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> Many projects don’t offer any clear mechanism for sponsoring them. One problem with that is that I don't believe you can pay me for talk to your team without

> Many projects don’t offer any clear mechanism for sponsoring them. One problem with that is that I don't believe you can pay me for talk to your team without approval from my current employer. It then becomes a problem not of finding the right person from the project to speak, but finding any person in the project who is currently a contractor able to bill you. Or am I overthinking it?

cestith 5y ago
Evaluating who you really want doing the talking and working something out that their employer allows or gets a cut from are absolutely real concerns. That doesn't necessarily make them deal killers, but they could kill some deals.
simonw 5y ago
Yeah, that's a good point - though I imagine that would vary enormously between different companies, countries and cultures. In California people seem a lot more comfortable with their employees having a "side hustle" than they did when I worked in the UK!
bjornsteffanson 5y ago
Exactly this. Every OSS project is going to have a slightly different arrangement, but many contributions to OSS projects are subject to conflict of interest agreements. I work full-time on a large OSS project that has thousands of community contributors, and also has a few hundred paid full-time contributors as well. Our COI agreement limits what we can accept as gifts and outside payments. I would be open to speaking of course -- in fact, it's our responsibility to the community as core contributors. But taking a paid Zoom call with a commercial entity is very different than speaking at a conference or responding to Github issues (at my company, at least). I'm genuinely not certain how someone would approach my company to do this, which is also exactly to the author's first point quoted in the parent comment. My guess is likely that someone would pay my company, and my company would compensate me to speak as a normal part of my day-to-day role.

cestith 5y ago

Evaluating who you really want doing the talking and working something out that their employer allows or gets a cut from are absolutely real concerns. That doesn't necessarily make them deal killers, but they could kill some deals.

simonw 5y ago

Yeah, that's a good point - though I imagine that would vary enormously between different companies, countries and cultures. In California people seem a lot more comfortable with their employees having a "side hustle" than they did when I worked in the UK!

bjornsteffanson 5y ago

Exactly this. Every OSS project is going to have a slightly different arrangement, but many contributions to OSS projects are subject to conflict of interest agreements. I work full-time on a large OSS project that has thousands of community contributors, and also has a few hundred paid full-time contributors as well. Our COI agreement limits what we can accept as gifts and outside payments. I would be open to speaking of course -- in fact, it's our responsibility to the community as core contributors. But taking a paid Zoom call with a commercial entity is very different than speaking at a conference or responding to Github issues (at my company, at least). I'm genuinely not certain how someone would approach my company to do this, which is also exactly to the author's first point quoted in the parent comment. My guess is likely that someone would pay my company, and my company would compensate me to speak as a normal part of my day-to-day role.