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As a professional full-time open source maintainer and developer, initiatives like this bother me a lot. The work we do is worth much more than $20/hr. Ideall

As a professional full-time open source maintainer and developer, initiatives like this bother me a lot. The work we do is worth much more than $20/hr. Ideally I'd like to see open source developers in stable, tenured positions that pay fair salaries with benefits. Anything that normalizes the idea that open source should be funded on tips, patreons, or spare time goodwill is embarrassing to all of us. We can do better. If you value open source, hire people to do it and pay them fairly.

kylecesmat 7y ago
Formidable employee here: To be quite honest we are compensated very fairly for our industry already and this program is not meant to ‘provide a living wage’ by any means. Instead, this is a ‘fair nod’ at the work some of us feel compelled and motivated to do after work hours. Not saying your perspective is wrong, just hopefully providing a bit more context about what this program means for someone who uses it.
- systematical 7y ago
  This is awesome. If my employer did this I'd probably take a lot of that money and donate to other OSS and charity since I'd neebed working on OSS regardless.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  I get that. I work ten hours a week or so for free on my open source passion projects. If that turned in to an extra $200 a week that would be cool - I’m doing the work anyway. I haven’t read the article yet but my only fear with crowd funding is what happens when I want to take a month off of technical work.
  - stingraycharles 7y ago
    As someone who supports several developers, I hope you take as much holiday as you need. I mostly support it to increase the chance of the project surviving in the long term, and as a token of appreciation of your past contributions.
  - wazanator 7y ago
    You can pause patreon campaigns. If you're open about your work life balance and how you need to take a month off from the project I think most people will understand that.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  And I'd assume you guys have some employees who are paid competitive salaries by Formidable and end up working almost exclusively on your open source code anyway, right?
- est31 7y ago
  You're an employee so you can answer the question: does Formidable take copyright ownership of the open source contributions provided by you? Do you have to ask your employer if you want to change licenses for your open source projects?
  - exogen 7y ago
    No and no.
    - Boygirl 7y ago
      I think the only stipulation is that work needs to eventually be made available to the public under some open source license.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
sktrdie 7y ago
But why though? Of course giving a well-payed salary to people is something great and I have nothing against it. But the whole "cool" thing about open-source is that it showed that it can do pretty amazing things without capitalism. Instead here we are trying to push the same mentality we use for everything else into open-source. Why not continue the experiment as it has for the last 30 years (without any major economical incentives); it has only produced amazing pieces of work so far, so why risk to taint it?
- O_H_E 7y ago
  That's an interesting perspective. I always had the feeling that it is unsustainable or unstable to rely on underpaid work.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    I suspect that a significant portion of open-source development is paid work that meets a business need, but not the business' product. I know that what little open-source contribution I've made has mostly been stuff I had to do at/for work that was easy enough to break off and have as a separate library/module.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  It's still capitalism. It works because business folks sell valuable software acquired at a zero dollar cost of goods for billions of dollars. And there are a ton of crappy open source projects out there, so it hasn't "only produced amazing pieces of work" it's also produced amazingly terrible software that has proliferated because it's free, but the sales people don't know or care.
Aeolun 7y ago
Of course. It seems that that’s exactly what’s happening here. These people are being paid a salary to do a bunch of open source and other work. The company just recognizes that people that continue contributing at home still bring them some form of value, and it is very nice to see that this is recognized and rewarded, regardless of the amount. Maybe we’ll get to a point where this will be the norm, and companies will have to go further to stand out, but right now this is pretty amazing.
theWheez 7y ago
In the link, this is addressed: It’s well known that nominal compensation isn’t the most effective incentive to get people to do things, and compared to engineer salaries in our US and UK tech hubs, $20/hr isn’t exactly a windfall. This is intentional. We don’t want people to log on after hours to earn money. Instead, we think of the Sauce bonus as a recognition of the work people want to do anyway, and the compensation is aimed to be meaningful enough to do something fun with, but not so high that it would skew their priorities to stare at their computer screens instead of spending time with their hobbies, families, and friends.
- lozenge 7y ago
  This ignores that extrinsic motivation(money) can reduce intrinsic motivation(interest in the project). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
  - exogen 7y ago
    In my personal experience this effect has much more to do with expectations than compensation. As soon as it's my job to work on something, and there are deadlines and expectations looming, all of a sudden I'm more interested in every other side project I've ignored for the past several years. But in this case, there's no expectations set, pre-approval process (after which you'd be expected to meet your goals), or anything like that. If you find yourself affected by the extrinsic motivation, you can simply not log the work afterward, and then it's like you weren't offered any money for it in the first place.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> Ideally I'd like to see open source developers in stable, tenured positions that pay fair salaries with benefits. You can already get this today - almost all the major tech companies pay people to work on open source.
sdegutis 7y ago
As a long time open source contributor and maintainer, I'm not convinced it's worth more than $20/hour. Where does this worth come from? Comparing it to what corporations loaded with cash are willing to pay for an especially advantageous employee? That's not a fair comparison to make.
anderspitman 7y ago
I partially agree. I work for a public university and 100% of our code is MIT licensed. But I spend a ton of time outside of work on other open source projects. I'd love an extra 20USD/hr for that work. Heck I'd probably even open source a few more of my private repos.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > I work for a public university and 100% of our code is MIT licensed. Shouldn't federally-funded work be placed in the public domain, or something like that?
austincheney 7y ago
I have had employers hire me and then not give me work to do leaving me with large swaths of time to work on my unpaid open source that they are using internally. It’s probably an ethical violation to use their office, time, and equipment to work on code they are not paying for (since it’s free and liberally licensed), but they absolutely know I’m doing it.
- nwsm 7y ago
  Your situation may not be serious enough to care, but you could be fired and the company could claim ownership of all your work, screwing over you and any project with a dependency to your OSS.
  - austincheney 7y ago
    I have gone through something like that before. My first big corporate employer did not claim ownership but they slapped a patent on my first big personal project. Potential for sub licensing was more important than the work itself. My solution to the concerns of ownership and distribution is to ensure a personal project is publicly disclosed, copyright is released, and the project is known to the employer before agreement of employment. It is typically not in a company’s interest to claim ownership of such projects where there is a maintenance liability and the potential for revenue and protection are unclear.
chaostheory 7y ago
I have a few open source projects that I contribute $5 monthly for each project on https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/. I view my contribution as a subsidy and not as a salary. Might be wrong but Formidable probably views it the same way.
ken 7y ago
It sounds like these employees do indeed have stable positions with fair salaries and benefits. What's the problem? If the work is worth more than $20/hr, who's going to pay it? One person's work is "worth" what someone else is willing to pay. Markets are conversations, and all that. OSS is an arena where the supply of potential practitioners is huge.

kylecesmat 7y ago

Formidable employee here: To be quite honest we are compensated very fairly for our industry already and this program is not meant to ‘provide a living wage’ by any means. Instead, this is a ‘fair nod’ at the work some of us feel compelled and motivated to do after work hours. Not saying your perspective is wrong, just hopefully providing a bit more context about what this program means for someone who uses it.

systematical 7y ago
This is awesome. If my employer did this I'd probably take a lot of that money and donate to other OSS and charity since I'd neebed working on OSS regardless.
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
I get that. I work ten hours a week or so for free on my open source passion projects. If that turned in to an extra $200 a week that would be cool - I’m doing the work anyway. I haven’t read the article yet but my only fear with crowd funding is what happens when I want to take a month off of technical work.
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  As someone who supports several developers, I hope you take as much holiday as you need. I mostly support it to increase the chance of the project surviving in the long term, and as a token of appreciation of your past contributions.
- wazanator 7y ago
  You can pause patreon campaigns. If you're open about your work life balance and how you need to take a month off from the project I think most people will understand that.
anderspitman 7y ago
And I'd assume you guys have some employees who are paid competitive salaries by Formidable and end up working almost exclusively on your open source code anyway, right?
est31 7y ago
You're an employee so you can answer the question: does Formidable take copyright ownership of the open source contributions provided by you? Do you have to ask your employer if you want to change licenses for your open source projects?
- exogen 7y ago
  No and no.
  - Boygirl 7y ago
    I think the only stipulation is that work needs to eventually be made available to the public under some open source license.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

sktrdie 7y ago

But why though? Of course giving a well-payed salary to people is something great and I have nothing against it. But the whole "cool" thing about open-source is that it showed that it can do pretty amazing things without capitalism. Instead here we are trying to push the same mentality we use for everything else into open-source. Why not continue the experiment as it has for the last 30 years (without any major economical incentives); it has only produced amazing pieces of work so far, so why risk to taint it?

O_H_E 7y ago
That's an interesting perspective. I always had the feeling that it is unsustainable or unstable to rely on underpaid work.
- tracker1 7y ago
  I suspect that a significant portion of open-source development is paid work that meets a business need, but not the business' product. I know that what little open-source contribution I've made has mostly been stuff I had to do at/for work that was easy enough to break off and have as a separate library/module.
anon1m0us 7y ago
It's still capitalism. It works because business folks sell valuable software acquired at a zero dollar cost of goods for billions of dollars. And there are a ton of crappy open source projects out there, so it hasn't "only produced amazing pieces of work" it's also produced amazingly terrible software that has proliferated because it's free, but the sales people don't know or care.

Aeolun 7y ago

Of course. It seems that that’s exactly what’s happening here. These people are being paid a salary to do a bunch of open source and other work. The company just recognizes that people that continue contributing at home still bring them some form of value, and it is very nice to see that this is recognized and rewarded, regardless of the amount. Maybe we’ll get to a point where this will be the norm, and companies will have to go further to stand out, but right now this is pretty amazing.

theWheez 7y ago

In the link, this is addressed: It’s well known that nominal compensation isn’t the most effective incentive to get people to do things, and compared to engineer salaries in our US and UK tech hubs, $20/hr isn’t exactly a windfall. This is intentional. We don’t want people to log on after hours to earn money. Instead, we think of the Sauce bonus as a recognition of the work people want to do anyway, and the compensation is aimed to be meaningful enough to do something fun with, but not so high that it would skew their priorities to stare at their computer screens instead of spending time with their hobbies, families, and friends.

lozenge 7y ago
This ignores that extrinsic motivation(money) can reduce intrinsic motivation(interest in the project). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect
- exogen 7y ago
  In my personal experience this effect has much more to do with expectations than compensation. As soon as it's my job to work on something, and there are deadlines and expectations looming, all of a sudden I'm more interested in every other side project I've ignored for the past several years. But in this case, there's no expectations set, pre-approval process (after which you'd be expected to meet your goals), or anything like that. If you find yourself affected by the extrinsic motivation, you can simply not log the work afterward, and then it's like you weren't offered any money for it in the first place.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> Ideally I'd like to see open source developers in stable, tenured positions that pay fair salaries with benefits. You can already get this today - almost all the major tech companies pay people to work on open source.

sdegutis 7y ago

As a long time open source contributor and maintainer, I'm not convinced it's worth more than $20/hour. Where does this worth come from? Comparing it to what corporations loaded with cash are willing to pay for an especially advantageous employee? That's not a fair comparison to make.

anderspitman 7y ago

I partially agree. I work for a public university and 100% of our code is MIT licensed. But I spend a ton of time outside of work on other open source projects. I'd love an extra 20USD/hr for that work. Heck I'd probably even open source a few more of my private repos.

saagarjha 7y ago
> I work for a public university and 100% of our code is MIT licensed. Shouldn't federally-funded work be placed in the public domain, or something like that?

austincheney 7y ago

I have had employers hire me and then not give me work to do leaving me with large swaths of time to work on my unpaid open source that they are using internally. It’s probably an ethical violation to use their office, time, and equipment to work on code they are not paying for (since it’s free and liberally licensed), but they absolutely know I’m doing it.

nwsm 7y ago
Your situation may not be serious enough to care, but you could be fired and the company could claim ownership of all your work, screwing over you and any project with a dependency to your OSS.
- austincheney 7y ago
  I have gone through something like that before. My first big corporate employer did not claim ownership but they slapped a patent on my first big personal project. Potential for sub licensing was more important than the work itself. My solution to the concerns of ownership and distribution is to ensure a personal project is publicly disclosed, copyright is released, and the project is known to the employer before agreement of employment. It is typically not in a company’s interest to claim ownership of such projects where there is a maintenance liability and the potential for revenue and protection are unclear.

chaostheory 7y ago

I have a few open source projects that I contribute $5 monthly for each project on https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/. I view my contribution as a subsidy and not as a salary. Might be wrong but Formidable probably views it the same way.

ken 7y ago

It sounds like these employees do indeed have stable positions with fair salaries and benefits. What's the problem? If the work is worth more than $20/hr, who's going to pay it? One person's work is "worth" what someone else is willing to pay. Markets are conversations, and all that. OSS is an arena where the supply of potential practitioners is huge.