Let’s talk about open-source sustainability

Re:Let’s talk about open-source sustainability by lars_francke on Friday January 18, 2019 @01:35AM (#18937458)

I also agree with this. While I don't (yet, but about to) have my own project to take care of we mostly consult on the Apache Big Data ecosystem. These tools are used by thousands of companies in major internal programs (e.g. "we're moving the whole companie to an Event Driven architecture based on Kafka" or "we're building a Data Lake in Hadoop") but there are major and minor issues which we see at every single customer and which go unfixed.

Each individual customer is not willing or can't commit the resources (which can be hours to weeks of development time) to fund us to fix those. If they were to pool the resources it'd be easier.

But that's not how those companies work. They have their purchasing processes and kicking that off for minor things is often too much work, kicking it off for major things may take ages and strain budgets.

All the other models I've seen so far (Patreon etc.) don't really fit into the corporate world as we currently see it.

We've tried asking for sponsorship directly, in conference talks or on Twitter (https://twitter.com/opencore/status/1057939697413079040) but so far have not found any sustainable way that works.

I'm convinced that solving this single issue will do more good for the OSS projects (which in turn might lead to better lives for people as can be seen in the example of your project) than any other action anyone could do.

We're eager to hear any model that worked for someone else.

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Re:Let’s talk about open-source sustainability by TAForObvReasons on Friday January 18, 2019 @02:42AM (#18937665)

Thought experiment: If you see problems with many customers, why don't you fund yourself or someone else to do the work? It would obviously save you time and energy dealing with each of the companies, and you could use that as a way to officially associate your company with the project. This is a similar calculation that happens with every one of your customers and every other company.

If you want a model that works, build your own open source projects or paid components around Apache Big Data. It's in your company name anyway .. open core, and it's a model employed by many companies like Sidekiq

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Re:Let’s talk about open-source sustainability by lars_francke on Friday January 18, 2019 @04:57AM (#18938222)

> Thought experiment: If you see problems with many customers, why don't you fund yourself or someone else to do the work? It would obviously save you time and energy dealing with each of the companies, and you could use that as a way to officially associate your company with the project. This is a similar calculation that happens with every one of your customers and every other company.

To be really blunt: We are basically busy 100% of the time and it would not economically make sense for us to work for free on major issues. If you look at my Apache history (committer on various projects, contributor to more) you'll see that we DO contribute a lot. But it's mostly minor stuff that can be done within a day or so. For major stuff we just don't have the resources. We could add encryption to Kafka at our own expense and it'd take a couple of weeks of development time but we wouldn't have any immediate benefit from it. Companies like Cloudera or Amazon would benefit though.

This is how I see it at least but this is very much a plea for ideas. Maybe I'm just set in my ways.

> If you want a model that works, build your own open source projects or paid components around Apache Big Data. It's in your company name anyway .. open core, and it's a model employed by many companies like Sidekiq

Yep, that "just" requires us to have a good idea, plus the free cycles (basically investing money) plus we'd now need to learn how sales work etc. and to be honest...we're not good at that. We're really really good at the stuff we do now though. It's hard to change your own ways ;-)

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