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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

I'm an open source author and maintainer of a somewhat-popular python package[0] (~1M downloads/month) that I've maintained for over 10 years. I don't recall ever receiving a donation. I am still maintaining it, but I just don't have time to add the improvements that it needs to keep up with the ecosystem (asyncio, for example). If organizations who use it got together and chipped in some non-negligible amount, I would be much more serious about keeping up with it, but $0, or $5-20/month, is just not realistic incentive to compete with other priorities in my life. I don't know the answer, but that's my thought process.

0. https://github.com/amoffat/sh

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First, I don't use it, but thanks. (I know, being a maintainer is a thankless job, but I'm a rebel.) Second, the OP addresses this issue directly. He's talking about "making OSS maintenance legible" (emphasis mine) to BigCorps via 5-6 figure invoices "on letterhead".

It's a grand idea, and I hope it works. The path to not working is too achingly obvious though. Budgets are always tight (even if you're Apple and you have to artificially make money feel tight). What corp officer with budgetary discretion is going to greenlight a 5-6 figure payment to someone who's not doing work directly for the company? I think the key here is that that person is going to have to a) be principled, and b) smart about selling it, by emphasizing the fact that the changes were beneficial to our company, and leave out the fact that those changes were beneficial to every company. It wouldn't hurt if BigCorp got a measurable recruitment bump from it, too.

If I could figure out for certain which big companies were using my software, I might try the invoice idea for fun. I expect it would be ignored, but I would send it anyways to prove the idea one way or the other.

Big companies don't just pay random invoices;* you need to indicate what project and account (usually IDs from their CRM). So it would merely be chucked out.

* In really big companies it's possible for admins to buy routine stuff below a threshold just to save on paperwork. So there's a scam in which someone sends out a bunch of $100 invoices for "printer paper" -- account payable assumes the department code was left off by the vendor but it seems legit so they pay it. Seems like a hard way to collect money.

It's called a Purchase to Pay system - whoever makes an order supplies a Purchase Order number from their internal system, which the supplier will reference on their invoice so the accounts team can look it up before paying it.

In terms HN would understand, it's a stateful firewall for invoices that prevents paying orders that didn't originate from your company.

If you hosted the package/library yourself instead of in closed silos/package repos, you could directly check the IPs of whoever regularly pulls your stuff.

We all opted for centralized package repos though, so now only they know. And they’re not telling us.

Just another “free” opportunity lost to centralization, I guess.

> We all opted for centralized package repos though, so now only they know. And they’re not telling us.

I'm sympathetic to the view, but there really are some things that are better centralizing. Reducing code into binaries is something that a "fair" 3rd party is going to be better at than the 1st party. Why? The 3rd party central source is (presumably) mechanically cloning and building, whereas the 1st party is doing much much more. Effectively the 3rd party offers a better guarantee to the end user that this binary corresponds to that particular source.

Also, the Way to measure who's using your code is to put runtime telemetry in there. Distasteful, but so common now with every kind of software, it's crazy. Yes, even OSS CLI programs phone home now (heck, ohmyzsh phones home every time I open a terminal!). For a generic server library, you'd add a check to make sure it's the most recent version and print that out to stdout on startup.

See, it's not user hostile it's to keep them informed of updates! /s

> ohmyzsh phones home every time I open a terminal

are you talking about the update check that by default runs once every 14 days[1], or is there something else?

[1]: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh#getting-updates

I did some double checking and it looks like I had a bad interaction between little snitch and zsh.

The answer is to use a license that require companies to pay. If you ask for $0 then people will gladly pay you $0. It is naive to expect anything else.

Oh, wow. I've used this before. I think the python community needs to work out how to make it easier for us to identify and donate to maintainers. When I pip install, I never get a donate here: some url. When I npm install, I do (arguably too much). Anyhow, sh is handy. Thanks!

I really don't think there's an answer. The ideal form of Free Software is just people sharing their solutions out into the world. We should just be thankful that you've decided to share it rather than keeping it private. If people thought a customer service relationship was something they needed from you, they'd pay you enough for you to start a company based on this.

I would be pretty skeptical of projects that try to keep up with the ecosystem, if they are adding things just to keep up (rather than because they need them). The fundamental advantage of Free Software is that the people writing it are doing the ultimate dogfooding. A Free Software project that is adding functionality they don't need is no better than a company in terms of knowing what "customers" want or how to evaluate whether they did it right.

I maintain a much, much smaller PHP library[0] (~1-2k downloads/month), and I've made a few thousand dollars in sponsorships, donations, and paid improvements to the library over the past year. I don't try all that hard to solicit donations, but I do have a donate button and a request for people to sponsor the library right near the top of the README. I noticed you don't have any visible donate button -- I'm guessing if you added one, and a little blurb about why people might want to donate, you'd up your donations quite a bit.

(Usual disclaimer, n=1, etc)

[0] https://github.com/jlevers/selling-partner-api

Good for you. The welfare queen megacorps have been too comfortable expecting handouts like open source charity work and public bailouts. Open source software has served the elite executive class while leaving working people to depend on anti-freedom proprietary offerings. I am sick of watching it go down like that. The never-ending data leaks, dark patterns, lock-in strategies, and attacks on encryption and freedom of speech, are all exacerbated by this tendency to yield the commons to the ruling class. If open source doesn’t serve working people, I don’t care a lick for it anymore. Cheers to Stallman and all, but this is where his proposals fell short.

I don’t share this commenter’s particular perspective but I felt it was valuable enough to the conversion to vouch for it.

it serves everyone. it's technology. free intellectual "property". free and open innovations.

obviously these tools amplify their user's productivity. corps are organized to be economically productive, hence they benefit enormously from free power tools.

hobbists benefit too, but since their productivity is low they benefit relatively little in terms of economic surplus.

(sure, I might do my taxes using free software, but my taxes are also trivial, two lines and that's it. sure, I might whip up a blog/website using free software to share stuff with people, but again it's economic productivity is already zero, it doesn't matter if now it's a technologically amazing site.

and sure, I work as a freelancer using these free tools, but again my productivity is very limited compared to, relative to the systems I work on for corps.)

the solution is probably a mix of a bit of wealth tax and consumption taxes.

For start, https://github.com/amoffat/sh seems to not even mention this problem.

No idea whether it would help but clearly staying exactly

> I've maintained for over 10 years. I don't recall ever receiving a donation. I am still maintaining it, but I just don't have time to add the improvements that it needs to keep up with the ecosystem (asyncio, for example). If organizations who use it got together and chipped in some non-negligible amount, I would be much more serious about keeping up with it, but $0, or $5-20/month, is just not realistic incentive to compete with other priorities in my life.

may be a good idea.

Even if that would not help this project then making people aware about problem in general would help.

You should set up GitHub Sponsors if you haven't already.

It is setup, what can be easily checked.

> organizations who use it

Do you know which organizations these are?

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