Gregory's Server@jacob You might be doing these for a while, if you try to enumerate all the "wrong ways" for maintainers to get paid :D
I'd suggest a toot listing the "right ways" but my guess is “there aren't any”
|
14 comments
   @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/ |
@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.