
Urllib3, Stripe, and Open Source Grants - malditojavi
https://medium.com/@shazow/urllib3-stripe-and-open-source-grants-edb9c0e46e82
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imrehg
I'm working at a tech company that is leaning towards such support. Have any
suggestion on how would we go about doing such grants well?

We are in touch with the community around our projects, and they are doing
awesome stuff. I'd love to be able to enable them more. Been looking into
Bountysource a bit, but still figuring out the workable model.

~~~
shazow
I'd advise you reach out to the maintainers of some of your favourite projects
and ask for their help in finding good candidates for grants.

Or do what Stripe did and put out a call for applications/proposals.

Another thing you could try is giving your engineers a quarterly/yearly budget
to allocate to OSS projects, then they could do things like Gittip.

Either way, we need more companies trying these kinds of things so we have a
better idea of what works. :)

~~~
ak217
> Another thing you could try is giving your engineers a quarterly/yearly
> budget to allocate to OSS projects

I'd expand on that by pointing out the following:

Your company's engineers are almost certainly using open-source projects on a
daily basis, and finding bugs or missing features in those projects. Often in
such a situation the engineer has no time to code the missing feature, much
less see it through an upstream pull and release, so they will hack up a quick
internal fork or custom rewrite.

Ask your team that if they find themselves in such a situation, to bring the
project and feature as a candidate for your grant. For example, as Andrey
mentioned in the blog post, he recently pulled code from Kevin Burke to add
customizable retry support to urllib3. That's something my employer could use,
but we'd need to add support for the 503 Retry-After header (which we added
in-house). I'll be bringing that up as a possible grant with my employer, to
incorporate that feature upstream so we can just use it through urllib3.

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mqsiuser
I applied with [http://www.use-the-tree.com](http://www.use-the-tree.com).
It's okay with me to _not_ have been interviewed via Skype and _not_ receive
funding.

Also the eMail from Greg (on June 5th) was nice and well written:

Hey,

Thanks a lot for applying to the Open Source Retreat. Unfortunately, we aren't
able to accept your project. We ended up with about 120 applications, and
ultimately only had 2 available slots, which meant we had to turn away a lot
of projects that we would have loved to sponsor. We'll be announcing our
selectees soon; watch our Twitter feed
([https://twitter.com/stripe](https://twitter.com/stripe)) for details.

We're treating the retreat as an experiment, but the strong interest we've
seen makes it likely we'll do something like it again (and we hope you'll
apply if/when we do). In any case, we expect we'll learn a lot from this run
and hopefully have lessons to share back with the community. We've also had a
number of companies express interest in doing something similar, so hopefully
other similar opportunities will arise soon.

\- gdb

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tomi
Did Stripe require that some specific feature was added or fixed? Especially
if they did, that $3750 is a small amount of money to pay get some
functionality to work. Not to mention, that they get some nice publicity from
this.

Regardless, kudos for Stripe for sponsoring open source projects.

~~~
s_husso
I think all parties win in this, not just Stripe. Urrlib3 developer and users
(new features and enhancments), and the whole FOSS community (if more and more
companies start doing this). Also if the competition is fierce for the top
talent, doing these kind of "support the community" acts, surely won't be seen
as negative things for the company that does these things.

So kudos indeed for Stripe! Let's hope this comes "a thing"

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kasbah
What does he normally do full-time?

~~~
shazow
I know, right?

Ahem. All kinds of things, maintaining a bunch of open source libraries and
tools ([https://github.com/shazow](https://github.com/shazow)), bootstrapping
a service that emails you analytics summaries
([https://briefmetrics.com/](https://briefmetrics.com/)), building random apps
that I happen to need (a partial list on
[http://shazow.net/](http://shazow.net/)).

I suspect your underlying question was whether I am employed full-time—I am
not.

~~~
voltagex_
I wish I could sponsor your next two weeks. Let's hope that Stripe's
initiative catches on with others.

~~~
shazow
Thanks! :) Until you have corporate funds to back a bigger project, little ad-
hoc donations are also appreciated:

[https://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#sponsorship](https://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#sponsorship)

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jflowers45
Awesome to see Stripe supporting open source. One of my gov clients does this
as well ... I worked with the broadcasting board of governors and we worked
together on enhancing Mozilla's popcorn maker, but tailoring it to
journalists. In general I think they're trying to work on open source as much
as possible which is cool

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B0jan
I'm so glad Stripe paid you to work on urllib3. I'm building a project that
uses your lib, if became something big, i'll pay you too! In the meanwhile i
hope some other companies finance your work.

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therobot24
"51 files changed, 1809 insertions(+), 633 deletions(-)." \- am i missing
something, or is amount of code changed a good thing? Like was there a lot of
bad code, and now it's changed to be good...or is this just a measure of
improvement like "look at how much work we did". I dunno, i'm out of the loop
on this stuff i guess.

~~~
pbreit
I think you're trying too hard to find badness. It's just a simple few data
points of what the author was able to achieve in the two week sprint. It's
reasonable to assume it was predominantly improvements.

~~~
therobot24
not really trying, saw it and didn't get it - figured the forum would have
answers, downvotes seem to disagree, but whatever

