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by kbenson
2640 days ago
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I think that particular type of patronage is fairly uncommon, but popular projects might have a couple people like that each. That's still a very low number if I'm correct. I know sometimes there are foundations for languages that aggregate donations and fund grants to do specific work (e.g. part of the The Perl Foundation's function, I believe). I think the majority of companies that give back do so through developer time and effort. If there's a non-profit to push money through to fund work, they at least get to write it off easily, so whether a language has one like the one I referenced above might greatly affect whether there are dedicated people working on the language specifically or not. Does anyone know if the "Rust organization" he references is meant to refer to Rust as a whole, or is a specific non-profit with a goal of funding Rust advancement? I'm not finding anything specific. Mozilla probably isn't equivalent, as I imagine only a fraction of anything donated to them could be expected to go directly towards Rust. |
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I spent a lot of time wrestling with the decision to even try this at all ("is it fair for me to do this when so many others can't?" and "will folks just think I'm abusing my position" are both things I had to come to terms with).
That said, if we do a better job of breaking down barriers to getting into that position in the first place, it's not a terrible model to start with. Getting a enough large grants to fully cover a salary from various companies a year is much more feasible than getting enough tens of thousands of individuals to contribute.
Working with these shorter sponsorships vs a full time employer also just feels more like the kind of open source work that got me wanting to do it full time. It lets me be much more flexible on when/what I work on (within reason, there are expectations on what "full time on crates.io/Rust" means). It's also helps to avoid situations where the employer is upset because you're spending time on a feature/bug/whatever that is important to the ecosystem but not directly useful to the company (e.g. working on a PG specific feature in Rails while employed by a company that uses MySQL)