Sadly, this is the future of a lot of FLOSS development unless people start to see their projects as their legacy instead of a simple hobby or a way to scratch an itch.
Once your project obtains any sort of real notoriety, it starts having a blast radius, and you need to have at least some idea of who is pushing what to it when and why. The Linux kernel has a pretty good system of this for the time being with Linus being BDFL. There's governance, there's a standard, and most importantly, there are resources coming in.
If your wares are being used by large groups of people you've never met and in ways you cannot possibly imagine, then it's time to start doing the boring paperwork and political parts of managing the community around it, not just pushing commits and adding features.
Linus gets paid to be a BDFL. Pay me enough and I too will sit down and benevolently dictate things all day long. Until then, the world will have to make do with the blast radius.
I'd love to set one up, but I don't think it's enough... That's not the whole story. I bet the actual fundraising is a full time job unto itself.
I joined the GitHub Sponsors thing and somwhow got a few sponsors, but it wasn't even close to "quit $DAYJOB and focus on free software" territory. Achieving success here would be a dream come true but even the biggest open source projects aren't making anywhere close to a good individual salary. As the biggest free software project ever, Linux is always the exception.
lmao, no. start paying people for FLOSS development, and maybe then we can talk about holding them accountable for their projects. as long as there are no contracts and no payment, there’s no point in making demands of these people.
Doing the boring paperwork to create a foundation or something similar is a step towards things like contracts and payment. Otherwise you're just a dude with a computer and how in the hell is my department supposed to pay you for services?
The existence of such organizational qualities should be something we look out for as software engineers when picking out dependencies for our projects.
Comments
Sadly, this is the future of a lot of FLOSS development unless people start to see their projects as their legacy instead of a simple hobby or a way to scratch an itch.
Once your project obtains any sort of real notoriety, it starts having a blast radius, and you need to have at least some idea of who is pushing what to it when and why. The Linux kernel has a pretty good system of this for the time being with Linus being BDFL. There's governance, there's a standard, and most importantly, there are resources coming in.
If your wares are being used by large groups of people you've never met and in ways you cannot possibly imagine, then it's time to start doing the boring paperwork and political parts of managing the community around it, not just pushing commits and adding features.
Linus gets paid to be a BDFL. Pay me enough and I too will sit down and benevolently dictate things all day long. Until then, the world will have to make do with the blast radius.
He gets paid because there's a foundation set up to direct resources around kernel development, including his compensation.
You can see the fiscal info around that foundation here [0]
I know it's boring paper bullsh*t but this is the sort of thing more people need to set up.
[0] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
I'd love to set one up, but I don't think it's enough... That's not the whole story. I bet the actual fundraising is a full time job unto itself.
I joined the GitHub Sponsors thing and somwhow got a few sponsors, but it wasn't even close to "quit $DAYJOB and focus on free software" territory. Achieving success here would be a dream come true but even the biggest open source projects aren't making anywhere close to a good individual salary. As the biggest free software project ever, Linux is always the exception.
lmao, no. start paying people for FLOSS development, and maybe then we can talk about holding them accountable for their projects. as long as there are no contracts and no payment, there’s no point in making demands of these people.
Doing the boring paperwork to create a foundation or something similar is a step towards things like contracts and payment. Otherwise you're just a dude with a computer and how in the hell is my department supposed to pay you for services?
The existence of such organizational qualities should be something we look out for as software engineers when picking out dependencies for our projects.