In the OpenSource Supply Chain discourse in the past few years, we got many versions of the same article. The title is usually something like “unpaid maintainer of library X demand Big Company to shut up or pay them money”. There are variations on that theme, like Github Sponsors launching, pieces that explains how the CRA will magically make companies pay maintainers, etc. It is usually cheered on by the peanuts gallery, which applaud making the Evil Big Tech pays for the abuse they impose over their “exploitation of the Commons”.

Funnily enough, it seems no-one sat down to ask if this could help the maintainers or not. And if it was solving a problem. Everyone seem convinced that there is a problem, and that this lack of money transfer is the root of it. On my previous post, How FOSS Won and Why It Matters, I pointed out that forcing this kind of Commercial Supply Chain relationship on FOSS would make it unusable for corporations.

But I did not talk of the other side of the equation. Would it help maintainers? And why are hobbyist maintainers not trying to get this kind of relationship going. After all, it works for some people. Let’s try to tackle it in this blogpost. Spoiler alert, the amounts of money are not large and stable enough to make it a viable endeavour.

The Income Level Needed

What I am going to talk about here is pretty “spherical cow”. We are going to build a relatively average profile of a software engineer. It means it will represent no-one well. The cost of living in your country, disabilities, personal situations, average income, and more will vary from maintainer to maintainer. But this “spherical cow” engineer profile will still be useful for our model here.

So let’s assume someone in NA or Western Europe, with a family, and an income of something like 5k USD-or-equivalent monthly income post-tax. Taking into consideration the cost of a family, a car, housing, food, and the rest, they probably have some leftover money, but not that much. There is some wiggle room if their partner work, but we will still consider “5k per month” as our income level goal.

This is both low and high. From a “crowdsourced donation” point of view, this would be a highly successful project, probably in the top 1% of project using this kind of model. If not the 0.1%. And that is for a single maintainer. So we can put it in the bucket of “possible in theory, but need a lot of work, risky, and unrealistic”. So we can forget this model as a way to get the hobby out of the hobbyist maintainer with this model.

From a “get a stipend or funding by a government or charity” point of view, things get more complex. A lot of charity, foundations or government stipends would not cover that much. There are understandable reasons for it, which we will explore later. But it could still go in a bucket we will call “could work in combination with other part time income stream”. More about that in a bit.

But there are also stipends that do reach this income level. Sounds good right ? Except they tend to be limited in time, from 6 months to a year. And they tend to be for specific project implementing a feature or something comparable. Let’s keep this for last, because it is the more complex one.

The Time Problem

The biggest problem when trying to justify paying a full cost salary for hobbyist maintainers is that a full time salary is, in a lot of the World, considered to be something around 38 to 40 hours of work per week. The thing is, most hobbyist maintainer packages do not have enough work to do to justify that much time spent on it. As such, even if we could secure some income streams for this (which is dubious), these would probably be unstable. After all, it is easy to cut on spending if you feel that you are not getting enough bang for your bucks.

What about Part-Time then? You work for commercial software most of the week, but you spend your Fridays on FOSS. Seems like a cool gig, I would go for it… If Part-Time jobs existed in software engineering. I genuinely would offer you to try to get one. I have tried the past 5 years. Impossible. Part-Time jobs do not exist in software. The only way to make this kind of stuff work is through freelancing. Which brings us to the next problem.

Stable Income Is Not Negotiable

Well yeah, duh. Let’s start with the 6 months program of acceptable income, but for 6 to 12 months. If a maintainer want to go full time on these programs on his maintainership, it means they need to leave their, current, full time employment. And they know that after the program end, they will be out of income.

Except, that is not acceptable. Our maintainer has a mortgage or a rent to pay, a loan on the family car, and other fixed costs. If the program end, they will still need a stable income. So they would need to go on another grant or find a new full-time employment. Here is the thing. And you will not believe me, but please try.

Finding a new source of income as a software engineer take 6 months to a year of near full time work. When the market is looking good. And lately it does not look good at all. My friends are regularly searching for 2 years. And you may not believe me on the near full time part, but let me tell you. Software hiring is a effed up process, which demand massive homework and learning for no good reasons and is grueling on the mind.

Now, let’s go back to the 6 months grant. Well. I leave a FTE job for a 6 months grant, which I will need to spend finding a new FTE because I need income after the 6 months. I am not sure that grant helped me maintain my package. Even if it is 12 months, 6 months in I need to be switch to searching for a job if I have nothing yet. Because I cannot afford to not have income after that grant ends.

And freelancing is comparable. If I want to leave my current FTE for freelancing, I need to already have clients onboard. And I will spend a lot of my hours doing marketing, client management, and all that stuff, because I cannot afford to go without income. Which means the time I have left to do my maintainership is not going to be that large. When I do freelancing, I usually consider that only half of my workweek is done in software engineering. The rest is client management and prospecting. Not really efficient way to get out of the “Hobbyist” situation.

Aside: The Paid Feature Implementation Trap

A few org will pay a fixed grant to implement a specific feature. This can be a large grant over many years. Sounds good, right? Except there is a small catch. In order to get that, you need to provide a compelling case of what the feature will be, what it will achieve and why you have a high chance of getting it to work.

Seems great, we don’t want to spend our money on frivolous thing after all! Except building that kind of case demands a lot of work and research, usually over many years of building expertise, testing prototypes and maybe a mock implementation. Then you need to write the whole grant demand, which is also time consuming.

And that is time that will not be compensated and that usually hobbyists maintainers do not have. One of the shared characteristic of hobbyists maintainers, that we observe again and again, is that they are heavily ressource, in particuler time, constrained. Asking them for a massive time investment to maybe get a grant that will barely cover their living expenses is not a realistic solution. They will not apply. They can’t afford it.

So What? We Cannot Pay You?

Yeah, you can’t. Being a Full Time Software Engineer combined with a Hobbyist Maintainer put you into an economic gravity well. In theory, you can get out. But it takes a lot of energy, a lot of work, and a lot of luck. You could design a program to help these maintainers get out of that situation, but it would be hard with current funding source. And at any point it could fail and they would fall back at the bottom of the gravity well.

You would need something like a 3 years program, at silicon valley level of yearly income, with you as the program management doing all the work of vetting the potential recipient, with no demand placed on the recipient. There are a few people doing things comparable in other charity areas. McKenzie Scott comes to mind.

But she is definitely an exception. And this is why being a hobbyist maintainer is an economic gravity well. You can get out of it, being with help or by yourself. But it takes a lot of effort, energy and risks. And you probably are going to end up back at the bottom anyway. Please keep this in mind when you offer “solutions” to the hobbyist maintainer problem.