How Should Open Source Development Be Subsidized? (techcrunch.com)

"Open source maintainers are exhausted and rarely paid," writes TechCrunch's editorial manager. "A new generation wants to change the economics."

An anonymous reader quotes their report: [Patreon] is increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect with fans and sustain their work... For those who hit it big, the revenues can be outsized. Evan You, who created the popular JavaScript frontend library Vue.js, has reached $15,206 in monthly earnings ($182,472 a year) from 231 patrons... While Patreon is one direct approach for generating revenues from users, another one is to offer dual licenses, one free and one commercial... Companies care about proper licensing, and that becomes the leverage to gain revenue while still maintaining the openness and spirit of open source software...

Tidelift is designed to offer assurances "around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software," CEO Donald Fischer explained... In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues... Open Collective wants to open source the monetization of open source itself. Open Collective is a non-profit platform that provides tools to "collectives" to receive money while also offering mechanisms to allow the members of those collectives to spend their money in a democratic and transparent way.
TechCrunch warns that "It's not just that people are free riding, it's often that they don't even realize it. Software engineers can easily forget just how much craftsmanship has gone into the open source code that powers the most basic of applications...

"If you work at a for-profit company, take the lead in finding a way to support the code that allows you to do your job so efficiently. The decentralization and volunteer spirit of the open source community needs exactly the same kind of decentralized spirit in every financial contributor. Sustainability is each of our jobs, every day."

Comments

Make it easy for companies to contribute. Sell it

[raymorris]

I've spent several years being paid to do open-source development full-time. The Moodle project made it easy for my organization to contribute. In fact, that's mostly what the maintainers did - maintain the community and developer documentation, not write the code.

First, the software is modular. One can write a Moodle module without touching the rest of the code, or even understanding it. The Apache web server and Linux kernel are similarly modular, and I've been paid to write modules for both.

There are example modules of various types, and how to showing how to develop for Moodle.

There is a well-maintained forum, both user forum and developer forum.

Unit tests are included and easy to run.

Utility functions are included, so you don't have to know *how* Moodle does things, the internal functions, you just call "add block" and Moodle adds your block to page.

All of the messaging welcomes participation and contributions.

All of these things encourage business, government, and non-profit organizations to contribute - meaning paying their employees to contribute.

What Moodle didn't do was offer the ability to BUY Moodle directly from the people who run the project. You CAN sell GPL software. You just can't prevent other people from selling it under a different name. The government agency I worked for probably would have purchased it if they could have. Competing proprietary software sells for thousands of dollars per year, so $500/year, or $200/year, would have been seen as super cheap. Even though we could get the same product for free, I would have encouraged them to buy a copy, and I think they would have done so.

  Moodle allows you to DONATE, but as a government agency we weren't allowed to just give away tax money. We WERE allowed to purchase software, and there was no law that we couldn't buy software if similar software is available for free.

Re:Free is free.

[lkcl]

You doing that after work. On weekends. For the community.

Work in your free time so the programs you support do one thing and do it well.

*NO*. this is extremely dangerous advice, for certain classes / types of projects: those with extreme complexity. you're no doubt familiar with the adages and articles that have made the rounds here on slashdot: the ones about attention span (how it takes 20 minutes to recover from interruptions), about information retention (the "7 things in your head" myth), and so on.

an article that *hasn't* made its way onto here in the 15+ years i've been on slashdot is the difference between, and purpose of, electrical and chemical neuron memory. electrical is the short-term "immediate" memory. it's what you lose if you get hit on the head. chemical memory is long-term retrieval and it's much more difficult to access ("it's on the tip of my tongue", "just sleep on it", "author syndrome" and so on).

what happens is that things that you can't recall and those things you're not recalling regularly are swapped over during sleep. it's why you can remember things if you're working on them regularly, and why if you're struggling to remember something you can do so the next day (it's also why not getting decent sleep before exams is not a good idea).

you should by now have the basics of why i'm posting this, but it's worth explicitly writing: certain kinds of complex tasks, which require *significant* information retrieval and cross-referencing, as well as creativity *and* engineering, are just far too much for any human being on the planet to achieve without ***FULL TIME*** focus.

reverse-engineering is one such task. it literally took me six to eight weeks in some cases to find a single bit amongst hundreds of packet replays, that one bit being responsible for whether it was possible to proceed to the next packet or not. that was six to eight weeks FULL TIME at 12 to 14 hours a day.

and that resulted in me going into serious, serious debt... which i'm still paying back, over 12 years later! why? well... was any fucking fucking fucker paying me to do that work? was anyone fucking well giving me money to do that work? no they fucking well weren't. and when that work was released under GPLv2+ licenses, what did people do? they went "oo thank you very much, i'll have that, it saves my business an absolute fortune"... completely failing to reward or compensate me for that work. some other free software projects actually even blatantly copied my work (used it as a template) and failed to give credit so it's not even *known* that i did that work.

several people in high-profile projects - myself included - have not been properly compensated for our work, and gone into serious, serious debt as a result. the gentoo developer who ended up with USD $40,000 of credit-card debt and had to get a job with *microsoft* of all companies. the GPG developer who ended up with USD $10,000 of debt despite the fact the GPG is one of *the* most widely-used security programs around!

the only reason why certain critical software projects (openssl for example) actually started to get funded a few years back was because of shellshock, heartbleed and other serious vulnerabilities. companies started to realise that they were making an absolute fortune but were spongeing off of peoples' expertise and not properly paying them to be able to do the work to fix even basic security vulnerabilities.

so no. it is NOT the case that everything can be broken down into the unix maxim "do one thing and do it well". certain classes of engineering projects simply do not succeed until they have reached a particularly high level of internal complexity (DCOM is one extremely good example, i won't go into details like i have in the past).

to imply that *all* free software projects can be broken down into small tasks that can be done "in people's spare time" is to completely misunderstand software engineering and to do free software

I like prestige, and need groceries

[raymorris]

Myself, I enjoy prestige. I like that my name is in the kernel changelog.

I NEED money. I HAVE to eat, and my kid has to eat.

Prestige is nice, money is required. Given the choice between no money and lots of prestige, or the opposite, I'd take the money, so my kid can eat.

I was fortunate to be able to get paid to work on open-source for several years. I'd like to do that again, but due to changes related to globalization I don't think that's very likely to happen. Not for me at this point in my career.

Very early in my career, it occurred to me that if I wanted power, fame, and money, I should start with fame. Being very well known carries with it a degree of power - even Instagram models and other "social influencers" have the ability to influence others by being well-known. If you well-known for being very good at something, being an expert, that's more power - Stephen Hawking influenced a lot of people, and his opinions could sway others. Heck, even being really good at basketball set Dennis Rodman on a path to influencing international relations. Not deciding them, but influencing them. Once you have game and influence, it's not that hard to leverage those to get money. Especially if you're well known for being very good at something, people will pay you to do that thing - or write books about it. So fortunately you don't have to choose between prestige and money, long-term.

For people early in their careers, or stagnating, making significant contributions to open source can add some prestige to their resume, which can definitely lead to more money. Once or twice in interviews I've had the good fortune to be asked of I was familiar with certain software and been able to say I've helped write that software, I've contributed to it. Someone asked if I know LVM (a major part of the Linux storage stack), I mentioned that I'm the maintainer of the Linux::LVM Perl module. (Which needs a new maintainer, btw, and probably a rewrite to the API).

Re:Free is free.

[lkcl]

Oh shut up, you live in Taiwan, you need like 50 dollars a year to live there.

actually it's around USD $1200 a month ($400 for rent, and food for myself and my family is around $700, because things like butter cost around USD $3 for 250 grams, and a 1L bottle of milk is around USD $4). if i was in taipei city that would be around USD $3,000 or above, as rent there is about the same level as shenzhen, london and cambridge.

Re:How about freeing up some of that $7.5B?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

How about freeing up some of that $7.5B?

That's what Microsoft paid for GitHub.

. . . but why did Microsoft buy GitHub . . . ?

The Economist has an interesting opinion on this:

https://www.economist.com/the-...

Microsoft assures users the service is safe under its stewardship, but many are wary. When Mr Ballmer spoke of developers, he had a specific sort in mind: those using Microsoft’s tools to build projects for Microsoft products. He once called open-source Linux a “cancer”, which would spread uncontrollably. In a sense, his words proved prophetic: today, open-source software is everywhere, from websites to financial markets to self-driving cars. Under Mr Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft has embraced open-source development. In buying GitHub it hopes to gain the trust of developers it once spurned. But some wonder if the change is complete, or if Microsoft will use its newly bought dominance of open-source hosting to push its own products. Alternatives to GitHub—some themselves open-source—wait in the wings. If it is not careful, Microsoft may find the developers it just paid so much to reach slipping from its grasp.