to analyse production data (always only half joking).
- corentin 18y ago
  On the ScrewTurn website, I can read: "ScrewTurn Software - Developers for Passion". Whatever that means, I don't see them spending the money they got to hire someone.
- gwc 18y ago
  This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money) because of a bad project admin/lead. I'm not sure I follow this assertion. Jeff is asking a generic question, yes, and he does make some generic suppositions, but he does not really declare any conclusions. If anything Jeff was surprised by the exchange and is asking the question as he is because he believes (or used to believe) that money could help OSS projects and is curious how, since it is not something that he has experience in himself. As a side note, do you really think $5K will buy you a quality full-time developer for 3-6 months? I would be very surprised, though I admit I have little knowledge of programming labor markets outside of Boston or SV.
  - gm 18y ago
    Oh you'd be surprised what you get abroad for $5k... US-based developers with mediocre skills: Be afraid, be very afraid.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  This guy is absolutely, positively, dead wrong about OSS projects and money. I think this is a case where your credentials matter--while Atwood doesn't have a huge array of Open Source projects under his belt and just this one data point, he still has one real data point. What Open Source projects do you manage, or have you managed, that would have been dramatically positively impacted by receiving a no-strings $5000 cash infusion? I've built two companies based on Open Source software now, and I can assure you that spending money to make things happen in Open Source can be challenging. People are often involved in Open Source for reasons other than money. Over the years I've probably managed a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of expenditure on Open Source development...and on many occasions it wasn't with the core developers on a project, because the core developers had no interest in the money, either due to their employment contracts, difficulty in dealing with foreign payments, or simply a desire to keep their Open Source work purely for fun. When I was considering what my options were when shutting down my old business (just prior to starting Virtualmin), I spent a little time building a website specifically for throwing money at Open Source projects to get things done (called ransomware.com, and I still have the domain...maybe once I've got some free time from Virtualmin I'll spin it into something). It's still a gaping hole in the Open Source world, but it's one that's incredibly hard to fill, and you can't do it in the obvious ways. Google SoC covers one aspect, but it's an "internship" style model, which doesn't produce "core" code very well--it's just as much for teaching as it is for producing code, and requires significant time investment on the part of the project. SourceForge donations provides "tips", but it doesn't seem to work well for getting specific project work done. There have been a few others, but they seem to fizzle out pretty quickly, as I think the profit potential for the orchestrating company is small...it's almost gotta be a non-profit to convince people to take part. Finally, a lot of folks use eLance, Rent-A-Coder, and others, to get work like this done--I frequently see projects come up related to our software in my Google Alerts--but it's not targeted to this purpose, and the code ends up being "one off" rather than finding its way into the core codebase...I know we have never heard of any of these projects coming back into our codebase (which is fine...a large percentage of our code is BSD-licensed, and so there's no obligation to let us know what's going on with it). So, while I agree that money can certainly be used to great effect on Open Source projects, it takes time to make it useful, and sometimes you don't want to use it for the obvious "get more features", since a lot of developers on Open Source software like to do that stuff themselves even if it comes more slowly. We've begun spending money on Webmin and Usermin, now that we have some...but for ancillary stuff, like design and logos, and graphics. Jamie still writes almost all of the code (and a couple of other occasional contributors and I write a tiny remaining percentage).
jonknee 18y ago
Looking at that project's website, I probably would have spent it on a designer / copy editor.
stcredzero 18y ago
He's right that time is the key resource. However, money can buy time. This has to be bought in certain established increments, however. (Full-time employees. Interns.) $80k is going to be a lot more useful than 16 chunks of $5000. There are very few Open Source projects with some form of GUI that reach a professional level of polish without money. Anyone know of the exceptions?
jrockway 18y ago
$5000 isn't enough to quit your full-time job, so it's pretty much worthless. There is only so much time in a day, regardless of monetary incentive. The best way to "donate" to an open source project is to hire the developer(s) to work on the project for a certain percentage of their time. (Google does this.) That said, the money is good for traveling to conferences. I can't believe this .NET guy can't think of a single conference that he wants to attend or speak at. I've already been to 4 this year, and have at least 3 more. Three are international, so the travel costs kind of add up. So that's what I use donations / book revenue / etc. for.
- michaelneale 18y ago
  There are a lot of freelancers/one man shows who contribute to open source, so in that case, their time is a bit more liquid and the 5K would be put to good use.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    That's true, but you can't say no to a big client just because you happen to have some donation money floating around.
    - michaelneale 18y ago
      ok also true. I guess ideally people would find a good use for it (in the past the money could have been put to good use on infrastructure etc, but now OSS hosting environments are almost entirely free - as in free beer free).
tomh 18y ago
Sounds like the local laws were at fault, which begs the question; why accept money in the first place if you don't have a legal entity in place to use it properly? Set up an LLC in the USA with that cash, or at least a non-profit that can accept donations (and therefore, make them tax-deductable so that more people will be encouraged to donate, instead of less, since um, googling the OSS project in question will now point to Atwood's post, which wouldn't convince me to give them any money at all).
gleb 18y ago
The money won't spend itself, not in any useful fashion. Usefully spending money is work like any other, and is in fact exactly what a CEO/founder does.
rw 18y ago
There's something about Atwood's writing that makes me mad he earns any income from that site.
- Hexstream 18y ago
  He writes so much it's no wonder he eventually has to sacrifice relevance for lack of experience.
omouse 18y ago
Stop submitting CodingHorror.com blog posts here. They add nothing and aren't even worth discussing when Atwood doesn't take the fucking time to research things. Flagged.
- raganwald 18y ago
  Let's do this: you vote for the posts you like, I'll vote for the articles I like, and we'll let the YC News ranking engine push the posts neither of us like off the front page. There's aboslutely no need to tell people not to post stuff, unless you think that posts like Atwood's will get votes.
  - Hexstream 18y ago
    Personally my treshold to upvote a story is pretty high, and to pseudo-downvote an article I don't feel has its place I'd need to lower my standards and upvote a lot of stories I don't like that much, but the system would think all those stories I upvoted have equal importance to me while this is not the case.
  - omouse 18y ago
    Sorry for the poison of my comment, but it is annoying not to be able to, at the least, hide articles. Your idea, and the way the ranking engine currently works, leads to the problem they're having on IMDB where people are strategically rating a movie (Shawshank Redemption) to punish another movie (The Godfather). I don't want to be forced to up-vote other stories I don't particularly care for in order to punish one story. It feels like voting in a US or Canadian election, where you vote for the other party to punish the current party. But what if the other parties are just as bad as the current one? What if they're worse but you still want a way to punish the current party?
    - raganwald 18y ago
      Don't forget you also have a meta-vote: you choose which sites to patronize. When and if the posts on the front page no longer match your interests, it's time to walk away and let the tragedy of the commons play out the third act. I agree that it is very annoying not to be able to hide comments. I hope there is some incredibly important reason for this. Maybe it is explicitly to foster the kind of comment you made, to goad people into taking action when the quality of articles drops rather than tolerating dreck and linkbait by ignoring it?

24 points by sant0sk1 18y ago

gm 18y ago

This guy is absolutely, positively, dead wrong about OSS projects and money. First of all, money is nothing but a resource. Get that word in your head. Resource. It means you can use it towards a goal. You can administer it. So this guy gave $5K to someone that does not know how to manage it. At least the administrator is smart enough not to touch it (when in doubt, do nothing, some people say). But he is also a bad enough administrator not to touch it. What would I do with $5K on a OSS project? Hire developers for a beginning. Hire a full-time guy for 3-6 months (depending on where the programmer is) and set a very clear goal as to what is to be accomplished during this time. The goal will vary depending on the project, but the idea is to have a person deadly-focused on a goal. This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money) because of a bad project admin/lead. The conclusion this guy makes is that time matters more than money. Duh! Of course it does. Money, however, buys time. Therein lies the missed connection.

pchristensen 18y ago
It wouldn't be the first time Atwood made a generalization based on one data point.
- xlnt 18y ago
  How is it possible to "generalize" from one data point? The normal method of generalizing is finding a similarity shared across many data points, and proposing it applies more widely. Perhaps one could generalize badly with 2 data points, but isn't it just impossible with 1, and therefore he must actually be doing something else?
  - pchristensen 18y ago
    That logical impossibility is exactly what I meant when I made the comment. If generalization doesn't work for you, how about this: "This wouldn't be the first time that Atwood came up with a theory that only had to fit one data point." He could just as easily have said that all open source developers are Italian or that Italians can't spend money, and he would have been just as wrong.
    - xlnt 18y ago
      ok i agree
- michaelneale 18y ago
  I used to work with Chemical engineers (I was an elec eng) - they had a saying: "one point is a line, two points is a trend" when trying to analyse production data (always only half joking).
corentin 18y ago
On the ScrewTurn website, I can read: "ScrewTurn Software - Developers for Passion". Whatever that means, I don't see them spending the money they got to hire someone.
gwc 18y ago
This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money) because of a bad project admin/lead. I'm not sure I follow this assertion. Jeff is asking a generic question, yes, and he does make some generic suppositions, but he does not really declare any conclusions. If anything Jeff was surprised by the exchange and is asking the question as he is because he believes (or used to believe) that money could help OSS projects and is curious how, since it is not something that he has experience in himself. As a side note, do you really think $5K will buy you a quality full-time developer for 3-6 months? I would be very surprised, though I admit I have little knowledge of programming labor markets outside of Boston or SV.
- gm 18y ago
  Oh you'd be surprised what you get abroad for $5k... US-based developers with mediocre skills: Be afraid, be very afraid.
SwellJoe 18y ago
This guy is absolutely, positively, dead wrong about OSS projects and money. I think this is a case where your credentials matter--while Atwood doesn't have a huge array of Open Source projects under his belt and just this one data point, he still has one real data point. What Open Source projects do you manage, or have you managed, that would have been dramatically positively impacted by receiving a no-strings $5000 cash infusion? I've built two companies based on Open Source software now, and I can assure you that spending money to make things happen in Open Source can be challenging. People are often involved in Open Source for reasons other than money. Over the years I've probably managed a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of expenditure on Open Source development...and on many occasions it wasn't with the core developers on a project, because the core developers had no interest in the money, either due to their employment contracts, difficulty in dealing with foreign payments, or simply a desire to keep their Open Source work purely for fun. When I was considering what my options were when shutting down my old business (just prior to starting Virtualmin), I spent a little time building a website specifically for throwing money at Open Source projects to get things done (called ransomware.com, and I still have the domain...maybe once I've got some free time from Virtualmin I'll spin it into something). It's still a gaping hole in the Open Source world, but it's one that's incredibly hard to fill, and you can't do it in the obvious ways. Google SoC covers one aspect, but it's an "internship" style model, which doesn't produce "core" code very well--it's just as much for teaching as it is for producing code, and requires significant time investment on the part of the project. SourceForge donations provides "tips", but it doesn't seem to work well for getting specific project work done. There have been a few others, but they seem to fizzle out pretty quickly, as I think the profit potential for the orchestrating company is small...it's almost gotta be a non-profit to convince people to take part. Finally, a lot of folks use eLance, Rent-A-Coder, and others, to get work like this done--I frequently see projects come up related to our software in my Google Alerts--but it's not targeted to this purpose, and the code ends up being "one off" rather than finding its way into the core codebase...I know we have never heard of any of these projects coming back into our codebase (which is fine...a large percentage of our code is BSD-licensed, and so there's no obligation to let us know what's going on with it). So, while I agree that money can certainly be used to great effect on Open Source projects, it takes time to make it useful, and sometimes you don't want to use it for the obvious "get more features", since a lot of developers on Open Source software like to do that stuff themselves even if it comes more slowly. We've begun spending money on Webmin and Usermin, now that we have some...but for ancillary stuff, like design and logos, and graphics. Jamie still writes almost all of the code (and a couple of other occasional contributors and I write a tiny remaining percentage).

jonknee 18y ago

Looking at that project's website, I probably would have spent it on a designer / copy editor.

stcredzero 18y ago

He's right that time is the key resource. However, money can buy time. This has to be bought in certain established increments, however. (Full-time employees. Interns.) $80k is going to be a lot more useful than 16 chunks of $5000. There are very few Open Source projects with some form of GUI that reach a professional level of polish without money. Anyone know of the exceptions?

jrockway 18y ago

$5000 isn't enough to quit your full-time job, so it's pretty much worthless. There is only so much time in a day, regardless of monetary incentive. The best way to "donate" to an open source project is to hire the developer(s) to work on the project for a certain percentage of their time. (Google does this.) That said, the money is good for traveling to conferences. I can't believe this .NET guy can't think of a single conference that he wants to attend or speak at. I've already been to 4 this year, and have at least 3 more. Three are international, so the travel costs kind of add up. So that's what I use donations / book revenue / etc. for.

michaelneale 18y ago
There are a lot of freelancers/one man shows who contribute to open source, so in that case, their time is a bit more liquid and the 5K would be put to good use.
- jrockway 18y ago
  That's true, but you can't say no to a big client just because you happen to have some donation money floating around.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    ok also true. I guess ideally people would find a good use for it (in the past the money could have been put to good use on infrastructure etc, but now OSS hosting environments are almost entirely free - as in free beer free).

tomh 18y ago

Sounds like the local laws were at fault, which begs the question; why accept money in the first place if you don't have a legal entity in place to use it properly? Set up an LLC in the USA with that cash, or at least a non-profit that can accept donations (and therefore, make them tax-deductable so that more people will be encouraged to donate, instead of less, since um, googling the OSS project in question will now point to Atwood's post, which wouldn't convince me to give them any money at all).

gleb 18y ago

The money won't spend itself, not in any useful fashion. Usefully spending money is work like any other, and is in fact exactly what a CEO/founder does.

rw 18y ago

There's something about Atwood's writing that makes me mad he earns any income from that site.

Hexstream 18y ago
He writes so much it's no wonder he eventually has to sacrifice relevance for lack of experience.

omouse 18y ago

Stop submitting CodingHorror.com blog posts here. They add nothing and aren't even worth discussing when Atwood doesn't take the fucking time to research things. Flagged.

raganwald 18y ago
Let's do this: you vote for the posts you like, I'll vote for the articles I like, and we'll let the YC News ranking engine push the posts neither of us like off the front page. There's aboslutely no need to tell people not to post stuff, unless you think that posts like Atwood's will get votes.
- Hexstream 18y ago
  Personally my treshold to upvote a story is pretty high, and to pseudo-downvote an article I don't feel has its place I'd need to lower my standards and upvote a lot of stories I don't like that much, but the system would think all those stories I upvoted have equal importance to me while this is not the case.
- omouse 18y ago
  Sorry for the poison of my comment, but it is annoying not to be able to, at the least, hide articles. Your idea, and the way the ranking engine currently works, leads to the problem they're having on IMDB where people are strategically rating a movie (Shawshank Redemption) to punish another movie (The Godfather). I don't want to be forced to up-vote other stories I don't particularly care for in order to punish one story. It feels like voting in a US or Canadian election, where you vote for the other party to punish the current party. But what if the other parties are just as bad as the current one? What if they're worse but you still want a way to punish the current party?
  - raganwald 18y ago
    Don't forget you also have a meta-vote: you choose which sites to patronize. When and if the posts on the front page no longer match your interests, it's time to walk away and let the tragedy of the commons play out the third act. I agree that it is very annoying not to be able to hide comments. I hope there is some incredibly important reason for this. Maybe it is explicitly to foster the kind of comment you made, to goad people into taking action when the quality of articles drops rather than tolerating dreck and linkbait by ignoring it?