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.
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.
While I'm certainly not in a position to turn down the money, I'm hesitant to think about what kind of dependence this could create for folks like me.
Am I going to end up the code-monkey equivalent of an Uber-driver - paid just enough to keep coming back, but not enough to pay my bills?
Is this going to disrupt real, bill-paying programming jobs? If so, is anyone going to realistically pay their bills, with the huge pool of hobbyists going out there chasing after this?
Is my hobby going to stop being fun, since someone threw money at it?
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.
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.
It’s well known that nominal compensation isn’t the most effective incentive to get people to do things, and compared to engineer salaries in our US and UK tech hubs, $20/hr isn’t exactly a windfall.
This is intentional. We don’t want people to log on after hours to earn money. Instead, we think of the Sauce bonus as a recognition of the work people want to do anyway, and the compensation is aimed to be meaningful enough to do something fun with, but not so high that it would skew their priorities to stare at their computer screens instead of spending time with their hobbies, families, and friends.
Of course. It seems that that’s exactly what’s happening here. These people are being paid a salary to do a bunch of open source and other work.
The company just recognizes that people that continue contributing at home still bring them some form of value, and it is very nice to see that this is recognized and rewarded, regardless of the amount.
Maybe we’ll get to a point where this will be the norm, and companies will have to go further to stand out, but right now this is pretty amazing.
I partially agree. I work for a public university and 100% of our code is MIT licensed. But I spend a ton of time outside of work on other open source projects. I'd love an extra 20USD/hr for that work. Heck I'd probably even open source a few more of my private repos.
As a long time open source contributor and maintainer, I'm not convinced it's worth more than $20/hour. Where does this worth come from? Comparing it to what corporations loaded with cash are willing to pay for an especially advantageous employee? That's not a fair comparison to make.
I have a few open source projects that I contribute $5 monthly for each project on https://opencollective.com/. I view my contribution as a subsidy and not as a salary. Might be wrong but Formidable probably views it the same way.
It sounds like these employees do indeed have stable positions with fair salaries and benefits. What's the problem?
If the work is worth more than $20/hr, who's going to pay it? One person's work is "worth" what someone else is willing to pay. Markets are conversations, and all that. OSS is an arena where the supply of potential practitioners is huge.
I have had employers hire me and then not give me work to do leaving me with large swaths of time to work on my unpaid open source that they are using internally. It’s probably an ethical violation to use their office, time, and equipment to work on code they are not paying for (since it’s free and liberally licensed), but they absolutely know I’m doing it.
But why though? Of course giving a well-payed salary to people is something great and I have nothing against it. But the whole "cool" thing about open-source is that it showed that it can do pretty amazing things without capitalism. Instead here we are trying to push the same mentality we use for everything else into open-source.
Why not continue the experiment as it has for the last 30 years (without any major economical incentives); it has only produced amazing pieces of work so far, so why risk to taint it?
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.
They do say they pay for personal hack projects too, so I read it more as "hey, go do whatever OS projects you feel like/do some skill building and we'll pay you $20/hr". That makes sense to me - the company benefits if you bring more skills and knowledge to the workplace
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.
Disclaimer- formidable employee and open source maintainer
Formidable does pay folks their full engineering salaries to make targeted contributions to open source during work hours. We can't afford to do a ton of this, so it mostly happens when folks are between projects. The extra $20/hour is extra. It's meant to be fun and encouraging. It's basically the "buy me a beer" license, but Formidable actually buys us a beer.
I agree this could be the case, except that there is no pressure to work on anything work-related. You can literally contribute to any OSS project, whether it's your own video game side hustle, a learning project in a language we don't use, or, if the mood strikes, also one of our projects' dependencies.
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.
That formula doesn't make individuals want to work more on open-source.
Looking at the team profiles on Formidable's site it looks like a lot of them were working on open source projects anyway, so this isn't a way of manipulating them to do something they weren't already doing. It's just a way of rewarding them.
I think your conclusion comes a bit too quickly. Sure, open-source is about passion for everyone who doesn't do it as a day job and earning money can kill that passion. But so can other factors (e.g. communities that demand but don't contribute) and still, we see a lot of OSS projects out there.
In my opinion, an important factor here is that you earn that money for whatever OSS project you are working on. That reduces the pressure to work on that single project you would get paid to work on.
And if you are completely against the compensation, you could still not tell your company about what you are doing after 5 pm ;-)
As an active Open Source contributor I'd like to say that apart from passion being involved it also is a big responsibility depending on the project either way and being paid for it affirms my passion and beliefs.
I'd agree with you more if they were only incentivizing certain projects, but it sounds like employees are paid for any open source work. And I agree the $20/hr is low enough that most devs could make more freelancing on the side, so why bother with open source? Seems balanced enough to be worth trying, and they're reporting the experiment as a success.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Say your open source project was a brick-and-mortar company. The things you're describing would probably be the work of two full time positions. I see no reason at all why it shouldn't be claimed.
Support and Community Management are capital W work.
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.
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).
BountySource is one option. You can post a GitHub issue with a bounty; it doesn’t even have to be your own. You can also contribute to other bounties.
I added to a bounty to support inline code comments to Gitea’s pull request UI. It was the one feature I truly missed after moving from GitHub.
The issue was already on the roadmap, but wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. once the bounty hit a couple hundred bucks, someone implemented the feature and claimed the bounty. Money well spent.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
There is no deal. Nobody is forcibly handing you money here. It is completely optional for you to participate. Think of it the same way as participating in your company's bonus rewards program like bonus.ly.
>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.
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.
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.
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
sisk|6 years ago
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.
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
crysin|6 years ago
jahewson|6 years ago
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.
pizzazzaro|6 years ago
Am I going to end up the code-monkey equivalent of an Uber-driver - paid just enough to keep coming back, but not enough to pay my bills?
Is this going to disrupt real, bill-paying programming jobs? If so, is anyone going to realistically pay their bills, with the huge pool of hobbyists going out there chasing after this?
Is my hobby going to stop being fun, since someone threw money at it?
paulddraper|6 years ago
I would be glad.
magicalhippo|6 years ago
Of course, if it's not meant to be fun-time stuff, then it would be great.
bhousel|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
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.
theWheez|6 years ago
It’s well known that nominal compensation isn’t the most effective incentive to get people to do things, and compared to engineer salaries in our US and UK tech hubs, $20/hr isn’t exactly a windfall.
This is intentional. We don’t want people to log on after hours to earn money. Instead, we think of the Sauce bonus as a recognition of the work people want to do anyway, and the compensation is aimed to be meaningful enough to do something fun with, but not so high that it would skew their priorities to stare at their computer screens instead of spending time with their hobbies, families, and friends.
Aeolun|6 years ago
The company just recognizes that people that continue contributing at home still bring them some form of value, and it is very nice to see that this is recognized and rewarded, regardless of the amount.
Maybe we’ll get to a point where this will be the norm, and companies will have to go further to stand out, but right now this is pretty amazing.
anderspitman|6 years ago
sdegutis|6 years ago
chaostheory|6 years ago
ken|6 years ago
If the work is worth more than $20/hr, who's going to pay it? One person's work is "worth" what someone else is willing to pay. Markets are conversations, and all that. OSS is an arena where the supply of potential practitioners is huge.
austincheney|6 years ago
sktrdie|6 years ago
Why not continue the experiment as it has for the last 30 years (without any major economical incentives); it has only produced amazing pieces of work so far, so why risk to taint it?
chrisseaton|6 years ago
You can already get this today - almost all the major tech companies pay people to work on open source.
nickjj|6 years ago
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.
jb3689|6 years ago
habnds|6 years ago
Boygirl|6 years ago
Formidable does pay folks their full engineering salaries to make targeted contributions to open source during work hours. We can't afford to do a ton of this, so it mostly happens when folks are between projects. The extra $20/hour is extra. It's meant to be fun and encouraging. It's basically the "buy me a beer" license, but Formidable actually buys us a beer.
smusumeche|6 years ago
jevakallio|6 years ago
ptah|6 years ago
sktrdie|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
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...
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.
onion2k|6 years ago
Looking at the team profiles on Formidable's site it looks like a lot of them were working on open source projects anyway, so this isn't a way of manipulating them to do something they weren't already doing. It's just a way of rewarding them.
arendtio|6 years ago
In my opinion, an important factor here is that you earn that money for whatever OSS project you are working on. That reduces the pressure to work on that single project you would get paid to work on.
And if you are completely against the compensation, you could still not tell your company about what you are doing after 5 pm ;-)
I think it is a great opportunity for employees.
philplckthun|6 years ago
Disclaimer: I work for Formidable
anderspitman|6 years ago
sagartewari01|6 years ago
Blender, Linux kernel...
onion2k|6 years ago
drusepth|6 years ago
jaden|6 years ago
jevakallio|6 years ago
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.
moneil971|6 years ago
SolaceQuantum|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
>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|6 years ago
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).
Spivak|6 years ago
Support and Community Management are capital W work.
ossie|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
cobbzilla|6 years ago
I added to a bounty to support inline code comments to Gitea’s pull request UI. It was the one feature I truly missed after moving from GitHub.
The issue was already on the roadmap, but wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. once the bounty hit a couple hundred bucks, someone implemented the feature and claimed the bounty. Money well spent.
wolfhumble|6 years ago
smusumeche|6 years ago
majikandy|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
pabs3|6 years ago
jevakallio|6 years ago
Will take this under consideration!
caniszczyk|6 years ago
orliesaurus|6 years ago
[1] https://tidelift.com
Aeolun|6 years ago
127|6 years ago
return1|6 years ago
paxys|6 years ago
tzakrajs|6 years ago
bobblywobbles|6 years ago
Put money in the deal and I'm no longer doing this work selflessly, but for self-interest instead.
ryanisinallofus|6 years ago
(I work at Formidable)
jb3689|6 years ago
yawaramin|6 years ago
antt|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
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.
dblock|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
I pitched that this could be worth trying at Artsy on my last day