Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

Love to see this kind of leadership from stewards of open source. I hope more companies will follow their lead in general. (Not necessarily saying this approach is the most effective, but the messaging is in the right direction!)

Netted about $25 from their funding round, which is very nice. I can imagine if 1000 companies did this, then on average, many open source maintainers would have their living expenses covered in most parts of the world.

That said, in my case, $25k/yr isn't enough to survive on where I live without aid. Not all open source maintainers need to make a living from their open source work, but it will almost certainly increase the quality of our open source libraries if the developers both choose to do that and are able to sustain their living.

I wrote about the open source funding problem a while ago with my thoughts on solutions here: https://matt.life/writing/the-asymmetry-of-open-source

I don't actually go into these "payments-scaled-by-dependency" solutions because the one big problem I see is that it doesn't distinguish between projects and developers who want/need to make a living from their work, versus those who just want a coffee for motivation to keep going. Surely companies should want an active relationship with the developers of their most important and fundamental projects as well. This is why I typically advocate for sponsorships. Maintainers extend their reach for sustainability, and companies "reach the reach" of those they rely on and establish a business relationship to satisfy what open source licenses leave lacking.

Granted, their approach is certainly easier than developing relationships with all the developers, but I am curious to see if they will reap the results they are hoping for in a few more years.

I share some of your sentiment on the dep mapping. We actually approach support in a variety of ways, but the dependency graph is the more novel aspect of what we do. I _personally_ think its not overly compelling, but part of that is because of how hard it becomes to distribute any substantial amount of funds when you're trying to do it across thousands of dependencies.

Outside of the dependency funding we will often directly fund developers (e.g. as contractors, which we did with rrweb back when the author was full time on the project), we subsidize a our services for open source projects (https://sentry.io/for/open-source/), and we also do direct contributions in a variety of ways to organizations (some of that was listed in the post, but even things like continuous support of many community run events).

People will often think a lot of these things as marketing (such as events), and they are, but its marketing that helps both sides. If we were truly lead gen oriented on these things though I can tell you it absolutely does not have the payback you'd get from some other traditional investments.

Edit: One thing I did want to mention- we're not actually looking for a return on investment for these github sponsorships. We don't consider it maintenance fees, but rather as a signal of gratitude. If someone stops maintaining a project thats fine, code doesn't have to live forever. We bundle this into our annual budget at this point more from a charitable giving angle than some kind of R&D cost center.

Yeah, understood.

To clarify my stance, I view this as a net positive for the ecosystem and I hope other companies follow your example. This is a really good thing we hope to see more of!

I’m hoping developers will lean in more too, where sustainability is concerned, to make less passive options a viable option for companies. I think we’re definitely heading the right direction overall.

> Surely companies should want an active relationship with the developers of their most important and fundamental projects as well.

This sets up a false dichotomy. We _do_ have active relationships with the developers of our most important and fundamental projects.

> establish a business relationship to satisfy what open source licenses leave lacking

We do this. We pay on contract for work we need. This is separate from that.

> the results they are hoping for

The result we are hoping for at a company level is to give a more-or-less fair amount of money in return for the value we have received over the past year from sponsorship-seeking Open Source maintainers. I think of this as IOR instead of ROI—we are paying for value already received. This result is achieved. :)

Our hypothesis is that through social validation we can encourage other companies to follow suit, and if we're successful enough this could create opportunities that don't exist now. The $25k/yr scenarios you describe would be the bottom rung of this. FOSSFunders.com is where we're pursuing this. Wish us luck! :)

To be clear, I’m not criticizing, I think this is wonderful and good leadership. I’m just painting the larger picture for other readers. Sentry’s initiative is a good example that other companies can follow, I just want to make sure we don’t give the impression accidentally that this is a whole solution.

Super glad to hear that there are business relationships being established where needed. That helps strengthen the ecosystem.

So, yes absolutely, good luck!!

Fair enough. We could do better at telling the larger story. Thanks for the nudge! Cheers! :^)

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