How to Pay Professional Maintainers

https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/

by FiloSottile • 4 years ago

128 71 4 years ago

words.filippo.io

hinkley7• 4 years ago

This is my theory: we have missed a critical element of how FOSS got adopted in the industry in the first place. That blind spot explains a lot of the problems we have had with getting compensation to FOSS authors, which has created a whole other set of problems for us to deal with.

In the middle of the S curve for adoption, software development teams were struggling with the fact that someone in finance laughed at the idea of spending money to make money. R&D is a cost center, and anything that reduced costs would make life better for the company. Well, any costs except labor, which are some magic other shade of money that can't tell that you just spent 1000 man hours on something that should have taken 300 but you first had to squeeze another application onto aging hardware that was slower than what some of the developers have at home.

In some cases these people were power tripping. They seemed to enjoy being able to say 'no' to any requests, able to use their purchasing veto power to make you do what they want you to do. Everyone had one of these stories. Many had one about the current employer.

Then along came Open Source. When you said, "I want to use X" and this person said, "We're not paying for that, no," you could cheerily shoot back, "Oh but that's the best part, it's free, so you don't have to pay for it. Have a nice day!" and tralala your way back to your desk while they are left trying to think of a way to force you to do things their way. That is why it's used everywhere. Because nobody could stop us.

So we've democratized the power dynamic quite a bit (you still have general managers forcing teams to use Oracle because otherwise they have to explain why they have been sending that much money to Oracle if half the applications are running on Postgres, so they pull the dick move of banning Postgres), but that money problem is still there, as it always has been. If I can't buy copies of TeamCity, which is commercial software with a commercial license, I sure as hell can't get the company to send $100 with no contract to some internet randos just because I say they're saving us a million dollars a year.

You can't educate your way into fixing that problem. People have been trying literally for decades. There's a plumbing problem here, and until that gets fixed you can plead with people all you want to fund OSS, but it's not going to happen.

jka• 4 years ago

Interesting - so, to reinterpret: are you saying that one of the significant changes that open source brought about has been to remove purchasing approval barriers for software usage?

...and that we're stuck in a local minima where we now have to get over other, similar approval barriers to send money back towards open source projects? (in the case of projects that accept funding, at least)

(it's possible I've misinterpreted; and, for what it's worth, I think there are other reasons that FOSS has succeeded in addition to what you say - but I like that way of looking at the current landscape)

hinkley7• 4 years ago

In a nutshell, yes.

I observed a number of people say one thing in a group setting but would confess to other things off the record. The purse string issue was high for a lot of people, but as you say that wasn't the only motivation.

I think too that we oversold the Enlightened Self Interest value to the company in open sourcing internal tools. People worked hard on code that they didn't want to have to write again somewhere else, especially not several times. My current and future job satisfaction are elevated by convincing my bosses to free the code, the Greater Good is also improved by doing so. Nothing makes me want to leave like feeling trapped, and any work I do that has value past my expiration date is a big part of feeling like being here still is a choice.

But I think only a few companies ever enjoyed the fruits of that effort to the degree that we were all telling them they would. Sun Microsystems in particular. But the industry benefited enormously, so history will probably be fairly kind.

xxpor• 4 years ago

The funny thing is, every eCommerce site already knows this at least implicitly. We've all heard the "every X ms of additional latency on the site reduces our conversion rate Y bps". Adding friction to anything means it's much less likely to get done.

Even for commercial software, if it were easy to purchase, I'd still have to figure out how to make sure we comply with the licensing, get the key into the server, figure out how to deploy it (and not be able to inspect the software to see how it works if I need to).

Or I can just go to github, make sure it has an acceptable license, and run import-from-pypy foobar==1.0.

cheesedoodle2• 4 years ago

An OSS project that a previous company heavily relied upon, pleaded that they needed funding or would seize maintenance. As the project manager at the time, I told the R&D manager to start funding this OSS project. In return, we'd get maintenance and features that we otherwise would handle in-house. Roughly a 10kUSD/y handout from a Fortune 500. "How much do we pay today?", asked the R&D manager, "Nothing", I said, "its open source". "Then we will continue to pay nothing". So many companies take OSS projects for granted and as a once OSS core developer, I have seen many sides of this. Don't expect anyone to pay you for the work you are doing, and if you find your self not having the capacity to continue, try to see if there's any other maintainer ready to continue it for you, if not, even if it hurts, just leave it alone...

WrtCdEvrydy• 4 years ago

"How much do we pay today?"

"Not as much as we'll pay replacing it"

hinkley7• 4 years ago

While this plays out with OSS quite a bit, it's not limited to just free software.

You are almost always spending more on an early adopter than they are paying you for your software, but typically that's with the understanding that you are re-selling those solutions to new customers.

That hasn't always been the case. I've worked at a couple of startups where one of our customers was exuberant about how critical we were to their roadmap, but part of why they were so happy was because they were getting a sweetheart deal, and we couldn't figure out how to tell them no, or sign them to a more lucrative contract because the one they have is already so nice, they'd be fools to sign a different one.

And then they go pikachu face when we either went under or got sold to someone whose career (and probably no small part of their job satisfaction) was built around saying No if you were lucky, and Fuck you, Pay me if you weren't.

anamax• 4 years ago

This request for money was both too late (after you've been using the OSS project) and too early (before there was a concrete need). The latter is especially bad because if you haven't had a need yet, why do you think that there will be one in the future?

It might have worked better to treat the OSS project as a "free trial but we pay start paying after 90 days" from the beginning.

asah• 4 years ago

As a mid-level manager, I'd just whip out my personal credit card and expense it. In 20 years, nobody blinked. Ditto with taking a tax deduction from the IRS for my personal consulting work, which depends on FOSS.

IMHO the issue is that users are lazy and have truly-zero risk tolerance, and that in turn means that FOSS developers need a lot more money per donor, which in turn means fewer donors.

I'd like to see a single consolidated donation per unit time, that's then divvied up __based on your usage__ i.e. homebrew/apy/yum nags you from time to time and makes it one-click to make a decent-sized donation to the 100+ projects you actually use.

(obviously, there's disagreement about what "use" means, but the UI would make it easy for the donor to make adjustments...)

(and yes, I'm volunteering to work on something like this and/or help fund it)

hinkley7• 4 years ago

Was that something you learned from someone else, or something you did because you didn't agree with how others had done it?

I haven't run into a story like this often. Not in my own history, or talking to others over beers. I think you might not realize how unusual your reaction is, in the grand scheme of things. If you could try to convince some of your peers to do the same, a lot of people you never meet will benefit greatly by it.

mfer4• 4 years ago

Professional developers need to be paid. A big question is, how do you go about doing it?

Donations don't work. Even recurring ones. Large companies have legal hurdles in paying that way. The legal hurdles are very large and are legal ones. Things they don't control.

A long tradition has existing among some of setting up a business, having invoices, and providing services for the pay (e.g., some consulting, logo on the site (marketing), etc).

Setting up a business and handling this this way is how other industries have long worked. I think of my local electrician. It's not hard.

Just an idea of how to turn an idea into a practical reality.

jrochkind13• 4 years ago

Just to be clear, are you saying... not open source?

mfer4• 4 years ago

You can have a business, get paid for your work, and have the software be open source. So, I'm talking about open source software.

onikolas7• 4 years ago

Setting up a company is a practical way to offer services, especially if you are working outside the US. There is an overhead, at least in my case (living in Europe), like paying for an accountant, but its well worth it.

petesergeant• 4 years ago

Can't they just be employees? Would any of the FAANGs notice if they started paying a team of 100 mid-level developers? Add a few admin staff to yearly work out who gets to be in the team of 100, or whatever

saagarjha• 4 years ago

Most open source maintainers can’t and won’t be your employee.

UncleMeat• 4 years ago

Big companies like Facebook and Google already employ a ton of people whose full time job is OSS work. At Google, the number is definitely larger than 100. And this isn't just mid-level people. There are principal engineers doing this stuff.

This does aggravate some of the OSS community, however. Calls of "Google is taking over C++" or "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" are common from the community. This represents a big problem: the community does not agree about what future they want to build.

Sean-Der• 4 years ago

I have had offers to be paid to work on specific things for github.com/pion/webrtc and github.com/pion/dtls. I took one and it wasn't as great as I thought it would be.

I really value the autonomy/independence I have now. I enjoy not having to make compromises. No deadlines to meet, no business goals and no creating stories for promotion. Instead I make the software as good as I can.

Working a job unrelated to your Open Source project is the best place to be. You will probably make more money. You don't have to worry about clients paying on time. You don't have to worry about things like health insurance or 401k.

Open Source is also great for the resume. Since it is all public you have a body of work that makes it much easier to get another job.

that_guy_iain3• 4 years ago

After a quick read, my take on this. This basically says we need commercial software that companies pay for. It's just that people are so used to open source and developers have been banging on about how open source is good that no one really wants to admit that open source isn't all that good, we have the 1% of projects that everyone points to Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, etc but the reality is most open source libraries and applications are under-maintained. There are lots of battle tested well used production ready libraries that are being used by thousands of companies that have open issues and open pull requests and no one has even responded to. The whole "you can fix it yourself" is great until you realise that often means "you can fork it and fix it and maintain your own version"

mfer4• 4 years ago

It's more complex than that...

1. There are business that maintain open source software, today. That are paid maintenance. This can work for some cases. This can even work for libraries as some already do this.

2. Linux is a good example. There are legal organizations that surround it. From Linus to most of the contributors. People are paid for the work. Through legal organizations. With contracts involved. It's not an example of open source with volunteers doing the work out of the goodness of their heart.

3. Open source software can be great. But, just like an electrician doesn't just do electrical work in order to make a living... the same applies to open source software development.

4. There is a lot of open source maintained by companies that is not their core business value. This is reliable and production ready software. Sometimes people do make change requests to fix or improve these.

that_guy_iain3• 4 years ago

1. There are business that maintain open source software, today. That are paid maintenance. This can work for some cases. This can even work for libraries as some already do this.

This is true, but in my experience they end up complaining about the same thing. Competitors using their code to make money. Often this results in them becoming non-open-source, for example, Elasticsearch. I personally think the approach that Elastic has taken is the right approach and is what we should embrace instead of the whole open source is great and we should all do open source to help our careers.

4. There is a lot of open source maintained by companies that is not their core business value. This is reliable and production ready software. Sometimes people do make change requests to fix or improve these.

These are also often under-maintained.

3. Open source software can be great. But, just like an electrician doesn't just do electrical work in order to make a living... the same applies to open source software development.

I highly suspect the majority of them only do electrical work to make a living.

pabs35• 4 years ago

Linux still has volunteers working on it, for 5.16 volunteers beat RedHat both by lines changed and changeset counts. Probably some of the (Unknown) people are also volunteers.

https://lwn.net/Articles/880699/

lazide3• 4 years ago

Yeah - but having worked in many companies over the decades, ALL software is this way and most commercial software is even worse.

The difference is, you can’t fork and fix it yourself when it’s closed source from someone else. and a surprising amount of code running in every company it’s ‘someone else’s’ code even when it’s internal and part of the same company.

that_guy_iain3• 4 years ago

I've found that most software maintained by companies is better maintained.

mothsonasloth• 4 years ago

I like the way JHipster does it:

- Organisations give money that goes into Jhipster organisation coffers

- Committee / treasurer manages this chest of money

- Bugs are found and assigned bounties depending on how severe they are

- PRs are made for those bugs, when accepted and merged the money is released

FiloSottile2• 4 years ago

There was a pretty good discussion yesterday on this in the comments of a related article. I'll repost below my comment which summarizes the two articles I wrote, but I recommend checking out that thread, as it covers a lot of supporting and dissenting directions.

→ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30741702

Open Source volunteerism is the result of the early hacking culture and of what makes the Internet special: people choose to experiment and share their work, and their work can reach every corner of the world. It has no significant parallel in other industries, it's beautiful, and I owe it my career.

However, it's not a sustainable, fair, or effective foundation for an industry with the responsibility to power modern society. We need the critical role of Open Source maintainer to professionalize. This is most likely to happen through capture by large intermediaries, but I wish to see it happen through the formation of a serious professional role, organized independently or in small firms, like lawyers.

This will require changes both from the maintainers [1] (become legible, get a LLC, send real invoices, offer guarantees) and from companies [2] (pay the maintainers, pay them real money, pay for maintenance, and keep paying them).

[1] https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/

[2] https://words.filippo.io/pay-maintainers/

musicale• 4 years ago

(pay the maintainers, pay them real money, pay for maintenance, and keep paying them).

I'm sure every business will be completely on-board except for the "pay" part (and possibly the "real money" part as well.)

Companies are allergic to anything that involves paying money, especially to developers outside the company, especially for "free" open source software, which is believed to be maintained and supported gratis in perpetuity by the "open source community."

As someone noted above, it is possible that someone who wanted to use open source software once encouraged management to believe this lie, thus turning it into a permanent and non-negotiable requirement for all open source software, forever.

To their credit, this has enabled an enormous transfer of value from a skilled volunteer workforce to tech companies.

mholt• 4 years ago

I also wrote about this in some depth recently (but for maintainers): https://matt.life/writing/the-asymmetry-of-open-source (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30706650)

I'm glad Filippo is de-stigmatizing high-tier sponsorships:

Designing, building, managing, and growing an Open Source project demonstrates all the skills required of a Senior Software Engineer. That means maintainers can access $150k–300k++/year compensation packages.[1]
...
$1,000/month without benefits is a nice way to show appreciation, but won't achieve any other goals.

Smaller sponsorships do still contribute towards an overall paycheck, but aren't sufficient alone. While the majority of my sponsors are at $25/mo. (I should kindly mention that Filippo is one of them! For which I am very grateful.), I have tiers for $250, $1000, $6000, and $11000 per month as well [1]. I only have one or two total sponsors among the higher tiers. Currently, the majority of my expenses are covered by a single executive sponsor (ZeroSSL). The rest of my expenses are covered by independent professionals or small companies (which I also rely on -- thank you!) Without both the higher-tier and lower-tier sponsors, I would not be able to sustain a living working on Caddy.

(By the way, sponsorships drop out on a regular basis, so it's always important to sign on new sponsors regularly.)

So when I say to large companies: "You need an enterprise sponsorship to support your business use of Caddy," I mean it! It would take hundreds of $25/mo. sponsors to cover living expenses and match a senior engineer's salary, or it would only take a few enterprise sponsorships -- and it's way more affordable to sponsor along with a few other large companies than it is to bring the expert in-house exclusively. Ideally, we'd achieve a healthy mix of lower-tier and higher-tier sponsorships.

Maintaining a large and complex project like an extensible, general-purpose web server is a lot of work and requires expertise I've spent almost a decade tediously accumulating. I don't want to have to find other work right now, and with hundreds of thousands of dollars of their revenue per hour relying on a web server that a student designed and developed after-hours in his senior year of college and spent years mastering since then, large companies depending on the project shouldn't want me to leave it either!

After I got married last month, our open source sponsorships are suddenly supporting a family of five. Yet another reason -- albeit a more personal one -- that I strive to reach sufficient sponsorships: now I have something I care more about more than software.

I really love working on Caddy every day. I hope it continues as companies continue to sponsor its development.

[1] https://github.com/sponsors/mholt

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

I think we need a valuation of the software. If you can show its real value to a business it's much easier to get a business to add a line item to pay for it. Defining the risk to a business of the software being abandoned is another good way to make a case for funding.

After that I think it's worth having a new corporate funding method. I think there should be a "co-op patreon", where the software funding requirement is presented, and companies join the patreon group and equally share the cost of supporting it, adjusted by revenue amount. In this way both a mom-and-pop and a FAANG can contribute fairly to the project. The more organizations that join, the less they have to pay, as once the funding cap is reached, no more money is needed, and the cost is spread across more and more orgs. If every company that used curl joined such a group, they'd all be paying pennies.

So, next steps would be:

  1. Standard process to evaluate software value
  2. Standard provess to evaluate software risk
  3. Stock letter to use in companies to propose funding
  4. "Patreon" clone that enables corporate co-funding adjusted by revenue

lazide3• 4 years ago

The issue is quantifying these things. Companies that provide commercial support provide (usually) some kind of SLA. If software may have a vague risk of a future issue or may be abandoned, that’s pretty hard to weigh if it is worth $x dollars unless everyone is already doing it and it’s ‘industry best practice’, which we aren’t close to yet.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

Pay them real money. In the order of what they could make as senior engineers.

What advantage is that to the company over just hiring them and having them continue to work on the open source project. From the company’s perspective, not only does that cover paying for maintenance, it also gives them far more control over the direction of the open source project by directly employing the main contributors.

wmf4• 4 years ago

A single customer doesn't have to pay the entire cost. Twenty customers paying $10K/year provides a full-time income for the maintainer without the inequality of one customer paying for all the others.

wila• 4 years ago

You are assuming that the OSS engineer is available for hire as an employee.

pphysch• 4 years ago

I don't think digital public goods are economically that different from physical public goods.

Expecting private companies to fund the (micro)infrastructure that enables their business has never been a solution. It's a libertarian pipe-dream, leading to a spaghetti of "toll roads" and service outages.

The obvious, time-proven solution is to fund this infrastructure through an accountable, transparent, public institution. There should be a central source of truth where you can check if X project is being publicly funded, at least within a particular jurisdiction. Grants would be simple: $X over Y years for "maintenance and general development", then reevaluate after Y years.

If the federal government won't do it (although they already literally do this for government software projects...), then at least a forward-looking state could get things started. "libfoobar is officially a Texas Digital Public Good..."

But leaving this up to the good-will of private, profit-seeking companies will simply never work in the long-run. Cost-cutters will inevitably come and ruin it, with no recourse for the maintainers. They will be the first to be "laid off".

topaz0• 4 years ago

And the companies should be taxed enough to pay for it. But in this country it's hard to make the case for that I'd think.

ldoughty• 4 years ago

I find it actually difficult to do this.

When we engaged OpnSense, they had a website, had an email for support/service inquiry, and even a website to "buy support subscriptions"...

This made the process VERY easy to get through our legal hurdles, and "buy 20 hours/year in support" (which we likely won't use even half of)... we also contracted a professional service to simply sit down with a developer to go over how they intend the image to be created/automated... while we could figure this out, it was another opportunity we could classify as a professional service to get through our systems. This is certainly not "paying them what they are worth", by any means, but our budget allowed us to spend a few thousand a year at least.

Apache, on the other hand, has been difficult... We want to support a specific project, and would like a similar relationship, but the developers are not listed anywhere, and there's no support mechanism except through 3rd parties. It seems your best bet is to put out a request, and see if they are an active member of the project, and try to negotiate with them individually? That's not going to be an easy sell to management.

FiloSottile2• 4 years ago

I love this, it's essentially a case study for the companion article addressing maintainers instead of companies: https://words.filippo.io/professional-maintainers/

We need both sides to shift for this kind of transactions to become commonplace.

buro92• 4 years ago

Other industries have collections agencies, i.e. the PRS in the UK https://www.prsformusic.com/what-we-do/prs-and-mcps

What the PRS does is collect royalties when the works of their members (music) is broadcast on TV or radio, performed in public (even via a shop tannoy system), stream or downloaded.

Companies wishing to use the music must sign an agreement with the PRS to give them an annual fee, and the PRS distributes it as fairly as can be based on some sparse data (i.e. sampled radio play, reported shop mixes, etc). Most played artists get the most, but everyone gets a little.

What if the IT industry did similar?

We have SBOM ( https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/what-is-an-sbom/ ) as a standard amongst companies averse to making software licensing mistakes, and just to have a record of what software at what version is running within an infrastructure.

It should be more trivial for this industry to have a collection agency that fairly allocates payments to the software and dependencies actually in use... than it is for the PRS to do what they're doing.

Yes the PRS has legacy, but all legacy starts somewhere. If you're running code I've written and still maintain, SBOM will tell you so... and a collection agency can come up with some payment structure (free to organisations below this much revenue, not-free to organisations above so much revenue, etc).

Don't invent something new. Steal the idea and structure from those who made it work.

wmf4• 4 years ago

Companies like Tidelift are exploring similar models for software.

WJW3• 4 years ago

I'm not sure you want to use the music industry as the pattern from which to take inspiration for rewarding FOSS programmers. Most musicians don't make more than a couple bucks per month, if they make anything at all. Aspiring musicians waiting tables is a stereotype for a reason.

Also how would you even start to decide how much postgres gets vs colors.js? One is a huge project with highly specialized code, the other inserts terminal coloring characters into a string.

buro92• 4 years ago

Most musicians don't make more than a couple bucks per month

Most musicians aren't represented in the sampled plays of radio. Those that are, are getting paid nicely.

We don't have to rely on that, given that most risk averse large customers are already asking for SBOM manifests showing all software licence information, version numbers, etc. We have better data available to us.

WJW3• 4 years ago

Whenever this topic pops up we get the same few points made again, but progress seems to never be any nearer than before.

In the end, the "dream" of being paid for your open source work seems to be very similar to having a small SAAS-like business but without having to do marketing, customer acquisition or any of that boring "business stuff" that comes with running a normal company. No leetcoding required! You just write code and somehow people will show up and pay you. It's a perfect fantasy for the HN audience, which is why articles about it come up so often.

kkfx• 4 years ago

The best maintainer is one who need personally to have a certain software maintained, that's why FLOSS tend to have a mean better quality and less refinements than commercial software.

Honestly my personal opinion is "when labeled 'professional' or 'enterprise' is something similar to Star Trek Enterprise ship, something that keep having terrible troubles, extremely bad design (for instance a single 'reactor') etc"...

daqhris• 4 years ago

What about a centralized database (i.e blockchain) of all maintainers who get rewarded recurrent revenue in digital money (i.e. crypto) for their projects?

In all seriousness, the author and his project Filippo are on the right track to help bring income to humans maintaining open source software. Another team doing a similar stellar job in the crypto sector is GitCoin and their grants to software devs.

onebot• 4 years ago

I would love to know how to recruit a professional maintainer. This is a tremendously difficult skill set.

david_allison2• 4 years ago

Suggestions off the top of my head:

* Specifically mention that you're after someone with nontrivial open source experience/maintenance experience and you'll accept it in place of Leetcode

* Some inkling that you've thought about titles/HR considers "maintainer" as experience

* Provide the expected time commitments from interviews upfront. Likewise for compensation.

* Expect part-time or contract work. If full-time, explicitly allocate time to their OSS.

* Remote, if part-time or contracting

* Async friendly. I've had 1 "real-time" meeting in OSS (total).

* Post a spec/contact details in a reply to this comment, or "Who is Hiring"

pabs35• 4 years ago

Send them a mail offering funding, asking their preferred payment method and then send them money every month until they stop maintaining the software.

baby• 4 years ago

I'd be interesting if I could, today, look at my dependency tree and decide to donate a number X that would be shared amongst all the dependencies that have declared a donation API (perhaps a cryptocurrency address). This way I contribute to all of what I depend upon, making my own part of the ecosystem healthier.

epberry• 4 years ago

Railway is developing an interesting model for this, the open-source kickback https://railway.app/open-source-kickback

david_allison2• 4 years ago

To keep this short and to the point, we will pay you [in credits] 25% of whatever we make whenever a user deploys your open-source project on Railway. No limits, no minimum amount required, nothing!

That's an awesome idea! Hopefully they'll move to real money soon.

pabs35• 4 years ago

Wonder if they apply that to dependencies too...

pabs35• 4 years ago

I like the Snowdrift model for paying people for their work on OSS.

https://snowdrift.coop/

mkevac• 4 years ago

Had to use VPN to read this from Turkey :-(

How to Pay Professional Maintainers

Related Stories