We Just Gave $155k to Open Source Maintainers
blog.sentry.io
blog.sentry.io
It's not even about the amount, since in the grand scheme of things, it's nothing.
It's about the leadership they are exercising and the influence it can have on other businesses.
Most of our daily work as programmers involves us benefiting from OSS, yet so few of us are part of a culture that values this kind of support.
This is a nuanced subject - companies won't just all start donation to OSS because of Sentry. But more and more companies taking leadership over time can compound into an industry perspective shift.
The only thing relevant is the result. Even if some companies start to do symbolic gestures and token donations, the result of Sentry making a positive action is even greater.
Because companies are generally managed by far worse people. Just this afternoon I stumbled across an email template framework on GitHub in which one of the issues posts had a responder remove HTML templates from a reply to a bug report because he said his boss claimed that was their "intellectual property."
Using an MIT licensed lib for free, think the plain ole html markup they generated with it is "valuable code," that's the CIS + MBA grads I know!
They've not sold me on that, but their error tracking and the management around it is good enough. Their search interface and the fingerprinting sucks major ass though: most of the time when you click on a Sentry alert you'll actually find a different error.
The UI is basically only good for reacting to immediate alerts. But when you get one of those, you get a lot of info to work with.
Isn't that a scoping error on your side? We run the on-prem version at work, and the only time I've seen anything like this is when there weren't different scopes for each goroutine and the error messages got mixed up.
*disclaimer:i work for sentry
https://github.com/Fody/PropertyChanged/issues/270#issuecomm...
Long term vs short term
But the point is that using a long-term approach - you will be able to pay people orders of magnitude more than if you take the short-term approach.
Long-term becomes the short-term in the future ;). If some businesses had started such an initiative in the past, people would be getting paid in the present - consistently.
So, do both.
What they pay out to maintainers is like a dividend.
I think instead of getting fixated on the dollar value and its impact, it's more meaningful to think about the message this sends. $2k/engineer is a more meaningful metric.
Disclosure: I am a Sentry employee.
FWIW, Google has $136B cash in hand[1], and that figure has historically grown $10-20B year-over-year, so it does not have to raise capital to make OSS donations. The figure I cited – $290,000,000 – might sound like an insane number, but it is a rounding error on their balance sheet.
(Also, to be clear this was not a shot at Google, their history of OSS contribution, or anything like that – I just chose some random mega cap company.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-plenty-cash-with-n...
Every engineer worth retaining is realistically responsible for at least $2000 more in real corporate income or institutional savings than was anticipated in any single year. The bigger the organization the more I would think they leverage the same engineering successes to higher dollar amounts than that.
Many of course get bonuses well in excess of this baseline when even larger contributions are recognized.
I would like to see someone prosperous & generous donate to the Syslinux Project so they can update to a point where they have a Microsoft-signed SecureBoot universal multiboot solution for UEFI so it will be as useful as it was under BIOS booting. Ideally, if a signed "shim" is involved it would be universal so it would boot any form of Linux using either GRUB or Syslinux, once the official update is released and adopted by the distros.
Many of these people have kids and mortgages while living off this work.
If they can’t afford to actively continue their work now and go private sector that leaves Sentry holding the bag with abandoned dependencies.
150k direct donation will cover long term investment in the things their company needs to run.
If these devs want to pay bills now, the best thing to do is for Sentry to hire them. What's so hard about that?
I think I am going to start making a laundry list of small YouTubers, Projects, Browser Extensions, and Maintainers so I can help them out as they helped me out.
I'd like to ask a question in earnest: Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from the project over the years?
Sooooo ...
> Does [$155,999.89] reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from [all community-run open source projects] over the year[]?
Yes. We believe that contributing $2,000 annually per engineer is a meaningful amount that fairly compensates the value we receive from open source volunteers.
May I flip the question? Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've given to Sentry over the past year?
You certainly may, but without knowing how much Sentry uses Rollup it’s hard to say.
> May I flip the question? Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've given to Sentry over the past year?
It must be frustrating no one would have said anything if Sentry gave $0 instead of $500. Your response seems disingenuous though. They didn't ask about just this year or any other project. The brackets show you knew that.
What's a good (practical, repeatable, reasonable) way to determine fairness?
If, by magic, these OSS components you use disappeared: How much would it cost to build them?
I'm not taking a stance here, I'm just interested.
Hmm... I'm not sure that's a reasonable metric. If Microsoft disappeared it would no doubt cost millions to rebuild SQL Server. That doesn't meant that it would be reasonable for them to charge a 1 million dollar license fee to use it. The cost is amortized across their entire customer base. Similarly I don't think it's reasonable to expect Sentry to pay the NGINX developers 1 million just because it'd cost them that to redevelop in house. One would instead hope ALL dontations summed to something reasonable.
A simpler way to say this: What's the average compensation for a developer, and how many hours do you think it would take for one of your developers to build some small foss component? I bet it's more than the $500 donation.
This feels like a great incentive not to use Open Source.
> As a company we wanted to arrive at a budget through a global view and then allocate from there.
Looking at some individual results seems a good way to check that process.
The flip-question leaves me a little confused. I hope it wasn't asked out of irritation or to be snide, as my question was very much asked in earnest. I've only ever used Sentry through employers who had a subscription. My experience with the product is mostly positive and I'd say that the folks I worked for thought it was a good value.
Back to your original question, then:
> Does $500 reflect the value and developer time savings you've received from the project over the years?
I guess the binary answer is yes, though I quite agree with you that it's difficult to gauge value in open source a priori.
Thanks for the kind words about Sentry ... and thanks for making Rollup! :)
It's pretty much impossible to reflect/match the value received over time. Think about a SAAS that charges 5$ per month, even though the time it saves you is months, if not years.
It's also impossible to accurately know what the value received over time is.
The best we can all do is support OSS in a way in which we are comfortable, whether that is more or less than the objective received value.
Nice try, people are not paid by the amount of "value" they add. This is a common sales tactic to find and establish an arguable ceiling.
We are also Sentry users BTW.
It's only a philanthropic decision because not all businesses wish to do the same. Because all are benefiting from the philanthropic efforts of a few.
If it was a standard in the industry, it would become a business decision, as innovations in OSS becomes innovations on their bottom line.
P.S. This isn't intended to be criticism, just curiosity. Kudos to Sentry for the donation. If every profitable company donated $2k per developer, we can expect some pretty amazing innovations in OSS
But if you spent $154,999.89 because the exchange rate slightly improved while you preparing the transaction, after you chose a number of Euros to donate, then you spent $154,999.89
Some people say the best charity is anonymous. I used to believe that
In my experience in the non-profit world I’ve found that its merely convenient that there is zero public transparency if you dont want it and so I have a different view of its “best” “good” “utility”, some people have an interesting in keeping the “anonymous good” perception
The opposite is announcing
It is completely amoral to me, as in it doesnt make a difference and I dont care and I have all options
But I was wondering what others think [so I can amplify my standing in society, when convenient]
Donate anonymously and have the collection of donations “leaked” in the future?
Donate publicly and announcing it?
Do both like McKenzie Bezos where some people get to be satisfied and inspired by the list and never question if there are others done?
On the other hand, it can remind and inspire others to donate, causing an add-on effect which increases donations.
RIP Gratispay.
Feel free to check us out, we're hiring: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_artqGMblKQKwWMf_IZmUHJC...
Also thanks Sentry!
Just as one might block "googleads.g.doubleclick.net" to avoid google tracking, it is very reasonable to blacklist sentry to avoid various companies tracking you.
Treating products like Sentry the same as advertising and analytics companies can only be harmful for our industry.
> Do we provide any of those capabilities? No.
Yes you do. When I view a bug in Sentry it tells me how many users have hit the particular bug and which users they are. I can even search by user and see what bugs they've hit.
Even if you only send an event when a bug happens it’s still handy to send some metadata along.
https://docs.sentry.io/product/cli/send-event/
Other places discuss sending "info"-level log events:
https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/python/guides/logging/
These things aren't necessarily bad, but they're 100% the building blocks for various forms of badness, and I can fully understand track-free users just saying no to all of it.
In any case, the solution for Sentry-the-company is just to have a separate domain for receiving events, so getting that blocked doesn't block your corporate landing page.
A way to opt out of personal data collection that is provided by Sentry to end-users would put Sentry back on track. Until then, I'll be running my own solution.
Edit: A cross-domain cookie could work for this
I'm a very satisfied user of Sentry, but I use it for an internal project. I also use LogRocket which is far more intrusive. For public projects, I would use Sentry but certainly understand that many people would block it. I would never use LogRocket without informing users though.
Normalizing collecting information about users and their behavior without getting informed consent in advance is harmful to our industry.
When you access a website you access resources on a remote server, this means that is almost impossible to not leave any trace of you visiting that website (access logs, ISP logs, DNS logs, etc).
I do think there should be explicit consent for a locally installed software to send logs or analytics to an external server, but I don't think explicit consent must be given when the user is the one accessing the server.
Also, there is a big difference between technical logs (app crashes, 404 pages, resources that fail to load) and storing user-specific information or actions (exact location, products purchased, items viewed) most importantly when this information is used for marketing purposes, not for improving the user experience (by making the website faster/easier to use/more secure, etc.).
I'm only speculating though, as this is a pretty common mistake
Often times much more is being collected than than what would be required for performance monitoring, it's not at all clear where this data ends up ("why does Bob from marketing have an account on our Sentry?" is literally something I overheard), and opt-outs are rare.
IMO every company should give something to OSS projects no matter how little, even if its a few hundred dollars or a small commit. Everyone benefits from OSS and how it does not occur to companies to give back is beyond me. I think us developers fail to educate management on how simple and vital to support OSS projects. I dream of the day when it becomes normal for job candidates to ask potential employers "how do you support OSS?"
I've never heard of Nim before this comment. It looks pretty cool, especially the self-contained aspect. Do you know of any big company using Nim in production?
By contrast, we use Rust quite heavily, including our core ingest component: https://github.com/getsentry/relay.
That's why there's such a discrepancy in this case.
One additional thing that would have been fairly cheap: call out the smaller open source projects you donated to. To some the exposure can mean a lot in a blog post like this :)
Thanks for Nim and keep up the great work! :^)
I now almost always setup the free tiers by default on new web projects. I have yet to regret it.
Well that would never work
> What is Bountysource?
> Bountysource is the funding platform for open-source software. Users can improve the open-source projects they love by creating/collecting bounties and pledging to fundraisers.
It's paid out three quarters of a million dollars since its foundation in 2013. It was relaunched last month. The pace is picking up, too: $100k has been paid out in the last 90 days[1].
Disclosure: I know of it because I work for Shopify, which is one of the donors.
I wish more companies supported OSS devs like this
However, I do feel like individuals also have their part to play in this situation.
If a business has to dedicate 1% of revenues to OSS, why shouldn't the individual, who is also an indirect beneficiary?
"$154,999.89" is as long as "$15,499,989" so it's tricking the brain into temporarily thinking it might be millions of dollars at first.
But after reading this comment and the title again, I see how that could be a possibility.
HN, a pretty high quality crowd at the best of times, is confused about numbers now? Fixed point decimals at that! And reacting to that temporary double-take?
The We Company only takes.
(Before parent poster edited their post they had "$~154k").
> As to the 11¢ offset, we have currency conversion to thank.
Perhaps after giving each open source project 11 cents? That made me curious about the numbers, and I found a paper which says "Daffara estimates that there were 18,000 active open source projects in September 2007 worldwide"[0] which would mean donating about $2000.
Another analysis from 2013 calculated that "87% of projects have 5 or fewer committers per year"[1] so if we unreasonably assume that each developer only works on one project, that might mean 5 times as many developers as projects, so $10,000 to donate 11 cents to every open source developer.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.4978.pdf
[1] https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/04/22/the-size-of-open-so...
HN Cynicism: No, you're donating it wrong
I'm more disappointed that the suggestion was upvoted enough to distract from any substantial discussion.
The title change can bring the discussion back on-topic but this really does feel like a massive brainfart. HN literally decided that a factual number was not appropriate and a sensational milestone is.
If you want to argue, "well, they put the .99 cents on the end to confuse people and make it look like they donated 1.5 million instead" then that really only speaks to your own desperation to twist facts and make them sound favourable to your agenda. You're literally admitting to jumping to a conclusion before even processing the information.
Sorry, I'm just sad that HN decided that they needed to editorialise this specific title.
The original blog post draft originally had $150,000 in the title, but when the receipts came back and we realized that we "saved" 11 cents, someone jokingly updated the title and we thought it was a cutesy change. That's it.
155k is nice, could be more.