I recently started reading Nadia Eghbal's book, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" [0]. One point she makes early on is th

I recently started reading Nadia Eghbal's book, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" [0]. One point she makes early on is that attracting lots of people to open source projects isn't all that hard; but managing lots of potentially low quality contributions is really hard. See "Hacktoberfest" for an example. [1] If you pay $X for someone to "resolve" the issue, when they submit a patch that doesn't work, or doesn't follow the style guide, or doesn't fit the software architecture, or is otherwise unsatisfactory, how much time are you going to spend fixing/massaging/arguing? Will it be worth it to answer the jilted contributor who keeps sending "I want my $50!!!!" emails? Nadia also has a quick 10-minute presentation on some ways you can use money to help open source, but without actually paying for bug fixes. [2] [0] https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0578675862 https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0578675862 [1] https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/ https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjAinwgvQqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjAinwgvQqc