Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

The only valid advice given by the author is that open source contributions work much better if the person is paid or sponsored to maintain it. Other than that, do not listen to the authors advice.

95% of this article is terrible advice and at this point wastes the student’s time for free work, which is not sustainable for open source at all.

They are better off building a startup and making money out of that to fund open source projects whilst getting paid or paying others for it. The majority of companies are already doing that.

Otherwise you will end up with a wave of unmaintained packages, abandonware and no community picking it up for the long term maintenance.

Overall this is another article pontificating ‘a right way’ for students when open source is already a thankless ecosystem where maintenance is paid in time with little to nothing in return.

This is why lots of open source developers complain that no-one is paying them as they are extremely bad at pricing their own time and end up doing free work for years…

…Because companies want you developers to be happy to rip off your valuable time for free whilst your scream: ‘x company is using it!’ yet they are exploiting you by them not paying for your time.

The way I thought the article was going was that it’s pointless to contribute to open source if you don’t know what you are doing. The contributor needs someone to show them.

Which is a great point - how are we actually mentoring the junior engineers so that they can take over some day?

That's not what I get from the article.

More that it's pointless to contrinute to an open source project if you're not interested in improving the software the project is building for a reason that matters to you. That's true regardless if you know what you're doing or not.

So if your objective is just to "get a PR merged" that's not really helpful. Rather it should be to "fix this bug" or "add this feature" because those things somehow matter to you.

The "you" can also mean your employer. So if you use some software as part of your job and it's got a bug or is missing a feature that matters enough to you then fixiing it and contributing it back is a perfectly valid and great way of funding open source. It's also not normally philantropic, because when you make the effort of getting your changes merged upstream it also reduces your own long term maintenance burden of having a private fork.

It’s also not realistic because many businesses would prefer you not give back because it’s like giving away IP. It stays in house. You would be breaking your employment contract if you do so (speaking for the US)

You need to get permission from your employer obviously but I think most are fine with that these days.

I'm not talking about open sourcing something your company has made from scratch and is their core product but just contributing (usually small) imporovements made to some open source used so the "giving away IP argument doesn't really hold water".

In my experience that's an easy sell to the company on purely practical / selfish terms ("we can keep it in house and have to spend time reapplying our changes to each new upstream version that comes out or we can submit it upstream and have easier updates in the future").

Look at all the companies contributing to the Linux kernel in each release, most of them do it for precisiely this reason.

I am reacting to the latter as well. Not sure how many corporate lawyers / attorneys you have dealt with but it’s brutal. And they usually are not technically savvy. Better off keep reapplying

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