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With this approach, suddenly your fun project turns into a job. Which is the exact thing most open source developers avoid.
by xyst 5y ago
With this approach, suddenly your fun project turns into a job. Which is the exact thing most open source developers avoid.
- cestith 5y agoMost hobbyist developers, sure. There's plenty of F/LOSS code written by consultants, consultancy companies, or developers at companies doing things with the code other than selling it. I write code on a regular basis at a commercial software company, but none of my code is in the products. It's all for ancillary purposes. A little of it is GPL, because it's not unique to our situation. If my employer wants to collect a fee for sending me to talk to other companies or wants to let me take a PTO day to go get paid personally to do that, it's not hurting my feelings at all.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoYeah I'd be very leery of anything saying it's a solution to open source sustainability that isn't directly involving maintainers in the conversation and decision. It might sound 'fun' to throw dollars at a project and get their core developer to speak to your team, but it's also a huge time burden and productivity sink for them. If you've gotten value from a project pay the developer how they prefer to be paid. If maintainers just want direct financial support please give it. Don't make them jump through hoops or do tricks for you. These folks have lives, families to support, etc. and it does not scale to suddenly have their corporate users banging on their e-mail inbox demanding speaking time, etc. while shaking dollars at them.
- simonw 5y agoI really enjoy public speaking, so for me that wouldn't apply: if I could opt into earning $1,000 for an hour of work every now and then based on my open source work I'd be delighted. If a company reaches out to a contributor and offers them money to talk they can always say no!