This is where I fall over - damn my parents for teaching me to feel guilty about asking for money!
> One great hack for finding out who is using your package is to open an issue called "Who is using this?" and ask for testimonials or offer to put users' logos or links in the README under a "Who uses this" section
This is a fantastic idea - I'm going to try it! If companies don't know I'm open to the possibility of advertising their logo on my website (in an innovative way, using my library) then how can they consider giving me money for it?
Especially in those situations, doing right by one another depends on a rich environment of information about costs, benefits, needs, and opportunities. You have to talk frankly about your time, money, and interest, and you have encourage and listen to others when they do so. Otherwise, nobody can have any confidence that people are being treated fairly, rather than seething or starving in silence, and good work is being rewarded.
I've tried in the past to write up a few of the basic lessons we all learn the hard way in freelance work:
https://blog.licensezero.com/2017/10/16/mercenary-rapport.ht...
To spoil it:
Give as you take.
Talk frankly about time and money.
Slice the pie fairly.
Keep your integrity at all costs.
Pay help forward to new people.
Honest pay for honest work.
In fact, from the perspective of the bigco, there seems to be a thriving ecosystems for leftpad-style packages already even without additional money pouring in. Why subsidize it to become even bigger?
Jack Dorsey has Devs he pays in BTC whose sole job is to contribute to Bitcoin Core development and nothing else [1], they have no affiliation to his companies other than that.
Also, he's an investor in LN labs who are technically their own thing led by Starkbot (Elizabeth Stark) [2].
So, it can and has been done.
Personally speaking, a lot of the 'how would it ever work...' questions that come up here that are thought to be seemingly impossible to solve have often been pilot-tested inside the cryptocurrency space to one degree or another, so if nothing else I hope most of you can find value in that 'us crazy people' are actually pushing the envelope in the edge-cases of innovation.
For example, because many of us have been proponents of UBI (from various source points, mind you) from either a pragmatic or an ideological standpoint, we've tried to see what verifiable widescale UBI deployment (in Iceland) would entail back in 2014; it failed, as many of us expected it would, but we tested hypothesis whose data could ultimately be used later to iterate and improve a system.
1: https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-jack-dorsey-square-crypto/
2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2020/02/05/j...
Everyone has costs for things like shelter, power, food, water and other necessities, there is a need for some form of income.
I certainly think they should fund projects based on quality, as your reputation for quality increases I would hope that your ability to bring in sponsorship would be higher, though it's also a shame that people need years of their own funding to break in to open source software development properly full time. In many ways, open source development is only for the privileged/rich.
I have no idea how a small developer could ramp this up, but for a larger project, the approach appears to be to form a foundation, and to give contributing companies a chair that's closer to the table.
So writing and releasing OSS may not lead to direct monetization opportunities, but it can be a great way to get in touch with enterprises and to get demand readings quickly.
Their website doesn't seem to mention that in any way. :/
If you’re looking to make money, I don’t recommend you get into open source. I wish this weren’t the case, but this is the current situation.
Unfortunately, it seems the best path if you want to do open source as a career is to do enough open source to get your name out there and then leverage that into a job offer at some megacorp. Maybe you’ll be able to get a role doing open source, but that’s rare. Hopefully you can continue to do open source in your free time at least.
That said, if you insist your goal is to get paid doing open source full-time, here are my tips:
1. Create a project that is end-user facing. No one is aware of which transitive dependencies they are using, so no matter how useful your software, you’ll struggle to get donations, sponsors, or consulting work unless the end user knows your name. Reliable, error-free transitive dependencies are invisible. Therefore, the maintainers are invisible, too. And, the better these maintainers do their job, the more invisible they are. No one ever visits a GitHub repository for a transitive dependency that works perfectly – there’s no reason to do so. But a developer investigating an error stack trace might visit the repository if for no other reason than to file an issue. At least then there’s a small chance they’ll see the maintainer’s plea in the README. (I wrote more about this here: https://feross.org/funding-experiment-recap/)
2. Make sure it’s something that the enterprise cares about. If you build a cool P2P project or a new programming language you’re gonna have a tough time. No matter how useful or innovative the project is. On the other hand, if you’re making a front end framework or a UI library for React or something like that, you’ll have a much better shot at getting companies to sponsor your project.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask for money. Contact companies that are using your library and tell them you want them to sponsor your package. One great hack for finding out who is using your package is to open an issue called “Who is using this?” and ask for testimonials or offer to put users’ logos or links in the README under a “Who uses this” section. Lots of developers will out their companies as users of your package if you do this. This gives you a good list of companies to initially reach out to. Without tricks like this it’s impossible to know who’s even using your package. That’s the first to step to finding sponsors.