[sktrdie]

My opinion is that open-source contributions stems from passion. People do it and implement something because they're passionate about it.

When you attach any money to it, it becomes tainted with responsibility and emotions. Such as, "should I work on this an extra hour and burn myself out and get those extra 40 bucks for dinner tonight?" That formula doesn't make individuals want to work more on open-source.

Sure they push them towards doing stuff in open-source but that usually almost never leads to creating great pieces of work.

One great and amazing thing that open-source thought us is that individuals can group together and work on amazing things without any economical reward. To me it was always a fascinating experiment outside the usual realms of politics, economics, social-studies.

Nobody would have ever imagined it to work without "money", but it does and it will continue to work. In fact, instead of pushing capitalism mentality inside of open-source we should be doing exactly the opposite: push open-source mentality in other parts of our society.

[kelset]

open source maintainer here - I disagree that you get those "responsibility and emotions" only when you attach money.

You already get plenty of those by the sheer fact that you care about the craft you contribute to.

> Nobody would have ever imagined it to work without "money", but it does and it will continue to work.

I'm sorry to break it for you, but it doesn't actually work.

And constant articles and talks from OSS maintainers about burnout is one of the proofs.

If you want to read more, there is a great book on this subject which I feel will help you get a more informed opinion on it: https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-stu...

Initiatives like this are important to "show by example" - currently there are too many Open Source consumers and not enough contributors.

And also, work IS work - and it should be retributed.

[sktrdie]

> I'm sorry to break it for you, but it doesn't actually work.

Happy to disagree here. Personally it has been working amazingly since over the past, what, 30 years open-source has been the foundation of almost any tool or tech we use nowadays and it was done without economical incentives. Not sure where your data comes from.

I agree about the burnout, but not sure adding money to the equation helps with this problem.

[Arkanosis]

> over the past, what, 30 years open-source has been the foundation of almost any tool or tech we use nowadays and it was done without economical incentives

Not sure what you are talking about… Most big open-source projects I can think of have at least at some point been the result of economical incentives, either direct or indirect. Sure, there are significant exceptions, but we wouldn't be where we are today if open-source wasn't economically sound.

[jsbaby608]

You are correct. But, the biggest projects we all use (apache, linux, php, etc) all have many paid maintainers through large companies.

If these people weren't paid, I don't think we would have any of the quality software we see today.

[sktrdie]

Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation -- (basically a charity). It does not "make money" per se, it just has to cover its costs.

Not sure about the rest but I believe most have the same model. Sure there are few nitpicks, but my overall point was that open-source doesn't need money to work.

[rdelval]

I'm a maintainer for an Apache project. My company pays me to maintain the project because we use it internally. If they did not pay me to maintain it, I would not be doing it. I imagine I'm in a similar spot as many other open source maintainers.

[spunker540]

One thing to consider though is that all the big companies like Google and Facebook and many others have dedicated employees on their payroll whose primary responsibility is contributing to open source projects and the more critical a piece of open source software is, the more likely it is that there are contributors being paid by very large corporations to push the project in the right direction for them.

[antt]

Expenses like paying their employees.

I will never understand how so many people in tech think that not for profit means never make a profit, or pay anyone for their time. But somehow spending money on corporate funded machinery is fine.

When a local maker space wasted thousands of dollars for a license of some cam software, but didn't want to pay a member $10 for cleaning up after everyone else (and keep them from being homeless) I had to seriously reconsider supporting a place that was so anti-people and pro corporation.

[mhink]

> I will never understand how so many people in tech think that not for profit means never make a profit, or pay anyone for their time.

My dad used to be a test engineer for UL, and the way he always (wryly) put it was: “They might not be for profit, but they’re definitely for making money.”

[sktrdie]

@antt, no they don't pay the employess. In fact they don't have employees: "With no employees and 2663 volunteers, it spent $270,846 on infrastructure, $92,364 on public relations, and $17,891 on two ApacheCons." - from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apache_Software_Foundation

ps: I'm getting downvoted for linking facts :D

[sktrdie]

@rdelval cool, but that's totally different form Apache (the foundation) paying you. I think that's a really nice thing to do and have nothing against it.

My main point was simply that the history of open-source, as you can tell by all the amazing open-source released over the last decades by Apache itself, point to the fact that people created something of extreme high-quality without any direct economical reward.

[rdelval]

And my point is that behind what you think is an altruistic contribution to open source, there is almost always a company with an economic incentive funding the engineer working on the project.

[kelset]

> Not sure where your data comes from.

I literally linked a 150 pages book with both data and examples in my previous comment.

[sktrdie]

Ah damn I'm sorry. Can you tell me where this data is in the book? I quickly brushed through the 217 page book and there seems to be no data regarding my comment where I think open-source doesn't need economical incentives in order to work.

[nickpsecurity]

I prefer to share this article that came before the book since it's a quicker read:

https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet...

[onion2k]

That formula doesn't make individuals want to work more on open-source.

Looking at the team profiles on Formidable's site it looks like a lot of them were working on open source projects anyway, so this isn't a way of manipulating them to do something they weren't already doing. It's just a way of rewarding them.

[andyrichardson]

^^ This guy gets it

[arendtio]

I think your conclusion comes a bit too quickly. Sure, open-source is about passion for everyone who doesn't do it as a day job and earning money can kill that passion. But so can other factors (e.g. communities that demand but don't contribute) and still, we see a lot of OSS projects out there.

In my opinion, an important factor here is that you earn that money for whatever OSS project you are working on. That reduces the pressure to work on that single project you would get paid to work on.

And if you are completely against the compensation, you could still not tell your company about what you are doing after 5 pm ;-)

I think it is a great opportunity for employees.

[philplckthun]

As an active Open Source contributor I'd like to say that apart from passion being involved it also is a big responsibility depending on the project either way and being paid for it affirms my passion and beliefs.

Disclaimer: I work for Formidable

[anderspitman]

I'd agree with you more if they were only incentivizing certain projects, but it sounds like employees are paid for any open source work. And I agree the $20/hr is low enough that most devs could make more freelancing on the side, so why bother with open source? Seems balanced enough to be worth trying, and they're reporting the experiment as a success.

[sagartewari01]

> Sure they push them towards doing stuff in open-source but that usually almost never leads to creating great pieces of work.

Blender, Linux kernel...