[Themaintainers] $1m to pay open source maintainers on Tidelift

[Lee Vinsel]

Thanks for sending this out, Camille!

Andy, I, and others have been talking a lot about issues related to this.
We believe that humans have a deep need for recognition, but ultimately
good feelings aren't enough, and real recognition must also involve
actually valuing the work in the sense of $$$$.

As David Edgerton and others have pointed out, Maintainers are sometimes
quite well paid, and if we can look back into the quickly retreating past
when there were strong unions in the USA, Maintainers were frequently union
leaders.

But we are also aware and interested in the many cases where Maintainers
aren't well rewarded today. Andy and I are really inspired by Stephanie
Hoopes and her United Way project called ALICE, which stands for Asset
Limited Income Constrained Employed and focuses on the working poor
<https://www.unitedwayalice.org/>. In some work we did with Stephanie, we
saw that there was a large overlap between ALICE households and what we
might call Maintainer occupations.

A final thought: we should also pay attention to the large amount of human
effort, like open source maintainer work, that falls largely outside of
traditional markets, including the kind of domestic labor examined in the
literature on social reproduction
<https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/social-reproduction-theory-ferguson/>.
This includes a lot of care work obviously. And on that front, I've been
inspired not only by Nancy Fraser's recent writings on care but also by Evelyn
Nakano Glenn's book, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America
<https://www.amazon.com/Forced-Care-Coercion-Caregiving-America/dp/0674064151>,
which does a great job especially with the gendered and racialized nature
of the topic.

Thanks again for the post and for continuing to take interest in
maintenance/Maintainers.

Lee

On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 8:50 PM Camille E. Acey <connect at camilleacey.com>
wrote:

> https://blog.tidelift.com/1m-to-pay-open-source-maintainers-on-tidelift
>
> "How can we ensure that the open source software we rely on continues to
> get even more awesome and more dependable?
>
> At Tidelift, we believe the solution is hiding in plain sight: pay the
> maintainers."
>
>
> Camille E. Acey
>
> "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and
> that is an act of political warfare." - Audre Lorde
> _______________________________________________
> Themaintainers mailing list
> Themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
> https://lists.stevens.edu/mailman/listinfo/themaintainers
>


-- 
Assistant Professor
Department of Science, Technology, and Society
Virginia Tech
leevinsel.com
Twitter: @STS_News
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