60% of Open-Source Maintainers Are Unpaid: It's Concerning & What We Can Do About it
60% of Open-Source Maintainers Are Unpaid: It's Concerning & What We Can Do About it
40% of you are getting paid for this...? đź«
It's based on a survey with ~400 responses, and 50% of the responders are in some way affiliated with the surveyer (no information about any methodology is available, it seems more of a marketing stunt than a "serious" survey of the landscape)
Yeah that sounds very unlikely to me. I guess the definition of "open source maintainer" and "unpaid" are wide open. Does it count if a company pays your salary and you are allowed to do the open source stuff as part of your job? How popular does your project have to be before you are an "open source maintainer"?
I think lots of the kernel folks are paid to contribute full time. For a while I was paid a full time maintainer on some apache licensed search stuff. Before that web stuff.
I guess the demoninator in that fraction is low.
Their conclusion that companies must be the ones to fund more development is uh, unlikely to be the solution.
The days where you're going to have a corporation fund anything out of the goodness of their hearts is long gone, if it ever really existed in the first place.
They won't even make sure that critical bits of software their business relies on are being maintained, never mind being altruistic money fairies to anyone else.
The future, honestly, is going to be a combination of government funding (because it's in their - and our - interest to not be beholden to one or another monopolist), and user funding. How many people do you know that use some open source software that have donated either money OR time to the project they use?
And when one does get paid to port their FOSS project you get posts like this:
"Targeting a proprietary platform first, especially one owned by Facebook, is shameful for a FLOSS project"
This is shit and true:
I think organizations utilizing open-source projects for their benefit are slacking off in rewarding the maintainers handsomely.
I have been working at software company which prefer to use free tools and expect perfect result. They just keep their money even for motivation own developers, what to say about rewarding free tools maintainers. No culture of consuming, no gratefulness. Just business, just making money, they count every cent, I hate this. That I can see when the goal of software business is just making income.
In this week's totally grassroots and natural discussion topics I keep seeing these two themes repeated over and over again (here and elsewhere): Open source developers should be paid employees - nay they must be! - oh and Firefox sucks. Boy does it suck. They're going to be just like Chrome, just watch.
It's like the "No for real bro I totally love paying for YouTube what the hell is wrong with you you freeloader" shit all over again.
We could monetize and enshitify it like everything else. We could ask if they take donations like good little neolibs. Or, we could consider that some people don't need or want to be paid for their incremental contributions to society then leave alone the developers of the best software around.
Developers need to eat and pay rent.
What’s bad about (politely) asking for donations? After all, why not let people who really want to support the free software you’re creating do so even if they can’t code?
You're right, the profit motive isn't necessary. Instead, how about we guarantee them food, water, shelter, and healthcare? Once they aren't worrying about that, I bet they'll have plenty of time to maintain their code!
If they didn't have the basics covered they'd not be volunteers. If they wanted money they're already soliciting. I'd bet most would say as I say when I volunteer, "Donate anonymously to XYZ organization."
But, I'd be on cloud nine if all were guaranteed water, food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, and recreation. It's been the consistent US left platform for eighty years.