Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Open Source

Should Maintainers of Open Source Projects Be Paid? (techrepublic.com) 121

Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS, writes "Over the last few weeks I've interviewed a range of open source project maintainers, most of which don't directly get paid for supporting their projects... Is this a bad thing?" It's not completely clear. Linux Foundation executive Chris Aniszczyk has been an outspoken opponent of open source "tip jars" that seek to sustain projects with donations. "These [open source developers] should be encouraged to start businesses or your business should hire them directly," he argues. But many such developers don't want a 9-to-5 corporate job, preferring the independence of contract work. Open source sustainability, in other words, is messy. Most open source project maintainers with whom I've spoken got started because it was a "fun" way to spend their free time. They had a variety of personal "itches" they needed to scratch. Exactly none started coding because they were hoping to get paid for that work.

In fact, in some cases, it was specifically to create space from their employer that they started the project. For Datasette founder Simon Willison, for example, he "wanted a creative outlet." That is, a project that he got to have complete control over. In some ways, he said, it was perhaps "a way of blowing off steam," but really it was a place where he could express his creativity without a corporate overlord steering that creativity. See the problem...?

Aniszczyk reasonably suggests that the most sustainable source of funding is a paycheck, but that's precisely what many of these developers don't want. Or, at least, they don't want a paycheck that comes with restrictions on their ability to code freely... [O]pen source sustainability will never have one, meta answer for all of open source. It's always a project-by-project analysis and, really, a founder-by-founder (or community-by-community) decision.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Should Maintainers of Open Source Projects Be Paid?

Comments Filter:
  • By whom? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bringonthenight ( 6914282 ) on Sunday May 31, 2020 @07:08AM (#60127826)
    By whom should they be paid?
    • Re:By whom? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday May 31, 2020 @09:29AM (#60128030) Journal

      By whom should they be paid?

      By the people that use it to do business. And that's "should" in the sense that if you rely on something it's a dumbass idea not to support it in some way.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Simply put a price on your code. You want to get paid? Sell it. If your code is worth selling, it will be bought.

        • They are paid. Open source means people will use your code and some will modify it, if you use the code, you can voluntarily donate to the project. Almost all open source projects are donation-supported. You want to force everyone to pay? The write closed-source code and only release the software or code once someone has paid. That's not open source anymore. There are licensing models to support however you want to receive payments and by whom for your software. We don't need more licensing paradigms.
        • Would you mind actually reading my post and responding to what I wrote not generic comments on the topic.

          Whatever the oss devs did, it's not sound business to rely on something that you don't even pay lip service towards making sure it's stays working. Companies should support OSS because its business critical and it's much much cheaper to fling a few bucks at it than employ a full time dev to understand and work on the code.

      • If it mattered that much we'd have people on staff work on it, and share the work if we really have to.

        This isn't even the right question, it's like asking if you watch a free YouTube video, should the people in the credits be paid?

        Who is that even aimed at? Getting paid for their labor or not is their business, using the results of their labor is mine. There is no relationship between us. Asking this question after the fact is pointless, so maybe the better question is, if I rely on it, is this relation

      • By the people that use it to do business. And that's "should" in the sense that if you rely on something it's a dumbass idea not to support it in some way.

        It is open source, remember? Once I have the source, I don't need you to maintain it because I can hire someone to support it if I need someone to support it.

        • It is open source, remember? Once I have the source, I don't need you to maintain it because I can hire someone to support it if I need someone to support it.

          Sure you can, but do you have the budget to do that, versus a small sponsorship?

  • by johannesg ( 664142 ) on Sunday May 31, 2020 @07:09AM (#60127834)

    If a business derives very great value from open source software, doing something in return would not be a bad thing. Doing so strengthens a 'supplier' they rely on, after all. You could consider it a public service, or responsible maintenance.

    For example, the Qt company is not doing so well. One of their customers is Tesla, who has apparently never paid a cent to Qt. While that's a perfectly valid choice, it may lead to a situation where the Qt company closes and Tesla is left with a much more uncertain (and much more expensive) situation. A tiny bit of investment may avert that risk.

    How to organize such a thing is less clear. Qt has a company behind it, but lacking that, how should a potential paying customer spend its money wisely to ensure further growth of the infrastructure it relies on? It's easy to get this wrong, and see contributors disappear because they are not being paid while others are.

    • If a business derives very great value from open source software, doing something in return would not be a bad thing. Doing so strengthens a 'supplier' they rely on, after all. You could consider it a public service, or responsible maintenance.

      For example, the Qt company is not doing so well.

      Are you sure? Their stock price has been shooting up, as has their revenue [nasdaqomxnordic.com].

      I don't think they're on track to become a Microsoft or Google, but building a small to medium business around a successful open source project does seem to be a viable business model.

      You don't get a fraction of the in-person revenue, but you get an enthusiastic user base that will actually promote you, write documentation, tutorials, and even code for you.

    • How to organize such a thing is less clear. Qt has a company behind it, but lacking that, how should a potential paying customer spend its money wisely to ensure further growth of the infrastructure it relies on? It's easy to get this wrong, and see contributors disappear because they are not being paid while others are.

      The most common approach is to hire the primary contributors. The individual engineers, I mean.

  • If the project is actually valuable, the person maintaining the project should have no trouble convincing people with money to pay them for their work. If they can't demonstrate why they should be financially supported for the time they choose to put in to it, then call it the hobby it is.
    • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      If the project is actually valuable, the person maintaining the project should have no trouble convincing people with money to pay them for their work.

      Even if something is valuable to a business it is in the interest of the business for other businesses to pay the developers money where at all possible.

      Even if something is valuable to a business the business may not understand that it is being used or what the actual value is.

      Even if something is valuable to a business such payments may be cut to reduce costs

      Where a project does not have a sales arm of sorts to convince businesses to pay, relatively few will pay and hope or assume others will pay, and on

  • by Pimpy ( 143938 ) on Sunday May 31, 2020 @07:17AM (#60127840)

    In general, a good maintainer is one that is able to remain objective and focus on the quality of whatever it is that they are maintaining. When you suddenly go from having full autonomy in decision making to a corporate role, this can be hard to continue. With contract work this is a bit easier, as you can pick and choose what to take on, and you're better positioned to maintain an overall balance without the project being derailed by a prevailing corporate interest. Every company that hires a maintainer seems to think they'll have no problems allowing them to continue to do things they way they like, but the reality is often different. There will eventually be scenarios where a contribution by another part of the company is rejected or asked to be reworked which may cause schedule slippage or put deadlines at risk and it becomes attractive to apply top-down pressure. The role of the maintainer is a largely thankless task where one has to spend a great deal amount of time saying 'no' to things - this doesn't mesh well in a financial relationship where there is a 'yes' expectation. There are certainly cases where it can be made to work, but these aspects need to really be thought out well in advance and reflected contractually to ensure that both sides understand the caveats going in and that there is ultimately no bad blood.

  • Paid by whom? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by misnohmer ( 1636461 ) on Sunday May 31, 2020 @07:37AM (#60127858)

    The OP doesn't say who should be paying those maintainers. The post does go to say they should get paid do to whatever they want (no ties to any deliverables or having any restrictions), so I'm curious, who wants to fund such free spirits?

    • Re:Paid by whom? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ruszki ( 1407845 ) on Sunday May 31, 2020 @07:51AM (#60127866)
      universal basic income
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by misnohmer ( 1636461 )

        Ah, yes. THE dreamy idea for which only the benefits are talked about (and studied!), leaving how to pay for it completely unaddressed. I thinks the majority of people would agree that a society where nobody has to work to be able to live at some mutually agreed standard of living would be just amazing and the greatest thing since sliced bread. The elephant in the room, as always, is what that standard of living should be (and therefore how much is would cost) and who should pay for it (and no, "the governm

        • Re: Paid by whom? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by zmooc ( 33175 ) <zmooc@zmo o c . n et> on Sunday May 31, 2020 @08:58AM (#60127974) Homepage

          While it's true that the financing aspect is never addressed, there's actually a relatively easy and sustainable answer to that, and it is to treat the people as shareholders of the Earth, paying them dividend from the use of the planet and its resources, which are now given away practically for free. Such a construct would also be a perfect instrument for reducing our footprint to something sustainable and to reduce income inequality. Alaska and Norway already have a very basic system like this in place with the Alaska Permanent Fund and the Government Pension Fund. Marshall Brain's rather awkward but otherwise very interesting parable "Manna" is also based on this approach and its best known alternative, which is not far from slavery.

          • You would need a colossal bureaucracy for that, which is prone to all shades of, let's be nice, quid pro quo behavior. That's one of the problems of all such schemes imposed from the above. And the reason current versions of capitalism, based at least nominally on individual behavior, from the ground up, are quite stable while considered by most people as quite acceptable.
            • by zmooc ( 33175 )

              We already have exactly that bureaucracy in place in almost all countries. The total size of the bureaucracy could actually be much smaller than it is now if using such a scheme.

          • by ahodgson ( 74077 )

            The earth isn't worth a nickel without someone's labour to turn it into wealth.

            You can't give someone a right to someone else's labour without making them your slave.

            UBI is BS.

        • by dvice ( 6309704 )

          > UBI ... leaving how to pay for it completely unaddressed

          OK, I will try.
          - Lets say a government automatizes food production, distribution and sales and makes food selling a monopoly.
          - Each resident is given 100 tokens every day.
          - Food costs 100 tokens per day.
          - Now everyone gets food, and money circulates around the system.

          Obviously when you think it like this, the money becomes irrelevant. Why not just give free food to the people, which would be Universal Basic Service, or UBS for short. I think this

          • > At some point, you will notice that UBI has negative effects. Then you revert back one dollar and there you have the sweet spot of UBI.

            Sounds good. At the $1 level, it costs about three dollars to process each of the $1 payments. So it's a negative on society. So per your formula we reduce it by $1, one dollar less than $1, so we set it at zero. There ya go. :)

            • by Sigma 7 ( 266129 )

              That "gotcha" is almost the same as a "horror movie jump scare" that moves at a glacial speed of 6 inches per century, in addition to being predictably choreographed.

              At the $1/month level, the government can wait 12 months and send out $12/year, or even slip it in as a refundable tax credit and not require duplicate paperwork for something that's already being done once per year, and thus overlapping the processing cost with something else that gets processed.

              Not to mention that there's already a $1/month t

            • by Kjella ( 173770 )

              Sounds good. At the $1 level, it costs about three dollars to process each of the $1 payments. So it's a negative on society. So per your formula we reduce it by $1, one dollar less than $1, so we set it at zero. There ya go. :)

              Sounds like your banking system could use an upgrade. Here in Norway no-frills debit transactions (BankAxept) cost $0.012 in bulk (>50 mio transactions/year). With no risk of disputes or anything like that 365 deposits/year should be no problem for a 21st century bank. You should compare it to the high frequency trading in the stock market...

              • Yes, unfortunately the US government isn't particularly efficient. And they mail out a lot payments, as in inside a paper envelope, rather than using electronic transfers.

          • - Now everyone gets food, and money circulates around the system.

            Obviously when you think it like this, the money becomes irrelevant.

            You don't know people, sorry. Some will do anything for your tokens just so they can have more. Mothers will fuck you so their kids gets more food than yours. Fathers will gamble it in hope to make more, they get addicted and waste it on drugs, or they're the ones who sell you the drugs. Kids will punch other kids just to take away their tokens at school... People always find more uses for money (or tokens) than it is actually good for. This is why we have rich and poor people in the first place.

          • It's been tried [wikipedia.org].
        • Ah, yes. THE dreamy idea for which only the benefits are talked about (and studied!), leaving how to pay for it completely unaddressed.

          I guess there is a great misconception at the root of this. It is not about paying everyone. It's about defining a minimum for when we pay somebody and, more importantly, if we can pay somebody.

          As a consequence will some no longer get paid, while others will get paid a minimum. This is important to realise. It may seem worse, but it's actually better this way. Because when for instance we pay two people not enough will both starve eventually. But when we pay one, and not the other, does at least one not hav

          • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
            I'm not sure what you are describing, but it's not UBI.
            • I'm not sure what you are describing, but it's not UBI.

              There are plenty of bad descriptions for UBI by people who don't understand it.

              • by sfcat ( 872532 )

                I'm not sure what you are describing, but it's not UBI.

                There are plenty of bad descriptions for UBI by people who don't understand it.

                Sure, like the one at the top of this thread that somehow envisions replacing the dollar with tokens. UBI is just what it says. Universal Basic Income, so welfare for all. Its just enough to have food and maybe very cheap rent. Its trying to take the first level of the hierarchy of needs off the table in capitalism. And while robber barons won't like it because employees wouldn't have to be so subservient at the bottom level, not much would change for those above the lowest rung. Politicians, on the

                • Universal Basic Income, so welfare for all.

                  No, it's not. Income is not the same as welfare. Some governments may create a connection between their welfare system and a minimum income, i.e. not to pay more welfare than the minimum income, but they will also have rules on who is entitled to welfare. You'll still be able to fall through a welfare system when you fail the rules. Someone who can work, chooses not to, doesn't seek work nor is sick, will fall through the welfare system here in the UK simply because they deliberately choose poverty. UBI wil

                  • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

                    I know that some people want to see UBI as a "money for everyone", but this is not what UBI is

                    No, it's exactly what it is, hence the use of the work universal.

        • by Sigma 7 ( 266129 )

          Ah, yes. THE dreamy idea for which only the benefits are talked about (and studied!), leaving how to pay for it completely unaddressed.

          If you take money out of the picture (e.g. Star Trek's futuristic society, or perhaps one where humans die out leaving sapient robots behind), how much money will it cost to provide resources to everyone?

          You'll notice that if you completely ignore money, there's already infrastructure in place to do that. The only difference is that some food is getting thrown away because i

          • I'm sorry, but that is so incredibly naive.

            Let's start with the 0.01% "rich" paying for everyone. World's 15 richest people have a total combined net worth of 940 billion. Let's say we taxed them all 100% of their net worth, definitely something they would notice, and ignoring the fact that we'd liquidate all their businesses to do that, so lots of business would close and people would lose jobs, but let's say we did that. Dividing the entire wealth of the world's richest 15 people by 7.8B people in the wor

      • The article is demonstrating how giving shit away for free is not sustainable.

        • The article is demonstrating how giving shit away for free is not sustainable.

          Slashdot is giving you news for free. How's that for free shit?

  • Betteridge saw to that.

  • by Joe2020 ( 6760092 ) on Sunday May 31, 2020 @07:58AM (#60127878)

    We worship money and idolise it far too much up to a point where some want to make it a sin when not all work isn't rewarded with money. We will end up valuing money more than anything. Let's continue to pay them with respect, gratitude and kindness, because these things are not easy to come by. When we continue on a narrow mindset might we one day end up paying our parents and grandparents with money and no longer with love. What a silly world that would be. Maintainers who cannot continue need to let go so other volunteers can step up. The moment we pay with money will some start making demands, withhold their money, use it to exert power and we will lose the freedom that comes with open source. Let's not close this door.

  • by quonset ( 4839537 )

    Information wants to be free. Let that free stuff come out. No need to handicap it with money.

  • A pretty fair chunk of open source is developed by large corporations that use it in house and contribute back to the community to see what they can do with it. Hereâ(TM)s an article that nicely demonstrates my point by sheer volume. They need to maintain the code in house for their own use and then contribute the updates to open source distributions.

    https://www.infoworld.com/arti... [infoworld.com]

    There are pragmatic reasons I have seen used do justify this to corporate bean counters. You get free labor on your core

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      I feel like the way they came up with those numbers (using profile information) isn't valid either, if someone contributes to open source in their spare time it shouldn't be attributed to their employer.
      • Sure, if they did it in their spare time. My point was that a significant amount of open source is effectively corporate funded by people who are doing that work for their day job anyways. They have come to an arrangement where a portion of their work is allowed to be exported as open source.

    • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
      Yes, this is very common, and very often beneficial.
  • ... should not have to work for a living, meaning working for someone else, beside that.

    Then again, nobody should, regardless of what they do or don't do.

  • by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Sunday May 31, 2020 @09:06AM (#60127982)

    I've noticed a huge influx of the 'tip jars' or open hands when it comes to node.js "things". (As a thousand warnings scroll by about deprecation).

    I've also never seen the FreeBSD developers put out a hand. They all seem to be gainfully employed by someone that makes money from FreeBSD: iXSystems, Juniper, etc.

    It's also why I make sure all of my stuff is MIT/BSD licensed. There's a non-zero chance some of my libraries gets picked up by someone that wants to use it in something bigger. You're welcome to do whatever you want, but if you get stuck I know the guy that wrote it, give me a call. It also doesn't scare them away from using it since it won't taint their entire project with the GPL. No need to resort to some weird GPL minus SaaS exception.

    • It's also why I make sure all of my stuff is MIT/BSD licensed.... It also doesn't scare them away from using it since it won't taint their entire project with the GPL.

      For me, that's precisely why I use the GPL. If I'm spending my free time to write OSS,* then I want the ability to look at (and possibly use) your code too. I've learned a lot over the years by reading other people's code ("Hmm, how does that work?"). Don't want to make your code OSS? Fine, but then you can't use mine either. (Yes, I realize

      • GPL-ers think that companies keep secret a lot more than they do. It's mainly just secret sauce and added value. IBM, Intel, Juniper, iXSystems all drive FreeBSD development.

        If you look at most of the biggest/most useful libraries for Python and other languages the heavy lifters are all BSD/MIT/Apache (or similar): Numpy, Scipy, sklearn, Plotly, matplotlib, Tensorflow. Because of their use as building blocks in larger tooling I feel the non-GPL is important.

        I have occasionally found an edge case where I kn

  • I've been an OSS developer for decades, originally participating in FreeBSD and apache work. The model, as it is now, is a naive hippie pipe dream.

    I think the OSS license should absolutely allow for an income stream back into the project from any company using the tool as a principle part of their own stack, in a manner that creates positive income. A portion of that income should go back into the project.

    • I think the OSS license should absolutely allow for an income stream back into the project from any company using the tool as a principle part of their own stack...

      Nothing in any OSS license I have ever read forbids income for the developers from those who use the software. There is no reason an OSS license needs to address money at all. Developers and users are free to agree to any separate contract for payment outside the scope of the OSS.

      • by Tora ( 65882 )

        sorry, no. Adding limitations on use requiring payment actually makes most "OSS" licenses no longer count as OSS.

        So while you can do it, there are the OSS virtue police who start crying foul, and in some licenses, it is in conflict with its base clauses. Free for all unlimited use, as in limitations aren't allowed.

        That is why I worded it as "they should ALLOW for this" -- not everybody MUST do it, but it should be allowed for.

        Especially when it comes to Intellectual Property -- right now it's gray and vag

        • by Luthair ( 847766 )

          There are plenty of models that work:

          • * paid support
          • * paid feature development
          • * commercial product built on top of them
        • Adding limitations on use requiring payment actually makes most "OSS" licenses no longer count as OSS.

          That's not what I wrote. Again, a separate contract ("dual license") can be negotiated. I've done it.

        • by nuggz ( 69912 )

          sorry, no. Adding limitations on use requiring payment actually makes most "OSS" licenses no longer count as OSS.

          So while you can do it, there are the OSS virtue police who start crying foul, and in some licenses, it is in conflict with its base clauses. Free for all unlimited use, as in limitations aren't allowed.

          That is why I worded it as "they should ALLOW for this" -- not everybody MUST do it, but it should be allowed for.

          Especially when it comes to Intellectual Property -- right now it's gray and vague, but if you don't exclude IP from the licensing it's likely you are just giving away any IP along with the software -- really difficult if you want to leverage a patent.

          Make another contract.
          "I will work on project X, you will pay me X, changes will be released under that OSS license"

          Also, there is nothing stopping you from going, see which developers you value, and paying them.

  • by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Sunday May 31, 2020 @09:38AM (#60128052) Journal

    I mean, this isn't complicated.

    If you believe theoretically "they should be paid" then go right ahead. Use your money and pay them.

    Or are you asserting "someone else" should pay them?

  • Really nothing else to say. For better or worse, we are treated (and treat others and things) according to their monetary worth because that is the only common standard. By that measure, a volunteer is worth nothing and if you doubt it look how you treat volunteers and low wage workers like retail staff, call center employees, or Salvation Army volunteers.

    If it's open source and useful then maybe there should be a cost proportional to the benefit. A corporation reaps huge profits so a % goes to the proje

    • by mark-t ( 151149 )

      For better or worse, we are treated (and treat others and things) according to their monetary worth because that is the only common standard. By that measure, a volunteer is worth nothing and if you doubt it look how you treat volunteers...

      This is either false or at best a logical fallacy. An organization might value its volunteers very highly. But if you say that how much they are paid is the only measurement of how much they are valued, then you are begging the question, because you are suggesting th

      • by Pizza ( 87623 )

        > An organization might value its volunteers very highly. But if you say that how much they are paid is the only measurement of how much they are valued, then you are begging the question, because you are suggesting that their monetary worth is defined by how they are treated while how they are treated is still defined by their monetary worth.

        Money is the _only_ way businesses measure and demonstrate "value". Thinking otherwise is, at best, highly naive.

      • Here let me help you with that

        For better or worse, we are treated (and treat others and things) according to their monetary worth because that is the only common standard.

        This is the oversimplification fallacy, the straw man fallacy and is patently false. It is a straw man because rather than talking about the value of one's work, it talks about one's monetary worth. It is an oversimplification fallacy because it says a complex thing, how one is treated, is the product of a single factor, monetary work, and it is patently false because many people with low monetary worth are treated well for other reasons.

        If it's open source and useful then maybe there should be a cost proportional to the benefit. A corporation reaps huge profits so a % goes to the project. A start-up reaps next to no profit and pays proportionally. A hobbyist reaps no profit and so pays nothing.

        Here, the OP is suggesting that there sh

  • There is no such thing as a free lunch. If someone else is paying, then they have some level of control and could stop paying.

    It's honestly a stupid question. Open source maintainers, like anyone else, should be paid for their work if they find other parties who see value in paying and are voluntarily willing to trade money in exchange for whatever they mutually agree will be provided. There are many ways this can happen and not happen.

  • Please do not say "Free Software Does Not Grows On Trees", it sounds like my grandpa talking. I think that the idea of open source and free software is not to pay for the software, but to pay for the time of the developer supporting it. When people start thinking how to make an OSS maintainable they quickly go by the easy way, to close source future version of the software and charge for a license, that can be shortsighted since their plan can fall back.

    The complex thing is to turn into services, since s
  • In my experience, companies that benefit from open source software usually have a few people dedicated to that project. This is a selling point for the company along with allowing them to add to or improve on functionality beneficial to them. As far as individual contributors, we contribute to make our lives easier along with anyone else using the software. Unlike microsoft, I can simply fix a bug or something that just makes my job harder upstream. This is what makes open source great.

    On a side note,
  • A lot of maintainers working for large Linux-related companies ( RedHat, Suse, Intel, various OEMs, etc) and getting paid by them. Working as a maintainer is just a job function for them. The question is what provision should be made for other major maintainers not corporately 'sponsored'?
    Perhaps there should be a fund from corporates (that they don't get to direct) for non-employed maintainers to be paid from. Those maintainers get paid as long as they're contributing as determined by a consensus of oth

  • I have been doing OSS for 20 years. I prefer to just release stuff for the community. Many people in a specific well heeled industry use my tools professionally. Total donations to date 0. (I dont really ask but have in the past). Now? I have the next tool ready, but I am not releasing it. No incentive and I am just making my job competitors stronger with what I had to fight hard for. If you use a tool professionally and make money on it, you should donate to the author. Its the only way to have nice things
  • We have to be honest. Not all open source projects have the same value. An essential component like the Linux Kernel has no practical alternatives, while the next desktop music player app is at best forgettable. Having some sort of mechanism to sort out which project, and which contributor is paid how much is not an easy task.

    In the current model, we have direct patronage (PayPal, Patreon, etc) for small projects, service / support contract based models for medium sized projects that support one or few deve

  • Yes
  • How many times a year does /. ask if open source dev-s should be getting paid again? Every few months for sure and every time it's as retarded a question as it was all the previous times.

    Getting paid for anything implies an existence of a contract, you agree to do something in return for someone else agreeing to pay you for it. There is no contract involved in writing some open source code, you do it purely on your own initiative without asking for anyone's agreement. So no, nobody can expect to get paid f

  • If they wanted to be paid, they wouldn't be giving their work away for free.

Real Programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.

Working...