<story><title>Corporations and OSS Do Not Mix</title><url>http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc/blog/2015/11/corporations-and-oss-do-not-mix.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>In 15 years, I&amp;#x27;ve read my fair share of &amp;quot;open source developer&amp;#x27;s lament&amp;quot;, and when the projects mentioned are stuff like Requests or SQLObject I honestly don&amp;#x27;t understand. If you step back and try to look at these problems in a structured way, you can see that it always boil down to the following algo:&lt;p&gt;1. Is it a money problem? Then &lt;i&gt;ask for money&lt;/i&gt; every time anyone asks for a piece of you (i.e. bug fixing, event patronage, whatever).&lt;p&gt;2. Is is a time problem? Then hire someone. If you can&amp;#x27;t afford it, it&amp;#x27;s a money problem: goto 1.&lt;p&gt;3. Is it a skills problem? Then hire someone. If you can&amp;#x27;t afford it, it&amp;#x27;s a money problem: goto 1.&lt;p&gt;I mean, &lt;i&gt;requests&lt;/i&gt; alone is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. with all due respect to Kenneth and Ian, I find it hard to believe that it cannot pay one developer salary, even at Californian rates, unless they simply &lt;i&gt;cannot be bothered to ask for money&lt;/i&gt;. Stuff like adding a &amp;quot;donate&amp;quot; button on the page looks &lt;i&gt;lazy&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;There are tons of ways to get money out of big corporations. Get a rotating-sponsorship deal where a company pays one salary for one year -- between Amazon, Google and Twitter (all heavy requests users, I&amp;#x27;m sure), you already have three years of &lt;i&gt;full-time development&lt;/i&gt;. They get quick bugfixes, you get a better life, win-win. These companies make &lt;i&gt;billions&lt;/i&gt; with your code, I cannot believe they can&amp;#x27;t cough up some spare cash. I mean, look at the OpenBSD Foundation: they asked for some change to pay a month of server time, and they got &lt;i&gt;Microsoft&lt;/i&gt; to dole out huge cash to port OpenSSH to Windows. &lt;i&gt;Microsoft&lt;/i&gt;, FFS!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fijal</author><text>Hi toyg.&lt;p&gt;You clearly haven&amp;#x27;t tried raising money for an Open Source project. It&amp;#x27;s really really difficult and the amounts of money you get range a lot. Usually you also want to underpromise and overdeliver, so it&amp;#x27;s about raising 10-20k USD to deliver a project that will take three to six months of full time work to deliver, ADDITIONALLY to fixing bugs, maintaining infrastructure and doing things for which you can&amp;#x27;t possible raise money at any rate. Contact me privately I can share more of the details, but it sounds like you&amp;#x27;re quite detached from the open source reality.&lt;p&gt;PS. We work on PyPy and cffi</text></comment>
<story><title>Corporations and OSS Do Not Mix</title><url>http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc/blog/2015/11/corporations-and-oss-do-not-mix.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>In 15 years, I&amp;#x27;ve read my fair share of &amp;quot;open source developer&amp;#x27;s lament&amp;quot;, and when the projects mentioned are stuff like Requests or SQLObject I honestly don&amp;#x27;t understand. If you step back and try to look at these problems in a structured way, you can see that it always boil down to the following algo:&lt;p&gt;1. Is it a money problem? Then &lt;i&gt;ask for money&lt;/i&gt; every time anyone asks for a piece of you (i.e. bug fixing, event patronage, whatever).&lt;p&gt;2. Is is a time problem? Then hire someone. If you can&amp;#x27;t afford it, it&amp;#x27;s a money problem: goto 1.&lt;p&gt;3. Is it a skills problem? Then hire someone. If you can&amp;#x27;t afford it, it&amp;#x27;s a money problem: goto 1.&lt;p&gt;I mean, &lt;i&gt;requests&lt;/i&gt; alone is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. with all due respect to Kenneth and Ian, I find it hard to believe that it cannot pay one developer salary, even at Californian rates, unless they simply &lt;i&gt;cannot be bothered to ask for money&lt;/i&gt;. Stuff like adding a &amp;quot;donate&amp;quot; button on the page looks &lt;i&gt;lazy&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;There are tons of ways to get money out of big corporations. Get a rotating-sponsorship deal where a company pays one salary for one year -- between Amazon, Google and Twitter (all heavy requests users, I&amp;#x27;m sure), you already have three years of &lt;i&gt;full-time development&lt;/i&gt;. They get quick bugfixes, you get a better life, win-win. These companies make &lt;i&gt;billions&lt;/i&gt; with your code, I cannot believe they can&amp;#x27;t cough up some spare cash. I mean, look at the OpenBSD Foundation: they asked for some change to pay a month of server time, and they got &lt;i&gt;Microsoft&lt;/i&gt; to dole out huge cash to port OpenSSH to Windows. &lt;i&gt;Microsoft&lt;/i&gt;, FFS!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lambda</author><text>I work at a company that uses a large amount of free software.&lt;p&gt;For much of it, if we find a bug, we either fix it ourselves locally, or go through the normal process of submitting a bug report, possibly submitting our own patch, and waiting for a fix from upstream, while finding some way to work around it or the like.&lt;p&gt;For some of the software that is central to our business, we have a contract with a company that provides support and development services. If we have a bug that we need fixed right now, we get in touch with them and pay an agreed upon rate to do so.&lt;p&gt;We don&amp;#x27;t do this for everything we use, because most of it works off the shelf, or we just replace it or work around it, or the open development process works well enough. But for those things that are absolutely key to our business, and for which there&amp;#x27;s a consulting company that employs several of the core developers on the project, it&amp;#x27;s definitely worth it to pay for the support that we need.</text></comment>