[brigadier132]

I have had situations where i wanted to use an open source tool that was somewhat obscure and i would have paid $300-400 an hour for consulting from the maintainers/creators and could not get in contact with anyone. So if you create open source software i recommend posting a link to a consulting business with some minimum price that you are satisfied with, even if its something like $1k an hour.

[mschuster91]

Been on both sides of that end, the problem is that especially outside of the US offering paid services comes with some serious challenges on its own:

- registering a business entity costs money and (especially in dysfunctional bureaucratic hellholes) time

- you can be held completely liable for whatever you offer if you don't take excruciating care with the legalese fineprint

- it's a complete nightmare on tax filings (e.g. in Germany you can't have your taxes handled by Lohnsteuervereine if you have a side business, i.e. income from sources other than regular employment)

- you often lose anonymity because PayPal discloses your real name to everyone knowing your email address, or SEPA payments requiring your name

- people can and will fuck with you just because they can or because they hate you for whatever reason. Anything from mass reporting you to Paypal over death threats to outright SWATting you.

[artdigital]

You don’t need to register a business for a bit of side money. Even in Germany, you don’t need to register as “eingetragener Kaufmann” unless it’s, you know, actually a proper side business and ticks some criteria.

Going down that road, there’s heaps of people doing consulting as sole proprietor (or e.K. In Germany) without getting sued or stuck in tax hell

I think you’re looking at things a bit too pessimistic here

[mschuster91]

> Even in Germany, you don’t need to register as “eingetragener Kaufmann” unless it’s, you know, actually a proper side business and ticks some criteria.

You absolutely can do a Gewerbeanmeldung. The problem is, without a Kapitalgesellschaft ("Mini GmbH" and similar), you're fucked liability-wise. Your entire private assets can be taken if you end up bankrupt.

[carlosjobim]

I don't really get the sentiment on tax fillings. Experts in most other fields manage to do the odd job here and there for a few hundreds, why shouldn't programmers be able to? Either on the books or off the books.

> people can and will fuck with you just because they can or because they hate you for whatever reason. Anything from mass reporting you to Paypal over death threats to outright SWATting you.

That sounds like straight paranoia. All businesses are online today on Google Maps etc. Does your local hot dog stand get swatted on a regular basis?

[mschuster91]

> That sounds like straight paranoia. All businesses are online today on Google Maps etc. Does your local hot dog stand get swatted on a regular basis?

I've been on the Internet for decades and seen pretty nasty shit. If you want to know what German trolls are capable of, search for "Drachenlord". Additionally, I'm an active antifascist and received my fair share of death threats. So yes I'm biased.

[carlosjobim]

I think those are two very different sides of the internet.

There are easy solutions for the problems you listed. The easiest being to not use your real name to accept SEPA payments. You can put anything you want there on the invoice, the banks just care about the account number.

[mschuster91]

> The easiest being to not use your real name to accept SEPA payments. You can put anything you want there on the invoice, the banks just care about the account number.

Is it wise though? Absolutely no. All that is is asking for a lot of trouble. Alone because a SEPA identifier is enough to cause people to order an awful lot of bullshit using it and you'll be stuck unwinding fraudulent pizza and dildo deliveries pretty much forever until you change the bank or have them create a new account.

I have a lot of shit to dunk on Bitcoin and others, but the one thing these got right is that no one could simply claim they had an authorization to your funds.

[carlosjobim]

What? The only thing people can do if they have your bank account number is send money to that account. There's nothing else they can do.

[j1elo]

But the time I might spend working on consulting inquiries is not time spent on the daily job, on the oss project itself (especially if the request is about something not aligned with the roadmap of the project), or on relaxing during free time.

As an oss maintainer, the way I see it is that unless the purpose itself behind the oss code is to make money via consulting, offering consulting is usually not in the interest of the people behind the code.

It is oss, after all. Other companies can form around the project and provide consulting support.

[brigadier132]

There are a million reasons why people write open source software. From what I read, there is a sizable group of creators that make no money from their creations and actually struggle to survive despite having such in-demand skills and I was simply suggesting one way they could get by.

> on the oss projeft itself (especially if the request is about something not aligned with the roadmap of the project)

I disagree that it wouldn't be valuable. You can discover that things you believed were simple to understand were actually complicated or you can discover new use cases you had never thought of. But most importantly if you have no money now you can get money.

[j1elo]

Well for that subset, I would agree with you. I mean come on, you are making oss stuff that provides some value for some people, and you are struggling to get a decent income from other channels? It would make sense to try and maximize the surface area of all potential income generation activities.

But that's just a small subset of all cases, as you mention.

I've lived the opposite case: consultancy was the idea, but not enough people came in, with not enough frequency.

Talking generally, it feels ironic that if difficult to understand things get polished and ironed out, that source of revenue might and probably will dry out. So an incentive would exist to keep consultancy needs existing. (Edit: I am just digressing on this last thought, not talking about my particular personal experience)

[carlosjobim]

Wait, if you are getting paid for adding features or fixing stuff on the OSS code, that's time spent on the project. And chances are that if somebody is willing to pay something, many other people will find use for it.

[j1elo]

Sounds good in isolation, but as others have mentioned, in some (most?) places, accepting money like that would be considered a professional activity, and you suddenly must worry about a host of other distracting things that take time, effort, and preoccupations: incorporating, tax filings, invoicing.

Or you could pay someone to manage it for you, but you're still suddenly involving yourself in stuff that you hadn't even had the interest or intention to do anyways.

In my European country, for example, having a regular source of revenue [1] requires registering with the government as an independent contractor, which costs a bit less than 400€/month. Then you will need to extend invoices, with the consequence of having to worry about VAT (consulting is a service? I guess so it incurs in VAT), make VAT tax filings each trimester, store invoices for several years in case they are requested.

One day you look back and think "but, but, I just wanted to spend a couple hours per week on small consulting requests!". As a consequence, people are greatly discouraged if it's not going to be a serious path to make serious money.

[1]: Yes, revenue, i.e. regardless of profit, and in theory also regardless of amount, albeit in practice they won't enforce it for measly revenues if they are roughly below 1000€/month.

[carlosjobim]

> In my European country, for example, having a regular source of revenue [1] requires registering with the government as an independent contractor, which costs a bit less than 400€/month.

I apologize, but I actually can't believe that. Maybe you have misinterpreted some regulation or base it on hearsay? If that is truly the case, then your main goal right now should be to escape to a free country as soon as you can.

Either way, some paid OSS work can't count as regular income. But if the place where you live is like what you told, the taxman is probably gonna come and get you, to milk some money no matter if you followed the rules or not.

[j1elo]

I made a 100€ mistake in there. I misremembered the amount to be 365€, but it actually was 265€ when I worked as such, some years ago. Fares and benefits have been slowly rising over time, and seems that now the rate is 294€ [1].

There is a lot of contention between organizations of self-employed people and the government. Of course, paying that amount regardless of actual profits seems crazy. On the other hand, it goes to pay the public healthcare services which allows things like spending whatever amount of time needed for treatment in a hospital and not pay a single dime for it. All a matter of pros and cons.

[1]: https://www.healthplanspain.com/blog/expat-tips/1762-self-em...

> minimum monthly social security payment for the self-employed currently around 294 euros per month

[robocat]

Another issue is that software developers are sometimes paid highly and are in top tax bracket. In New Zealand the top marginal tax rate is 39% (although I am guessing most software devs would be on 33% (Over $70,000 and up to $180,000) even at 33% it is not so motivating to be offered $1000 if $330 of that immediately disappears as taxes. Plus the hassle of recording amounts and declaring them - uggggh.

In California that top marginal tax rate is 13.3% so not quite the same problem as some other countries.

[j1elo]

> it is not so motivating to be offered $1000 if $330 of that immediately disappears

I get how 1000 is better than 670, but on the flip side, that's 670 extra that you didn't have before, right

If it's about where the line falls, I guess you could only accept a minimum of $1492, so after the 33% cut you get $1000 :)

But yeah, as mentioned in my other sibling comments, I believe that the administrative burden itself might be enough of a barrier for lots of people to prefer skipping the problem altogether.

[birk]

Great thread and feedback re: administrative considerations. I believe it's our job at Polar to streamline this as much as we can leveraging Stripe Tax, Atlas and more. Of course, it's a massive topic and each country is unique, but give us time and we'll hopefully make things easier than they are today within OSS.

Re: expectation around getting the same $ as for a paid salary as an engineer today. We cannot expect it from Day 1. It's a new pattern. However, since maintainers are in complete control (it's not a traditional bounty service) sponsored issues that are accepted should align with efforts the maintainer wants to pursue too. Before they got $0. Now, they better know what their users want and can get them to sponsor efforts that align with theirs. In addition, we want to support maintainers being able to set explicit "goals" (Kickstarter). You can achieve this today by adding such context as you add Polar to certain issues, but we can streamline it even further.

[thayne]

My open source work is a hobby. If you want to give me some money for something I would do anyway, I probably won't say no. Or if you and people like you paid me enough consistently that I could quit my day job and focus completely on my OSS projects, then I would probably do that. But even for $1k an hour I don't know that I would want to deal with contractual obligations for my hobby project.

Of course that isn't the case for all projects, but you can't always assume that the maintainer is willing to accept payment if you are willing to give it.

I think a better model might be to have consultant companies that employee people to fulfill bounties on various projects, and possibly handle building and distributing custom forks if the upstream maintainer is unresponsive (or just takes longer than the customer wants) or doesn't want the change upstream.

[birk]

> My open source work is a hobby. If you want to give me some money for something I would do anyway, I probably won't say no.

Polar is designed for maintainers and to give them complete control. So you can decide which issues Polar should be embedded on, i.e issues that align with your long-term goals and direction for the initiative. So you can get sponsorship for efforts that align with your goals.

> Or if you and people like you paid me enough consistently that I could quit my day job and focus completely on my OSS projects, then I would probably do that. But even for $1k an hour I don't know that I would want to deal with contractual obligations for my hobby project.

That's the goal, but give us time :-) Pledges/sponsorship towards issues today (Polar v0.1) are not a contractual obligation. As we expand the services we offer, maintainers will have control which ones to leverage. So it's completely up to you what to offer and what not based on your desires and needs. Hopefully, however, Polar at least gives you all the tooling to craft such services and subscriptions.