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We Just Gave $155k to Open Source Maintainers
- krono 5y agoFor anyone else who has the domain blacklisted: https://outline.com/LBMvNU https://outline.com/LBMvNU Also thanks Sentry!
- abfan1127 5y agoif you don't mind sharing, why is the domain blacklisted for you?
- jordanrobinson 5y agoI've seen sentry in a lot of analytics blocklists, so I'd assume it would be from that.
- TheDong 5y agoThey provide javascript / browser integration into sending sentry events, aka "tracking data", to their servers. Just as one might block "googleads.g.doubleclick.net" to avoid google tracking, it is very reasonable to blacklist sentry to avoid various companies tracking you.
- zeeg 5y agoI don't want to derail this thread, but Sentry isn't tracking. Can you hypothetically track users with Sentry? Sure. Do we provide any of those capabilities? No. Treating products like Sentry the same as advertising and analytics companies can only be harmful for our industry.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dpedu 5y ago> Can you hypothetically track users with Sentry? Sure. > Do we provide any of those capabilities? No. Yes you do. When I view a bug in Sentry it tells me how many users have hit the particular bug and which users they are. I can even search by user and see what bugs they've hit.
- Aeolun 5y agoI mean… that’s kind of the point right? Even if you only send an event when a bug happens it’s still handy to send some metadata along.
- mikepurvis 5y agoIt's definitely not just crashes— your documentation talks all over the place about custom events, extra data blobs, breadcrumbs, etc: https://docs.sentry.io/product/cli/send-event/ https://docs.sentry.io/product/cli/send-event/ Other places discuss sending "info"-level log events: https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/python/guides/logging/ https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/python/guides/logging/ These things aren't necessarily bad, but they're 100% the building blocks for various forms of badness, and I can fully understand track-free users just saying no to all of it. In any case, the solution for Sentry-the-company is just to have a separate domain for receiving events, so getting that blocked doesn't block your corporate landing page.
- Aeolun 5y agoWhy would someone use Sentry for that when stuff like OpenReplay exists. It’s like trying to hammer your nail in with a screwdriver.
- mikepurvis 5y agoI don't think you would if your upfront goal was "telemetry" and you actually evaluated solutions for that. But if you had the Sentry pipeline in place already for crash reports, it would be very easy to slide into using it for tracking other kinds of custom events.
- maximedupre 5y agoTime to innovate, then :D
- krono 5y agoIf it looks, walks, and quacks like a behavioural advertising/tracking/analytics platform... why should it not be treated like one? Especially when you consider Sentry seems to be moving towards enabling these use-cases even further. A way to opt out of personal data collection that is provided by Sentry to end-users would put Sentry back on track. Until then, I'll be running my own solution.
- BYK 5y agoYou mean things like these: https://docs.sentry.io/product/relay/#pii-data-scrubbing https://docs.sentry.io/product/relay/#pii-data-scrubbing, https://docs.sentry.io/product/data-management-settings/scrubbing/ https://docs.sentry.io/product/data-management-settings/scru...
- krono 5y agoMore along the lines of a client-side and end-user controllable way to prevent data (or specific categories) from being collected in the first place. Edit: A cross-domain cookie could work for this
- Noughmad 5y agoBut Sentry can be used for the same analytics as ads. You can send events manually, it doesn't have to be an actual error, with all the info attached. I'm a very satisfied user of Sentry, but I use it for an internal project. I also use LogRocket which is far more intrusive. For public projects, I would use Sentry but certainly understand that many people would block it. I would never use LogRocket without informing users though.
- account42 5y ago> Treating products like Sentry the same as advertising and analytics companies can only be harmful for our industry. Normalizing collecting information about users and their behavior without getting informed consent in advance is harmful to our industry.
- XCSme 5y agoOne thing to note is that I think a website is different than a software product that you install on your local machine (in terms of privacy). When you access a website you access resources on a remote server, this means that is almost impossible to not leave any trace of you visiting that website (access logs, ISP logs, DNS logs, etc). I do think there should be explicit consent for a locally installed software to send logs or analytics to an external server, but I don't think explicit consent must be given when the user is the one accessing the server. Also, there is a big difference between technical logs (app crashes, 404 pages, resources that fail to load) and storing user-specific information or actions (exact location, products purchased, items viewed) most importantly when this information is used for marketing purposes, not for improving the user experience (by making the website faster/easier to use/more secure, etc.).
- luizfelberti 5y agoI'd suspect it's because Sentry offers client-side telemetry as one of their services, and they might be using the same domain for both commercial and technical stuff (hosting both the main site and backends) so blockers have no choice but to block the entire thing if the enforcement is DNS based I'm only speculating though, as this is a pretty common mistake
- krono 5y agoJust confirming what the others have said. Often times much more is being collected than than what would be required for performance monitoring, it's not at all clear where this data ends up ("why does Bob from marketing have an account on our Sentry?" is literally something I overheard), and opt-outs are rare.
- brightball 5y agoThey should seriously setup their client side metrics on a different domain.
- Tycho 5y agoIs there any such thing as 'bug bounties' that companies put out to get fixes for open source software?
- ssddanbrown 5y agoUpon the suggestions from other commenters, I've had recent interaction with huntr.dev. I maintain an open source project and had a few members on there report vulnerabilities over the last month or two. They seem to pay out both to the finder of the vulnerability and the maintainer (me). The process seemed a janky at first but they've improved the platform since my first interaction and they seem to be encouraging a good thing. Had a few false reports but that has been outweighed by well-defined genuine reports.
- maximedupre 5y agoThat a great question...never heard of it for OSS
- roflc0ptic 5y agoIt seems like it would create some bad incentives for open source maintainers/submitters - someone submits a PR to fix a bug, gets rejected, maintainer commits a similar bug fix, claims reward. Dunno. Interesting idea, execution might have bad knock on effects
- maximedupre 5y ago> It seems like it would create some bad incentives for open source maintainers/submitters - someone submits a PR to fix a bug, gets rejected, maintainer commits a similar bug fix, claims reward. Well that would never work
- maximedupre 5y agoMeaning that it would be obvious what that said maintainer did to claim the reward lol
- maximedupre 5y agoThat's an amazing way to step up. It's not even about the amount, since in the grand scheme of things, it's nothing. It's about the leadership they are exercising and the influence it can have on other businesses. Most of our daily work as programmers involves us benefiting from OSS, yet so few of us are part of a culture that values this kind of support.
- reikonomusha 5y agoPart of it is about the amount. Symbolic gestures and token donations from other companies following suit don’t really matter.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- maximedupre 5y agoWhy would you assume that companies following suit would make symbolic gestures rather than a culture/values shift? This is a nuanced subject - companies won't just all start donation to OSS because of Sentry. But more and more companies taking leadership over time can compound into an industry perspective shift. The only thing relevant is the result. Even if some companies start to do symbolic gestures and token donations, the result of Sentry making a positive action is even greater.
- RNCTX 5y ago> Why would you assume that companies following suit would make symbolic gestures rather than a culture/values shift? Because companies are generally managed by far worse people. Just this afternoon I stumbled across an email template framework on GitHub in which one of the issues posts had a responder remove HTML templates from a reply to a bug report because he said his boss claimed that was their "intellectual property." Using an MIT licensed lib for free, think the plain ole html markup they generated with it is "valuable code," that's the CIS + MBA grads I know!
- ljm 5y ago
- Olumde 5y agoBravo! Well done!!! IMO every company should give something to OSS projects no matter how little, even if its a few hundred dollars or a small commit. Everyone benefits from OSS and how it does not occur to companies to give back is beyond me. I think us developers fail to educate management on how simple and vital to support OSS projects. I dream of the day when it becomes normal for job candidates to ask potential employers "how do you support OSS?"
- ceejayoz 5y agoI presume the remaining $0.11 is Office Space-style shenanigans?
- burkaman 5y ago> As to the 11¢ offset, we have currency conversion to thank.
- arbitrage 5y agoAnd a belligerent failure to understand sig-figs.
- whit537 5y ago:face_with_rolling_eyes:
- whack 5y agoI was very confused by this. Why the 11 cent offset for currency conversion? Are there some laws around sending $155k in foreign payments? From a PR perspective, that extra 11 cents provides a pretty good ROI since you can just say that you've donated $155,000 P.S. This isn't intended to be criticism, just curiosity. Kudos to Sentry for the donation. If every profitable company donated $2k per developer, we can expect some pretty amazing innovations in OSS
- awb 5y agoOn the contrary, having a bizarre number creates marketing buzz and curiosity. $154,999.89 got me to click. $155k can get lost in the shuffle of all the other numbers getting thrown around on HN.
- marcinzm 5y agoI'm guessing one project required currency conversion and so the 11 cents is the cost of conversion for that one project. Maybe they gave the project $10 and 11 cents got eaten in conversion making it $9.89. It's possible they spent $155,000 but projects only got $154,999.89 so the note the latter.
- grzff 5y agoFauci funded COVID-19: https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/nih-admits-funding-gain-function-covid-experiments-gives-ecohealth-five-days-report https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/nih-admits-funding-gain-f... Everyone involved should face the firing squad.
- ghuntley 5y agoWay to go Sentry! I’ve just finished setting up the early motions of a similar fund over at https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-open-source-sustainability-fund https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-open-source-sustainability.... Currently an initial amount of USD 30,000 has been earmarked. One day I hope to triple that (or more). At https://www.gitpod.io/blog/devxconf-wrap https://www.gitpod.io/blog/devxconf-wrap USD 10,000 was distributed to maintainers of LSP implementations and “digital infrastructure” that people use day-to-day but seldom think about.
- maximedupre 5y agoI guess HN is where the people that care about OSS conglomerate :D
- ghuntley 5y agoAnd GitHub is the place where employees of billion dollar companies pester unpaid maintainers because they won’t support a 12 year old version of .NET https://github.com/Fody/PropertyChanged/issues/270#issuecomment-320145654 https://github.com/Fody/PropertyChanged/issues/270#issuecomm...
- maximedupre 5y agoWho is MarkLTX?
- ghuntley 5y agoSomeone who is internet famous on GitHub in the .NET community for all the wrong reasons.
- maximedupre 5y agoWhat's his business?
- gscho 5y ago
- andrew_ 5y agoThe Rollup project appreciates and thanks Sentry for the contribution. I'd like to ask a question in earnest: Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from the project over the years?
- zeeg 5y agoI'm not actually sure we use Rollup fwiw. The contributions were democratized via our employees - we asked them where we should direct funding for individual projects. So what that ultimately means is some person(s) at Sentry valued the project and your contributions :)
- toomuchtodo 5y agoAppreciate you sharing the process and providing a democratic say to those on the Sentry team in handing out this open source comp.
- andrew_ 5y agoGreat insight, thanks for sharing.
- bentlegen 5y agoWe do use Rollup: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-javascript/blob/master/packages/vue/rollup.config.js https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-javascript/blob/master/p...
- whit537 5y agoIt's tough, I think it depends on the framing and is definitely something worth talking about. Part of what we were trying to do with this initiative is start with some _global_ concept of "fair" and then allocate that amount as best we could. The total amount we came up with is $150,000 which is $2,000 per engineer on staff. Sooooo ... > Does [$155,999.89] reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from [all community-run open source projects] over the year[]? Yes. We believe that contributing $2,000 annually per engineer is a meaningful amount that fairly compensates the value we receive from open source volunteers. May I flip the question? Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've given to Sentry over the past year?
- kiba 5y agoI just notice that this is the same Chad Whitcare of Gratispay! RIP Gratispay.
- remram 5y agoYou mean Gratipay? https://gratipay.com/ https://gratipay.com/
- whit537 5y ago<3
- whit537 5y agoImagine my surprise seeing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693731 surface serendipitously three weeks ago. That post from four years ago during Gratipay's final days is linked in today's announcement. :D
- simlevesque 5y agoWe need more of this. I say this as a happy Sentry customer.
- a_c 5y agoThis is good start. Would be great to see more companies following suite.
- fouc 5y agoCan someone shorten the dollar amount in the title to be less distracting/markety? $155K would be better. "$154,999.89" is as long as "$15,499,989" so it's tricking the brain into temporarily thinking it might be millions of dollars at first.
- ehPReth 5y agoI didn’t read it that way? Unsure about others though
- nateferrero 5y agoI did... one data point!
- maximedupre 5y agoI guess my subconscious did. It's easy to say that I didn't read it that way after the fact lol But after reading this comment and the title again, I see how that could be a possibility.
- fouc 5y agoIt's a VERY temporary effect, until I see the commas & period. The point is the overall length of the number looks to be in the millions.
- ljm 5y agoI thought I was going to pay almost three thousand dollars a month for a subscription until I saw the punctuation. The point is the overall length of the number looks to be in the thousands. HN, a pretty high quality crowd at the best of times, is confused about numbers now? Fixed point decimals at that! And reacting to that temporary double-take?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dustymcp 5y agoWoulndnt be hackernews if someone didnt complain about a format.
- wyuenho 5y agoWhile I appreciate that Sentry stepped up to the plate to fund open source, I'd also like to point out the obvious which is this is just 1.5 person's salary in Silicon Valley, for a year. I hope that companies instead of donating money, can pool their resources together to start a non-profit fund invests their money that will grow in time, so in time, more engineers can be funded.
- maximedupre 5y agoRight. Interesting perspective. Why not invest the money and make it grow instead? Long term vs short term
- Johnny555 5y agoBut when would you have enough to start paying people? When the average return on the investment is $150K/year? Do you start paying at $15K/year? Should you raise more money and wait until you can fund $1.5M/year?
- maximedupre 5y agoSure there are some details to iron out lol. But the point is that using a long-term approach - you will be able to pay people orders of magnitude more than if you take the short-term approach. Long-term becomes the short-term in the future ;). If some businesses had started such an initiative in the past, people would be getting paid in the present - consistently.
- wyuenho 5y ago100 companies 100k each gives you 10 mill. Just the return on that on any meager performing stock can fully fund 1 SV dev, indefinitely. Or, you can withdraw a couple mil from the fund per year, fully fund the entire project for 3-5 years or so. Investment is just a way to stretch out the fund.
- oh_sigh 5y agoWhy give a starving man a sandwich, when you could plant some wheat and an avocado tree?
- tnolet 5y agoThis is amazing. I'm CTO and co-founder of a (much smaller) monitoring company. We have as one of our core values that we donate 1% of MRR to non-corporate backed Open Source. We are also Sentry users BTW.
- mahalol 5y agoThat is amazing, your company rocks.
- maximedupre 5y agoIf all software businesses could give away 1% to OSS, what a difference it would make! It's only a philanthropic decision because not all businesses wish to do the same. Because all are benefiting from the philanthropic efforts of a few. If it was a standard in the industry, it would become a business decision, as innovations in OSS becomes innovations on their bottom line.
- htrp 5y ago1% of MRR is a huge win. Do you make one-time payments or does it become a monthly grant?
- mraza007 5y agoseeing this post makes me feel so good that they are really supporting the OSS community. I wish more companies supported OSS devs like this
- maximedupre 5y agoI know right! However, I do feel like individuals also have their part to play in this situation. If a business has to dedicate 1% of revenues to OSS, why shouldn't the individual, who is also an indirect beneficiary?
- dom96 5y agoReally cool to see $100 donated to Nim as part of this, although it does pale in comparison to the $23k Rust + Rust projects have received.
- maximedupre 5y agoThen the value received for Sentry most likely also pale in comparison. I've never heard of Nim before this comment. It looks pretty cool, especially the self-contained aspect. Do you know of any big company using Nim in production?
- whit537 5y agoWe have no Nim usage in the company. One of our engineers nominated it as something they find personally interesting, and we wanted to give at least a little bit to every project that our employees nominated. By contrast, we use Rust quite heavily, including our core ingest component: https://github.com/getsentry/relay https://github.com/getsentry/relay. That's why there's such a discrepancy in this case.
- dom96 5y agoThat's absolutely fair and we appreciate the donation a lot. One additional thing that would have been fairly cheap: call out the smaller open source projects you donated to. To some the exposure can mean a lot in a blog post like this :)
- whit537 5y agoWe're thinking through how to follow up on this post with additional signal-boosting throughout the year, point taken about exposure value to small projects. We'll keep that in mind! Thanks for Nim and keep up the great work! :^)
- withcoherence 5y agoMy new startup, Coherence, also is committed to giving back to the open-source we all build companies on. We're going to divide our budget up per-engineer, and give individual devs discretion on what projects they want to support. Feel free to check us out, we're hiring: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_artqGMblKQKwWMf_IZmUHJCf4nsVjgxc2hwVVYK39w https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_artqGMblKQKwWMf_IZmUHJC...
- that_guy_iain 5y agoThey literally have open-source projects where not a single Sentry employee works on it. We're not talking small projects but the PHP sdk and Symfony SDK. No matter what you think of PHP, it literally powers msot of the internet. There are as many job ads for PHP as any other language. So there is no denying, in my opinion, that the PHP ecosystem is of some value to Sentry. Maintained by volunteers. The CTO won't even step up when these guys are getting a hard time in the GitHub issues. I know he was on that ticket too because he left an emjoi reaction. They'll shell out realistically a single person salary to the entire open-source community act like it's a big deal but they won't even step up and defend people who spend hours making sure their product still works. Literally, I have no respect for Sentry or their leadership after that. We can say they're stepping up but realistically stepping up would be paying a salary to the folk that have been maintaining their product for free for ages (as far as I can tell). Nevermind giving them a product manager and some basic support.
- zeeg 5y agoI'm not actually sure what you're referring to (as CTO I promise you I am not managing any of our GitHub repositories or anything at that level). If you think there are concerns with the PHP SDKs you seem to know where to express those, but a lot of our SDKs start (or are) maintained by contractors as well as contributors from the open source community. That said, none of this has anything to do with these donations to the open source community. We fund a lot of other initiatives outside of this one thing, and it seems you have some gripes with how we do that, which you're welcome to, but it doesn't take away from this investment.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago> and it seems you have some gripes with how we do that Actually, I have a gripe with the fact you left unpaid volunteers to deal with an angry customer. I have a gripe with the fact you just left an emjoi response when a volunteer pointed out they were volunteers and weren't getting paid. I have a gripe with the fact I gave them greive for several replies in hope that a Sentry employee would finally step in and the company that I was paying money to would provide basic techincal support which I was told by the volunteers the company would be unable to do because only volunteers worked on it. In my opinion, open source maintainers of your offical products in your offical github org are part of your team. You didn't even stand up for them. You didn't even get a product manager or customer success manager to intervene. It's the bare minimum. And before you carry on with what issue this is. It doesn't matter at this point. Personally, I would just like it if in the future you stepped up for your maintainers.
- vmception 5y agoThoughts on announcing it? Some people say the best charity is anonymous. I used to believe that In my experience in the non-profit world I’ve found that its merely convenient that there is zero public transparency if you dont want it and so I have a different view of its “best” “good” “utility”, some people have an interesting in keeping the “anonymous good” perception The opposite is announcing It is completely amoral to me, as in it doesnt make a difference and I dont care and I have all options But I was wondering what others think [so I can amplify my standing in society, when convenient] Donate anonymously and have the collection of donations “leaked” in the future? Donate publicly and announcing it? Do both like McKenzie Bezos where some people get to be satisfied and inspired by the list and never question if there are others done?
- forgotmypw17 5y agoOn one hand, announcing one's donations can be criticized as trying to reap extra rewards for oneself for the donation. On the other hand, it can remind and inspire others to donate, causing an add-on effect which increases donations.
- maccard 5y agoI have shared this link with my company in the hope that we can do something similar. It encourages people like me (I'm only an engineer) to bring it up with people who can make decisions in a small company. ,
- whit537 5y agoThat's awesome! Good luck! :D
- jcuenod 5y agoObviously this is a good thing that we want to see more of. I like the approach of asking engineers what projects to support. My first thought was that this doesn't seem like a large amount. Maybe we need a thread listing large SAAS companies that have donated nothing to OSS projects, though.
- whit537 5y agoI'd love to see other companies express their open source donations in terms we can compare across companies. Yes, in absolute terms $155k (rounding up ;) is not that much, but Sentry is not that big. We have ~75 engineers. How much do other companies with 750 or 7,500 engineers donate to open source, per engineer?
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoThe sentry team is pretty cool too. Not to mention the product is very well made. I now almost always setup the free tiers by default on new web projects. I have yet to regret it.
- Weryj 5y agoI must say, I do really like sentry. Any hosted service that offers the option of free local hosting is always a perk. Add it to the home lab.
- hanswesterbeek 5y agoI like Sentry. I don’t like boasting about virtuous deeds. 155k is nice, could be more.
- simonw 5y agoIn this case boasting about the virtuous deed is adding a great deal of extra value to the world, because it is likely to inspire other companies to step up and do the same.
- anyfactor 5y agoI JUST LOVE THIS. I thought they were making donations to big names in OS fields but I was pleasantly surprised. neovim, axios, urlib3 and dark reader. I think I am going to start making a laundry list of small YouTubers, Projects, Browser Extensions, and Maintainers so I can help them out as they helped me out.
- ourbetterworld 5y agoThat sounds like a worthy project! I’m sure Gitcoin and others in retroactive public goods funding would benefit from a list and your efforts. Let’s talk, maybe we can get those people paid!