opensoul.org - Give back to the community Comments

Comment on 'Give back to the community' by Sebastian

2009-01-12T22:50:49Z

That is a very good idea. I see that my company using rails can spare lots of money every month.

Comment on 'Give back to the community' by Edgar J. Suárez

2009-01-11T04:30:28Z

This is just a great idea! Hope everyone practice it :)

Comment on 'Give back to the community' by David Chelimsky

2009-01-09T19:10:22Z

The tipping concept sounds right, and makes me more comfortable with the idea. Of course, what waiter is now comfortable with not receiving a tip :)

Anyhow – I think the one thing that still concerns me is this statement: “For our client, the cost is small: a couple hundred dollars in exchange for thousands of dollars worth of savings and better software.”

The “for our client, the cost is small” suggests they are signing off on this as a line item in your contract with them. That’s fine as long as a) they understand the licenses of the software that you’re using and b) you take the software on as yours to maintain in the context of that contract.

If what you mean is that the cost is indirectly diverted to the client as part of the cost of doing business, that’s a different matter.

Please understand I’m not trying to be a nay-sayer here. I’d really love to see everyone benefiting from this. Just want to make sure we don’t dig ourselves into a hole in the process.

Cheers, David

Comment on 'Give back to the community' by Brandon

2009-01-09T18:23:34Z

Mislav,

Good point about PayPal. I’m sure we can come up with something else though, like Amazon gift cards??

And this definitely won’t be a substitute for feedback and patches, but in addition to.

Comment on 'Give back to the community' by Brandon

2009-01-09T18:15:14Z

David,

I think you raise some very valid concerns that I hadn’t thought of.

…there’s something about formalizing a process of contributions that sounds scary to me.

I want to emphasize that I don’t want this to be a formal process with strict rules. We simply want to recognize other people’s hard work in a more meaningful way. If a client or a individual maintainer has a problem with it, we won’t do it.

As much as I’d love to be the recipient of all those contributions, it does start to blur the line between free OSS and proprietary software…

Maybe. But there’s nothing that says open source has to be free (as in beer). It’s nearly impossible to charge for it if you’ve released the code, but I don’t see any conflict in tipping for things that are valuable, even if I can get them for free.

To beat up the beer analogy: just because the bar is giving out free drinks doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tip the bartender.

…if you pay me a few hundred bucks (or more) over time I might feel obligated to prioritize the problems that you raise over those of others, even if they are not the most important problems from a community standpoint.

I could definitely it becoming a burden for maintainers if this idea where to really take off and they were making their living off of donations. Then they might feel an obligation to their “constituents”. But I don’t see this being a reality for most of the projects—unless you’re the maintainer of RSpec or some popular framework like that. ;)

For us, the donation is a “Thank You” for prior work and not an expectation of preferential treatment in the future.

Regardless, the projects are open source, so if a maintainer does get a big head, we’re all still free to fork and patch to our hearts content.

But I do see how this could become corrupted.

Comment on 'Give back to the community' by Mislav

2009-01-09T17:32:38Z

I think David has an interesting point here.

On the other hand, I’d like to receive $10 for every project that uses will_paginate :P

But keep in mind that only half of countries in the world can receive PayPal. Here are flags of the countries that can’t: http://skitch.com/mmarohnic/bysrj/countries-that-can-t-receive-paypal

I turned down a lot of offers for donations in the past year mostly because there was no cheap way to cheaply transfer small amounts of money. The other reason, what I would always say to the person, is that I value feedback or patches for my projects more than $10. It simply means more to me.

Comment on 'Give back to the community' by David Chelimsky

2009-01-09T16:03:58Z

On one hand I think this is really cool – but there’s something about formalizing a process of contributions that sounds scary to me.

As much as I’d love to be the recipient of all those contributions, it does start to blur the line between free OSS and proprietary software – and it could conceivably grow to something that imposes a burden on library maintainers. i.e. if you pay me a few hundred bucks (or more) over time I might feel obligated to prioritize the problems that you raise over those of others, even if they are not the most important problems from a community standpoint.

And this is even more pronounced when you say that you’re doing this on behalf of clients, who now have a financial investment in these OSS projects. It’s one thing for you, as a fellow OSS developer, to show your appreciation. But the bean counters at your clients probably see this as a bargain investment, but an investment none-the-less.

I know this all sounds paranoid – and it’s admittedly not thought through – but I think it’s worth pondering.

WDYT?

Comment on 'Give back to the community' by Aaron Schaap

2009-01-09T15:18:25Z

You’re absolutely right and thanks for the reminder. Sending over a few bucks to keep the community alive is a small cost but if we can all do that it does some amazing things.

We’re going to add this to our list and with trying to come up with a way in which we can even make the client away of it as to bring more awareness of the value.