Genuine question here, the post ends with "In that case, you may wish to talk to us (offline) about our consulting rates.".
Without bothering the author, I'm really curious what the price range would be for consulting with recognized open-source maintainers, once you reach them offline ... Anyone willing to try a guess ?
(I'm a consultant myself, thinking about my own fees ... but I have zero significant contributions to Free Software as Arnold Robbin does, just curious !)
I don't know if there's any expectation that someone will actually hire them. I've written the same thing before. Sometimes you'll get requests to do custom work. For instance, I've had grad students see something I've posted online who've asked me to do X, for some X that would take hundreds of hours. "Sure, I'll be happy to do it for $150/hour" is more polite than saying "Do your own research".
I've seen that Stallman does consulting at $250/hr, which is interesting when you consider that I, a no-name from a no-name state school with 8 years' experience, am billed to my company's clients at more than 1/3 the rate of someone who's effectively a celebrity.
While I'm not recognized, my OSS is on the way to reach 2M installs this year from npm. Usage from CDNs of a single project is already 1+M/year.
Mid-term (within 5 years) I am considering whether to go consulting or trying to sell software products (or both). What is the value you see from OSS developers? Assuming is not consulting for their own libraries ofc.
But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the temerity to actually create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. My computer can hold multiple incompatible forks without them mutually annihilating. Why can't people's belief systems?
Now, such sentiments often come from the peanut gallery rather than the maintainer. But maintainers could help more. When was the last time anyone saw a maintainer thank someone for creating a fork? Forks should be treated more like Andon Cords (https://itrevolution.com/kata). Creating them is an act of bravery, and even if you don't agree with the reasons they are a valuable source of feedback. These are events to be celebrated and encouraged. A fork that doesn't gain traction isn't a 'failure' to be derided, it is a valuable experiment at worst, a negative result that didn't take away energy from other efforts. At best it actually influenced upstream. Everyone should be enormously grateful.
> When was the last time anyone saw a maintainer thank someone for creating a fork?
It's probably happened. The closest I've seen was when Cython was forked from Pyrex* because Sage developers had needs that the Pyrex author wasn't interested in developing or maintaining. It was an amicable fork, and for quite some time Cython development cohabited with Pyrex and some patches were upstreamed as they fit Greg's purposes.
* there was a brief period when the fork was named SageX, which was, regrettably, my sarcastic spitball. Fortunately, several devs were huge Battlestar Gallactica fans and they eventually settled on the name Cython around the time it was spun off to its own project.
It's basically a disingenuous thought-terminating cliché, much like people who say "if you don't like your job then just quit" to people who are being exploited at work. Sure, you technically can "just fork" a project, but everybody knows that projects aren't just the code: they're the community, the mindshare, the maintainers, etc. It's also a very political act with social consequences. You could divide a project's community if you fork and do manage to become big enough.
So yeah. People saying "just fork" are being disingenuous, and I think they know that.
While open source software really shines when lots of contributions work together and when everyone is polite, understanding, and well-reasoned, not every project is like that.
Sometimes it's hard or even demoralizing for the developer to handle all the feature requests that do not take into account the constraints. I've seen some GitHub issues like that and it's disheartening.
I am starting to wonder why Open Source became the standard as apposed to alternatives. Clearly a love/passion/aptitude/... puts people in a position where they contribute time and expertise for some/no reward that matches a cost/benefit. The article list the truth behind volunteering and the consequent constraints.
Why is it that way though?
The planet has public money advancing major scientific interests in an organised though potentially politically aggravated mechanism. Would a lack of action on a subject of possible national security be tolerated due to the rights of volunteers? How about international security?
Is it politics/government/non scientific interests that make open source the most successful answer to by the people for the people?
18 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 57.2 ms ] threadwhy would do like this and not like that? like that would be better.
can you add touch support? I don't like using keys.
can you add key support? I don't want to click the screen.
why it's not working on my Android 4.1 version?
Without bothering the author, I'm really curious what the price range would be for consulting with recognized open-source maintainers, once you reach them offline ... Anyone willing to try a guess ?
(I'm a consultant myself, thinking about my own fees ... but I have zero significant contributions to Free Software as Arnold Robbin does, just curious !)
Mid-term (within 5 years) I am considering whether to go consulting or trying to sell software products (or both). What is the value you see from OSS developers? Assuming is not consulting for their own libraries ofc.
It makes a nice contrast to the way that the core Elm team pushes back on forks and retains control for themselves.
But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the temerity to actually create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. My computer can hold multiple incompatible forks without them mutually annihilating. Why can't people's belief systems?
Now, such sentiments often come from the peanut gallery rather than the maintainer. But maintainers could help more. When was the last time anyone saw a maintainer thank someone for creating a fork? Forks should be treated more like Andon Cords (https://itrevolution.com/kata). Creating them is an act of bravery, and even if you don't agree with the reasons they are a valuable source of feedback. These are events to be celebrated and encouraged. A fork that doesn't gain traction isn't a 'failure' to be derided, it is a valuable experiment at worst, a negative result that didn't take away energy from other efforts. At best it actually influenced upstream. Everyone should be enormously grateful.
But it does vary by project. The Linux kernel has tons of forks maintained by random people for random reasons. But Python not so much.
a) A short-lived branch hosted elsewhere for managing the merge process. This is a technical fork.
b) A long-lived branch that may never be merged back. This is a social fork. Like egcs vs gcc, or Vim vs Neovim.
It's the latter that seems to have stigma attached to it.
It's probably happened. The closest I've seen was when Cython was forked from Pyrex* because Sage developers had needs that the Pyrex author wasn't interested in developing or maintaining. It was an amicable fork, and for quite some time Cython development cohabited with Pyrex and some patches were upstreamed as they fit Greg's purposes.
http://lists.copyleft.no/pipermail/pyrex/2006-November/00207...
http://lists.copyleft.no/pipermail/pyrex/2007-July/002480.ht...
* there was a brief period when the fork was named SageX, which was, regrettably, my sarcastic spitball. Fortunately, several devs were huge Battlestar Gallactica fans and they eventually settled on the name Cython around the time it was spun off to its own project.
So yeah. People saying "just fork" are being disingenuous, and I think they know that.
Sometimes it's hard or even demoralizing for the developer to handle all the feature requests that do not take into account the constraints. I've seen some GitHub issues like that and it's disheartening.
Why is it that way though?
The planet has public money advancing major scientific interests in an organised though potentially politically aggravated mechanism. Would a lack of action on a subject of possible national security be tolerated due to the rights of volunteers? How about international security?
Is it politics/government/non scientific interests that make open source the most successful answer to by the people for the people?