More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
in a project with high contributor growth, individual developers might find it easier to increase their own time on a project. For example, 92.3% of contributors to the Linux kernel are paid by an employer, for which the Linux Foundation offers this explanation: “Kernel developers are in short supply, so anybody who demonstrates an ability to get code into the mainline tends not to have trouble finding job offers.”
Sometimes, the reason why a maintainer can’t find funding for their work is not because their users are mean and ungrateful, or because the world is cruel, but because that person is shy about marketing themselves.
Its code lives under a proprietary license that requires purchase for commercial use, but every commit converts to open source, under an MIT license, after eighteen months. In this way, Onivim 2’s developers can freely license older versions of the project while charging for access to the newest, most desirable version of the code.
I’ve heard from a few engineers from large companies who confess that they’ve “laundered” their pull requests through non-work email addresses, because being associated with their employers can make it harder to get their contributions accepted.
Thompson notes that subscriptions only work when the content is differentiated: “After all, it’s not like it is hard to find content to read on the Internet: what people will pay for is quality content about things they care about.” But who provides the content is a form of differentiation in itself.
Fernando Pérez is the author of Jupyter, a set of open source tools and services for interactive computing, used by researchers and companies around the world. It is arguably one of the most impactful pieces of scientific software in circulation today. Yet Pérez, a physicist by training, had trouble finding a tenured academic position for many years.
Similarly, Tom Caswell, lead developer for Matplotlib, a data-plotting tool for Python, and Andreas Müller, core developer of scikit-learn, a machine learning library for Python, both have PhDs but are employed in non-tenure-track positions. There is a sense among developers in research-related fields that, while writing open source software can have other benefits, it doesn’t fit into the academic reputation system.
Tiago Forte, reflecting on his experience moving from public to paywall-protected content, observes, The experience of blogging changed dramatically after I flipped the switch. My articles went from thousands of views to hundreds, but the quality of my readers spiked. I found my tribe. The noise of random passersby leaving inane comments dwindled to nothing, and we started having real conversations about what it would take to manifest a new vision of work.
During the month of October, anyone who makes five pull requests to an open source project is eligible for a free T-shirt.329 This is a wonderful way to encourage newcomers to try their hand at making their first contribution. But it doesn’t help to support the maintenance of open source projects, because casual contributions are already in abundance.
(If you don’t think this causes spam, trust me: it’s incredible what developers will do for a free T-shirt.
Funding individuals can reduce some of the concerns that come with centralized project funding. One maintainer I spoke to explained that his co-maintainer lived in a country with a different standard of living. He didn’t know how to distribute the funds they’d raised, because their salaries were so disparate.
