I'm working on open source full time
willmcgugan.com
willmcgugan.com
But then the project is basically `donationware` and the income is unreliable.
I think we need more /reliable/ streams of income instead of digital panhandling.
Yeah well, at least in the EU, we could start funding the awesome OSS projects that already exist around here, like KDE, OpenSUSE, and many more, with some of those billions of taxpayer money the EU has promised for "innovation", instead of shoving them in the pockets of publicly traded 100-year-old corporations like Siemens, VW, Daimler, T-Systems, Dassault-Systemes, etc.
But of course, that would only work if those funds were actually for innovation and not a hidden form of wealth transfer and corporate charity.
maybe some push by OSS activists to expose how much current govt software relies on their projects?
maybe we should place some ad-tech veterans in the EFF :)
Big organizations only change course when something is already broken and it is hindering the organization. In places where everything is just humming along, nothing changes. (This often applies to careers as well btw)
I believe governments should be different from corporations, and their goal should be to empower the people that drive the greater good in society, vs exploiting those same people's time for capital
it's a very thin line :)
Do you have some technical definition for the word “exploit”?
exploitation is a one-to-one mapping, while empowerment is one-to-many?
seems to feel like "the difference between a religion and a cult...."
But, workers by definition don’t fund companies.
A lot of mathematics research has no immediate applications but still is valuable. Software is more practical, governments should pay for creation and maintenance of "infra-structure software", which no single corporation is willing to pay for. Why aren't they? Because the end-results benefit everybody.
So I think the discussion about "better models to finance open-source" is misguided. Government(s) should pay for it, as much as it has a positive return on investment in terms of better infra-structure.
That is a matter of politics, not "better models". Will the government invest in infra-structure? That is a political question and largely depends on who you vote into power.
But I assume most mathematicians don't do it for the money but for the fame, the pay is so meagre
Most rock-musicians are not millionaires.
As long as we keep framing all software development as "innovation", there will never be enough money for the infrastructure underpinning the real innovative work, and that both makes it appear that innovation is much more expensive than it really is, and that software development is somehow maintenance-free.
The NTP project is symptomatic imo.
So important and totally ignored until recently.
Boring things like documentation and security patches would go further.
And here's where it all breaks down - the most vocal proponents of how the money should be used would be those who want to see a particular tech stack survive/grow.
The way it is right now, being far from ideal, is better than having the loudest activists picking the winners.
In Brussels (and all over EU), many companies are founded just to leach off EU funds or to advise you how to do it, for a fee of course. They're basically red-tape companies, and it's big business in Brussels.
Look around on LinkedIn and you'll see a bunch of serial entrepreneurs with fancy titles and pompous resumes, who found a new company every couple of years, each tailored to a new innovative way of sucking that EU grant money and producing zero real world results, other than a fancy looking website about the vision of the company, and writing lots documentation.
And, honestly, I don't blame them, I blame the EU politicians for being monstrous idiots.
Nlnet is a very nice initiative but let's be realistic the funding provided by them can support one or two developers working part time but not a team of developers working on a product full time.
What we need is more small companies that sell services to governments. But this implies sales teams, support contracts, and a lot of organization. It's not something that every one want to do and as the skills to start.
Also, nobody told them to buy Github. It wasn't a charitable acquisition.
(I'm sure there are similar arrangements for other projects - that's just the stuff I'm familiar with.)
However, Python is an example of a large and prominent OSS product. Generally speaking, stuff like that doesn't struggle to find sponsors. But there are all those countless small OSS projects that get used by for-profit companies without any financial support for their maintenance. There needs to be some arrangement to accommodate those, as well.
That barely counts, as C# is very Windows-centric AFAIK.
Labor needs to be rewarded, not just investment capital.
By contrast, public funding for code is buying code (at least in theory).
Funding developers is a risk as to weather the results will be what you hope. Paying for software is actually paying rent on something already complete. A typical software company uses the rent they collect on prior work to fund the newer risky work. The big companies are mostly doing the rent thing to pay shareholders.
Take Windows desktop. It's designed to run at scale, out the box, when you have 10 000 employees, and any hardware, printers, whatever. A govt isn't buying Windows its buying active directory, and the fact that every new hire knows how to use it already. And a million other things windows does at scale (technically and humanally).
If they sell 100% of their shares to the VCs, the VCs have 100% ownership of the code, because they own the company.
Simply have a law that any software the state buys, if not OSS already, becomes time-delayed OSS: after 2 years it becomes open source.
If Microsoft et al don't want to sell software on those terms, fine, then no country within the EU (or state owned entities) will ever buy any of their software.
This idea is probably far too sensible for the EU to ever adopt.
So then you have to have your law carve out exceptions. Which means you need criteria to determine when you have to have OSS, and when you can use off the shelf.
Or conversely all Govts at every level need herds of programmers to tweak OSS code to make it fit. My city is 10000 people so we need a rate calculator that matches our bylaws, over there is a city of 1000000 people who need a very different rate calculator.
So every town has to hire a programmer to tailor some OSS program - but hey, we don't need every town to have a rates-calculator domain expert - we can say hire 10 of them between us, and split the cost. Yay, a central it dept, with builtin monopoly, at govt pay, can't be fired. What could possibly go wrong with this model.
No wait, we'll make them compete, pay them only for success, negotiate rates, and we end up with? A commercial proprietary software business that's motivated to deliver... With experts at doing this one task at scale. Rinse and repeat for hundreds and hundreds of departments...
Why would each town need their own? It's FLOSS, so it's perfectly feasible to have the state maintain FLOSS systems, in which case you'd just need a small team that handles this functionality.
> Yay, a central it dept, with builtin monopoly, at govt pay, can't be fired. What could possibly go wrong with this model.
When the alternative is a builtin monopoly, at govt contract costs, that can't be fired but can also hold the state to ransom with proprietary software, then that central IT dept at state level looks a lot more desirable.
In fact, the only difference between the two would be that the FLOSS systems would allow the state to invite different vendors to bid on and compete for modification of the FLOSS systems, with all the modifications open so that the state can switch to a new vendor if necessary.
um, no it's not. The state does not have the skill set required to duplicate the functionality provided by the SAPs, IBMs and Microsofts of this world. (Not to mention the other 5000 or whatever bits of software in play.) And it does not have the skill set required to build a team of people who could acquire or duplicate this skill set.
Or put another way, Enterprise software companies have a 30-40 year head start in this space. Good luck catching up.
What it does have is a love for bureaucracy so no doubt they'd love to give it a go - hiring an army of HR/Product Managers etc to oversee another army of programmers - either on govt payroll or as contractors. All hired on a principle of "lowest price wins".
>> in which case you'd just need a small team that handles this functionality.
I think you underestimate the sheer scope of functionality in play here. The size and diversity of the user base (ie govt employees), the breadth of software encompassing every utility, every browser, every os, every niche tool and product they use. To mandate this must all be OSS would be an interesting (and expensive) play. And that's _before_ we add "govt overhead" to everything and everyone...
>> When the alternative is a builtin monopoly, at govt contract costs, that can't be fired but can also hold the state to ransom with proprietary software, then that central IT dept at state level looks a lot more desirable.
Does it though? Firstly it's really not that much money in the grand scheme of things. Secondly when the OSS software project fails, as most software projects (commercial or OSS) do, who carries the can for spending all that money and having nothing to show for it? Politically that would be insane. And for what? So instead of being beholden to commercial suppliers they are beholden to a nice big internal new govt department?
Honestly, I think commercial companies will do it better for less money.
>> In fact, the only difference between the two would be that the FLOSS systems would allow the state to invite different vendors to bid on and compete for modification of the FLOSS systems, with all the modifications open so that the state can switch to a new vendor if necessary.
How would the state choose between one vendor and another? Who will decide if the vendor did a good job or not? Which FLOSS system is even in the running to replace serious bits of Govt software? If there are good, well supported _free_ competitors to [SAP et al] then why do commercial businesses still use [SAP]?
If business, who prioritize the bottom line think [SAP] is worth the money, why should Govt spend even more money for less return? Repeat the same question 500 or 5000 times for all the bits of software a govt uses, and you'll get an idea of the absolute monster of bureaucracy this would create.
>
> Does it though?
Well, yes. The only difference should be the license the software is provided under. The result of the current system is all the disadvantages of FLOSS + the lock-in effect.
> Firstly it's really not that much money in the grand scheme of things. Secondly when the OSS software project fails, as most software projects (commercial or OSS) do, who carries the can for spending all that money and having nothing to show for it?
Well, who carries that now? Because all the software is supplied without any liability to the vendor. Right now if a SAP rollout is a complete failure, SAP's responsibility ends with "Sorry".
> Politically that would be insane.
I don't understand why: lets say SAP delivers a FLOSS system because that is in the requirements - how does the politician get the blowback if it all goes wrong, compared to the SAP proprietary system?
> And for what? So instead of being beholden to commercial suppliers they are beholden to a nice big internal new govt department?
Firstly, they are not locked into "commercial suppliers", they are locked into "a single supplier with the power to arbitrarily raise prices and lower quality at the same time".
Secondly, while the state might be beholden to a new internal department, they have control over that department. They might even outsource that department to a commercial entity if they so wished, and keep only a minimal headcount of lawyers to ensure that the FLOSS license is adhered to.
>> In fact, the only difference between the two would be that the FLOSS systems would allow the state to invite different vendors to bid on and compete for modification of the FLOSS systems, with all the modifications open so that the state can switch to a new vendor if necessary.
>
> How would the state choose between one vendor and another?
The same way they currently choose between different proprietary vendors.
> Who will decide if the vendor did a good job or not?
The same way they do it now for proprietary vendors.
> Which FLOSS system is even in the running to replace serious bits of Govt software?
They can decide that the same way they currently decide which proprietary vendor gets the contract.
> If there are good, well supported _free_ competitors to [SAP et al] then why do commercial businesses still use [SAP]?
Who cares?
My point is that the practical result of the current system is that the requirement for all vendors usually boils down to "Must pay license fees to $VENDOR", where $VENDOR is Microsoft, SAP, etc.
If the requirement is changed to "All software must be provided under a FLOSS license", then the state can switch vendors at will.
This does not prevent those companies (SAP, etc) from providing systems. It only means that they cannot hold the state to ransom for future modifications of those systems.
Really, there is no downside to the state adding a single FLOSS requirement to all the existing contracts. They can even grandfather in existing systems so that everything continues working, and only make it a requirement for new systems, or only for new modifications to existing systems.
If it's specialised software that's written on a one-off basis, then of course it can be open source.
> Or conversely all Govts at every level need herds of programmers to tweak OSS code to make it fit.
You seem ot be arguing that OSS code needs "herds of programmers" to tweak it, but that proprietary code doesn't. I don't follow why you think this is so.
> My city is 10000 people so we need a rate calculator that matches our bylaws, over there is a city of 1000000 people who need a very different rate calculator.
Either both cities need something different, in which case it needs to be written differently every time, and that's exactly the same whether its proprietary or OSS, so OSS is no more costly or time consumringf to do.
Or, they both need the same code, so the OSS program doesn't have to be partly re-written for each city.
I would have thought that if the program is well-written, then changing things like tax rates would just be a value that is entered somewhere, e.g. on a GUI or web interface.
> Yay, a central it dept, with builtin monopoly, at govt pay, can't be fired. What could possibly go wrong with this model.
Then that's the same as the proprietary software model... except that the code is open source so if one cite doesn't like those terms they can update it separately.
> No wait, we'll make them compete, pay them only for success, negotiate rates, and we end up with? A commercial proprietary software business that's motivated to deliver... With experts at doing this one task at scale.
No. Doesn't work because they proprietary model is to write the code once then sell it lots of times. Once they've written it, they can sell it lots of times at something only slightly less than the cost of writing it each time, because that's the same cost as for each individual city to write it. So if a country has 100 cities, they end up paying 100 times as much with the proprietary solution than OSS,
Are they going to set up a software engineering team to extend the program they bought?
Also, other companies could reuse the code, even if it's after say .. 3 years. It would also be a boon for transparency, and also lower the bar for alternative suppliers.
Over here, it's almost a meme that the government procures software that noone but the original supplier has a right to modify, which naturally results in enormous maintenance fees. Often they even procure new SW, because it's cheaper than the maintenance fees of the old one.
I don’t know the current status of implementation since the policy was published mere months before the Obama/Trump transition. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see it make progress again under the Biden administration.
oh noes - my domain ran out ... bugger
Regardless, we should find a way. Neither FTAs, "capitalism", nor intellectual "property" should be above public good.
It's a serious competitor to Shibboleth in the SAML space.
Ban Microsoft and Oracle from public procurement, and invest the money in Europe.
We have no Tech industry and pitiful wages because we've bowed down to this US colonisation for decades via neoliberal policies.
The problem with companies contributing to existing open source projects is that it creates even more unpaid labor for the maintainers, who now have to review and discuss and commit to future maintenance of those contributions.
Meanwhile they still aren't learning any money to allow them to commit more of their own time to the projects!
Contributing improvements externally allows the project to remain independent. And if the maintainer is overburdened they can decline the patches or postpone review. Nobody is forcing them to accept the changes.
I don't know how you would see the evidence of the company imposing their will on the project - that's not likely to happen in public. It's also very likely to happen without any explicit influence taking place at all.
If a company hired me to work full-time on one of my projects, and I had to pick between two competing priorities for my time, I would naturally take my employer's own preferences and current challenges into account when making that decision. I wouldn't even consider that to be a bad thing.
The problem with money translating to power is not unique to this arrangement, in any case. Donations can be similarly withdrawn, after all, so they also create an implicit bias. The only way to fix this is to make it so that people don't have to rely on such sources of income to sustain themselves.
No. This allows companies to seize control of FOSS projects.
FLOSS is used by everybody and should not be driven a single corporation.
Just like cities vs company town.
Besides because of the license FLOSS has a built in escape hatch if you don't like the direction a corporation is going. I recognize your concern I just think the risk is far lower than you do.
Projects which don't have such governance are self-limiting in terms of [popularity x complexity]. At some point, tensions arise as a complex project which cannot scale its maintainers and cannot service all of its users.
Open source devs don't owe anybody support, but the marketplace doesn't owe them popularity either.
From experience the ratio of random drive-by contributors to people who regularly contribute high-quality code to the point of qualifying as a "maintainer" is something like 20:1 or worse. That doesn't mean they become maintainers, just that 1 out of every 20 might have the chops, if they dedicated to it. This is true even of corporate contributors from well staffed companies; they only want me to accept the patch so they can do something else. I have literally had corporate engineers file reports to me saying "Please do this" (not maliciously, mind you) and when I respond "I don't have time", but actually knew the person in question enough to follow up with "But I would trust you to do this if I added you as a maintainer, since it's not hard", and they still rejected it as, effectively, "too much responsibility." Didn't even get to the point of whether their work would let them have time for it or not. They have no interest beyond that, I can't blame them in a sense.
The idea that most projects actually have enough well-intended, frequent, sufficiently informed contributors to merit any actual "governance" structure at all beyond "Whatever the one or two authors do to make it all work" is completely detached from the reality of my own experience, is all I can say. And that's the reality for most open source projects that aren't stupidly famous, have literally zero monetary funding, and are still very important.
While there is surely a long tail of Open Source projects which don't have (and shouldn't have) such a governance structure, many of the most widely used projects do. The bargain that project founders make is giving newcomers a real governance stake and thus ceding some control over the project, in order to make it worthwhile for contributors (and their employers) to invest — with some contributors eventually becoming maintainers.
> The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so
True. And that's perhaps why ASF-style governance has found a niche in Open Source: it provides one solution to a problem often seen as intractable.
But the whole thread is about contributions from companies, where the employers are paid to do the companys biddinf. And while individuals might be apprehensive about doing maintenance, I see less reason for companies to want to avoid maintenance.
Good companies fund, great companies maintain
The point is; contributions to the Open-Source ecosystem are usually much more valuable than paying random open-source projects a small donation.
An engineer submitting a bug fix might be worth hundreds/thousands of dollars of labour donated to the project.
Something like how Bitwarden does it seems reasonable to me. You can run your own server if you buy a license, or you could just take their source and comment out the license check, but the license is so cheap so why bother?
I do wish they had a lifetime license though. I hate subscriptions.
That's how it should work - users contributing back.
https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-source-8790e...
My sense is that a large company prefer, and feel more comfortable, partnering with organizations like the Linux Foundation or Apache Software Foundation.
We use a ton of FOSS software. We pay thousands per month to AWS, Datadog, etc... but nothing for the "free" software we use.
People are generally in support of the idea, but then it falls away as a priority, and there's the question of which projects to fund and for how much. We'd have to talk to the finance department, figure out a budget, etc. So it doesn't happen.
It's an old idea, and a proven one. Anecdotally, I made my living as a such a hire for nearly a decade.
Another good plan, mentioned elsethread: have your current devs contribute. Opportunities to contribute always arise, and contributing is in the company's interest. The only thing typically standing in the way is codifying an open source policy (which is a good idea for large organizations.)
I'm aware of various attempts to collect payments or offer support plans but I don't think anyone's hit a combination which is as corporate-friendly. Everyone understands the idea of paying for support and it's usually much easier to give six figures to one party than 3 figures to a dozen projects, _especially_ when the latter doesn't get you some kind of guaranteed benefit easily explained to the accountants.
Once the dust settled, do the same with the next project.
From the maintainer side it can be a bit tricky though. Typically the finance will want to pay another corporation, so the maintainer would need to create some sort of legal entity to bill with. The other potential issues would be around legal liability in case something goes sideways. You run the risk of getting sued if you don't provide a level of support that some corporate client is expecting.
Furthermore, funding public goods with donations creates ethical issues: in a competitive environment freeloaders have a competitive advantage over donors.
Is there a way to contribute equally and fairly to public goods? Yes: taxation.
I agree. But then, how do you decide where the money goes ?
You create international projects and hire very skilled people to decide funding allocation and hired skilled people to do the work.
Without the distortions caused by the interests of for-profit companies (or the whims of some billionaire) you have a more efficient innovation process.
Being removed from the public eye is the whole point of the word "private".
They essentially funded R&D then left private companies alone to profit from that R&D.
So I don't think that model applies to say a web site analysis tool, or another text editor, or a cutting edge todo list app... You know, the boring OSS software we use everyday...
People within big corporations talk about the problem as a substitute for actually solving it. They could easily solve it. It would cost them very little. They just don't want to solve it.
Big corporate directors hate open source developers. They think we're all a bunch of communists.
They don't want to incentivize value creation via open source.
Instead of trying to figure out how to leverage network effects to capture some value from open source and help grow innovative ecosystems, they'd rather smother innovation and incentivize cronyism, dirty politics and bureaucracy instead.
Mostly big corporate (ie the whole world outside IT) has no idea what a software license is - if you polled all the workers at Wallmart they'd look at you blankly - and I'm talking management here...
99% of companies don't pay for their OSS because its free. Companies don't make donations to suppliers. They pay the sticker price and move on. Wanna give it to me for free? Great. Wanna charge me for it? Great. But give it to me for free, then expect me to suddenly start donating? How am I supposed to explain that to the board and shareholders?
If you want companies to pay for your work, slap a price tag on it. If you want to give it away for free then do that. But don't expect companies to create a new funding model for you - that's not their business.
Without VC funding and personal connections to insiders, no corporation will ever work with you no matter how good your product is and no matter what the price tag is.
Open source used to be one of the very few ways to get a foot in the door if you didn't have personal connections to insiders. Doesn't work anymore. It's a red mark. They severed the last remaining meritocratic mechanism for earning money in the tech sector... Now the only way to get money is through prostitution or fraud.
That may be your experience, but it's not mine. Then again I said "companies" and you are referring to "corporations". I am selling to lots and lots of companies.
I'm also no longer a one-man-band - the larger the company the more they care about a lot more than just this moment - they want some assurance about support etc.
Open source used to be one of the very few ways to get a foot in the door if you didn't have personal connections to insiders. Doesn't work anymore. It's a red mark. They severed the last remaining meritocratic mechanism for earning money in the tech sector... Now the only way to get money is through prostitution or fraud.
> The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
If the tech giants would budget N days per month for developers to contribute to projects they like, I think that would a) help morale, and b) help the open source world.
The tides are slowly changing
Indeed have a fund[0] for this, and other companies seem to be taking the same approach. The disadvantage is that funds are restricted to projects used by the business, therefore this focuses more on infrastructure and development tooling rather than end user applications.
Google has an Open Source Peer Bonus[1], where a Google Employee can nominate external OSS contributors to receive a payment
Obviously each country would only hire their citizens / permanent residents, so it can also be considered a jobs programs of sorts. 200 billion dollars were spent on advertising last year. A 1% tax would net 2 billion a year, assuming your average OSS developer will work for 150,000, that's 13,000 developers you could fund with that tax. This also avoids Mozilla type situations who need 300 million a year to develop a browser by directly paying for developers instead of funding companies which spend on marketing, executives, and god knows what else.
A) prove I'm working on OSS full time? What is full time? 40 hours a week? 5 hours a week? I'd this govt dept gonna have to hire managers, code reviewers?
B) am I govt employee? Do I get benefits? Vacation time maybe? Medical? Will the govt need to hire HR people to manage those benefits?
C) how do i apply to get this job? Who evaluates my application? What if there are 26000 initial applications and 1000 more a week after that? More HR?
D) how long is this contact for? Month to month? Life? Somewhere in between? Can I be fired? Who is evaluating and firing me?
E) how many users is a minimum user base? A million people? What about niche software like hospitals or train operators? How do i begin to prove number of users? With a mechanism that can't be gamed? If those numbers drop can I be fired? If someone forks my project and can claim to be more popular can I be fired? How many forks of my project will the govt pay for? Is someone deciding which forks are more worth?
I could go on but you get the point. Distributing 2 billion is expensive. My guess is that half or more will simply go to funding this new department. The best jobs program to come out of it will be in the new govt HR department. And recipients of this new money will get to spend half their time writing reports on what they worked on, user numbers, and all the good things dutiful employees do...
Everyone agrees that open source is valuable, but at the same time its very model removes the most direct way of extracting that value from the user - ie by primarily selling the code (in source or binary format).
Compare this to proprietary binary software which has identified "this software has value, this is the price..." for them it's not complicated - create value, sell value.
Conversely with open source it's create value, give value away, try and get customers to pony up cash for some other reason (support, donations, whatever) which is a hard sell because that is minimal added value.
In my career I found a balance - I ship code not compiled binaries, so users are free to do whatever they like, they can ship binaries, but not my source code. That works at personal scale, and I make enough to keep working. It's not ideal, but I charge for the value, and there are lots of honest users.
Big projects, Linux etc, get enough volunteers and funding. Some (chromium et al) are corporate sponsored. But for the long tail of one-man projects perhaps a pure open source model is not the best idea. Maybe there's space for something between closed binaries and source code for free?
1. Taxes could fund grants that instead of being passed around among friends of friends at certain universities are paid to those who provide the tools most useful to the most people (2).
2. People could be defined as actual living, breathing people, not corporations (3).
3. Corporations that complain about #2 could have their executives held personally liable for crimes, frauds, etc.
These things are human problems, not technical problems or infrastructure problems. There is nothing stopping the US and UK from doing them (as for other countries, there's the US and UK intelligence services mulling around in their back yards to stop anyone from doing them...)
-- Some Russian factory workers.
"Spartacus"
-- Spartacus
"Haiti"
-- Hatians
2. Crucified.
3. Forced to spend over a century paying reparations to the slave owners for their lost slaves resulting in one of the most impoverished countries in the world.
Not a great track record.
Maybe just giving random people money in hopes one of them could become an OSS programmer, but even then, debatable.
I think it makes a lot more sense to have the companies just hire people to work on OSS more often.
Nonetheless, the point stands that the only thing stopping people from doing those things effectively is the people themselves.
I am currently favoring the https://gitcoin.co model: individuals make donations to the projects they want to support, companies contribute to the fund only to match the individual donations, and quadratic voting rules determine how much each project ends up receiving in the end. Quadratic voting works to ensure that no single whales benefit from the matching funds and that the distribution is more even.
I've also have been contributing some of the BAT I receive from Brave to creators that are registered and I'd like to support (hi @geerlingguy!). It seems that if more people did that we could put some of the money from the ad industry into good use.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/80-monetizing-open-source-proje...
Sadly my personal funds have run out and I've not been successful finding sponsors etc. But the work has helped me land a new/exciting full-time job so I've wasted nothing through my endeavour. I wish Will McGugan all the best at the start of his adventure, and hope he has as much fun as I've had over the next year or two!
Kickstarter initiated a trend of paying for things we want by funding people that are creating in our niche areas of interest.
Platforms like Patreon and Ko-fi let you support the creators you want directly. You can do it on a subscription basis and have a 1:1 channel to talk with the creator. You can get custom work, support, advice, etc.
Github introduced recurring donations directly on user pages, making it seamless to contribute to open source creators. I chip in $5-30/mo to my favorite projects. I'm not the only one doing this, and the money adds up.
Twitch and YouTube introduced subscriptions, bits, and channel points, which gamify contributions and make you feel involved. These have resulted in a massive windfall for creators, and that same technique will propagate into open source. "Get your name in the README", etc., distributed on millions of machines is a compelling technique.
The world is changing.
What does "enthusiast" mean here exactly?
>if you're just that tad below the "everyone knows your tool"-line, you will never ever make your living from donations.
I wouldn't be so sure. https://awesomekling.github.io/I-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-Ser...
To me, if Will is trying to build software that is genuinely valuable to people, and if people are willing to give them money so that software continues to exist, then that's enough. I don't think Will is also obligated to solve Open Source funding on a systemic level. "Do things that don't scale" is still often sound business advice.
Instead I just moved to Electron and now my app is a huge motherf__ing beast.
Otherwise I see contributing to open source as essential for my company and we are still quite small but already have one dev that has been full time supporting a critical open source project for about 6 months. I'm not sure why others don't see it that way.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28487153
Edit: Just realized he develops the package that lead me to discovering Tidelift, small world.
As programmers in a lucrative field, you can get financial independence (https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...). Then you can work on whatever you want without hoping for the rest of the world to change so you can pursue your passions.
I think it would be a good idea for open-core startups to grant options to EFF or the equivalent, at the beginning. I'd very much like to see the community directly benefit from the corporations that bootstrap themselves off of the communities back.
[0] https://ghost.org/ [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a...
Obviously there are exceptions (Firefox, popular programming languages, etc.).
I especially like that you can often put enterprisey features like LDAP integration and auditing into the "paid" bit which gives a nice way to encourage companies to pay without affecting hobbyists.
Software, as an industry may have evolved past that naive stage. It just kinda makes me a little sad.
Anyway, this guy is a genius and I hope the funding goes well. His other projects look amazing as well.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager the browser is the minimum common denominator, not the terminal. But I’d like to live in such a world.
How do you hardware accelerate control characters?
how would this be able to support languages other than python?
I used to say "My dream is to work for free." At the time, I earned my keep as a manager, and had to do all my coding as extracurricular open-source projects (I've been writing open source for over 20 years).
I am now living the dream. A few years ago, I was basically forced into early retirement, and it's the best thing that ever happened to me.
I manage to keep busy: https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
1. The multiplier is net negative for software engineers: it advances the commoditization of our knowledge skills;
2. It does so while providing essentially free labor for large organizations with agendas that are rarely positive for society;
3. Most (>99.99%) software development is not similar to, say, mathematical, engineering or scientific inquiry: there's no similar value produced for society by working on it (open source or otherwise), and people who work on open source now thinking they're following the traditions of the hackers of 30-40 years ago are quite mistaken (see above two items) most of the time
Some open source software projects are altruistic. The vast overwhelming majority are not.
Good.
>It does so while providing essentially free labor for large organizations with agendas that are rarely positive for society
And? The only downside that I can see is that corporations might take your work without providing their modifications back. Copyleft licenses mitigate this issue.
Alright, then how do you explain the folks who have completely anonymous open source contributor identities? Or folks who commit documentation improvements? I think flattening the entire open source world down to ego and narcissism is reductive to the point of being wrong.
It heavily depends on what kind of software one is developing, in many cases it is not applicable at all.
So the labor is still beneficial more broadly.
We need to take back FLOSS from SaaS providers and similar megacorps: please use AGPL.
Claiming that less than 0.01% of open source projects provides any value overall seems to be quite pessimistic and not matching reality. Really, just 1 project in 10 000?
If its a small product but with a lot of users, think about a small add on service in the few dollars a month range. If its a more sophisticated product that's a bit more framework oriented, maybe use it as the foundation for project based services and build a consultancy. If its a true product that can be sold, then make a commercial version and start selling it. A lot of times there is a vast vast market out there that doesn't know this is a free open source project, they just see a product which solves their problems and they buy it.
Thou shall contribute before using.
———
- Don’t have to say how much.
- Only individuals may request anonymity
- May post donor list (good for the shaming larger corporation or well-endowed benefactors/benefitees)
- Profit!
Maybe try offering a few million and see what happens. :-)
> some are trying hard to raise money to fund open source, while others
I am not so surprised by diversity here
Can you set up a non-profit as long as fees and/or donations are limited to expenses (not compensation)?
Why does a library for displaying pretty text on the terminal need a full time maintainer?
> In particular Rich and Textual, but also pyfilesystem and lomond
> In addition to working on Rich and Textual, [...] contribute to open source in other ways. [...] code reviews to open source projects
> Rich is a Python library for rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal.
> The Rich API makes it easy to add color and style to terminal output. Rich can also render pretty tables, progress bars, markdown, syntax highlighted source code, tracebacks, and more — out of the box.
Seems Rich is not just displaying pretty text, it seems to almost be a full blown UI library that can render components and more.
Since the API surface is that big, it's possible for bugs to slip through, and those have to be fixed by someone.
Then once companies and other people start depending on this library, they start being dependent on fixes to also be made to it as new platforms appear, new terminals get written and so on.
Either the companies/people can start contributing their fixes directly upstream, or the can fund one person who can do it for them, and for other users of the library.
Although most of us know what happens in situations like this: no one except the original author actually fixes stuff, until the author looses interests and moves on.