What does the w3c do that actually requires money? Are standard editors actually paid? I always assumed that they were volunteering their time on behalf of whatever company they worked for.
For that matter, what liabilities are we talking about here? Hosting a website? Maybe i am just naive, but what else is there?
Well, unless you think $300k sets you up for life and unless they could get a revenue stream going, it's going to run out and be back in the hands of volunteers no matter what.
This line of questioning (or accusation) is a good example of the phenomenon where people often expect a disproportional amount of your future time because they once gave you a one-time quantity of money, or possibly by pointing to money that other people gave you.
Look at it another way: $300k got us Light Table which was a pretty cool editor. I used it to help people get started with Clojure and I didn't pay them a dime. It didn't get us eternal paid support and maintenance, though. How could it? It also unfortunately never developed the ecosystem around it like Atom and VS Code were able to, so now it's here trying to find maintainers.
Also, pretty much all editors are dependent on volunteers to create plugins and ecosystem, even ones you directly pay money for like Sublime.
The idea is that you can accept donations to cover the costs, but not beyond that.
So an organisation can pay developers to work on it, cover hosting costs etc. but they have to be careful not to accept donations for more than that. A non-profit can accept more provided it is used for the right objects.
I have no idea (neither does the author of the article) where that leaves an individual developer who accepts donations to cover the value of their time.
I'd be surprised if that were true. (Do they donate anything? I'd be surprised if they did, I suspect they merely pay their membership dues.) The membership fees come at five levels, mostly dependent upon annual revenue; Apple, Microsoft, Google all pay the same as Adobe, Boeing, Dell, Facebook, HP, LG, Netflix, Siemens, Sony, Disney…
Most of what they do is host the work of others, who are not paid. It seems more than a little obscene that a corps 300 employees are splitting 31 million, for the task of overseeing a 2mil hosting operation.
They spend more on processing donations than hosting. They give away about 5x as much as they do on hosting. What value are these people adding beyond the cost of hosting the repository built by people who are not paid?
>'...they have 150+ community moderators that oversee the site's community and hundreds of community editors that are trusted with accepting and editing the site's annotations...'
Are these people paid anything?
Also, isn't 'project' generally suggestive of something a bit more open than a VC-funded startup?
> The sponsorship pays directly for maintainer time. That is, writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user questions, and improving documentation.
As far as I can tell, this project is literally just a 200 line configuration file for a linter. Not even editor integrations for the linter, just a configuration file for it.
Is it truly something that requires funding to 'add new features'? How much time does it take out of your day to add a new line of JSON to a configuration file, or is the sponsorship there to pay for all the bikeshedding that's probably happening in the issues and comments on the project?
What sort of bugs are there in a linter configuration file?
I'm really confused by all of this.
> The funds raised so far ($2,000) have paid for Feross's time to release Standard 14 which has taken around five days.
Five days to do what? Five full 8 hour days? Does it take 5 days to cut a GitHub release and push it to NPM? What about the other contributors that give up their time for free, are their contributions worthless?
Rather than feeling like a way to support FOSS developers or FOSS projects, it feels like a rather backhanded attempt at monetization by the maintainer where Standard was picked out because it was the his most popular project, and therefore would return the greatest advertising revenue.
Do JavaScript developers, or people that use this project, have a more nuanced opinion than me? I do zero web development, is this type of stuff normal?
> Really anything can be applied for as a contribution, you can rock up right now and say you'll translate the docs into Esperanto for X amount and the community decides if that's worth paying out of the pool for this round, if rejected you can apply again next round, no hard feelings.
Let's say the community decides it's worth paying for that. Does payment happen up front, or only upon completion of work? If the latter, who decides if the work meets the standard that was expected and thus is worth paying out for?
And now I'm wondering if the two comments below the article were purchased by the author...
There does seem to be value in Fiverr, though, especially stuff like the "fix my CSS" job. (disclaimer: I was NOT compensated in any way for this comment and I have never used Fiverr before)
You think people ought to be paid for writing code. Pathetic. Code is too valuable to be paid for; it ought to be part of a commons, not part of some corporate portfolio.
I think that you're just embarrassed that you contribute [0] next to nothing to the community.
You seem to be under the impression that IndieWeb is a formalized organization where the people operating under its banner are being paid by said organization.
In reality it's a set of shared goals, which a lot of the people disagree on facets of implementation and the like, and a collection of generally-agreed-to protocols that people can choose to support as part of interoperability with other websites.
I am fairly active in IndieWeb spaces and I disagree with others in these spaces all the time. I've also certainly never accepted any Google money (or any other sponsor) for my contributions, not that it's even been offered. This is the first I'm hearing of "us" being sponsored by Google.
I've seen plenty of material support from Mozilla (because there are several Mozillians involved in the projects) and Okta (for the same reason). But those aren't in any way signs that those companies are steering the decisions being made -- they're just offering things like hosting rooms and providing food at our mini-conferences and providing t-shirts and whatever (and those t-shirts, as far as I know, never have any sponsor logos on them).
Also, we take a more user-centric view of things; while we'd all like people to be on their own self-hosted websites and free of the big social networks and so on, we understand that it's not realistic to just ask everyone to jump ship all at once, and running your own web presence is not what most people want to do. It's much better to build bridges so that people can connect in whatever way works for them, and that's why there are services like brid.gy and so on which people run out of the kindness of their hearts, and paid services like micro.blog that try to make it easier for people to dive in without having to Do All The Things, and people who work on IndieWeb integrations for Wordpress and so on.
And I'm very grateful for things like brid.gy; most of the comments/responses I get on my website come in through that, via people on Twitter and Mastodon and occasionally Reddit. Sometimes I get webmentions from other IndieWeb users, but they're the vast minority. And same goes for private-post logins; most people log in via Twitter or Mastodon, and a bunch use my email-based login mechanism as well, and very few actually log in via IndieAuth. If I were to restrict my interactions to pure IndieWeb I'd have a very lonely presence.
2. Even well-known, active coders only receive ~$200/week. The creator of Drupal looks like the highest-paid coder at $420 (I know Chad Whitacre is a coder but I'm guessing much of his compensation is for his valuable work on gittip?).
3. Yes, we've all read Cathedral and the Bazaar -- an influential work in hacker and open source culture. And we've all read his opinionated guide on how to be a hacker. But I had never heard or used any of his listed tools: reposurgeon, deheader, coverity-submit, irkerd, doclifter, and cvs-fast-export. Also, it's not clear if he wrote those or maintains them. I'm sure the GPS and gif libraries he maintains are important, but I wasn't personally familiar with them.
My point is: what is Eric S. Raymond doing these days, other than maintaining a few interesting repos? And why do we owe him a living?
A: Like with most of these programs, a few large organizations like google and microsoft stand to make a lot more money, but the people at the heart of the problem (the actual maintainers) stand to lose.
AT the bare minimum, even doing it yourself, it costs more money to create a company and apply for 501C3 status than the paltry sums of money most projects receive in donations.
For that matter, what liabilities are we talking about here? Hosting a website? Maybe i am just naive, but what else is there?
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