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Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Something I never understood is why don't more maintainers just post the rate at which they'd be willing to do the work other people want?

I suspect very few open source maintainers are doing so well financially that there's NO rate they would accept to perform other people's requests for their own project.

Whatever number it would take to motivate you to do the work, just put it out there. Aside from the fact that you might get paid, there's a hidden benefit: cheapskates who don't value your time as much as you do will quit asking for freebies.

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Lots of people do this as a hobby - getting paid for a hobby is a very good way to make it not fun anymore. If its consistent $$$ that might be worth it. For a one shot thing, maybe not as much.

I think it also can be difficult to mix volunteer stuff with money. Posting in a bug tracker that multiple people work from which anyone can take on a bug from, that you will do it for $x, can make it feel like you're using a community resource to spam your business. There's probably other places where that type of advertisement is ok, but it ads an extra element of difficulty in doing these sorts of things.

> Lots of people do this as a hobby - getting paid for a hobby is a very good way to make it not fun anymore.

Not sure why your downvoted, this is very true in my experience.

Sure, but for almost everyone, there's a dollar figure at which they're willing to stop having fun and start making money. Maybe that dollar figure is $1,000/hr for some open source maintainer out there (I bet it's much lower for most of them).

Why not put a line in the readme which says, if you want to commission a specific change, send me an email to discuss, my consulting rate starts at $XXX/hr. Or there's a $YYYY project minimum, or whatever is meaningful to the maintainer. If that feels too aggressive then leave the dollar figures out. Hard to imagine this running afoul of any reasonable community norms, especially for a project which already has the problem of too many people asking for things.

Maintainers can handle this problem however they like, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who's not getting paid, if they've never asked to be paid. I think they would be better off asking.

And again, if no one inquires - then nothing changes, it's still a 100% hobby project, with the bonus that the expectation to do other people's shit for free is gone.

If OSS project maintainer offers “fixes for money”, then could there be a conflict of interest? Merging a PR that scratches some obvious itch would be equivalent to robbing my family of money I could earn by charging a BigCo and doing it myself.

IMO one of the best ways to contribute to OSS while making some living is to do product development and/or consulting work, and structure it so that you can methodically encapsulate and open up the components involved. Of course, this unfortunately does not apply to every project out there, but I believe Django was born and had been developed this way for example, as well as probably many well-known projects that we don’t know the precise origins of.

This can probably be fixed by splitting the platforms/features into tiers. Tier 1 is always fixed ASAP, tier 2 means that good contributions will be merged, tier 3 changes will only happen if sponsored.

Maybe but I've reached out to open source maintainers to offer them contracting work focused on their library and they have pretty much unanimously replied that they are too busy. And we were willing to pay above market rates to work on a product that has a significant global user base. There's definitely culture, process & funding problems around open source but for the most part being an open source maintainer seems like it's very good for your career.

I suspect being an open source project maintainer is a self selecting grind.

I imagine if someone is willing to pay a maintainer $1000/hr (implying they are that desperate to hire someone), the maintainer wouldn't need a line in the readme to hear about it.

As someone who tried their hand at doing paid "consulting" work on an open source project i contributed to (just very briefly when i was between jobs. I wasn't very succesful at it. Nobody offered me $1000/hr) most of the jobs were very small and there was a surprising amount of overhead between getting different jobs (maybe not that surprising, i was probably just naive). Decently big $$$/hr translated to less than i thought it would in practise.

> Maintainers can handle this problem however they like, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who's not getting paid

What exactly are you feeling sorry for, and would $$$ alleviate the issue? People don't go into open source software to become millionaires, and money will not fix burnout.

> with the bonus that the expectation to do other people's shit for free is gone.

People will always try to get you to do shit for free, even if its a paid project by a company. Not being paid at least means you can tell off the people you don't like really easily.

This was exactly my experience of "consulting". I too was between jobs, and it seemed like an idea worth trying. At the very least, something interesting to keep me occupied while unemployed. And it was an interesting experience to set up and run a company, which I don't begrudge. But when I looked at my effective hourly rate, it was below minimum wage.

It did give me some perspective on running companies, negotiating contracts and billing with an hourly/daily rate vs fixed price per contract. I would certainly increase what I was billing by several times were I to repeat it, but having a sustainable source of business before starting would also be something I would factor in.

Having a full-time and well-paid job means that open source work is in my spare time, and that time is limited and precious. I don't actually want to be paid for that. Or have any written or unwritten major obligations to others. The amount I need would have to be a full-time job that pays better than my current full-time job, and that will be expensive.

I've previously worked on large open-source projects like Debian, taking upon many obligations and essentially working a second full-time but unpaid job. That's definitely unsustainable, and I quit for several reasons with this being the major factor. Working like this is definitely not in anyone's self-interest.

Like another poster in this part of the thread, I have tried my hand at open-source consulting work, and I didn't have a viable business. You can't rely upon the sporadic needs of end users; you need something more sustainable, and not every project can support that.

This is coming from a UK perspective, but if you're earning money in anything more than trivial quantities, you need to register as a sole trader or create a limited company. That brings with it legal obligations, and other obligations, like bookkeeping, separate bank accounts, corporation tax payment, company reports and tax returns, personal tax returns and more. That makes for a lot of friction to take payments, and is a huge amount of hassle and inconvenience. But these are all factors in why I don't currently have any intention to make money from open source projects. There needs to be a way to narrow the gap required to make the transition from unpaid to paid work without all of the overheads of running a full company. Maybe there are ways around that to make it an easier burden to bear.

I have the same issue as you, not in open source but in freelancing. Occasionally I'm approached by someone in my network who needs a few hours of software development. In the past I tried this, figuring that I may as well earn a few bucks on the side during my free time.

But then I realized the enormous overhead that comes with taking payments in Israel. I'd need to open an account with the tax authorities and deal with a bunch of paperwork I don't understand. So now I'm busy learning the tax system or hiring an accountant... it's just not worth it unless they're going to commit to a large amount of hours, but I do value my free time as well. So either you pay me enough to quit my full-time job at a big company or forget about it. It's hard to do small amounts of freelance work because of the onerous regulatory environment.

All this is different for USians, who have to file tax returns every year anyway and simply need to add another source of income on their 1040.

Exactly so. The first year, I thought I would do all the accounts myself... with zero formal accounting knowledge. After all, with just a few invoices and payments, how hard could it be? The answer was... it's an entire discipline I know nothing about, and while theoretically simple, you have zero practical experience or understanding of what the government requires of you, and there are lots of tax rules and accountancy terms you have to properly understand. So you waste days doing it, and worrying if you got anything wrong, because you are legally obligated to do it correctly and file everything on time. That's a lot of worry and time to save some money.

The second year, I just paid an accountant to do it for me. It was very expensive given that the accounts could be written in their entirety on a single sheet of paper. But I had the peace of mind that it was all done correctly by an expert, and they were responsible for ensuring it was all done by the book and filed properly. And they found a few mistakes I made in the previous year.

The accounts are essentially a fixed overhead; it doesn't get much more expensive if you do 10 or 100 times the business. But that makes starting out hard because it's a big annual fixed cost.

I do wish freelancing was easier, be it on closed or open projects. It does seem like governments have stifled entrepreneurship with overly burdensome taxation policies. I'm not opposed to paying income tax, but I do think it could be made sufficiently simple to pay for small freelance activities that it's not deterring it, and that would be beneficial for the economy overall. Many of these small jobs could be the catalyst for the formation of a new company if they take off.

> Lots of people do this as a hobby - getting paid for a hobby is a very good way to make it not fun anymore.

This is true, but I don’t particularly like having my work thought of as a “hobby.” In the last three years, I’ve worked harder than I ever did, for a paycheck. I also feel as if the result of that work is the finest-quality software I’ve ever written.

My GitHub Activity Graph is solid green (and absolutely not “gamed”)[0]. I code every single day; often a lot of coding. It’s all been unpaid. The work I got paid for, never got into the public domain.

I’m currently working in closed-source, but the main reason is for a marketing embargo that will eventually lift (might be awhile, though. It’s a not-small effort). Nothing particularly proprietary or extreme. Most of my work is fairly pedestrian.

[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff

> getting paid for a hobby is a very good way to make it not fun anymore.

... or, in theory, to turn your hobby into your work, which I'm sure somebody would like (i.e. me, but somehow in 20 years it has never happened).

> The overjustification effect occurs when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task. Overjustification is an explanation for the phenomenon known as motivational "crowding out." The overall effect of offering a reward for a previously unrewarded activity is a shift to extrinsic motivation and the undermining of pre-existing intrinsic motivation. Once rewards are no longer offered, interest in the activity is lost; prior intrinsic motivation does not return, and extrinsic rewards must be continuously offered as motivation to sustain the activity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

I can only speak for my projects that maybe 5-10 people use because they are rather specialized and nothing special. I simply don't want to be hired. I have a job and my projects are for fun.

I am no idealist on these issues and earning your keeps as a open source developer sounds really good. But there is a difference between hobby and job, even if you can bring it close together ideally. But for hobbies I prefer to set any obligations myself.

Of course I could set my rate to a large number, but I think it is important that people understand the motivation behind some projects and that is learning, having fun coding, sharing or something else, depends on the individual I guess. Saying 'no' can still take time...

Why don't regular software consultants post their rate?

Pretty much for the same reasons as open source developers are the same.

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