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Software Below the Poverty Line

345 pointsby fold_leftalmost 6 years ago

43 comments

felixriesebergalmost 6 years ago
Electron maintainer here.<p>Most of the maintainers are being paid to maintain Electron full-time. I&#x27;ve worked in jobs before where you got to do &quot;some open source during work hours&quot;, but in the case of Electron, most of our people are specifically paid to work on Electron.<p>Yes, absolutely, find and use more ways to fund Open Source, but describing Electron as a project below the poverty line is plain incorrect. Yes, we too need funding, but that description strikes me as inaccurate and thus problematic.<p>&quot;Below the poverty line&quot; means something, doesn&#x27;t apply to Electron, and saying it because it sounds good trivializes a problem in a world where 1&#x2F;7 children in the US live _actually_ below the poverty line.
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vorticoalmost 6 years ago
I tell every entrepreneur that asks me for advice that the donation model for any business gets no more than 1-10% (depending on the industry) compared to a business model of selling commercial software. This is the difference between poverty and 6-figures. The open-source model is good for launching your own career, but you should avoid trying to make the career the open-source project itself.<p>The open-core model is a good alternative if you wish to be around open-source software. Or make your project de-facto standard and charge for consulting. Or, you can make an entirely commercial project that uses and contributes to open-source projects. That way, you are surrounded by open-source and can help them <i>financially</i> to add features you need.
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gregdoesitalmost 6 years ago
I find the author’s view puzzling. For open source projects that have the goal to become profitable and have full-time staff working on them, there are plenty that make this happen. For example, Ghost (the blog engine) via providing sourcing. RedHat similarly provided services and consulting on top of their open source contributions. Databricks, founded by the creators of Spark, is a unicorn.<p>The author is looking at the wrong type of metric. Expecting that every open source project on Github will get donations to pay each contributor a full-time salary is nonsense.<p>Also, on top of the value add services profitability route, the article does not take into account how many companies have full time employees contribute to open source as part of their working hours - a very tangible open source investment. While the author asks for companies to donate 0.5% or more of their profits to open source projects, I work at an unprofitable unicorn (Uber) which is a heavy contributor to open source itself and my team contributes to open source as part of our work: both to other projects, as well as open sourcing tools and improvements we built.<p>The same can be said for some of the most popular open source projects. Angular? Originally by Google engineers, on Google company time. Tensorflow? Also Google. React? Built by Facebook. Atom? By Github. And the list continues with many-many projects.
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ricardobeatalmost 6 years ago
Unpopular opinion: this is absolute non-sense. If you want to create a commercial organization to maintain a project, by all means go ahead, but the idea that all open-source work should be paid for in equal terms is not healthy in the long term.<p>The community aspect used to be the most enjoyable part of open-source, and I gladly donated (a lot of) my own time. It’s about people coming together around a common need - if there’s enough demand more people will join in. I loathe the current state of marketing&#x2F;funding&#x2F;clout based OSS where projects become institutions of their own and break the natural attention balance.
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Sir_Cmpwnalmost 6 years ago
Ah, an issue close to my heart. I work full-time on open source, making my money from three places:<p>1. Donations directly via Patreon, Liberapay, and fosspay[0]<p>2. Paid subscriptions on Sourcehut [1]<p>3. Part-time consulting gigs [2]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drewdevault.com&#x2F;donate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drewdevault.com&#x2F;donate</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;sr.ht-discuss&#x2F;%3C20190426160729.GC1351%40homura.localdomain%3E" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;sr.ht-discuss&#x2F;%3C2019042616072...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drewdevault.com&#x2F;consulting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drewdevault.com&#x2F;consulting</a> (numbers undisclosed)<p>With 1 &amp; 2 alone, I&#x27;d be making about $34,000. Not poverse, but I am preparing to move into a 200 sq ft apartment in a couple of months. Consulting gigs help a lot - working on these anywhere from 0-24 hours a week brings me up to a comfortable standard of living.<p>I think what helps is that I&#x27;m a person, not a project. By working on lots of different projects, I get a lot of different people interested in paying for my work. The income from any of my ventures alone would not pay me a livable wage.<p>I&#x27;ve put a lot of thought into how to make money from FOSS, if anyone has questions or wants to send me their thoughts, I&#x27;m listening.
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JackFralmost 6 years ago
I find the author&#x27;s attitude maddening. People writing open-source software are not being exploited. People writing open-source software have alternatives. They can simply stop writing open-source software.<p>It does a disservice to the millions of people on the planet who do not have alternatives, and who are truly being exploited.
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module0000almost 6 years ago
I&#x27;ve worked for 2(out of many) employers that allowed me to spend significant time committing our improvements and modifications upstream to open source projects we used in-house. This was <i>very</i> enjoyable, and I wish more employers behaved that way.<p>One of the enjoyable aspects of this practice, was during the selection process for &quot;what software do we want to use?&quot;. I didn&#x27;t have to select only open source projects which were &quot;<i>almost</i> a perfect fit, with XYZ problems we can live with&quot;. Instead, I got to select software with (to me) better criteria:<p>* what are the upstream devs like to work with?<p>* what is the future of this project?<p>* is this project something we would be proud of our association with?<p>* working on this project, will myself or my team be exposed to new skills and technology?
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base698almost 6 years ago
<i>&quot;The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold.&quot;</i><p>This is a general principal of the world. Almost everything, including customers, getting dates, and wealth follow the same pattern: Pareto.<p>There&#x27;s even a Bible verse:<p><i>Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.</i><p>Matthew 13:12<p>May be more interesting to compare the jobs allowing open source contributions at the top of the scale.<p>Or put another way: comments closer to the top attract more karma than those at the bottom.
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linuxhanslalmost 6 years ago
My company pays me handsomely for working - in part - on Open Source projects.<p>It&#x27;s kind of the reverse of what&#x27;s described here, I do not live off donations to the project, instead I &quot;donate&quot; some of my paid time to the Open Source project... That way my company, the Open Source projects, and myself benefit.<p>What I do benefits other users of those projects and we benefit from other contributions.<p>Open Source is about sharing ideas and code, not about living off a project. IMHO at least.
SolaceQuantumalmost 6 years ago
<i>&quot;The results I found were shocking: there were two clearly sustainable open source projects, but the majority (more than 80%) of projects that we usually consider sustainable are actually receiving income below industry standards or even below the poverty threshold.&quot;</i><p>I fear that open source is actually just the tech industry&#x27;s group of underfunded-but-vital-infrastructures that are constantly either forced to work for poverty pay or go corporate&#x2F;private(and externalize the costs to society as a whole). Similar to single-payer healthcare systems, domestic violence sheltering, child protection, pet shelters, and education systems.<p>Specifically that I fear once these entities try demand to be paid what they&#x27;re worth, there will be criticism and controversy.
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UglyToadalmost 6 years ago
I just don&#x27;t <i>get</i> this discussion. And part of it worries me.<p>Open source isn&#x27;t what you do to get vc funding, it&#x27;s not what you do to build a unicorn (it shouldn&#x27;t be). It&#x27;s in the name, open source, it&#x27;s a charitable act.<p>I worry this attempt to commercialise open source is corrupting it. For sure a lot of companies derive a lot of value from open source software but the user is irrelevant to the act of open sourcing something.<p>The problem, if you believe there is one, is that work that genuinely delivers benefit for society, is not rewarded economically. While the rich have more money than they can feasibly spend. The problem then is actually how we structure the economy and society, instead of applying a sticking plaster of commercialisation around open source and getting upset when big companies use the software under the licence available to all users, or relying on generous patronage, why not envision a society in which delivering valuable software for free is treated as more valuable than building Uber for dogwalking.<p>I haven&#x27;t fully structured my thoughts around this so they&#x27;re still half baked but it seems we&#x27;re discussing the problem from the wrong angle?
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crypticaalmost 6 years ago
As the open source author of a popular project (5 years old and over 5K stars on GitHub), I can relate the problem but at the same time, I think that some solutions could make the problem even worse.<p>There are actually two &#x27;fairness&#x27; issues in open source and from my experience each one is as bad as the other:<p>1. Fairness in terms of projects getting the amount of attention that they deserve.<p>2. Fairness in financial terms.<p>If corporations start donating and drawing attention to some projects more than others, it will cause both problems to worsen. This is because open source projects which are backed by a lot of funding and have strong connections with corporations tend to naturally draw more attention and thus funding because developers and bloggers are more likely to talk, write and tweet about them (regardless of actual merit). It reinforces the importance of social connections and turns an otherwise honorable and altruistic pursuit into a social-climbing financial scheme.<p>TBH, I&#x27;d prefer it if corporations did not get involved at all. If they did, I could only pray that my project would get its fair share of funding. The unfortunate reality of capitalism is that some people will get very lucky but it&#x27;s just not going to be you. Luck is often paid for at the expense of others; if your competitor gets lucky and walks into a pile of a few million dollars, that&#x27;s very bad luck for you. Corporations already took the meritocracy out of tech startups, it would be a shame if they also took the meritocracy out of open source (more than they already have).<p>Open source is very far from a meritocracy but it&#x27;s probably the closest thing possible to it in the tech industry and we should keep it that way. The best way to do this is to keep the big money out.
lackeralmost 6 years ago
Some of this data doesn&#x27;t seem right.<p>For example, the author lists Gatsby as &quot;below poverty threshold&quot;. However, Gatsby raised $3.8M recently. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;gatsby-e828" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;gatsby-e828</a> I&#x27;m pretty sure they are able to pay people better than poverty wages.<p>Another important omission is that many developers contribute to open source as part of their work for a larger company. The core React team, for example, is primarily working for Facebook. They spend a lot of their time working on Facebook-internal things, but a lot of their effort is going towards the open source community as well.<p>The real lesson here is that the OpenCollective model (where these numbers come from) is not where most of the funding for open source engineering is coming from. Most of the money paid to open source software engineers comes from companies that produce open source code as a byproduct of their main mission, like Microsoft building TypeScript or Google building Go.
jrochkind1almost 6 years ago
I think historically (like over the last 30 years) most successful open source projects have been maintained by people who have jobs for companies which do other things as their primary function and revenue producing business (whether non-software &#x27;enterprise&#x27; or other software products; or academic&#x2F;non-profit), who work on the open source <i>on company time</i>.<p>While I think there may be structural reasons that this is harder to do now (including increased complexity of software, and companies more ruthlessly chasing &#x27;efficiency&#x27;), it seems important to at least include in the discussion.<p>For instance, OP says:<p>&gt; Only accept jobs at companies that donate a significant portion of their profit (at least 0,5%) to open source, or companies which don’t fundamentally depend on open source for their products<p>OK, but how about &quot;or companies that have employees, ideally including you, spending a significant amount of on-the-clock time originating, maintaining, or contributing to open source.&quot; Is this not mentioned because it somehow seems even less &#x27;realistic&#x27; than companies donating 0.5% of profit to open source?
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xwdvalmost 6 years ago
Having met with many open source contributors and maintainers, the one pattern I see from those who do it consistently is that they are usually pretty wealthy or gainfully employed. It&#x27;s almost like a status symbol to be able to have many open source projects that you can afford to work on for free. And a lot of open source projects are really just part of commercialized software that has been extracted and made available to the public for free, so there has already been some revenue from it.<p>It is pointless to feel outraged about open source projects being &quot;below the poverty line&quot;. Virtually no one is actually being forced into poverty by working on open source projects, and if they are, they&#x27;re doing it wrong. Open source ventures are primarily a rich man&#x27;s (or woman&#x27;s) game.
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kazinatoralmost 6 years ago
Free software projects not earning significant donations is exactly the same phenomenon, or an aspect of it, as selling software (regardless of license) being difficult. Most software doesn&#x27;t sell. Not only is it hard to sell software, it&#x27;s hard to get people to just download it and try it for free. Most software will not find any users, let alone paying or donating users.
caniszczykalmost 6 years ago
I wrote about this in the past how all these open source donation systems like OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors are exploiting maintainers via gig economy dynamics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aniszczyk.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aniszczyk.org&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;25&#x2F;troubles-with-the-open-...</a><p>The solution is simple, having companies hire open source maintainers to work on their projects in some fashion or we need to make it easier for maintainers to start companies and build an actual business.
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samirillianalmost 6 years ago
2 Important points:<p>1) In terms of financial remuneration, it&#x27;s even worse than this. Consider Mastodon, which looks like it&#x27;s doing pretty well. Well, according to his Changelog interview, Eugen also pays 5 moderators to help maintain mastodon.social.<p>2) Sindre Sorhus, statistically living in poverty, tweeted saying open source was the best decision of his life! Quality of life is increasingly diverging from income. And I hope it continues to, since mean income keeps diverging from median.
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lliamanderalmost 6 years ago
I find the mindset of this article to be mind-boggling.<p>The fact that open source developers aren&#x27;t getting paid does not mean there is exploitation. Those developers don&#x27;t have to work on FOSS. They could also work on proprietary software. The problem is that it is hard to develop a business model around developing open source software (it&#x27;s also hard to develop a business around proprietary software, too).<p>If the current maintainer of a open-source project does not have the financial support to continue working on the project, they should put their open-source work on hold until they get their finances in order. If that software is part of a critical chain for a business, then that business should provide financial support. It is not a necessity that all current open-source projects continue to be actively maintained.
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_bxg1almost 6 years ago
Key quote here:<p>&gt; Open source infrastructure is a commons, much like our ecological systems. Because our societies did not have rules to prevent the ecological systems from being exploited, companies have engaged in industrialized resource extraction. Over many decades this is depleting the environment, and now we are facing a climate crisis, proven through scientific consensus to be a substantial threat to humanity and all life on the planet. Open source misappropriation is simply a small version of that, with less dramatic consequences.
sb1752almost 6 years ago
Minor point, which always frustrates me when people say it. &quot;proven through scientifical consensus&quot;. Nothing in the history of science has ever been &quot;proven&quot; by consensus. We get proof when observation matches theoretical prediction.
vijaybrittoalmost 6 years ago
Will a licensing model that mandates companies who have a certain amount of revenue to pay up for using the OSS, work?<p>Are there any licenses like this?
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steve1977almost 6 years ago
This only seems to take donations into account, which obviously doesn&#x27;t make sense.
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andrelaszloalmost 6 years ago
Last week I attended a talk by one of the nuxt.js core devs, Sébastien Chopin. Nuxt, in case you haven&#x27;t heard of it, is a framework built on Vue.js, with almost 100k weekly downloads on npm and 20k+ stars on Github. He said they have multiple sources of income, but donations and sponsors is just enough to cover hosting and offices. The team seem to get by on chômage (France&#x27;s unemployment program, which is relatively generous... for a limited amount of time) and on some consulting work.<p>Maybe that&#x27;s normal, but I hope that we can find more sustainable ways to develop great projects like this.
andrewstuartalmost 6 years ago
A &quot;KeepAlive&quot; system might work for funding software projects. If your company has a dependency on some open source software project, then it is very much in their interests to pay a &quot;KeepAlive&quot; amount per month to that project, ensuring that project remains alive and well and healthy, and thus <i>your</i> systems - which depend literally on that software - remain healthy.<p>&quot;KeepAlive&quot; is <i>not</i> sponsorship. Sponsorship has the perception&#x2F;reality of being optional&#x2F;nonessential and indeed there is an expectation that something further will be given to the sponsor after the money is handed over. Sponsorship isn&#x27;t a great model for funding software projects. Even worse is donations.<p>Nor is a KeepAlive payment a support payment. in fact you might have a support system on top of your KeepAlive system. A KeepAlive payment system is simply a payment to ensure that software that a company depends on stays alive.<p>The <i>super critical thing</i> that no one seems to understand - (and Patreon is the prime culprit here) is that you simply cannot allow the money amounts to drop to the floor - it must not be possible to contribute $1 a month. This is just digital street begging.<p>Patreon - and any other sponsorship&#x2F;donation&#x2F;support&#x2F;KeepAlive system that permits the payer to &quot;choose their own price&quot; is setting the whole system up for failure. Have you ever seen a &quot;choose what you want to pay&quot; system that does anything except drop straight to the pricing floor?<p>Any sponsorship&#x2F;donation&#x2F;support&#x2F;KeepAlive system must assert value, must anchor the price, and must set a practical minimum that is required and not optional. For example $10&#x2F;month for individual person KeepAlive payments, $200&#x2F;month for small companies and $500&#x2F;month for larger company KeepAlive payments. What&#x27;s the value in 300 people throwing a $1 coin per month into your digital suitcase - that&#x27;s what Patreon is.<p>Part of the problem is that software developers are typically afraid to set a realistic price point&#x2F;value on their work, thus the KeepAlive system needs to do it for them - ensuring it doesn&#x27;t turn into a Patreon like digital street begging system.
neilvalmost 6 years ago
For an expensive US city with a &quot;tech&quot; concentration, only the article&#x27;s &quot;BLUE&quot; category (6 figures) is usually viable, AFAICT. If you look at their chart as everything except blue being red, almost nothing is viable.<p>You can scrape by on some 5-figures in such a place (assuming no trust fund, and that parents didn&#x27;t buy you a condo), especially if you have roommates and a hope in growth of circumstances (e.g., startup founder or equity-heavy employee, or the academic postdoc situation), but that&#x27;s not a good plan for open source work.
tehjokeralmost 6 years ago
Another situation where public good meets an economic system that only rewards tightfistedness. Why not have a system of public funding of valuable projects that everyone uses? Charity is weak. Democracy is strong.
JumpCrisscrossalmost 6 years ago
In Islam&#x27;s golden age, they came up with a trust structure known as a waqf [1]. A waqf is &quot;an inalienable charitable endowment under Islamic law, which typically involves donating a building, plot of land or other assets for Muslim religious or charitable purposes with no intention of reclaiming the assets.&quot;<p>Working to endow charitable trusts might be a smart move for open-source projects.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Waqf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Waqf</a>
carapacealmost 6 years ago
Remember, the Free Software movement all started when RMS wanted to fix his printer. Xerox told him to go screw, so he did.<p>Should anyone <i>expect</i> to make a living writing software?<p>First: we don&#x27;t need endless piles of software. Most of the software we actually need could be written by less than 0.001 of the programmers and &quot;software engineers&quot; working today. (And I could put more zeros in there and still be right-ish.)<p>Second: if you&#x27;re not one of the truly good programmers[1] you should not be writing software for others to use. It is not needed (see point #1), and it&#x27;s irresponsible. Most of us should be pulling off-the-shelf components and configuring and connecting them. Excel proves that most people&#x27;s real software needs are mostly handled by Excel.<p>We don&#x27;t write all this software because we need it, we write it because we like to write software. (And because we have tricked normal people into thinking they need us and should pay us tons of money. It&#x27;s a huge scam.)<p>It&#x27;s understood that the really good folks pretty much write their own tickets (meaning they can generally pick and choose what they work on, whether they are in industry or academia or just private individuals. I.e. Jim Simons does what he likes.)<p>So my question is: Should mediocre programmers get paid to produce inadequate software? At all? Regardless of the FLOSSiness of their licenses?<p>[1] People like DJB, Fabrice Bellard, Mark Miller, RMS, and their ilk. They&#x27;re like professional athletes compared to you and I.
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mperhamalmost 6 years ago
Open source developer here making 7 figures per year on my own. I don&#x27;t take donations, I use an open core model and charge companies for access to my commercial products. AMA!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;interview&#x2F;how-charging-money-for-pro-features-allowed-me-quit-my-job-6e71309457" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;interview&#x2F;how-charging-money-fo...</a>
afpxalmost 6 years ago
Naive question - why isn’t more open source dual licensed commercial and GPL? If it’s licensed commercial, you would still be give it away for free.
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ktpsnsalmost 6 years ago
Vue.js is outstanding here. I spent the last weeks getting my hands dirty with Vue.js and I am quite disillusioned about the state of the ecosystem and the performance when it comes to large datasets --- compared with its competitors, notably React.js. Which is not even part of this small sample set of projects analyzed by Staltz. I wonder how it compares.
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winter_bluealmost 6 years ago
&gt; Only accept jobs at companies that donate a significant portion of their profit<p>One such company might be Bloomberg. I&#x27;ve heard that effectively 85% to 90% of all the profits go to charity.<p>I don&#x27;t know how much of that goes toward open source; but it&#x27;s still great overall, if you work there, to know that most of your work is helping make the world a better place.
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Buetolalmost 6 years ago
It doesn’t take into account that countries like France gives you some good benefits while you’re unemployed (like paying you the same salary you had before for a year) while you use this time to make FOSS that’s easy to maintain. There is a good study to be done on how people in countries with good social benefits make more and better FOSS !
oweqruiowealmost 6 years ago
I&#x27;d think a Universal Basic Income could help value work like this, work that the market traditionally does not reward, much like caregivers. Doesn&#x27;t solve the problem of course, but could go a long way.
RcouF1uZ4gsCalmost 6 years ago
Easiest way to make money from open source:<p>1. Use open source as a way to develop your skills and increase your developer profile (for example presenting at conferences)<p>2. Use your acquired skills and prominence to land a job at one of the FAANG companies.<p>3. Bonus if you your employer allows you to work at least part-time on your open source project.<p>In general, open source is a lousy way to make money by building a business. However, it can be very useful in building your personal brand by both increasing your skills and demonstrating your expertise.
cavnebalmost 6 years ago
disclaimer - I&#x27;m the founder of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codefund.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codefund.io</a><p>This is a very interesting view of the current issues surrounding the funding of open source. I think there are also some assumptions surrounding the motivations of being a maintainer that may not be accurate.<p>As the founder of a company that&#x27;s sole purpose is to bring funding to open source developers, bloggers and app builders, I do understand the issues with the &quot;trickle economics&quot; of generating funds for open source.<p>Let me first say thank you for your contributions. I do not believe that most people become open source contributors&#x2F;maintainers for the money. They do it b&#x2F;c they are good people trying to give back to their community.<p>The way I see it, maintainers need to be open to many different paths of generating funds. Open Collective and Patreon are incredible, however they often require an active effort in fund-raising to generate any significant amount of money. Tidelift is doing great stuff in this field as well by selling SLA contracts on open source projects, although it&#x27;s difficult to qualify and the developers might not want to sign a contract. There is the promise of crypto-economics and how they might impact funding OSS (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oscoin.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oscoin.io</a>). Finally, advertising (yuck?) has been a proven and more widely accepted form of funding as long as the user&#x27;s privacy is protected. That&#x27;s what we do. Fund open source maintainers through ethical advertising.<p>It takes a village to solve sustainable funding for open source.
timwaaghalmost 6 years ago
I did not get to contribute much to open source. I do think it is a privilege if you are able to make something you want to make and give it away to people who use it a lot. You get to put your name out there etc. And if you can really afford it and that is where your heart is, why not.<p>Maintaining commercial software is not a choice. It&#x27;s done out of pure necessity. My company wants to get rid of me for what I think are bad reasons. Meaning I need to pay for a lawyer to fight them. Its just misery for people to treat each other like that. This is common in IT. It does not take much and it really does not make as much as portrayed (globally speaking, as open source is global). I used to like the company but clearly they don&#x27;t give much of a damn about the law (not US law) or just being good employers. Literally all It managers are like this. All I&#x27;ve met anyways and I&#x27;ve been around. IT is a brutal world. But you will get a new job? Yes I will get a new job. Of course I will. I can&#x27;t afford not to.<p>As far as I&#x27;m concerned open source maintainers are the lucky ones. They do not need to deal with management.<p>Ps: not that I begrudge them extra wages. I&#x27;m all for it.
maxbendickalmost 6 years ago
André Staltz&#x27;s writing is always a pleasure to read. I still show people his intro to reactive programming <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;staltz&#x2F;868e7e9bc2a7b8c1f754" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;staltz&#x2F;868e7e9bc2a7b8c1f754</a>
OmarIsmailalmost 6 years ago
This is why I went with dual license for my react animation library.<p>Full reasoning here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;omar.dev&#x2F;articles&#x2F;why-im-charging-for-react-spho.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;omar.dev&#x2F;articles&#x2F;why-im-charging-for-react-spho.htm...</a>
DocTomoealmost 6 years ago
The methodology is highly flawed - with the amount of &quot;educated guesses&quot; the author takes, anything that comes out of that exercise is highly questionable.
rkara224almost 6 years ago
Hi guys,<p>I wanted to respond to this forum, to hopefully, demystify some misconceptions or help folks, understand, what real self-sustainability is, or what it could mean to us as people, or as a collection of individuals.<p>Many people believe, that, just because you are being paid, or have money, that you or your service is part of a self-sustainable system, or sociopolitical or economic circumstance. And, by using money to purchase products or services that you or your business is being sustained.<p>Fortunately, that&#x27;s not true.<p>Society, or real self-sustainability, doesn&#x27;t work like that.<p>This was proven in 1930, by the Austrian mathematician, Kurt Godel, in his incompleteness theorem, paper.<p>Basically, Godel concluded, that there is no such thing, as a set-of-all-sets, or superset, in mathematics, or that such a statement, or set, can never be proven, or exist in nature.<p>Fast forward to 1936, and Alan Turing, uses Godel’s statement, as the “process” or self-sustainable mechanism, for his Turing machine.<p>Input &gt; Process &gt; Output<p>Basically, Turing is saying to Godel, you’re right, there is no such thing as a set-of-all-sets or superset in nature. But, what if there was? What would that look like?<p>And then, Turing goes ahead, based on that supposition, to demonstrate that such a set exists in his 1936, computable numbers paper.<p>So every time people turn their computers on, they are basically proving Turing right, and Godel wrong, about their being a set-of-all-sets or a superset in nature.<p>What does this have to do with self-sustainability or human sociopolitical or economic circumstance?<p>Everything.<p>All sociopolitical or economic responses or circumstances are built on their being a “process”, or set-of-all-sets, present in every human or non-human transaction or request. In other words, we as people shouldn’t be seeking to “create” self-sustainable services or mechanisms in the world, Godel proved that, that would be a waste of time. We, should be looking at, is ways to “serve” the self-sustainable mechanism, that Turing has proven exists.<p>What, if we alter, what Alan Turing is saying about their being a set-of-all-sets, that can be aggregated, to a set-of-all-sets that can’t be aggregated, but could only be served. In other words a forum, or circumstance in which ‘process’ or the set-of-all-sets is the only constant in the system, and that, the forums or requests, themselves, are the things or mechanisms, that scale or aggregate in the system.<p>One of the biggest bottlenecks we face as humankind or a society is the ability to scale our requests, so that they can be managed by multi-individuals or organisations simultaneously.<p>By inverting a Turing machine, we just might be able to serve one another globally, or as a new human circumstance that can scale to serve any human or non-human request.<p>!DA
ThinkBeatalmost 6 years ago
The &quot;open source model&quot; is good for far more than launching your career.<p>You can contribue, create, participate, enjoy open source your entire life.<p>Contrary to American beliefs (being an American myself) not evertying is about making the most money.
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