Hi!
over the past couple of years there has been a number
of efforts trying to figure out effective ways of getting funded
for working on ASF projects as individuals and not employees
at companies building on top of these projects.
Chris's recent experience is but one of them:
https://lists.apache.org/thread/momxgzzyq03lz54knvzhxm16r8j40vog
My personal frustration with all these threads is that we never
seem to arrive at any actionable suggestions for how developers
like Chris can *easily* create these additional income streams.
Rightfully, we at ASF basically say that it must be a 3d party issue
to solve. It very much is. The problem is that doing so one one-off
just perpetuates the logistical pain of setting up contracts, etc. etc.
This creates a pretty significant barrier and, as Chris's experience
would suggest it typically becomes too insurmountable for individual
developers.
Sure, there have been interesting attempts to "hack the system"
and use things like GitCoin, BugMark and a few others to solve for
this "how do we get back to our open source roots when individuals,
not corporations were the economic agents around open source".
But I honestly don't know of any of them becoming viable either.
At least not so far.
At the risk of tilting at windmills once again, I'd like to see if there's
enough interest to take a crack at this problem yet again.
And in the spirit of "hacking the system" I'd like to suggest that we
focus on a 3d party solving it for us. In fact, I suggest we pick a
very particular 3d party -- TideLift
https://support.tidelift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406293106324-Quickstart-guide
Now, before you exclaim "who the heck appointed TideLift to solve it for
us?"
I'd be the first one to admit that I picked them because I know them
really well and I do think they are the closest to giving us some of the
answers.
But above all, I'm suggesting we look at TideLift because they seem to
be very much willing to work with us on actually changing their engagement
model to fit our needs. IOW, it is not like their rules are cast in stone
-- we can
assume they are malleable. If anyone knows of a similar 3d party -- let's
discuss
that too.
If, however, there's a general consensus about seriously looking
at them as that 3d party -- I'd like to start collecting names of ASF
developers (and PMCs) who would be willing to participate in
a trial program with them of sorts and report back.
If you have comments on anything above -- please reply in-thread.
If you'd be interested in this trial -- you can either do that or just
reply to me personally.
Thanks,
Roman.
