5 ms·

That's one of the issues with open source, polishing isn't "fun", where massive rewrites to a new thing are.

edflsafoiewq 4y ago
I don't know about fun, but structurally, polish is one of the hardest things to contribute to an open source project. Polishing usually has a very large "activation energy", where the overhead of synchronizing, making a PR, building consensus, etc. dwarfs the actual effort in the patch. Polishing may involve hundred or thousands of small changes like this. Outsiders are likely to prefer contributing large features where the effort involved is more commensurate to the benefits.
- dymk 4y ago
  On top of that, polish usually involves some amount of opinionated design, which can be hard to contribute to an open source project - you’ll break someone else’s workflow, or maybe it doesn’t mesh with the ideas of a core maintainer, etc.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    Yes let's wait and see the inevitable response here to the Audacity redesign... I'm sure everyone will be very positive about the polish! /s
worldsayshi 4y ago
I don't understand why there hasn't been a widely successful crowd financing platform for open source yet. I imagine it has to be a bit complex but it sounds like a solvable problem.
- Karsteski 4y ago
  Patreon exists, but I hesitate to contribute to projects/people through Patreon as I want to give them as little money as possible...
  - worldsayshi 4y ago
    I also feel that something like Patreon doesn't reflect the semi-decentralised way open source is built. There needs to be features like feature/bug-bounties that you can trust even if you don't fully trust the repo-owner/maintainer?
    - Karsteski 4y ago
      I'd be more okay with donating via Patreon if they didn't do the thing where every internet platform that becomes successful feels the need to start going down the political route. I'm not sure if this is a more of an issue due to the employees, or due to social media pressure, or if it's just "keeping up with the times" but I hate it. And it's also so US-centric, which makes sense as they are usually US-based companies, but it just irritates me looking from the outside.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        As someone who doesn’t follow the details of day to day Very Online politics-adjacent drama, I haven’t heard much about Patreon, so… they seem to be threading the needle well enough to stay off the radar of boring normies like myself. What’s their issue?
        Jensson 4y ago
        They started banning creators who made NSFW content a few years ago, might be that. They never allowed porn, but they started hammering down on all sorts of erotic material. I don't really care, but others do.
        pdntspa 4y ago
        I think that was more at the behest of the payment processors, Visa and MC absolutely hate adult content-related stuff. Which is fucking stupid, IMHO
        4y ago
- rcme 4y ago
  People generally don't like to pay for things they can get for free.
  - worldsayshi 4y ago
    I feel that your point isn't the whole story. Patreon seems to be financing a lot of creators nowadays. Personally I feel more inclined to donate myself when I feel there is a reliable way for others to donate in unison with me, so that it has a chance to become substantial enough to make a difference. I think that's the value proposition of Patreon and Kickstarter.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Wikipedia, Mozilla, Gnome... they've all been found to be poor stewards of donated money, using it for pet ideological projects instead of the projects that are the foundation of each organization. If I go to the discussion site for many FOSS projects, it's hard to go very long without seeing lots of political activism being pushed. FOSS decided to become political or those who are political decided to invade FOSS. Either way, they've made their bed and now it's shrinking their pool of potential resources.
  - darkwater 4y ago
    FOSS had always beeen political. How the heck is giving you the freedom to modify and tinker the source code of the software you are using, no string sattached, not a political act? I think it's fair to say that then "the ones who just want to have things for free as in beer" came. But FOSS has always been pretty utopian.
    - drdeca 4y ago
      The word "political" is used in a number of ways. When someone says "How could <x> __not__ be political? Of course it is political." in response to someone complaining about <x> becoming political, I think the person responding is typically using the word "political" in a way different from how it was being used in the original complaint. I think it would be best to attempt to understand what the person complaining meant by "political", (and if one dislikes using the word "political" by itself to express that idea, or if is unsure if one is interpreting correctly, perhaps rephrase the idea in one's own words, and maybe ask if that was what was meant) and respond to that. I saw a poll result the other day, which said that, in 2020, some voters and some corporate executives were asked whether they approved of companies expressing support for political/electoral/whatever causes/social issues, and given the options of "yes", "yes, but only if directly related to the company's core business", and "no". According to this poll result, less than 40% of voters picked "yes", and almost 80% said either "yes" or "yes, but only if directly related to the company's core business". (for completeness, but not really relevant to my point : over 60% of the corporate executives polled said "yes", and under 10% said "no") Perhaps an analogy can be drawn between these two situations?
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  liberapay.com is pretty much that. No fees - 100% non profit. Probably not "widely successful", though, otherwise you would have heard of it. And the overal money flowing through it, is quite modest. The main problem is still in the minds of people, I think. If something is free, then there is no need to pay, then most won't pay (or they pay 5€ and think they own the developer now).
- jakear 4y ago
  IMO the issue is as soon as it's paid, there needs to be a "Software Engineering Manager" of some sort or another in the middle of the payers and the workers. That's a very difficult job to hard-code. Having spent some time maintaining large OSS projects as a first party engineer, these are the options I see: - pay a fixed donation per month, a la patreon/etc. I would never do this. If I'm buying software for a company I want a real support contract, not a "I'll really try to respond to your issues with higher priority!". If I'm using software in a personal project, I want the monthly burn to be as close to 0 as possible. Also, who takes that money? What do third party PR submitters get? What do people who submit excellent issue reports with crash dumps and full debug traces get? What do first party PR reviewers get? Third party? etc. etc. - stake money on the closing of a given issue/PR. This is better, but comes with a whole can of worms. The obvious failure mode is a third party contributor submitting a PR, the maintainer saying "eh.... I don't really agree with the way you've done this", then building it themselves. Next step on that train is a fight between the third party and the maintainer about how much influence one's code had on the other. Even if that doesn't happen, the maintainer is almost guaranteed to request changes of some sort, who decides how much the maintainer gets for their work reviewing versus the third party for their work contributing? Not to mention the dirty little secret behind many third party contributions: if you are new to the repo, the frameworks, oss in general, etc., it is highly likely that the maintainer's work in holding your hand through contributing to the repo will far outweigh the work they'd need to put in to make the change themselves. But few would agree to paying the maintainer to accept their PR, or likely even the maintainer getting more money than them for their own PR.
- tcmart14 4y ago
  I don't know about crowd source, but one of my favorite solutions come from the ElementaryOS team. Their software store allows you to pay for what your downloading and I think that goes directly to the project? So its like opening the GNOME software center, but having the ability to donate right there as you go to download it.
kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
Just like all other software!

I don't know about fun, but structurally, polish is one of the hardest things to contribute to an open source project. Polishing usually has a very large "activation energy", where the overhead of synchronizing, making a PR, building consensus, etc. dwarfs the actual effort in the patch. Polishing may involve hundred or thousands of small changes like this. Outsiders are likely to prefer contributing large features where the effort involved is more commensurate to the benefits.

dymk 4y ago
On top of that, polish usually involves some amount of opinionated design, which can be hard to contribute to an open source project - you’ll break someone else’s workflow, or maybe it doesn’t mesh with the ideas of a core maintainer, etc.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Yes let's wait and see the inevitable response here to the Audacity redesign... I'm sure everyone will be very positive about the polish! /s

worldsayshi 4y ago

I don't understand why there hasn't been a widely successful crowd financing platform for open source yet. I imagine it has to be a bit complex but it sounds like a solvable problem.

Karsteski 4y ago
Patreon exists, but I hesitate to contribute to projects/people through Patreon as I want to give them as little money as possible...
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  I also feel that something like Patreon doesn't reflect the semi-decentralised way open source is built. There needs to be features like feature/bug-bounties that you can trust even if you don't fully trust the repo-owner/maintainer?
  - Karsteski 4y ago
    I'd be more okay with donating via Patreon if they didn't do the thing where every internet platform that becomes successful feels the need to start going down the political route. I'm not sure if this is a more of an issue due to the employees, or due to social media pressure, or if it's just "keeping up with the times" but I hate it. And it's also so US-centric, which makes sense as they are usually US-based companies, but it just irritates me looking from the outside.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      As someone who doesn’t follow the details of day to day Very Online politics-adjacent drama, I haven’t heard much about Patreon, so… they seem to be threading the needle well enough to stay off the radar of boring normies like myself. What’s their issue?
      - Jensson 4y ago
        They started banning creators who made NSFW content a few years ago, might be that. They never allowed porn, but they started hammering down on all sorts of erotic material. I don't really care, but others do.
        pdntspa 4y ago
        I think that was more at the behest of the payment processors, Visa and MC absolutely hate adult content-related stuff. Which is fucking stupid, IMHO
        4y ago
rcme 4y ago
People generally don't like to pay for things they can get for free.
- worldsayshi 4y ago
  I feel that your point isn't the whole story. Patreon seems to be financing a lot of creators nowadays. Personally I feel more inclined to donate myself when I feel there is a reliable way for others to donate in unison with me, so that it has a chance to become substantial enough to make a difference. I think that's the value proposition of Patreon and Kickstarter.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Wikipedia, Mozilla, Gnome... they've all been found to be poor stewards of donated money, using it for pet ideological projects instead of the projects that are the foundation of each organization. If I go to the discussion site for many FOSS projects, it's hard to go very long without seeing lots of political activism being pushed. FOSS decided to become political or those who are political decided to invade FOSS. Either way, they've made their bed and now it's shrinking their pool of potential resources.
- darkwater 4y ago
  FOSS had always beeen political. How the heck is giving you the freedom to modify and tinker the source code of the software you are using, no string sattached, not a political act? I think it's fair to say that then "the ones who just want to have things for free as in beer" came. But FOSS has always been pretty utopian.
  - drdeca 4y ago
    The word "political" is used in a number of ways. When someone says "How could <x> __not__ be political? Of course it is political." in response to someone complaining about <x> becoming political, I think the person responding is typically using the word "political" in a way different from how it was being used in the original complaint. I think it would be best to attempt to understand what the person complaining meant by "political", (and if one dislikes using the word "political" by itself to express that idea, or if is unsure if one is interpreting correctly, perhaps rephrase the idea in one's own words, and maybe ask if that was what was meant) and respond to that. I saw a poll result the other day, which said that, in 2020, some voters and some corporate executives were asked whether they approved of companies expressing support for political/electoral/whatever causes/social issues, and given the options of "yes", "yes, but only if directly related to the company's core business", and "no". According to this poll result, less than 40% of voters picked "yes", and almost 80% said either "yes" or "yes, but only if directly related to the company's core business". (for completeness, but not really relevant to my point : over 60% of the corporate executives polled said "yes", and under 10% said "no") Perhaps an analogy can be drawn between these two situations?
hutzlibu 4y ago
liberapay.com is pretty much that. No fees - 100% non profit. Probably not "widely successful", though, otherwise you would have heard of it. And the overal money flowing through it, is quite modest. The main problem is still in the minds of people, I think. If something is free, then there is no need to pay, then most won't pay (or they pay 5€ and think they own the developer now).
jakear 4y ago
IMO the issue is as soon as it's paid, there needs to be a "Software Engineering Manager" of some sort or another in the middle of the payers and the workers. That's a very difficult job to hard-code. Having spent some time maintaining large OSS projects as a first party engineer, these are the options I see: - pay a fixed donation per month, a la patreon/etc. I would never do this. If I'm buying software for a company I want a real support contract, not a "I'll really try to respond to your issues with higher priority!". If I'm using software in a personal project, I want the monthly burn to be as close to 0 as possible. Also, who takes that money? What do third party PR submitters get? What do people who submit excellent issue reports with crash dumps and full debug traces get? What do first party PR reviewers get? Third party? etc. etc. - stake money on the closing of a given issue/PR. This is better, but comes with a whole can of worms. The obvious failure mode is a third party contributor submitting a PR, the maintainer saying "eh.... I don't really agree with the way you've done this", then building it themselves. Next step on that train is a fight between the third party and the maintainer about how much influence one's code had on the other. Even if that doesn't happen, the maintainer is almost guaranteed to request changes of some sort, who decides how much the maintainer gets for their work reviewing versus the third party for their work contributing? Not to mention the dirty little secret behind many third party contributions: if you are new to the repo, the frameworks, oss in general, etc., it is highly likely that the maintainer's work in holding your hand through contributing to the repo will far outweigh the work they'd need to put in to make the change themselves. But few would agree to paying the maintainer to accept their PR, or likely even the maintainer getting more money than them for their own PR.
tcmart14 4y ago
I don't know about crowd source, but one of my favorite solutions come from the ElementaryOS team. Their software store allows you to pay for what your downloading and I think that goes directly to the project? So its like opening the GNOME software center, but having the ability to donate right there as you go to download it.

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago

Just like all other software!