[legutierr]

Do you ever respond to these emails telling them that they can hire you to attend to their issue? If my business depended heavily on an open-source component that needed a bug fix, more often than not I would pay the person to spend their time to resolve it.

Often it is easier to get a business to pay a consulting fee for a specific thing rather than make a donation that goes into a general funding pool for a project.

[Radim]

Yes, I do. But it turns out that their issue is pretty much always only tangentially related to Gensim (or any other open source library / technology). They're solving a business problem. That's what brings them money, with which they pay me, and I acknowledge that.

This leaves me with two choices:

1. Help narrowly, with the Gensim part only. Pros: easy for me. Cons: doesn't truly help the customer; feels dirty.

2. Help solve their actual business problem. Even if it means not using ML at all (a very common outcome), or suggesting a different architecture.

In my experience, most companies are so lost as to what to expect from ML, or how to get there, that I didn't feel comfortable with the "narrow" help. Lipstick on a pig.

So I went the full consulting route for a few years. But that felt too draining so I dropped it and created a product instead.

[ldng]

But that triggers different accounting/taxes paths that can be problematic. Not everybody is a freelancer.