 “We believe that open source should be sustainable and open source maintainers should get paid!” Maintainer: *introduces commercial features* Maintainer: *works for a large tech co* Maintainer: *takes investment* 52 comments
 @cam @jacob it's a weird sort of circular thing. I actually kind of have a policy of *not* donating to open source, because I have given a LOT of my life to the "community", and I feel like a personal boundary for me is that I am not going to make my personal donations to what are, let's be honest, corporate development teams be a _cost center_ in my personal life. and I've mostly succeeded, please do not look at my domain name registration bills. @cam @jacob but also, I am not entirely certain my moral calculus is correct here. I've given a lot but I've gotten a lot too. Am I net negative or net positive on my community contributions? Hard to say. But I have more or less given up on getting corporate sponsors, individuals are the only ones who can recognize the aesthetic merits of open source approaches. @glyph @jordinn I'd like a foundation that takes one payment in and then makes proportional payments out to as many projects as I set up. I suspect more people would do this if it were easy.   @cam @jacob I think a better open funding model is sponsor foundations or cooperatives. They should adopt #FOSS projects and deal with the hassle of asking for donations or applying for big grants. The reason I like the model is that, ideally, I can pick one and offload to them the cognitive load of picking projects and splitting the money amongst them them. Hopefully they would build for themselves a trusty reputation  @offby1 yeah exactly. The only "acceptable" way appear to be asking for donations -- offering nothing in return -- and doing so incredibly politely and absolutely not in any way that looks like advertising. Which doesn't actually work, shocker. If we're serious about open source sustainability, the community needs to grow the fuck up about money.   @jacob @offby1 I’m convinced we need to start with a social movement as a baseline: contribute to the things you use. My other take is permissive licensing, fenced community. Copy the code, it’s zero marginal cost. Want support / feedback / anything that takes scarce human time? Contribute with your time or cash. Moving off of GitHub to other Git forges may start a reset too. @mjgardner @jacob I'm not sure what kind of dunk you're aiming for here. I run an instance. I take donations, but if we had to find sponsors we would definitely consider it, in order to sustain the community. In fact, we are always looking for ways to do exactly that while maintaining the community values we have. @mjgardner @jacob I do not think that you made the point you were trying to make, and neither of the people you tagged are the people you seem to be trying to make it to. Another avenue - offering paid support, with or without restricting features - has had limited success (OpenSSL and SQLite come to mind). But value still clearly out of symmetry with compensation.  @jacob @offby1 tbh I don’t donate myself either to most projects because I do very little tech stuff myself outside of work that uses open source and honestly just don’t have the mental capacity for much after work (spent on other non-tech community mostly). I have tried to push my employer to pay projects (sponsorships or the commercial license or whatever) that we’ve used. this has worked exactly once. 😭 @jacob @offby1 It feels awful honestly hunting through npm or pypi or rubygems to find the right package to use for something knowing how it’s maintained (that is, not supported robustly) but also if you’re trying to ship X feature you usually can’t justify re-implementing things and probably won’t be able to convince the boss to pay for it (even when the maintainer has a way to given all the reasons it’s risky to try to even ask.)  @jacob @offby1 Emotional maturity isn't happening, but institutions[*] happen all the time, or more exactly, the norms and rules of the game that people follow (despite the opportunity to screw everyone at every possibly opportunity)... thats how all known systems work. People get accused of violating the norms because we're collectively still making up the norms. [*] I'm using the word institutions like the economics do, unwritten rules of the game that people follow  @offby1 @jacob FWIW, I've only heard good things about https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/  @jacob while I understand this is a bit tongue in cheek, you should keep an eye on @sovtechfund I have a suspicion they’re on the right path  @paoloredaelli @jacob the fsf has essentially no role in the production of software fwiw. purely an advocacy org, certainly not a leader in this space  @jacob What's so weird about that discourse is that the most asymmetrical method (the method that leaves the open source author most vulnerable), namely patronage, appears to be the only thing people don't complain about. If I were more cynical I'd say that it almost sounds like they like the idea that this arrangement empowers them over devs. @jacob what gets me is the intersection of “anti-commercial” and “big corps should pay for it” folks who believe corporations will just donate money to something they get for free and get nothing in return. Big corps want to pay for software. Please let me take their money the only way they know how to give it: with a commercial offering. “Selling support” works if you’re willing to be a professional services company, but not if you want to be a product company.  @schmichael   @jacob @jacob Enterprise features(batch deployment, software management utilities, identity management, etc) have never been problematic according to anyone I've had conversations with and they are largely why open-source has succeeded. This is why "the year of the Linux desktop" has been such a long standing dream despite Linux being one of the most heavily adopted OS's in the world - it most serves enterprise functions. (2/3) @jacob Having a job for a corrupt for profit company in how most people put food on the table, including nearly every OSS dev. With a few notable(Canonical, RedHat, The Linux Foundation, Novell, Mozilla, etc.) exceptions, OSS has never been anyone's day job and I wouldn't think that bothers anyone, save the maintainers who'd love a socialist utopia where they could work the OSS project of their dreams all day.(3/3) @jacob Also, the idea that this seems to convey... that open source can only be sustainable and maintainers could only get paid via these three mechanisms is, in my mind, a limited outlook on the possibilities that exist to fund development. I don't have the solution in my head, but berating people for wanting to have their development funded without having to resort to serving capitalist/corporate interest seems narrow-minded.  @jacob "open source maintainers should get paid!” Are two seperate beliefs. It's possible to talk about options to make FOSS and FLOSS sustainable that don't require the use of money / power coupons at all or as much or with such centrality. Or so I hope and choose to believe and imagine. |
Gregory's Server
@jacob the deagentive construction with “get” realllly stands out when you line it up like that, huh?