7 ms·

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

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

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