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> I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it. I also recall a figure like either $200 or $250 per hour being mentioned as the rate he was effectively paying himself. Whatever the rate actually was, I distinctly remember thinking, "holy shit, that's a lot higher than individual donors would probably assume."
I agree that maintainers of popular open-source projects deserve to be paid enough for a decent standard of living, but $200/hr (* 40hr/wk * 50wk/yr = $400k/yr) is excessive.
$200 /hr would be what I would consider to be the going rate for any mid level, non-FAANG type developer and pretty fair imho!
> Andre needed an adapter, so I ran up to lend him mine. As he was giving it back, I recall him making a half-joking, flippant remark about either his dongle or his computer, saying that "Ruby Together will just buy me another one." It really rubbed me the wrong way. Over the years to follow, more than one person told me stories of Andre paying for shared meals on behalf of Ruby Together without an apparent legitimate justification.
The article also accuses him of misrepresenting if not lying where certain donations went when soliciting more. Presumably, if he had justified reasons to need more funds, he could've said them.
Granted, we don't know how much Andre was making and what his expenses were, and the article seems to have its own biases. But I think at least the general outline of Andre's (and his organization's) funds/expenses should be public and accurate, so potential donors can decide whether he really needs their funds or another project needs them more.
Having previously worked as a software engineer at an ed-tech non-profit, I found nothing nefarious or unusual in Andre receiving compensation for his work or in the anecdotes around expensing business-related technology purchases or meals to his employer, this is all standard industry practice.
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...
So yeah, if I can't get the benefit of taking off of my taxes, I do want paid. Can't afford it otherwise, since my labor is taxed and simultaneously valued as 0 as a volunteer.
Simultaneously?
You’re taxed for paid labor - you’re not taxed for unpaid labor.
The rest of us have our labor. No matter how professional we are and donate, we cannot get tax writeoffs for donation of our labor.
I am pointing out the hypocrisy of our econo-social class's primary possession, and how the richies get tax writeoffs, and the labor class gets shit on.
I don't think they want a tax deduction necessarily, they're just pointing out that because of how voluntary labour is valued by the tax system it is rational to want to be paid for contributing to non-profits instead of doing it for free.
If you spent N hours working and donated your $X*N salary to a non-profit, you'd get a tax deduction for that amount. However if you instead spend the same N hours contributing, you get literally nothing even though the work should be valued at some fraction of $X*N if not the same value (and some laws such as campaign finance limits do treat volunteering of this form to be valued at standard rates even if it's unpaid, so this is not without precedent).
I don't think a tax deduction like that would work (everyone will pretend to be donating 16 hours of volunteer time a day), so it's back to charging for your work as a contractor.
I'm making a larger comparison that most of our resource, which is labor, cannot be donated at the mean cost per hour and taken off of taxes.
However rich people, whose primary resource is money, CAN be taken off on taxes.
Rich people have ways they can donate and shed their tax burden. Whereas average working people cannot volunteer professional labor and take off the same equivalent.
In fact it would surprise me if you _could_ somehow reduce your tax burden by doing vountary work.
2015: $29,250
2016: $43,988
2017: $48,143
2018: $51,058
2019: $60,000
2020: $32,693
2021: $21,420
The filings also note that "The entire board of directors reviews and approves (by vote) compensation for the CEO."
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...
I guess there could potentially be additional non-salary compensation, i.e. using another business to charge fees of the non-profit?
Looking closer at some filings there's also "$9k travel expenses" "$4k office expenses", "$12k IT expenses", which could potentially be supplementing his compensation as well.
Now the arguments for frivolous spending is definitely an issue that should be criticized, but getting paid to support a massive language ecosystem and SaaS at-large, that’s a non issue at any rate
The only issue is a lack of transparency.
I would personally say that $400K/yr for being an open source developer is fantastic, although I appreciate that that's also subjective. Even in Silicon Valley, though, $400K/yr would net you about $18K/month, which would be enough to live quite comfortably while still socking away more than half of your income for retirement.
To pay our team … which initially linked to a list of the board members without any explanation of how the money was being allocated. This resulted in a nonzero number of donors believing they were funding the work of people like Steve Klabnik, Aaron Patterson, and Sarah Mei, when in fact only Andre was being paid at the time.
I define a “great” standard of living as roughly: nutritious food (basic meat, vegetables, spices); a home apartment in an area without excessive crime, noise, or pollution; medical care; a couple weeks of vacation per year; ability to frequently purchase cheap things like video games, movie tickets, takeout; ability to rarely purchase more expensive things like high-end technology, quality furniture, very fancy meals; some choice of more frequent vacations, a better apartment/location, fancier everyday food, more things; and everything we take for granted (water, electricity, clean clothes, etc.).
Listing it out it’s actually quite a lot. But is it $400k? I really doubt it (very likely even $100k is more than enough, though inflation will change that). If you or a family member has health issues you may need this much, but that’s the exception (and a failure of health insurance and altruism…)
> As such, Andre's goal with Ruby Together was characterized as an effort to fund development activities—initially his own, but eventually others—by paying themselves a market hourly rate. I remember being extremely sympathetic to this perspective, having also wasted countless hours of my life maintaining open source for free only for others to benefit from it.
You're misrepresenting the article.
They’d like to imagine a world where there’s no such thing as sales and marketing, where they can interact with humans and especially business manager types who tell them what to build as little as possible.
So many developers seem to genuinely not understand why their contributions to software used by millions don’t magically generate income.
If you’re a FOSS developer you need to grow up and do one of the following rather than moaning about not being paid:
1. Accept that you’re not getting paid and do the work as an exercise in personal growth and enjoyment. Don’t make it your job and don’t do burnout-inducing things like providing support for free.
2. Come up with a business model. Learn something about sales and marketing. E.g., nginx plus.
3. Get a corporate sponsor and deal with having a manager type telling you what to do and/or corporate employees steering the direction of your project.
Sidekiq has all the right to remove the support for someone they find troublesome and can harm their image.
Now if another company is able to take full control is because there were never anyone else doing that. It seems pure luck that Sidekiq never pushed their own coup themselves, probably they are just good guys.
Otherwise I'm going to run out of flour and no one gets cookies.
This is the original sin of FOSS. Large mega corps end up taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth while only contributing when they feel like it.
At least with . net core Microsoft ultimately pays the bills. No one knows how other independent FOSS projects are supposed to be funded.
If you don’t want a megacorp using your software, don’t give it away. Or license it such that they can’t do what you don’t want them to do.
This retroactive take backs shit is so, so bad for everyone involved.
In GP's analogy, this would be like the reseller coming back and asking you to start making gluten free varieties, using a particular kind of flour, or improving the QA of the cookie shaping process to meet their customer demands. It is beyond reasonable to say "I'm willing to do it for a fee" (or even just "no") at that point. (I also think it's reasonable to say that the reseller should give something back even if they are not legally required to do so. Not all social norms are codified in legal contracts.)
The example in TFA of Heroku wanting an older release branch to continue being maintained for free falls under that umbrella -- just as you are free to do whatever you want with the source code, as a maintainer I am also free to say that extra work will cost extra. In that situation, Heroku can either pay one of their own engineers to continue maintaining old release branches and working around issues, or they can pay the upstream maintainer to do that work.
IMHO the "gatekeeping" model is the only funding model that has actually ever worked for open source software -- it's how RedHat, SUSE, and many other open source companies make their money. (I work for SUSE, but also maintain a fair number of open source projects.)
You cannot expect any such thing. You gave them away for free.
If you want to get paid, don't give your work away for free. If you give your work away for free, you cannot expect to get paid.
It's shocking how frequently people who deal in rigorous logic day in, day out are unable to understand this very simple principle.
Rate limiting access is completely reasonable. It's a sad state of affairs, because eventually we're going to end up with an internet full of Docker Desktop gacha licenses.
You can only use this if you're not at work. If your using it as a corporation you need to expense a license, then finance says ohh wow, Docker Desktop is too expensive.
Use something significantly worse.
Every large FOSS project needs to figure out it's funding at some point.
I don't want a future where I can only reliably use projects controlled by multi-billion or trillion dollar corporations. .net core is fantastic, but it's ultimately a Microsoft project in everything but name.