Surprised by the amount of negativity in this thread.<p>My interpretation of this is an organization recognizing external contributions as personal growth and community enrichment and seeking to reward that behavior. I would put this in the same vein as healthcare providers subsidizing gym memberships, or organizations paying for people to attend training, conferences, or higher education.<p>In any case, you're making the choice of self-improvement though in this case with community enrichment as an additional benefit. I don't know how Formidable compensates but anyone who thinks the compensation is anything more than a nod is missing the point.<p>The purpose is not to place a monetary value on the work being done, it's an acknowledgement of gratitude. If you won't accept that then consider it a small supportive investment in a person who is choosing to invest in themselves and their community.
As a professional full-time open source maintainer and developer, initiatives like this bother me a lot.<p>The work we do is worth much more than $20/hr.<p>Ideally I'd like to see open source developers in stable, tenured positions that pay fair salaries with benefits. Anything that normalizes the idea that open source should be funded on tips, patreons, or spare time goodwill is embarrassing to all of us. We can do better.<p>If you value open source, hire people to do it and pay them fairly.
I like the idea, but I'm concerned about the $20 / hour.<p>Since this is done on the employees' own time (after hours), isn't this basically saying, "hey, go help make our app's dependencies better in an overtime scenario but we're going to pay you $20 / hour instead of 1x to 2x your usual salary"?<p>I know at the bottom it clears that up but I dunno, it just feels weird to me. It seems like a concealed way to mainly benefit the company and potentially exploit the good will of its employees.
My opinion is that open-source contributions stems from passion. People do it and implement something because they're passionate about it.<p>When you attach any money to it, it becomes tainted with responsibility and emotions. Such as, "should I work on this an extra hour and burn myself out and get those extra 40 bucks for dinner tonight?" That formula doesn't make individuals want to work more on open-source.<p>Sure they push them towards doing stuff in open-source but that usually almost never leads to creating great pieces of work.<p>One great and amazing thing that open-source thought us is that individuals can group together and work on amazing things without any economical reward. To me it was always a fascinating experiment outside the usual realms of politics, economics, social-studies.<p>Nobody would have ever imagined it to work without "money", but it does and it will continue to work. In fact, instead of pushing capitalism mentality inside of open-source we should be doing exactly the opposite: push open-source mentality in other parts of our society.
I'm a fan of anything that helps open source, but in my experience it's more effective if the employee is able to work on open source projects as part of their job. Then again, maybe that's just my current evening burnout talking.
This seems like a good way to recognize the extra time put in to support OSS projects - and I like the thoughtfulness about not making it an incentive to spend even more hours working, by capping hours and keeping the bonus amount low.
TL;DR: A company pays their employees $20/hr for open source contributions done on the employees' own time with no strings attached. They also expand this to community promotion such as technical book writing and mentorships. They find this program to be wildly successful and highly encourage other companies to implement the same programs.<p>I for one am extremely excited that this is reaching front page of HN and entering a broader mindshare. OSS represents everything I hope the tech industry may become someday in the future- high quality work produced by intelligent, talented people for the benefit of all.
I'd be horrified about this Formidable company (What a name.) trying to claim ownership over anything I did in my free time that I was paid $20.00 for.<p>>More recently, we’ve expanded the definition of contributing to include any social impact work within the field of technology<p>Well, without clarification on my concerns, this would lead me to simply billing time around things such as answering questions in project IRC channels or helping to organize things, all activities that can't be later claimed, and not use this for programming at all.
I applaud any attempt to make open source work worthwhile to those who might not be able to continue spending the time on it without such a stipend/reward/incentive (whatever you want to call it). However, i have to admit that once capital is introduced into an altruistic equation, it has a way of murking things up. Successful initiatives will ultimately be those that allow people so inclined to continue doing open source work, rather than incentivizing potentially needless open source activity from opportunists.<p>Personally, I would like to see an honor or certificated system "giving pledge" that rewards impactful open source projects...especially those that are not initiated/backed by a corporation. Think of it as a sort of B-Corp (O-Corp anybody?) where a tiny sliver of value (equity/revenue/profit/annual fixed amount) is allocated to the open source libraries on which that business is built. How the money is used is another debate entirely, so is the handling of commercialized open source projects.<p>A very good candidate for something like this would be d3.js.
Out of curiousity, is there a site where people can put up some money for an open request on development? Like as opposed to hiring a contractor, and specifically developing the requirements, it would be more similar to a feature request with a bonus.<p>Like specifically, my company has been yearning for a more complete solution to indexes on ORC files (there exists something, but the solution falls short for our specific siutation).
Benefit for employee: recognition for out of hours coding, learning and contribution to society.<p>Benefit for company: employees reporting hours working which would normally be invisible (Spotting burnout, keeping company project focus etc)<p>Sounds like a brave but sensible move and an idea I hadn’t heard before. Also makes business sense to that company.
I think if I worked at a company that was doing this, I would ask them to pay the money directly to a charity instead (like the Free Software Foundation or Software Freedom Conservancy).
This is interesting, I recently wrote about ways companies can support and sustain open source: <a href="https://opensource.com/article/19/4/ways-support-sustain-open-source" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.com/article/19/4/ways-support-sustain-ope...</a>
There are a bunch of companies that give back to open source maintainers through a better approach...tidelift [1] is one that comes to mind. Has anyone been on their open source programme? Does it operate well?<p>[1] <a href="https://tidelift.com" rel="nofollow">https://tidelift.com</a>
Only thing different for me in doing open source for free and asking money for it, is that for the paid products, the audience participation goes through the roof and I actually know that someone values my work as they are paying for it. Plus, money is always nice.
I wonder what oss people think about Worklist, a bidding system for open source. I have not seen it be used beyond highfidelity. <a href="https://worklist.net" rel="nofollow">https://worklist.net</a>
We would love to copy something like this at our company, but given the large employee count and costs involved self reporting is definitely not a feasible option.
If I'm paid for open source, I'm going to lose any motivation to work on it more. The reason why I contribute to open source projects is BECAUSE I want to contribute for free.<p>Put money in the deal and I'm no longer doing this work selflessly, but for self-interest instead.
>We pay our employees $20/hr for contributions to OSS and tech communities, whether it’s a third-party library we use in our work like React, Next.js<p>While I applaud the sentiment $20 per hour is too little to make me care and enough to make me start thinking about money.<p>A much better way to deal with this would be pushing laws to allow for tax offsets for contributing time to charities (open source ones). Seeing $10 per hour (after tax) that doesn't inspire me much.<p>Being able to write off my full time wage as a tax deductible would make me vastly more motivated to document what I've been working on and work on a lot more of it.
No no no.<p>This work should be part of your total, main, comp. Working on open-source projects directly contributes to your employer's business, even if the code of that project doesn't get used in those systems. You're building your team's brand (and yes, your own, too). Because other Engineers want to work in an environment where OSS is encouraged, this reduces costs of hiring and retaining Engineers. At $20/hr Formidable is getting recruiting on the cheap.