I am extremely interested in this and I very much support the effort that Roman describes. But I do think Tidelift is not necessarily a good (and quite for sure not the only) solution.
I think their interest is a bit separated from ASF one. They mostly want to promote their service to get the cut of the payments (this is what I see). Maybe not even the payments they get through ASF but to get popularity and get the cut later. This is fine as a business model. But I am not sure ASF should endorse it. There should be - at most - a range of solutions that ASF can say "you are free to use". I think the "popularity" of a service should come from the corporate users wanting to use them as "intermediaries". Those services should be really a solution to make it easier (and trusted) to get money transferred between parties. And there might be many of those. I am currently an independent OSS contributor and get the money from the stakeholders in various ways - direct contracts and using the preferred mechanism of my customers (or "stakeholders"). I use various "intermediaries": * SAP Ariba - for Google * https://www.letsdeel.com/ - for Astronomer * Github Sponsors - for Amazon and others (some of them in advance discussions) There is an initial overhead to set it up, but once it's set-up it's easy to fulfill all the "bureaucratic" stuff on a regular basis. That's what they promise and deliver. Those platforms provide invoicing and money transfer mechanisms and charge very, very little for it (compared to setting up the legal relationship). What is really important and takes a lot of the time and effort and money is to have contracts with those parties that protect my freedom and independence as OSS contributor for ASF projects as well as becoming a valuable party for my partners. I am lucky enough to be able to negotiate "independence" but also have enough resources/contracts/stamina/negotiating power to have my lawyers (in Poland and Slovakia where I have my second business entity) and enough income to be able to spend a substantial amount of money on setting this up. I am also lucky to have friendly and competent lawyers that became my friends over time, not only business partners. I've involved my lawyers in all the contract discussions and I have some templates but many of the contributors do not have this freedom/capabilities. I think some "standards", "policies", "allowed clauses", "templates" might be of a great help to the committers who just want to "do the stuff" and don't have enough resources. Happy to help - for starting to share my contract templates if that might help others. But those are just technicalities, and I have a much more important comment. There is - of course - a completely different story. But what is really important is how to build the relationship, how to find those who will pay for your job and convince them to do so. But I am afraid none of Tidelift's or other platforms can help with it. Personal reputation in the project, building it, spending time, being vocal about it, self-promotion, speaking, being present is the only way to get people to want you to pay for your job and none of the platforms can help with it when personal effort is not spent on "selling" your work. There are no shortcuts for that. Thinking that when you do a good job, you will be noticed, is wishful thinking IMHO. If you want success, you need to act beyond doing a good IT job. And I think possibly making people aware of that and teaching them how not only to do a good job but also sell it is a way to go. That's one thing I've learned over the many years in the industry - if you do a bad job. then selling it is hard. If you do a good job, selling is easy - but if you won't do it yourself - no-one will do it for you. There is no-one else but you who can sell your job and you need to learn how to do it. But many people in our industry do not realise that. I think some kind of awareness, sharing experience, and providing guidelines to people who want to earn on open-source contributions (in a very good sense of it) is something that IMHO ASF can help with (and happy to help with it too - I am thinking on the next talk "how to make living on contributing to OSS" talk at Apache Con for one). Maybe in ASF we should focus on teaching our people to sell the great job they are doing and not be afraid of it. J. On Sun, Feb 27, 2022 at 11:17 PM Roman Shaposhnik <ro...@shaposhnik.org> wrote: > On Sun, Feb 27, 2022 at 11:11 PM Gary Gregory <garydgreg...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > We just went through this with Log4j and decided that the Tidelift model > > was not compatible with Apache. Hopefully someone on our PMC can provide > a > > recap. > > > > Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as I remember there wasn't any attempt > to work with TideLift on changing the engagement model on their end, > was there? > This time I'm suggesting that we work together with TideLift to come up > with the new rules (or to agree -- together -- that no such rules exist). > > Basically, the exercise I'm suggesting is different. > > Still, the kind of recap you have in mind would be super useful. > > Thanks, > Roman. >
