
Paying for Open Source Contributions - jevakallio
https://formidable.com/blog/2019/sauce-program/
======
sisk
Surprised by the amount of negativity in this thread.

My interpretation of this is an organization recognizing external
contributions as personal growth and community enrichment and seeking to
reward that behavior. I would put this in the same vein as healthcare
providers subsidizing gym memberships, or organizations paying for people to
attend training, conferences, or higher education.

In any case, you're making the choice of self-improvement though in this case
with community enrichment as an additional benefit. I don't know how
Formidable compensates but anyone who thinks the compensation is anything more
than a nod is missing the point.

The purpose is not to place a monetary value on the work being done, it's an
acknowledgement of gratitude. If you won't accept that then consider it a
small supportive investment in a person who is choosing to invest in
themselves and their community.

------
crysin
I wish I was rich enough to view getting a bonus of $20.00 an hour for fun-
time work as being more offensive than receiving nothing at all.

~~~
jahewson
Introducing a token payment such as this undermines the altruism of open
source contribution. When people are motivated by altruism they don't _want_
money.

e.g. I would help my neighbor move some furniture for free, but I wouldn't do
it if he offered to pay me $5.

~~~
GordonS
I think the parent's point is that for a lot of people, especially those
outside of SV, $20/h is more than a token payment.

Sure, it's not going to make a westerner rich, but if we think to happiness
instead of just _money_ \- it could well enable someone to make a living doing
something that makes them _happy_.

And of course there are several countries in which $20/h is a _great_ wage.

The OSS vs money problem is a _hard_ one to crack, and it's entirely possible
that there isn't a solution that suits everyone; there are the originators,
currently active maintainers, occasional contributers and end users to keep
happy - and each group has their own priorities and goals.

And if that wasn't enough, each project is different. Some are more or less
zero-touch, "completed software", while others are under heavy development;
some wish to follow copy-left, some wish to follow copy-right; some view their
work as merely a hobby, some view it as their job, and some view it as purely
altruistic. There are even those who are diametrically opposed to receiving
_any_ payment for their OSS work.

There simply isn't a one size fits all solution, so let's not be too negative
when ideas are put forward.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"I think the parent's point is that for a lot of people, especially those
outside of SV, $20/h is more than a token payment."

In the Tri-State Area (AK/TN/MS), many people will say $20/hr is a _great_
wage. Companies down here try to pay people minimum wage as much as possible.
As close to it as possible anyway. We also have a low-enough cost of living
that the ripoff isn't as obvious for skilled labor. They're ahead of most
people they encounter even at $15/hr. Especially if it's steady work with
benefits.

"but if we think to happiness instead of just money - it could well enable
someone to make a living doing something that makes them happy."

Another great point. Some businesses even optimize for this.

------
bhousel
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
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.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
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
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.

------
nickjj
I like the idea, but I'm concerned about the $20 / hour.

Since this is done on the employees' own time (after hours), isn't this
basically saying, "hey, go help make our app's dependencies better in an
overtime scenario but we're going to pay you $20 / hour instead of 1x to 2x
your usual salary"?

I know at the bottom it clears that up but I dunno, it just feels weird to me.
It seems like a concealed way to mainly benefit the company and potentially
exploit the good will of its employees.

~~~
habnds
agreed, additionally, there's an interesting behavioral phenomenon where
people are perfectly willing to help strangers on the street when asked for
free, but the willingness rate drops dramatically when someone offers them a
small amount of money because it reframes the conversation. Once people see
open source as a way to make money, it becomes a very different thought
process.

~~~
smusumeche
A lot of us in this industry are very fortunate to have high salaries. At the
risk of sounding crass, $20/hour is not much money to me. So this is really
just a show of support. I'm going to donate the money anyway. (disclaimer: I
work at Formidable)

~~~
Aeolun
It sounds like just enough to be nice, and not nearly enough to move the
needle, to me.

I guess that’s why I think it’s great.

If it was a smaller token amount, it would feel sad.

If it was more, it would feel exploitative (like a number of people in this
thread already said).

------
sktrdie
My opinion is that open-source contributions stems from passion. People do it
and implement something because they're passionate about it.

When you attach any money to it, it becomes tainted with responsibility and
emotions. Such as, "should I work on this an extra hour and burn myself out
and get those extra 40 bucks for dinner tonight?" That formula doesn't make
individuals want to work more on open-source.

Sure they push them towards doing stuff in open-source but that usually almost
never leads to creating great pieces of work.

One great and amazing thing that open-source thought us is that individuals
can group together and work on amazing things without any economical reward.
To me it was always a fascinating experiment outside the usual realms of
politics, economics, social-studies.

Nobody would have ever imagined it to work without "money", but it does and it
will continue to work. In fact, instead of pushing capitalism mentality inside
of open-source we should be doing exactly the opposite: push open-source
mentality in other parts of our society.

~~~
kelset
open source maintainer here - I disagree that you get those "responsibility
and emotions" only when you attach money.

You already get plenty of those by the sheer fact that you care about the
craft you contribute to.

> Nobody would have ever imagined it to work without "money", but it does and
> it will continue to work.

I'm sorry to break it for you, but it doesn't actually work.

And constant articles and talks from OSS maintainers about burnout is one of
the proofs.

If you want to read more, there is a great book on this subject which I feel
will help you get a more informed opinion on it:
[https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-
stu...](https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-
studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/)

Initiatives like this are important to "show by example" \- currently there
are too many Open Source consumers and not enough contributors.

And also, work IS work - and it should be retributed.

~~~
sktrdie
> I'm sorry to break it for you, but it doesn't actually work.

Happy to disagree here. Personally it has been working _amazingly_ since over
the past, what, 30 years open-source has been the foundation of almost any
tool or tech we use nowadays and it was done without economical incentives.
Not sure where your data comes from.

I agree about the burnout, but not sure adding money to the equation helps
with this problem.

~~~
jsbaby608
You are correct. But, the biggest projects we all use (apache, linux, php,
etc) all have many paid maintainers through large companies.

If these people weren't paid, I don't think we would have any of the quality
software we see today.

~~~
sktrdie
Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation -- (basically
a charity). It does not "make money" per se, it just has to cover its costs.

Not sure about the rest but I believe most have the same model. Sure there are
few nitpicks, but my overall point was that open-source _doesn 't_ need money
to work.

~~~
antt
Expenses like paying their employees.

I will never understand how so many people in tech think that not for profit
means never make a profit, or pay anyone for their time. But somehow spending
money on corporate funded machinery is fine.

When a local maker space wasted thousands of dollars for a license of some cam
software, but didn't want to pay a member $10 for cleaning up after everyone
else (and keep them from being homeless) I had to seriously reconsider
supporting a place that was so anti-people and pro corporation.

~~~
mhink
> I will never understand how so many people in tech think that not for profit
> means never make a profit, or pay anyone for their time.

My dad used to be a test engineer for UL, and the way he always (wryly) put it
was: “They might not be for profit, but they’re definitely for making money.”

------
onion2k
Initiatives like this are exactly what gets me clicking on "Careers" links.

~~~
drusepth
Conveniently, that mindset is one reason that makes higher-ups more
comfortable approving initiatives like this!

------
jaden
I'm a fan of anything that helps open source, but in my experience it's more
effective if the employee is able to work on open source projects as part of
their job. Then again, maybe that's just my current evening burnout talking.

~~~
jevakallio
Author of the post here.

Realistically, we can't pay people full engineering salaries to do random OSS.
Our team can already contribute to OSS on their work time when it relates to
their work, or our own projects, but for the personal interest/passion
projects without direct benefit for us as a company, it doesn't scale. Doubly
so when we have a pretty strict "no overtime" policy of working no more than
40 hours a week.

We have failsafes in place in case anybody gets a bit too excited about free
time OSS. We limit the Sauce hours you can do in a month for this reason, but
nobody has hit that max yet, so it doesn't seem to be a systemic problem.

~~~
bhousel
> Realistically, we can't pay people full engineering salaries to do random
> OSS.

Why can't you?

Professors get paid full professor salaries to do "random research".

Doctors get paid full doctor salaries to treat "random illnesses".

I expect if you looked a bit closer, you'll find that "Random OSS" is
maintenance that makes the entire ecosystem possible. Would love to hear from
some of your engineers what they are doing to earn that $20/hr.

~~~
yawaramin
But professors are usually also required to teach classes or carry out other
duties in return for getting research funding. They don't just get to randomly
do whatever they want.

And doctors treating 'random illnesses' doesn't really work as an analogy–that
would be more like if they could randomly decide to turn away patients they
didn't 'want' to treat.

------
moneil971
This seems like a good way to recognize the extra time put in to support OSS
projects - and I like the thoughtfulness about not making it an incentive to
spend even more hours working, by capping hours and keeping the bonus amount
low.

------
SolaceQuantum
TL;DR: A company pays their employees $20/hr for open source contributions
done on the employees' own time with no strings attached. They also expand
this to community promotion such as technical book writing and mentorships.
They find this program to be wildly successful and highly encourage other
companies to implement the same programs.

I for one am extremely excited that this is reaching front page of HN and
entering a broader mindshare. OSS represents everything I hope the tech
industry may become someday in the future- high quality work produced by
intelligent, talented people for the benefit of all.

------
verisimilitudes
I'd be horrified about this Formidable company (What a name.) trying to claim
ownership over anything I did in my free time that I was paid $20.00 for.

>More recently, we’ve expanded the definition of contributing to include any
social impact work within the field of technology

Well, without clarification on my concerns, this would lead me to simply
billing time around things such as answering questions in project IRC channels
or helping to organize things, all activities that can't be later claimed, and
not use this for programming at all.

~~~
exogen
Well they don't claim any ownership, so: problem solved! :)

There's a benefit to _having the option_ to transfer ownership though when it
makes sense: some projects become a support burden, or incur hosting costs, or
have just lost your interest. Over time I've donated several of my personal
projects to Formidable so that the company itself can officially maintain them
(including during work hours, with the higher pay that entails, if you get
assigned to work on it).

------
ossie
I applaud any attempt to make open source work worthwhile to those who might
not be able to continue spending the time on it without such a
stipend/reward/incentive (whatever you want to call it). However, i have to
admit that once capital is introduced into an altruistic equation, it has a
way of murking things up. Successful initiatives will ultimately be those that
allow people so inclined to continue doing open source work, rather than
incentivizing potentially needless open source activity from opportunists.

Personally, I would like to see an honor or certificated system "giving
pledge" that rewards impactful open source projects...especially those that
are not initiated/backed by a corporation. Think of it as a sort of B-Corp
(O-Corp anybody?) where a tiny sliver of value (equity/revenue/profit/annual
fixed amount) is allocated to the open source libraries on which that business
is built. How the money is used is another debate entirely, so is the handling
of commercialized open source projects.

A very good candidate for something like this would be d3.js.

------
swalsh
Out of curiousity, is there a site where people can put up some money for an
open request on development? Like as opposed to hiring a contractor, and
specifically developing the requirements, it would be more similar to a
feature request with a bonus.

Like specifically, my company has been yearning for a more complete solution
to indexes on ORC files (there exists something, but the solution falls short
for our specific siutation).

~~~
dbnotabb
I work for a company launching an Open source board where companies can post
jobs for cash works-hub.com/issues

------
wolfhumble
Question to author of the post: How are these hours reported? Thanks!

~~~
smusumeche
Hours are self reported using the same system that we use for logging client
work.

~~~
wolfhumble
Okay, thanks!

------
majikandy
Benefit for employee: recognition for out of hours coding, learning and
contribution to society.

Benefit for company: employees reporting hours working which would normally be
invisible (Spotting burnout, keeping company project focus etc)

Sounds like a brave but sensible move and an idea I hadn’t heard before. Also
makes business sense to that company.

------
natmaka
Freexian (R. Hertzog) offers something pertinent (Debian LTS):
[https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts-
details.html](https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts-details.html)

------
pabs3
I think if I worked at a company that was doing this, I would ask them to pay
the money directly to a charity instead (like the Free Software Foundation or
Software Freedom Conservancy).

~~~
jevakallio
That's actually a good idea. Right now we pay the salary to you, and you can
then donate it to a charity. It would be way more tax efficient to just skip
the middle step.

Will take this under consideration!

------
caniszczyk
This is interesting, I recently wrote about ways companies can support and
sustain open source: [https://opensource.com/article/19/4/ways-support-
sustain-ope...](https://opensource.com/article/19/4/ways-support-sustain-open-
source)

------
orliesaurus
There are a bunch of companies that give back to open source maintainers
through a better approach...tidelift [1] is one that comes to mind. Has anyone
been on their open source programme? Does it operate well?

[1] [https://tidelift.com](https://tidelift.com)

~~~
Aeolun
I’m not sure I’d consider this a better approach. If everyone used tidelift
open source would become a popularity contest, and basically about the money.

------
127
Only thing different for me in doing open source for free and asking money for
it, is that for the paid products, the audience participation goes through the
roof and I actually know that someone values my work as they are paying for
it. Plus, money is always nice.

------
return1
I wonder what oss people think about Worklist, a bidding system for open
source. I have not seen it be used beyond highfidelity.
[https://worklist.net](https://worklist.net)

------
paxys
We would love to copy something like this at our company, but given the large
employee count and costs involved self reporting is definitely not a feasible
option.

------
tzakrajs
I feel like this will end up cannibalizing their engineers effort.

------
bobblywobbles
If I'm paid for open source, I'm going to lose any motivation to work on it
more. The reason why I contribute to open source projects is BECAUSE I want to
contribute for free.

Put money in the deal and I'm no longer doing this work selflessly, but for
self-interest instead.

~~~
ryanisinallofus
Someone here gets the 20/hour for STEM volunteer work with kids then donates
the money to a charity which Formidable also doubles as a part of another
program. Would that address the issue for you or is the idea of getting paid
for fun stuff just ruin the fun no matter what on principle?

(I work at Formidable)

~~~
bobblywobbles
I may differ from others, but anything that I do as volunteer work needs to be
unpaid. Putting money in the equation means that I'm no longer doing X work
for Y people, but instead doing X work for Z dollars.

Putting money in the work makes it transactional, and that turns me off to
"paid volunteer work". At that point, it's really just another label for
"optional job". Volunteer work is donating your time or effort, so putting the
"paid" label on it is misleading in my eyes.

I also already donate to charity so I don't see a need to get paid to donate
more money, which others may have an incentive to do. This is a point to
consider.

------
antt
>We pay our employees $20/hr for contributions to OSS and tech communities,
whether it’s a third-party library we use in our work like React, Next.js

While I applaud the sentiment $20 per hour is too little to make me care and
enough to make me start thinking about money.

A much better way to deal with this would be pushing laws to allow for tax
offsets for contributing time to charities (open source ones). Seeing $10 per
hour (after tax) that doesn't inspire me much.

Being able to write off my full time wage as a tax deductible would make me
vastly more motivated to document what I've been working on and work on a lot
more of it.

~~~
jevakallio
This is a great idea. I don't know if it's even a starter, tax code wise, but
would be amazing if it could be done.

For the time being, we are happy with $20 for the reasons outlined in the post
itself. It's not an incentive, it's a reward, and a purely optional one. Many
people in the company (I'm the author) do work on Open Source and don't make
use of the benefit, because they don't care about the money. This, for us, is
fine.

~~~
antt
I don't care about it now as a full time employed adult. As a university
student I could have well become a full time maintainer of some of the
scientific libraries that have been neglected since the 80s.

Now as a gainfully employed productive member of society I like the idea of
going on a legal tax strike when the government does something I absolutely
detest.

>Oh by the by, since you are trying so hard to destroy civil society again
this year, here's my bill for keeping it running. You're welcome.

Which is precisely why it would never happen. But you should definitely spend
some ~money~ speech on politicians and lobbyists to start some of them
thinking about it.

------
dblock
No no no.

This work should be part of your total, main, comp. Working on open-source
projects directly contributes to your employer's business, even if the code of
that project doesn't get used in those systems. You're building your team's
brand (and yes, your own, too). Because other Engineers want to work in an
environment where OSS is encouraged, this reduces costs of hiring and
retaining Engineers. At $20/hr Formidable is getting recruiting on the cheap.

~~~
orta
Disagree on the no aspect, I think there are folks who will do OSS at depth
regardless - but there are people for whom the incentives (of community,
empowerment, fame etc) aren’t enough and maybe this is one way to make them
jump the hurdle.

I pitched that this could be worth trying at Artsy on my last day

