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Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 04:04:35 JST Simon Willison
in reply to

My closing suggestion was to support open source projects you depend on by reaching out to their maintainers and offering to pay them money to speak to your team! Ask them for an hour over Zoom or similar.
Here's a clip with this idea in more detail
In conversation about a year ago from fedi.simonwillison.net permalink
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1. I want to bring it back to this idea of tackling this problem from two directions. As users of open source, what can we be doing to help push money towards the projects that we care about? I have a proposal for you: a little bit of a conspiracy we can all get in on here. What you should be doing is paying maintainers to speak to your team. Maintainers are very busy people. I don’t have time to do extensive hands-on consulting with people... but I can spare an hour out of my day to jump on a Zoom call. I’ve done a few of these now and they’re absolutely fantastic as a way of having a time-boxed commitment where I can earn some money doing something genuinely useful, talking to people about my projects and sharing my expertise. It’s also a great trick for end-users of the software because, as I hinted earlier, open source engineers are often great at writing code but not great at asking for money. With this model, you don’t need the contributors to ask! You can push money towards them instead. You can get in touch with the maintainers of the software you’re using and say: Hey, we’d love to know more about this. We will pay you to jump on the Zoom call with our team and answer questions and talk about what you’re doing. If you’ve got projects that you depend on and you want to support them, try this sneaky backhand way of funneling money there. Every company has a training budget. Companies are very bad at just giving money away, but they’re really good at hiring consultants.
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  Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 04:04:36 JST Simon Willison
  in reply to
  
  Open source maintainers are often good at writing code but not good at asking for money
  Companies aren't very good at giving money away, but they absolutely know how to hire consultants - and they often have a training budget set aside already
  Spend that money on maintainers!
  
  In conversation about a year ago permalink
  
  Paul Cantrell and GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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  Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 04:04:38 JST Simon Willison
  
  I presented a ten minute segment at GitHub Universe on Wednesday: **Financial sustainability for open source projects**.
  Here's the video, slides and annotated transcript: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Nov/10/universe/
  In conversation about a year ago permalink
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    Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe
    
    from @simonw
    
    I presented a ten minute segment at GitHub Universe on Wednesday, ambitiously titled Financial sustainability for open source projects. GitHub invited me to speak as a representative of the GitHub …
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