3 ms·

Good companies fund open-source, great companies contribute.

by gitgud 5y ago

simonw 5y ago
Disagree. The problem with companies contributing to existing open source projects is that it creates even more unpaid labor for the maintainers, who now have to review and discuss and commit to future maintenance of those contributions. Meanwhile they still aren't learning any money to allow them to commit more of their own time to the projects!
- zaphar 5y ago
  Depends on what you mean by contribute. If you contribute by hiring the maintainer to do maintainer work then that falls in the great company category. If you contribute by just shoveling a bunch of patches at already overworked maintainers then not so much.
  - allset_ 5y ago
    I see it the opposite way. If a company hires a core maintainer (often the only maintainer), they have huge amounts of power over the direction of the project as they can threaten to fire the maintainer who is now dependent on the company for income. Contributing improvements externally allows the project to remain independent. And if the maintainer is overburdened they can decline the patches or postpone review. Nobody is forcing them to accept the changes.
    - asiachick 5y ago
      Do you any evidence this is is common? Plenty of heads of open source projects are hired by large companies. I've seen zero evidence of them not remaining independent but maybe I'm just unaware of those cases.
      - simonw 5y ago
        Gave you really seen that happen a lot? I can't think of many examples off the top of my head of open source project heads being hired by a company and given free reign to continue working exclusively on their project. I don't know how you would see the evidence of the company imposing their will on the project - that's not likely to happen in public. It's also very likely to happen without any explicit influence taking place at all. If a company hired me to work full-time on one of my projects, and I had to pick between two competing priorities for my time, I would naturally take my employer's own preferences and current challenges into account when making that decision. I wouldn't even consider that to be a bad thing.
        int_19h 5y ago
        It doesn't have to be full-time. The maintainer can be hired as a part-time contractor, or even consultant, and the contract can be specific to the project in question. The problem with money translating to power is not unique to this arrangement, in any case. Donations can be similarly withdrawn, after all, so they also create an implicit bias. The only way to fix this is to make it so that people don't have to rely on such sources of income to sustain themselves.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > If you contribute by hiring the maintainer to do maintainer work then that falls in the great company category. No. This allows companies to seize control of FOSS projects. FLOSS is used by everybody and should not be driven a single corporation. Just like cities vs company town.
    - zaphar 5y ago
      If money is donated you can bet that the giver will have some input on the work. It's human nature. If you want FOSS maintainers to be paid a living wage the likely outcome is that some percentage of the givers will have sway or defacto control of the project. At least employing the Maintainer makes that plainly visible instead of hidden behind a screen of deniability. Besides because of the license FLOSS has a built in escape hatch if you don't like the direction a corporation is going. I recognize your concern I just think the risk is far lower than you do.
- rectang 5y ago
  Many projects have a governance structure which allows for contributors to become maintainers. Projects which don't have such governance are self-limiting in terms of [popularity x complexity]. At some point, tensions arise as a complex project which cannot scale its maintainers and cannot service all of its users. Open source devs don't owe anybody support, but the marketplace doesn't owe them popularity either.
  - aseipp 5y ago
    I just think this isn't true. The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so; people just want to throw you patches and have you accept them and then never contribute again. Very, very few developers actually want to maintain anything. The trust barrier is also typically high. I don't just hand out a commit bit for no reason. This is all cultural, sure, but it is what it is. Maintenance isn't fun and people don't like it. From experience the ratio of random drive-by contributors to people who regularly contribute high-quality code to the point of qualifying as a "maintainer" is something like 20:1 or worse. That doesn't mean they become maintainers, just that 1 out of every 20 might have the chops, if they dedicated to it. This is true even of corporate contributors from well staffed companies; they only want me to accept the patch so they can do something else. I have literally had corporate engineers file reports to me saying "Please do this" (not maliciously, mind you) and when I respond "I don't have time", but actually knew the person in question enough to follow up with "But I would trust you to do this if I added you as a maintainer, since it's not hard", and they still rejected it as, effectively, "too much responsibility." Didn't even get to the point of whether their work would let them have time for it or not. They have no interest beyond that, I can't blame them in a sense. The idea that most projects actually have enough well-intended, frequent, sufficiently informed contributors to merit any actual "governance" structure at all beyond "Whatever the one or two authors do to make it all work" is completely detached from the reality of my own experience, is all I can say. And that's the reality for most open source projects that aren't stupidly famous, have literally zero monetary funding, and are still very important.
    - rectang 5y ago
- gitgud 5y ago
  Okay then, how about: Good companies fund, great companies maintain The point is; contributions to the Open-Source ecosystem are usually much more valuable than paying random open-source projects a small donation. An engineer submitting a bug fix might be worth hundreds/thousands of dollars of labour donated to the project.

Good companies fund open-source, great companies contribute.

by gitgud 5y ago

Good companies fund open-source, great companies contribute.

Disagree. The problem with companies contributing to existing open source projects is that it creates even more unpaid labor for the maintainers, who now have to review and discuss and commit to future maintenance of those contributions. Meanwhile they still aren't learning any money to allow them to commit more of their own time to the projects!

zaphar 5y ago
Depends on what you mean by contribute. If you contribute by hiring the maintainer to do maintainer work then that falls in the great company category. If you contribute by just shoveling a bunch of patches at already overworked maintainers then not so much.
- allset_ 5y ago
  I see it the opposite way. If a company hires a core maintainer (often the only maintainer), they have huge amounts of power over the direction of the project as they can threaten to fire the maintainer who is now dependent on the company for income. Contributing improvements externally allows the project to remain independent. And if the maintainer is overburdened they can decline the patches or postpone review. Nobody is forcing them to accept the changes.
  - asiachick 5y ago
    Do you any evidence this is is common? Plenty of heads of open source projects are hired by large companies. I've seen zero evidence of them not remaining independent but maybe I'm just unaware of those cases.
    - simonw 5y ago
      Gave you really seen that happen a lot? I can't think of many examples off the top of my head of open source project heads being hired by a company and given free reign to continue working exclusively on their project. I don't know how you would see the evidence of the company imposing their will on the project - that's not likely to happen in public. It's also very likely to happen without any explicit influence taking place at all. If a company hired me to work full-time on one of my projects, and I had to pick between two competing priorities for my time, I would naturally take my employer's own preferences and current challenges into account when making that decision. I wouldn't even consider that to be a bad thing.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        It doesn't have to be full-time. The maintainer can be hired as a part-time contractor, or even consultant, and the contract can be specific to the project in question. The problem with money translating to power is not unique to this arrangement, in any case. Donations can be similarly withdrawn, after all, so they also create an implicit bias. The only way to fix this is to make it so that people don't have to rely on such sources of income to sustain themselves.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > If you contribute by hiring the maintainer to do maintainer work then that falls in the great company category. No. This allows companies to seize control of FOSS projects. FLOSS is used by everybody and should not be driven a single corporation. Just like cities vs company town.
  - zaphar 5y ago
    If money is donated you can bet that the giver will have some input on the work. It's human nature. If you want FOSS maintainers to be paid a living wage the likely outcome is that some percentage of the givers will have sway or defacto control of the project. At least employing the Maintainer makes that plainly visible instead of hidden behind a screen of deniability. Besides because of the license FLOSS has a built in escape hatch if you don't like the direction a corporation is going. I recognize your concern I just think the risk is far lower than you do.
rectang 5y ago
Many projects have a governance structure which allows for contributors to become maintainers. Projects which don't have such governance are self-limiting in terms of [popularity x complexity]. At some point, tensions arise as a complex project which cannot scale its maintainers and cannot service all of its users. Open source devs don't owe anybody support, but the marketplace doesn't owe them popularity either.
- aseipp 5y ago
  I just think this isn't true. The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so; people just want to throw you patches and have you accept them and then never contribute again. Very, very few developers actually want to maintain anything. The trust barrier is also typically high. I don't just hand out a commit bit for no reason. This is all cultural, sure, but it is what it is. Maintenance isn't fun and people don't like it. From experience the ratio of random drive-by contributors to people who regularly contribute high-quality code to the point of qualifying as a "maintainer" is something like 20:1 or worse. That doesn't mean they become maintainers, just that 1 out of every 20 might have the chops, if they dedicated to it. This is true even of corporate contributors from well staffed companies; they only want me to accept the patch so they can do something else. I have literally had corporate engineers file reports to me saying "Please do this" (not maliciously, mind you) and when I respond "I don't have time", but actually knew the person in question enough to follow up with "But I would trust you to do this if I added you as a maintainer, since it's not hard", and they still rejected it as, effectively, "too much responsibility." Didn't even get to the point of whether their work would let them have time for it or not. They have no interest beyond that, I can't blame them in a sense. The idea that most projects actually have enough well-intended, frequent, sufficiently informed contributors to merit any actual "governance" structure at all beyond "Whatever the one or two authors do to make it all work" is completely detached from the reality of my own experience, is all I can say. And that's the reality for most open source projects that aren't stupidly famous, have literally zero monetary funding, and are still very important.
  - rectang 5y ago
gitgud 5y ago
Okay then, how about: Good companies fund, great companies maintain The point is; contributions to the Open-Source ecosystem are usually much more valuable than paying random open-source projects a small donation. An engineer submitting a bug fix might be worth hundreds/thousands of dollars of labour donated to the project.