Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001158.html

by sant0sk1 • 18 years ago

24 28 18 years ago

gm4• 18 years ago

This guy is absolutely, positively, dead wrong about OSS projects and money.

First of all, money is nothing but a resource. Get that word in your head. Resource. It means you can use it towards a goal. You can administer it.

So this guy gave $5K to someone that does not know how to manage it. At least the administrator is smart enough not to touch it (when in doubt, do nothing, some people say). But he is also a bad enough administrator not to touch it.

What would I do with $5K on a OSS project? Hire developers for a beginning. Hire a full-time guy for 3-6 months (depending on where the programmer is) and set a very clear goal as to what is to be accomplished during this time. The goal will vary depending on the project, but the idea is to have a person deadly-focused on a goal.

This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money) because of a bad project admin/lead.

The conclusion this guy makes is that time matters more than money. Duh! Of course it does. Money, however, buys time. Therein lies the missed connection.

pchristensen2• 18 years ago

It wouldn't be the first time Atwood made a generalization based on one data point.

xlnt2• 18 years ago

How is it possible to "generalize" from one data point? The normal method of generalizing is finding a similarity shared across many data points, and proposing it applies more widely.

Perhaps one could generalize badly with 2 data points, but isn't it just impossible with 1, and therefore he must actually be doing something else?

michaelneale3• 18 years ago

I used to work with Chemical engineers (I was an elec eng) - they had a saying: "one point is a line, two points is a trend" when trying to analyse production data (always only half joking).

corentin• 18 years ago

On the ScrewTurn website, I can read: "ScrewTurn Software - Developers for Passion". Whatever that means, I don't see them spending the money they got to hire someone.

gwc• 18 years ago

This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money) because of a bad project admin/lead.

I'm not sure I follow this assertion. Jeff is asking a generic question, yes, and he does make some generic suppositions, but he does not really declare any conclusions.

If anything Jeff was surprised by the exchange and is asking the question as he is because he believes (or used to believe) that money could help OSS projects and is curious how, since it is not something that he has experience in himself.

As a side note, do you really think $5K will buy you a quality full-time developer for 3-6 months? I would be very surprised, though I admit I have little knowledge of programming labor markets outside of Boston or SV.

gm4• 18 years ago

Oh you'd be surprised what you get abroad for $5k... US-based developers with mediocre skills: Be afraid, be very afraid.

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

This guy is absolutely, positively, dead wrong about OSS projects and money.

I think this is a case where your credentials matter--while Atwood doesn't have a huge array of Open Source projects under his belt and just this one data point, he still has one real data point. What Open Source projects do you manage, or have you managed, that would have been dramatically positively impacted by receiving a no-strings $5000 cash infusion?

I've built two companies based on Open Source software now, and I can assure you that spending money to make things happen in Open Source can be challenging. People are often involved in Open Source for reasons other than money. Over the years I've probably managed a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of expenditure on Open Source development...and on many occasions it wasn't with the core developers on a project, because the core developers had no interest in the money, either due to their employment contracts, difficulty in dealing with foreign payments, or simply a desire to keep their Open Source work purely for fun.

When I was considering what my options were when shutting down my old business (just prior to starting Virtualmin), I spent a little time building a website specifically for throwing money at Open Source projects to get things done (called ransomware.com, and I still have the domain...maybe once I've got some free time from Virtualmin I'll spin it into something). It's still a gaping hole in the Open Source world, but it's one that's incredibly hard to fill, and you can't do it in the obvious ways.

Google SoC covers one aspect, but it's an "internship" style model, which doesn't produce "core" code very well--it's just as much for teaching as it is for producing code, and requires significant time investment on the part of the project. SourceForge donations provides "tips", but it doesn't seem to work well for getting specific project work done. There have been a few others, but they seem to fizzle out pretty quickly, as I think the profit potential for the orchestrating company is small...it's almost gotta be a non-profit to convince people to take part. Finally, a lot of folks use eLance, Rent-A-Coder, and others, to get work like this done--I frequently see projects come up related to our software in my Google Alerts--but it's not targeted to this purpose, and the code ends up being "one off" rather than finding its way into the core codebase...I know we have never heard of any of these projects coming back into our codebase (which is fine...a large percentage of our code is BSD-licensed, and so there's no obligation to let us know what's going on with it).

So, while I agree that money can certainly be used to great effect on Open Source projects, it takes time to make it useful, and sometimes you don't want to use it for the obvious "get more features", since a lot of developers on Open Source software like to do that stuff themselves even if it comes more slowly. We've begun spending money on Webmin and Usermin, now that we have some...but for ancillary stuff, like design and logos, and graphics. Jamie still writes almost all of the code (and a couple of other occasional contributors and I write a tiny remaining percentage).

gm4• 18 years ago

You ask about how many open source projects I manage. None. I am a completely private sector guy.

I've done a lot with $5K; employing that focus I talked about.

I was not taking a shot at anyone, nor at open source. Just at resources vs resource administration. I do not know which project this was (I know the guy mentioned it on his post), nor do I particularly care. A resource is a resource and a manager is a manager. A project that is in development must move forward, open source or not.

Case in point: We are using a certain OSS project in house. We ran into a bug, it's a well-known bug, been there for a long time. We fixed it because we had a time motive, resources, and focus. Right there: done. No hesitating, we needed to move onto something else. That kind of focus would certainly help OSS. $5K or not in our pocket, it was fixed.

Anyway... That may very well explain why private projects move faster than open source ones, the private ones have a profit motive, failure means financial failure. No matter how altruistic you are, if you fail financially, you don't eat.

jonknee• 18 years ago

Looking at that project's website, I probably would have spent it on a designer / copy editor.

stcredzero• 18 years ago

He's right that time is the key resource. However, money can buy time. This has to be bought in certain established increments, however. (Full-time employees. Interns.) $80k is going to be a lot more useful than 16 chunks of $5000.

There are very few Open Source projects with some form of GUI that reach a professional level of polish without money. Anyone know of the exceptions?

jrockway2• 18 years ago

$5000 isn't enough to quit your full-time job, so it's pretty much worthless. There is only so much time in a day, regardless of monetary incentive. The best way to "donate" to an open source project is to hire the developer(s) to work on the project for a certain percentage of their time. (Google does this.)

That said, the money is good for traveling to conferences. I can't believe this .NET guy can't think of a single conference that he wants to attend or speak at. I've already been to 4 this year, and have at least 3 more. Three are international, so the travel costs kind of add up. So that's what I use donations / book revenue / etc. for.

michaelneale3• 18 years ago

There are a lot of freelancers/one man shows who contribute to open source, so in that case, their time is a bit more liquid and the 5K would be put to good use.

jrockway2• 18 years ago

That's true, but you can't say no to a big client just because you happen to have some donation money floating around.

tomh• 18 years ago

Sounds like the local laws were at fault, which begs the question; why accept money in the first place if you don't have a legal entity in place to use it properly?

Set up an LLC in the USA with that cash, or at least a non-profit that can accept donations (and therefore, make them tax-deductable so that more people will be encouraged to donate, instead of less, since um, googling the OSS project in question will now point to Atwood's post, which wouldn't convince me to give them any money at all).

gleb• 18 years ago

The money won't spend itself, not in any useful fashion. Usefully spending money is work like any other, and is in fact exactly what a CEO/founder does.

rw• 18 years ago

There's something about Atwood's writing that makes me mad he earns any income from that site.

Hexstream2• 18 years ago

He writes so much it's no wonder he eventually has to sacrifice relevance for lack of experience.

omouse2• 18 years ago

Stop submitting CodingHorror.com blog posts here. They add nothing and aren't even worth discussing when Atwood doesn't take the fucking time to research things. Flagged.

raganwald2• 18 years ago

Let's do this: you vote for the posts you like, I'll vote for the articles I like, and we'll let the YC News ranking engine push the posts neither of us like off the front page.

There's aboslutely no need to tell people not to post stuff, unless you think that posts like Atwood's will get votes.

Hexstream2• 18 years ago

Personally my treshold to upvote a story is pretty high, and to pseudo-downvote an article I don't feel has its place I'd need to lower my standards and upvote a lot of stories I don't like that much, but the system would think all those stories I upvoted have equal importance to me while this is not the case.

omouse2• 18 years ago

Sorry for the poison of my comment, but it is annoying not to be able to, at the least, hide articles.

Your idea, and the way the ranking engine currently works, leads to the problem they're having on IMDB where people are strategically rating a movie (Shawshank Redemption) to punish another movie (The Godfather).

I don't want to be forced to up-vote other stories I don't particularly care for in order to punish one story. It feels like voting in a US or Canadian election, where you vote for the other party to punish the current party. But what if the other parties are just as bad as the current one? What if they're worse but you still want a way to punish the current party?

Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects?

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