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

[Luis Villa]

(waves)

Hi! I'm one of the co-founders of Tidelift and a lurker on this list since
I first heard of it a year or two ago. Pleasant surprise for this to come
up here. (Camille, we're Clubhouse users at Tidelift- thanks!)

Lee, a lot of your links resonate with me: open source has traditionally
been terrible at admitting that financial security is key to long-term
sustainability, and also at acknowledging that non-code work (like
documentation, testing, etc.) is critical and important. And of course our
track record on diversity and inclusion is ... well, awful would be a good
start.

I'm happy to answer questions if folks are interested in our model.

Luis

On Sun, Sep 23, 2018 at 4:45 AM Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel at gmail.com> wrote:

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