20 ms·

Side projects

698 points by fcambus 12y ago

m40329180 12y ago
Brilliant - "because in order to have a long term engagement, you need a long term alternative to explore new things."
binarymax 12y ago
I hope this question isn't too forward - but my main question is 'how did you afford to do this?' I have had plenty of fun little side projects (some finished some not), but my main project is my salaried position. Aside from being independently wealthy, how can one create and maintain a long term open source project as a full time job. Consulting on the side? Donations? Something else? P.S. Thanks for Redis :)
- antirez 12y ago
  Unfortunately I've no good answer for your question, since I'm sponsored by Pivotal, but if we consider the percentage of open source software created, only a small percentage is sponsored. Many developers simply do it for free, as I did it in the first year of Redis developments, because I had an alternative stream of money to pay the bills. So, my point of view, is that the IT ecosystem is broken and IT companies are leveraging a huge value from OSS without providing enough back to pay developments of more OSS. It is one of the biggest injustices currently happening in the "rich world", but there is no easy fix.
  - binarymax 12y ago
    Glad to hear that it is sponsored - I did not know that. I agree with your points on the injustice, but with OSS it is hard to have it both ways. Lots of innovation comes from using OSS as building blocks by folks just starting out, who cannot afford it. Maybe we need more vocal social stigma against large profitable companies who built their company on free software and who don't give back. I've seen a couple good things happen recently though - with GPG and FreeBSD. Hopefully it is the beginning of a trend.
    - parasubvert 12y ago
      Pivotal is arguably a grand experiment to try to build an eventual RedHat-sized revenue stream on open source through subscription pricing. It's $300m now, and everything is open source or just was announced will be open sourced this year. Most of it in house R&D, some like Redis is sponsored patronage. What's interesting is that most enterprises don't really want to freeride - they don't have the knowledge or legal will (indemnity) to go it alone, plus have esoteric requirements that usually don't lead to good open source projects and will pay for proprietary add-ins. The main free riders are startups that couldn't afford a subscription anyway (until they scale and want help), along with service/cloud providers that are at such enormous scale and have such a large braintrust that they can go it alone. These are the organizations IMO (the Googles of the world) that really need to sponsor individuals and OSS foundations to avoid a tragedy (like GPG or even OpenSSL).
  - baq 12y ago
    you don't have to look far to see how true your words are - there've been multiple security fiascos pretty much directly caused by what you describe and hopefully things like http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/core-infrastructure-initiative http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/core-infrastructure-... will start appearing. one can hope there will be a time when such initiatives will happen proactively instead of in response to a disaster...
  - Avalaxy 12y ago
    > IT companies are leveraging a huge value from OSS without providing enough back to pay developments of more OSS. It is one of the biggest injustices currently happening in the "rich world", but there is no easy fix. GPL?
    - lclarkmichalek 12y ago
      AGPL
    - icebraining 12y ago
      As someone who likes the GPL and supports the idea that all software should be Free, the thing that bothers me about it is how "closed" it is to projects based on other Free licenses. GPL projects "take" from BSD/MIT/Apache/etc projects (in the form of libraries, supporting software, etc) and only give back with conditions they can't accept. You can say it's on them, for choosing the license they chose, they accepted that this could happen, but on the other hand, isn't that exactly what we're criticizing companies for?
      - pygy_ 12y ago
        The aim of the GPL is to ensure that the recipient of a program has the right, from a legal stand point, to obtain and modify its source code and redistribute the result under the same license. The FSF is hostile to proprietary software and criticize liberal licenses because they don't provide these guaranties.
        icebraining 12y ago
        I understand that, but while the FSF might criticize liberal licenses, both GNU and many other GPL projects use code under those licenses, while their code is closed to the original projects. That's what bothers me.
        mrec 12y ago
        And by choosing liberal licenses, those original projects have indicated that they're fine with that. Seriously, I don't see the problem. If you don't want people to use your code without making their changes available to you, license it under the GPL. That's what the GPL is for. Criticizing GPL projects for the fact that some projects are not GPL seems an odd way to spend your outrage budget.
  - famousactress 12y ago
    I've been broadly thinking about ways to take a bite out of this challenge. I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. As the company scales it has a massive effect on their culture. I visited New Belgium Brewing (makers of Fat Tire) for instance, and a huge number of their employees are solely responsible for thoughtfully putting that money into action and funneling it into worthy causes. Imagine the impact that a double-digit percentage of the workforce of your successful company whose job it is to stand up for the things you decided were important _besides profit_. It's really incredible. I really like the idea of setting up guard-rails like this to embody cultural values early on in ways that keep the organization accountable to them at scale and I wonder if something similar could help OSS. It's not hard to imagine a similarly structured pledge being adopted by companies and being popular with developers. It could be structured in hours or money, executed with developer time, donations, or hosting OSS developers like Stripe has done. If I allow myself the thought exercise of what happens if something like this started to see adoption, I imagine we'd see projects beginning to license themselves favorably to companies who make this pledge in a variety of ways. At any rate. That's roughly what I've been noodling around with regard to this problem. [1] http://onepercentfortheplanet.org/ http://onepercentfortheplanet.org/ and I highly recommend Yvon Chouinard's book Let My People Go Surfing, which was where I was first exposed to the idea http://www.patagonia.com/us/product/let-my-people-go-surfing-paperback-book?p=BK501-0 http://www.patagonia.com/us/product/let-my-people-go-surfing...
    - seiji 12y ago
      I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. Interesting approach, but I bet those companies also aren't high growth tech startups/companies. The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue. They aren't looking for new ways to pay for things they legally get for free. My favorite example is Redis at Twitter: Twitter has over 30,000 Redis servers deployed around the world using a total of over 500 terabytes of RAM (half a petabyte!), and they certainly have no interesting in paying for Redis. If Redis were typical "commercial software" licensed per-core or per-other-shennigans, they'd be paying over $70 million per year for Redis. (Redis is a unique position because the core dev team of Redis has always been small so it's easier to measure the direct exploitation involved versus other projects with thousands of amorphous developers like Linux or Hadoop or Apache.) Many open source projects are essentially corporate welfare. We work, make products companies use to make money/become more efficient/grow faster, the companies use the software for free to get richer, then nobody contributes back any of the gains.
  - revorad 12y ago
    patio11 has a good suggestion in this article (see the last section "A Brief Meditation on OSS") - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementation-of-csvexcel-upload-for-saas/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementatio...
    - davidw 12y ago
      That still relies on the company, or people therein being not quite economically rational: free riding is cheaper. Unless of course everyone does it and the good in question is then underprovisioned. It is certainly worth a try, though!
      - hastly 12y ago
        The thing is, free riding isn't necessarily cheaper for anyone. When you're depending on the software in question, it being underfunded might mean you're not getting the quality and features that would pay off in multiples for you. You could be sitting on a pile of bugs, or your dependency could be abandoned at your expense. These things happen all the time in open source land and it's a tragedy. I'm not convinced that freeriding is really rational at all. I would however grant that it's both easy and lazy.
        davidw 12y ago
        Obviously it depends on the circumstances. There are cases where it's so important to you that you might as well pay up, free riding or not.
    - seiji 12y ago
      Yeah, that's a great point, but due to the unique "sponsorship" arrangement of Redis, Redis isn't actually allowed to accept money from anybody else for anything. It's a tradeoff between "stable" income and "potentially unlimited" income, and Redis is still in the "stable" column.
    - alexfarran 12y ago
      This seems to be the way that commercial Wordpress themes are sold. 100% GPL licensed, but sold in the normal way. eg http://crowdfavorite.com/carrington-build/docs/faq/#license http://crowdfavorite.com/carrington-build/docs/faq/#license. It seems to be working.
  - kriro 12y ago
    I think many people agree that hireing in IT is kind of broken. I think many people in the business world understand PR/marketing budgets. I'd position FLOSS spending as a way to open a marketing channel to potential employees. The good players that give back need to be recognized and praised. [I honestly have a hard time understanding why bigish companies that use/rely on the software don't just give 50k to the GPG developer or sponsor OpenBSD etc. which can be great PR while they can spend similar sums on somewhat silly PR campaigns. I guess "IT people" generally don't have much input when it comes to PR...even outisde of signaling that you're a cool employer it's genuine good PR for (tech) companies]
  - up_and_up 12y ago
    > the IT ecosystem is broken and IT companies are leveraging a huge value from OSS without providing enough back to pay developments of more OSS. This! Not only IT companies but VC's and startup entrepreneurs all rave about how fast and easy it is to develop and get a MVP out the door these days compared to year ago. What % of their tech stock is OSS that they leveraging for FREE?! Not only that but if you run into a bug, you can even submit an issue ticket directly on github and get a dev to respond and potentially fix your issue for FREE! Obviously, the pure technology is not the sum of startup execution, but I wonder how many of these people made huge $$$ without donating a nickle to the OSS projects that provided the backbone of their entire technology stack!
- hastly 12y ago
  Maybe we should turn our open source projects into businesses? At least make it clear we're open to taking money for extra features and/or support? I mean, I have a whole list of projects I would like to support in a meaningful way through a subscription for some service, but it seems finding a way to do this is itself a hoop to jump through. Even if I'm super benevolent maybe I'm not willing to do HR/accounting work in order to exercise my benevolence. I know about Gittip and the like, but if you're a business (the only kind of entity with meaningful money to throw at this problem), you'd rather have a clearcut way to pay for a service, not a platform for dropping pennies.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    It doesn't work for desktop software for example.
    - hastly 12y ago
      Isn't taking money for extra features in desktop software the oldest trick in the book? Either way I don't think the problem is one of individual users not paying for their apps. I think the major problem is that of huge companies who get business value from the code use it to make money and give back nothing in return.
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        As proprietary software yes, but the moment you have something free with source code available, why should I pay you for it? This is why most successful desktop open source desktop software, actually live from another sources of funding, but it hardly created the same changes as with developer tools.
        jimmaswell 12y ago
        >but the moment you have something free with source code available, why should I pay you for it? People bought the paid version of xchat for some reason. Don't assume the customer is that smart.
- robotkilla 12y ago
  as someone who works on a lot of side projects: figure out where most of your free time goes and decide if you can sacrifice the hours you spend on those activities for side projects... and then actually do it. I watch very little TV. I have only a couple of friends that I see every few months max. I don't go to meetups, I don't use social media and I don't play a lot of video games. I can hardly stand to see a day go by without creating something however small it might be. I don't celebrate holidays and don't see family very often either. That helps a ton - I worked through Christmas and NYE last year while everyone else was partying... and then I switched to a side project on the weekend. I also have a sleep schedule that makes most people cringe: go to sleep anywhere between 8:30 and 9:30pm, get up anywhere between 4:00am and 6:30am. All that said, I think its incredibly important to switch off for days at a time every couple of weeks or months and break all the rules. Watch TV all day on a Friday or something. Edit Sorry, I misread your question: "how can one create and maintain a long term open source project as a full time job" That's something I have been working towards and haven't succeeded at yet. I'm leaving my comment up in case it helps anyone though.
  - burntsushi 12y ago
    This post is nearly a mirror image of myself! I tend to relax on the major holidays (xmas and nye), but everything else is the same. My brain is constantly working on some problem that is of interest to me. I have time to do side projects because that is what I do for fun. I have the same sleep schedule as you (I work in Cambridge, MA but live West of 495), although I'm not sure if I'd voluntarily choose it. Working alone in the mornings is quite productive though. And I second the sentiment "it's important to switch off for days at a time." I expect much of this will change when kids come along though. ;-)
    - robotkilla 12y ago
      I have a ten year old daughter - nothing has changed yet, she's as bad as i am ;)
      - burntsushi 12y ago
netcraft 12y ago
The site is not responsive for me, here is a cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://antirez.com/news/86 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- graghav 12y ago
  Yea, it is indeed not responsive. But I think Antirez is affording his time more on his "side projects" rather than making it responsive.
  - antirez 12y ago
    Not sure what is happening, probably Apache mod proxy is not configured well enough, since the machine is idle, and the Ruby process serving the requests is idle as well... EDIT: Btw current deployment is "ruby app.rb" + Apache mod_proxy. Not stellar... EDIT2: Problem found, was running via WEBrick since Mongrel was uninstalled for error from the server.
  - lukeholder 12y ago
    I think he means not 'responding', not complaining the website doesn't resize for different screen sizes (responsive).
    - philtar 12y ago
      Responsive meant that before the graphics design crowd took it over.
graghav 12y ago
Thanks for Redis. It has come a long way over the last six years. Looking forward for your "few side projects for the next years" to come.
- gadders 12y ago
  Rather than start a new thread, I'll add my congratulations here. Congratulations, Antirez!
Svenstaro 12y ago
Proxy Error for me.
seigel 12y ago
Thank you sir.
humbertomn 12y ago
I'm another believer that focussing in 1 thing is overestimated. "There’s a myth when it comes to what we’ve been taught about focus. Doing only 1 thing isn’t focusing. It’s essentially just doing 1 thing. Following a course of action until completion is FOCUS" - Hodan Ibrahim Interesting related read: http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/psychological-marketing-myth-focus/ http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/psychological-marketing-my...
- darkFunction 12y ago
  I struggle to focus on more than one thing, in programming and in life, one thing is intensely the single focus of all my passion and energy until one day it is not.
  - humbertomn 12y ago
    Maybe it's hard to measure what exactly is the 1 thing. In my typical day in my early stage project, I still have to code a few hours per day in addition to managing design work, doing initial marketing strategy and testing some campaigns, talking to customers, investors and mentors and making lots of decisions. I still spend around 40mins in stuff from my previous startup which I'm not officially in operations anymore, but still have to help with some things. On top of all that, I created a side project and built a team to run it and will be doing only mentoring, and this can be a great help to my oficial project. So, I'm not saying this is the ideal setup... Of course a lot will change once the company starts to grow and we are able to hire more people, but I can say at the end of the day I'm pretty happy with my production and already thinking about the next day of work.
bglazer 12y ago
I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on this project before I start getting really irritable. I'm not a terribly skilled web designer so I feel like contract work isn't really a feasible option. So I'm stuck with a chicken and egg scenario. I could make huge strides on the side project if I got funding to quit my job, but I can't get funding without an already working product. I've considered quitting my job and diving into it for a few months. I have savings but this seems foolishly risky to me. Maybe I just need to be more disciplined. If anyone has been in a similar situation, I would greatly appreciate advice.
- parasubvert 12y ago
  I've had a similar issue, and decided to treat it like a hobby - too risky to see as a job, but too interesting to ignore. If you have a hobby and part of the pleasure of the hobby is the end result, then I'd suggest carving time out daily to work on it like exercise. Even an hour a day and 2 hours on each weekend would triple the time you've put into it to date. That said, if you enjoy doing other things more, I wouldn't sweat it.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- rday 12y ago
  2 kids, 3 freelance gigs (full time at this), a couple startups behind me (1 pivoted away, 1 still running). I would love to get 5 hours for an OSX app I really want to build. You really do have to shut out the rest of your life if you want to make a serious run at a project. When you are cramming a side project into you life, you really can "work" 80 hour weeks. The irritability you're experiencing will probably just get worse. I'm just starting to learn to cook. I began riding my bike last year. I'm 34. The grass is always greener of course. But it seems like you are enjoying a lot of the things I wish I had made time for earlier. Maybe shut out the art project. Turn your code into open source and let that be your art for the next few months.
derekp7 12y ago
Does anyone have any suggestions for promoting an open source project? I hate mentioning my side project on various forums, even if it is topical -- it makes me feel spammy. I thought about taking out some ads once I add in a few more "enterprise" type features, and was hoping that some open-source focused sites would have a discount on advertising open source projects using unsold ad inventory. I'd also like to find someone to work with that can point out deficiencies in the project web site, or general improvements/features I should add.
- arh68 12y ago
  Put a screencast up on YouTube? I guess it depends what it is, but 8~10 minute videos can be pretty thorough.
- rckrd 12y ago
  -Tutorials & Examples -Extensive documentation Sure, these are boring things to work on, but in my experience these are what have let separate a mature project that I can see works from a less mature project that may introduce even more bugs and maintenance.
_pferreir_ 12y ago
I would like to highlight dump1090, the ADS-B encoder. It has become a "must-have" for RTL-SDR enthusiasts. It is small, simple, and works great.
- platz 12y ago
  dump1090 is great.
jjling 12y ago
I have a hard time focusing on side projects for very long. At any one point in time I'm usually working on 3 or 4 different projects. Then I get burned out and do something that isn't programming instead, like write a book. Ironically, the only "side-project" I've finished is a book and not code (https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/M0X7KAS29H5Q https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/M0X7KAS29H5Q) Makes me wonder if I'm cut out to be an entrepreneur or even an developer if I can't dedicate all my free time to coding.
moron4hire 12y ago
I think the key is that you have to dogfood your own side projects. I have a project that I've been building over the last, oh, 9 years. I haven't worked on it exclusively during that time, but I keep going back to it and tweaking it, making it better, etc., because I actually use it in just about everything.
christopherDam 12y ago
I need some advice. How other great people find the ideas for side project? I would greatly appreciate if any one help me to know how other get some cool ideas.
- seiji 12y ago
  Don't start with an idea, start with a problem. Work on fixing the problem. Grow from there.
sylvinus 12y ago
For those interested, Salvatore will present Disque at the next dotScale conference in Paris, on June 8: http://www.dotscale.io http://www.dotscale.io
Spearchucker 12y ago
I have a full time job, and a 3y/o kid. Get up at 7am and take him to school at 8:30am. Get to work at 9:30am or so. Get home around 6pm. Give my son a bath, we all have dinner and my son is in bed somewhere between 8 and 9pm. I then spend ~2 hours on my side project, in bed somewhere between 11pm and 12am. I train twice a week so this pattern happens three days out of 5. On weekends I can often negotiate up to 4 hours to myself. Progress isn't too slow, and I keep my sanity.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
fit2rule 12y ago
I'm a huge fan of LOAD81, its been a very interesting too for a few things .. one thing I've used it for is to view system statistics, akin to a poor mans gnuplot. Its also been valuable in teaching my 7-year old about computing - the ease with which you can bang out a program to draw stuff is very appealing. So count me as a LOAD81 fan, antirez .. its one of your side projects that gets regular use around our house!
andhof-mt 12y ago
I've got a side project. And chances are it will never make any real money. But I opted to do it because I know its a pain in the butt to make, and if I don't likely no one else will (or at least do a good job). Nicely edited, free, organized CS videos. I'm opening sourcing my education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nyzl3pVXp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nyzl3pVXp4
shlomozippel 12y ago
"Side projects are the projects making your bigger projects possible" Amen.
djabatt 12y ago
IMHO if you are not hacking on a few side projects you are missing out on learning new things. I love side projects they keep my work and personal life super fresh.
antoinevg 12y ago
Life is more than work. Make time for the ideas and people you love.
petercooper 12y ago
Every major source of my income over the past ten years has started as a side project. Not a single one came out of a deliberate effort to build something big but began as a mere experiment for the fun of it.
digisth 12y ago
Companies have long sponsored (or hired) individuals to work on FLOSS, but I think we could go a lot further. If we could make it part of the culture of (scaling) companies / funding ecosystems to say "when we reach X revenue, we're going to hire /sponsor 5 people to work on FLOSS stuff full time." Obviously, these companies will have more incentive to sponsor people who work on software they use heavily (which should stay the first priority, as it makes a lot of sense), but it'd be great to take it to the next level and have them hire people who work on useful / popular software that they don't use everyday (directly) or doesn't have much to do with their bottom line. This could include 'adjunct' software work like package repository maintainers and writers of documentation for these projects. If it wasn't one-offs and outliers, but just something that companies did as part of getting big, we'd have a lot less need for periodic emergency fundraisers, and fewer stories about "important software X that's about to lose its sole maintainer(s)."
digisth 12y ago
Is there a list of companies and the people they hired/sponsor to maintain FLOSS stuff?
gabamnml 12y ago
Many congrats for the excellent work with Redis
cheriot 12y ago
My side project is an escape from my real job where process, politics, and domain experts outside of their domain prevent progress...
Edmond 12y ago
You're spot on about using side projects as positive distractions. When you are working alone on a significant project, at some point you're not going to be as motivated to work on it, that's where other side projects can be helpful.
wuster 12y ago
I agree with his sentiment. Working on side projects keeps this career interesting. During the most boring, most soul-sucking projects of my corporate jobs, being able to accomplish projects on the side reminded me of why I am excited to be building software in the first place.
xacaxulu 12y ago
Sicilian pride! Antirez is an amazing guy and the OS community is indebted to him for Redis.
jmgtan 12y ago
My situation is getting bad enough that even my wife is complaining that I don't spend enough time with them (her and my son). I have a full time job with SAP, I also have regular consulting work on my own which I have been doing since I graduated from university, and lately I've started working on a number of products that I strongly believe in. I've started applying a bit of scrum in my own work where in I have a Trello board with my backlog, my plan for the current sprint, what is done and what is deployed (for demo). This allows me to focus and not jump around developing endless streams of features. I set a side a chunk of time (w/ adequate negotiations with my wife) where in I blitz through my tasks for the current sprint. It also helps that my wife is a project manager in her day job so she understands my Trello board. I find that this setup is the most effective for me, of course YMMV. For my consulting work I normally have 1 ongoing project at a time and usually a few in the RFP type of stage where in I'm still in discussions with clients.
udev 12y ago
I am curious whether it gets more and more (legally) tricky for employees of large tech-companies to have side-projects. For example, if I am working at Google/Amazon/Microsoft. What side projects won't get me into legal problems? Can I work on search, email, virtualization, etc. without being in conflict of interest?

698 points by fcambus 12y ago

Brilliant - "because in order to have a long term engagement, you need a long term alternative to explore new things."

I hope this question isn't too forward - but my main question is 'how did you afford to do this?' I have had plenty of fun little side projects (some finished some not), but my main project is my salaried position. Aside from being independently wealthy, how can one create and maintain a long term open source project as a full time job. Consulting on the side? Donations? Something else? P.S. Thanks for Redis :)

antirez 12y ago
Unfortunately I've no good answer for your question, since I'm sponsored by Pivotal, but if we consider the percentage of open source software created, only a small percentage is sponsored. Many developers simply do it for free, as I did it in the first year of Redis developments, because I had an alternative stream of money to pay the bills. So, my point of view, is that the IT ecosystem is broken and IT companies are leveraging a huge value from OSS without providing enough back to pay developments of more OSS. It is one of the biggest injustices currently happening in the "rich world", but there is no easy fix.
- binarymax 12y ago
  Glad to hear that it is sponsored - I did not know that. I agree with your points on the injustice, but with OSS it is hard to have it both ways. Lots of innovation comes from using OSS as building blocks by folks just starting out, who cannot afford it. Maybe we need more vocal social stigma against large profitable companies who built their company on free software and who don't give back. I've seen a couple good things happen recently though - with GPG and FreeBSD. Hopefully it is the beginning of a trend.
  - parasubvert 12y ago
    Pivotal is arguably a grand experiment to try to build an eventual RedHat-sized revenue stream on open source through subscription pricing. It's $300m now, and everything is open source or just was announced will be open sourced this year. Most of it in house R&D, some like Redis is sponsored patronage. What's interesting is that most enterprises don't really want to freeride - they don't have the knowledge or legal will (indemnity) to go it alone, plus have esoteric requirements that usually don't lead to good open source projects and will pay for proprietary add-ins. The main free riders are startups that couldn't afford a subscription anyway (until they scale and want help), along with service/cloud providers that are at such enormous scale and have such a large braintrust that they can go it alone. These are the organizations IMO (the Googles of the world) that really need to sponsor individuals and OSS foundations to avoid a tragedy (like GPG or even OpenSSL).
- baq 12y ago
  you don't have to look far to see how true your words are - there've been multiple security fiascos pretty much directly caused by what you describe and hopefully things like http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/core-infrastructure-initiative http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/core-infrastructure-... will start appearing. one can hope there will be a time when such initiatives will happen proactively instead of in response to a disaster...
- Avalaxy 12y ago
  > IT companies are leveraging a huge value from OSS without providing enough back to pay developments of more OSS. It is one of the biggest injustices currently happening in the "rich world", but there is no easy fix. GPL?
  - lclarkmichalek 12y ago
    AGPL
  - icebraining 12y ago
    As someone who likes the GPL and supports the idea that all software should be Free, the thing that bothers me about it is how "closed" it is to projects based on other Free licenses. GPL projects "take" from BSD/MIT/Apache/etc projects (in the form of libraries, supporting software, etc) and only give back with conditions they can't accept. You can say it's on them, for choosing the license they chose, they accepted that this could happen, but on the other hand, isn't that exactly what we're criticizing companies for?
    - pygy_ 12y ago
      The aim of the GPL is to ensure that the recipient of a program has the right, from a legal stand point, to obtain and modify its source code and redistribute the result under the same license. The FSF is hostile to proprietary software and criticize liberal licenses because they don't provide these guaranties.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        I understand that, but while the FSF might criticize liberal licenses, both GNU and many other GPL projects use code under those licenses, while their code is closed to the original projects. That's what bothers me.
        mrec 12y ago
        And by choosing liberal licenses, those original projects have indicated that they're fine with that. Seriously, I don't see the problem. If you don't want people to use your code without making their changes available to you, license it under the GPL. That's what the GPL is for. Criticizing GPL projects for the fact that some projects are not GPL seems an odd way to spend your outrage budget.
- famousactress 12y ago
  I've been broadly thinking about ways to take a bite out of this challenge. I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. As the company scales it has a massive effect on their culture. I visited New Belgium Brewing (makers of Fat Tire) for instance, and a huge number of their employees are solely responsible for thoughtfully putting that money into action and funneling it into worthy causes. Imagine the impact that a double-digit percentage of the workforce of your successful company whose job it is to stand up for the things you decided were important _besides profit_. It's really incredible. I really like the idea of setting up guard-rails like this to embody cultural values early on in ways that keep the organization accountable to them at scale and I wonder if something similar could help OSS. It's not hard to imagine a similarly structured pledge being adopted by companies and being popular with developers. It could be structured in hours or money, executed with developer time, donations, or hosting OSS developers like Stripe has done. If I allow myself the thought exercise of what happens if something like this started to see adoption, I imagine we'd see projects beginning to license themselves favorably to companies who make this pledge in a variety of ways. At any rate. That's roughly what I've been noodling around with regard to this problem. [1] http://onepercentfortheplanet.org/ http://onepercentfortheplanet.org/ and I highly recommend Yvon Chouinard's book Let My People Go Surfing, which was where I was first exposed to the idea http://www.patagonia.com/us/product/let-my-people-go-surfing-paperback-book?p=BK501-0 http://www.patagonia.com/us/product/let-my-people-go-surfing...
  - seiji 12y ago
    I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. Interesting approach, but I bet those companies also aren't high growth tech startups/companies. The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue. They aren't looking for new ways to pay for things they legally get for free. My favorite example is Redis at Twitter: Twitter has over 30,000 Redis servers deployed around the world using a total of over 500 terabytes of RAM (half a petabyte!), and they certainly have no interesting in paying for Redis. If Redis were typical "commercial software" licensed per-core or per-other-shennigans, they'd be paying over $70 million per year for Redis. (Redis is a unique position because the core dev team of Redis has always been small so it's easier to measure the direct exploitation involved versus other projects with thousands of amorphous developers like Linux or Hadoop or Apache.) Many open source projects are essentially corporate welfare. We work, make products companies use to make money/become more efficient/grow faster, the companies use the software for free to get richer, then nobody contributes back any of the gains.
- revorad 12y ago
  patio11 has a good suggestion in this article (see the last section "A Brief Meditation on OSS") - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementation-of-csvexcel-upload-for-saas/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementatio...
  - davidw 12y ago
    That still relies on the company, or people therein being not quite economically rational: free riding is cheaper. Unless of course everyone does it and the good in question is then underprovisioned. It is certainly worth a try, though!
    - hastly 12y ago
      The thing is, free riding isn't necessarily cheaper for anyone. When you're depending on the software in question, it being underfunded might mean you're not getting the quality and features that would pay off in multiples for you. You could be sitting on a pile of bugs, or your dependency could be abandoned at your expense. These things happen all the time in open source land and it's a tragedy. I'm not convinced that freeriding is really rational at all. I would however grant that it's both easy and lazy.
      - davidw 12y ago
        Obviously it depends on the circumstances. There are cases where it's so important to you that you might as well pay up, free riding or not.
  - seiji 12y ago
    Yeah, that's a great point, but due to the unique "sponsorship" arrangement of Redis, Redis isn't actually allowed to accept money from anybody else for anything. It's a tradeoff between "stable" income and "potentially unlimited" income, and Redis is still in the "stable" column.
  - alexfarran 12y ago
    This seems to be the way that commercial Wordpress themes are sold. 100% GPL licensed, but sold in the normal way. eg http://crowdfavorite.com/carrington-build/docs/faq/#license http://crowdfavorite.com/carrington-build/docs/faq/#license. It seems to be working.
- kriro 12y ago
  I think many people agree that hireing in IT is kind of broken. I think many people in the business world understand PR/marketing budgets. I'd position FLOSS spending as a way to open a marketing channel to potential employees. The good players that give back need to be recognized and praised. [I honestly have a hard time understanding why bigish companies that use/rely on the software don't just give 50k to the GPG developer or sponsor OpenBSD etc. which can be great PR while they can spend similar sums on somewhat silly PR campaigns. I guess "IT people" generally don't have much input when it comes to PR...even outisde of signaling that you're a cool employer it's genuine good PR for (tech) companies]
- up_and_up 12y ago
  > the IT ecosystem is broken and IT companies are leveraging a huge value from OSS without providing enough back to pay developments of more OSS. This! Not only IT companies but VC's and startup entrepreneurs all rave about how fast and easy it is to develop and get a MVP out the door these days compared to year ago. What % of their tech stock is OSS that they leveraging for FREE?! Not only that but if you run into a bug, you can even submit an issue ticket directly on github and get a dev to respond and potentially fix your issue for FREE! Obviously, the pure technology is not the sum of startup execution, but I wonder how many of these people made huge $$$ without donating a nickle to the OSS projects that provided the backbone of their entire technology stack!
hastly 12y ago
Maybe we should turn our open source projects into businesses? At least make it clear we're open to taking money for extra features and/or support? I mean, I have a whole list of projects I would like to support in a meaningful way through a subscription for some service, but it seems finding a way to do this is itself a hoop to jump through. Even if I'm super benevolent maybe I'm not willing to do HR/accounting work in order to exercise my benevolence. I know about Gittip and the like, but if you're a business (the only kind of entity with meaningful money to throw at this problem), you'd rather have a clearcut way to pay for a service, not a platform for dropping pennies.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  It doesn't work for desktop software for example.
  - hastly 12y ago
    Isn't taking money for extra features in desktop software the oldest trick in the book? Either way I don't think the problem is one of individual users not paying for their apps. I think the major problem is that of huge companies who get business value from the code use it to make money and give back nothing in return.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      As proprietary software yes, but the moment you have something free with source code available, why should I pay you for it? This is why most successful desktop open source desktop software, actually live from another sources of funding, but it hardly created the same changes as with developer tools.
      - jimmaswell 12y ago
        >but the moment you have something free with source code available, why should I pay you for it? People bought the paid version of xchat for some reason. Don't assume the customer is that smart.
robotkilla 12y ago
as someone who works on a lot of side projects: figure out where most of your free time goes and decide if you can sacrifice the hours you spend on those activities for side projects... and then actually do it. I watch very little TV. I have only a couple of friends that I see every few months max. I don't go to meetups, I don't use social media and I don't play a lot of video games. I can hardly stand to see a day go by without creating something however small it might be. I don't celebrate holidays and don't see family very often either. That helps a ton - I worked through Christmas and NYE last year while everyone else was partying... and then I switched to a side project on the weekend. I also have a sleep schedule that makes most people cringe: go to sleep anywhere between 8:30 and 9:30pm, get up anywhere between 4:00am and 6:30am. All that said, I think its incredibly important to switch off for days at a time every couple of weeks or months and break all the rules. Watch TV all day on a Friday or something. Edit Sorry, I misread your question: "how can one create and maintain a long term open source project as a full time job" That's something I have been working towards and haven't succeeded at yet. I'm leaving my comment up in case it helps anyone though.
- burntsushi 12y ago
  This post is nearly a mirror image of myself! I tend to relax on the major holidays (xmas and nye), but everything else is the same. My brain is constantly working on some problem that is of interest to me. I have time to do side projects because that is what I do for fun. I have the same sleep schedule as you (I work in Cambridge, MA but live West of 495), although I'm not sure if I'd voluntarily choose it. Working alone in the mornings is quite productive though. And I second the sentiment "it's important to switch off for days at a time." I expect much of this will change when kids come along though. ;-)
  - robotkilla 12y ago
    I have a ten year old daughter - nothing has changed yet, she's as bad as i am ;)
    - burntsushi 12y ago

netcraft 12y ago

The site is not responsive for me, here is a cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://antirez.com/news/86 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

graghav 12y ago
Yea, it is indeed not responsive. But I think Antirez is affording his time more on his "side projects" rather than making it responsive.
- antirez 12y ago
  Not sure what is happening, probably Apache mod proxy is not configured well enough, since the machine is idle, and the Ruby process serving the requests is idle as well... EDIT: Btw current deployment is "ruby app.rb" + Apache mod_proxy. Not stellar... EDIT2: Problem found, was running via WEBrick since Mongrel was uninstalled for error from the server.
- lukeholder 12y ago
  I think he means not 'responding', not complaining the website doesn't resize for different screen sizes (responsive).
  - philtar 12y ago
    Responsive meant that before the graphics design crowd took it over.

graghav 12y ago

Thanks for Redis. It has come a long way over the last six years. Looking forward for your "few side projects for the next years" to come.

gadders 12y ago
Rather than start a new thread, I'll add my congratulations here. Congratulations, Antirez!

Svenstaro 12y ago

Proxy Error for me.

seigel 12y ago

Thank you sir.

humbertomn 12y ago

I'm another believer that focussing in 1 thing is overestimated. "There’s a myth when it comes to what we’ve been taught about focus. Doing only 1 thing isn’t focusing. It’s essentially just doing 1 thing. Following a course of action until completion is FOCUS" - Hodan Ibrahim Interesting related read: http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/psychological-marketing-myth-focus/ http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/psychological-marketing-my...

darkFunction 12y ago
I struggle to focus on more than one thing, in programming and in life, one thing is intensely the single focus of all my passion and energy until one day it is not.
- humbertomn 12y ago
  Maybe it's hard to measure what exactly is the 1 thing. In my typical day in my early stage project, I still have to code a few hours per day in addition to managing design work, doing initial marketing strategy and testing some campaigns, talking to customers, investors and mentors and making lots of decisions. I still spend around 40mins in stuff from my previous startup which I'm not officially in operations anymore, but still have to help with some things. On top of all that, I created a side project and built a team to run it and will be doing only mentoring, and this can be a great help to my oficial project. So, I'm not saying this is the ideal setup... Of course a lot will change once the company starts to grow and we are able to hire more people, but I can say at the end of the day I'm pretty happy with my production and already thinking about the next day of work.

bglazer 12y ago

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on this project before I start getting really irritable. I'm not a terribly skilled web designer so I feel like contract work isn't really a feasible option. So I'm stuck with a chicken and egg scenario. I could make huge strides on the side project if I got funding to quit my job, but I can't get funding without an already working product. I've considered quitting my job and diving into it for a few months. I have savings but this seems foolishly risky to me. Maybe I just need to be more disciplined. If anyone has been in a similar situation, I would greatly appreciate advice.

parasubvert 12y ago
I've had a similar issue, and decided to treat it like a hobby - too risky to see as a job, but too interesting to ignore. If you have a hobby and part of the pleasure of the hobby is the end result, then I'd suggest carving time out daily to work on it like exercise. Even an hour a day and 2 hours on each weekend would triple the time you've put into it to date. That said, if you enjoy doing other things more, I wouldn't sweat it.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rday 12y ago
2 kids, 3 freelance gigs (full time at this), a couple startups behind me (1 pivoted away, 1 still running). I would love to get 5 hours for an OSX app I really want to build. You really do have to shut out the rest of your life if you want to make a serious run at a project. When you are cramming a side project into you life, you really can "work" 80 hour weeks. The irritability you're experiencing will probably just get worse. I'm just starting to learn to cook. I began riding my bike last year. I'm 34. The grass is always greener of course. But it seems like you are enjoying a lot of the things I wish I had made time for earlier. Maybe shut out the art project. Turn your code into open source and let that be your art for the next few months.

derekp7 12y ago

Does anyone have any suggestions for promoting an open source project? I hate mentioning my side project on various forums, even if it is topical -- it makes me feel spammy. I thought about taking out some ads once I add in a few more "enterprise" type features, and was hoping that some open-source focused sites would have a discount on advertising open source projects using unsold ad inventory. I'd also like to find someone to work with that can point out deficiencies in the project web site, or general improvements/features I should add.

arh68 12y ago
Put a screencast up on YouTube? I guess it depends what it is, but 8~10 minute videos can be pretty thorough.
rckrd 12y ago
-Tutorials & Examples -Extensive documentation Sure, these are boring things to work on, but in my experience these are what have let separate a mature project that I can see works from a less mature project that may introduce even more bugs and maintenance.

_pferreir_ 12y ago

I would like to highlight dump1090, the ADS-B encoder. It has become a "must-have" for RTL-SDR enthusiasts. It is small, simple, and works great.

platz 12y ago
dump1090 is great.

jjling 12y ago

I have a hard time focusing on side projects for very long. At any one point in time I'm usually working on 3 or 4 different projects. Then I get burned out and do something that isn't programming instead, like write a book. Ironically, the only "side-project" I've finished is a book and not code (https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/M0X7KAS29H5Q https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/M0X7KAS29H5Q) Makes me wonder if I'm cut out to be an entrepreneur or even an developer if I can't dedicate all my free time to coding.

moron4hire 12y ago

I think the key is that you have to dogfood your own side projects. I have a project that I've been building over the last, oh, 9 years. I haven't worked on it exclusively during that time, but I keep going back to it and tweaking it, making it better, etc., because I actually use it in just about everything.

christopherDam 12y ago

I need some advice. How other great people find the ideas for side project? I would greatly appreciate if any one help me to know how other get some cool ideas.

seiji 12y ago
Don't start with an idea, start with a problem. Work on fixing the problem. Grow from there.

sylvinus 12y ago

For those interested, Salvatore will present Disque at the next dotScale conference in Paris, on June 8: http://www.dotscale.io http://www.dotscale.io

Spearchucker 12y ago

I have a full time job, and a 3y/o kid. Get up at 7am and take him to school at 8:30am. Get to work at 9:30am or so. Get home around 6pm. Give my son a bath, we all have dinner and my son is in bed somewhere between 8 and 9pm. I then spend ~2 hours on my side project, in bed somewhere between 11pm and 12am. I train twice a week so this pattern happens three days out of 5. On weekends I can often negotiate up to 4 hours to myself. Progress isn't too slow, and I keep my sanity.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

fit2rule 12y ago

I'm a huge fan of LOAD81, its been a very interesting too for a few things .. one thing I've used it for is to view system statistics, akin to a poor mans gnuplot. Its also been valuable in teaching my 7-year old about computing - the ease with which you can bang out a program to draw stuff is very appealing. So count me as a LOAD81 fan, antirez .. its one of your side projects that gets regular use around our house!

andhof-mt 12y ago

I've got a side project. And chances are it will never make any real money. But I opted to do it because I know its a pain in the butt to make, and if I don't likely no one else will (or at least do a good job). Nicely edited, free, organized CS videos. I'm opening sourcing my education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nyzl3pVXp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nyzl3pVXp4

shlomozippel 12y ago

"Side projects are the projects making your bigger projects possible" Amen.

djabatt 12y ago

IMHO if you are not hacking on a few side projects you are missing out on learning new things. I love side projects they keep my work and personal life super fresh.

antoinevg 12y ago

Life is more than work. Make time for the ideas and people you love.

petercooper 12y ago

Every major source of my income over the past ten years has started as a side project. Not a single one came out of a deliberate effort to build something big but began as a mere experiment for the fun of it.

digisth 12y ago

Companies have long sponsored (or hired) individuals to work on FLOSS, but I think we could go a lot further. If we could make it part of the culture of (scaling) companies / funding ecosystems to say "when we reach X revenue, we're going to hire /sponsor 5 people to work on FLOSS stuff full time." Obviously, these companies will have more incentive to sponsor people who work on software they use heavily (which should stay the first priority, as it makes a lot of sense), but it'd be great to take it to the next level and have them hire people who work on useful / popular software that they don't use everyday (directly) or doesn't have much to do with their bottom line. This could include 'adjunct' software work like package repository maintainers and writers of documentation for these projects. If it wasn't one-offs and outliers, but just something that companies did as part of getting big, we'd have a lot less need for periodic emergency fundraisers, and fewer stories about "important software X that's about to lose its sole maintainer(s)."

digisth 12y ago

Is there a list of companies and the people they hired/sponsor to maintain FLOSS stuff?

gabamnml 12y ago

Many congrats for the excellent work with Redis

cheriot 12y ago

My side project is an escape from my real job where process, politics, and domain experts outside of their domain prevent progress...

Edmond 12y ago

You're spot on about using side projects as positive distractions. When you are working alone on a significant project, at some point you're not going to be as motivated to work on it, that's where other side projects can be helpful.

wuster 12y ago

I agree with his sentiment. Working on side projects keeps this career interesting. During the most boring, most soul-sucking projects of my corporate jobs, being able to accomplish projects on the side reminded me of why I am excited to be building software in the first place.

xacaxulu 12y ago

Sicilian pride! Antirez is an amazing guy and the OS community is indebted to him for Redis.

jmgtan 12y ago

My situation is getting bad enough that even my wife is complaining that I don't spend enough time with them (her and my son). I have a full time job with SAP, I also have regular consulting work on my own which I have been doing since I graduated from university, and lately I've started working on a number of products that I strongly believe in. I've started applying a bit of scrum in my own work where in I have a Trello board with my backlog, my plan for the current sprint, what is done and what is deployed (for demo). This allows me to focus and not jump around developing endless streams of features. I set a side a chunk of time (w/ adequate negotiations with my wife) where in I blitz through my tasks for the current sprint. It also helps that my wife is a project manager in her day job so she understands my Trello board. I find that this setup is the most effective for me, of course YMMV. For my consulting work I normally have 1 ongoing project at a time and usually a few in the RFP type of stage where in I'm still in discussions with clients.

udev 12y ago

I am curious whether it gets more and more (legally) tricky for employees of large tech-companies to have side-projects. For example, if I am working at Google/Amazon/Microsoft. What side projects won't get me into legal problems? Can I work on search, email, virtualization, etc. without being in conflict of interest?