Notices by Phil Dennis-Jordan (pmdj@mstdn.social), page 2

@hikhvar @vaurora Even if you do have the expertise and are fully set up for self employment, I’ve also struggled to find clients who are willing to go for such a retainer model rather than a more direct payment for specific work on a feature/optimisation/etc. I mean the latter isn’t to be sniffed at, but it’s difficult to commit to e.g. signing up as a maintainer for a project subsystem when you’re only being paid for dev & upstreaming of a specific deliverable.

@hikhvar @vaurora Yup. And this trust is easiest to earn by just being paid for your time for deliverables. But then moving to a retainer model from THAT, once you’re trusted, requires going through legal & accounting and they don’t really understand why you suddenly want to change what is working fine from their point of view.
So I suspect the model really needs to be supported and encouraged centrally by The Project, who can advertise willing & trusted maintainers.

@hikhvar @vaurora Coming at it from the other side though, as a small business owner based in a country where donations are not deductible as a business expense: F/OSS projects who take donations really, really, REALLY, need to start offering some kind of low-cost billable service or product, even if fairly nominal, rather than just donations alone. You’re missing out on a whole bunch of cash.

@cks @hikhvar @vaurora Yup. I find it truly baffling how many projects only accept donations considering this is an issue for most organisations in much of the world. I’m guessing it’s pretty straightforward in the US to make donations and treat them as expenses, otherwise it makes no sense how we ended up with asking for donations being so popular.

@danyowdee @arroz I suspect this may too be different if driving in/around Cupertino. Designed in California… for wealthy Californians.
Last I checked CarPlay/Siri still couldn’t deal with messages in languages other than the system UI language, etc.

@neil We’ve used this scheme a handful of times, mostly for replacing batteries in phones and tablets so far. They’ve also managed to avoid making it a bureaucratic nightmare, at least for consumers. No idea how it works precisely for service providers, but it sounds like they’re happy too.

@feld @encthenet @bitcoaxer Yeah, we’ll see how battery-powered shorthaul flights vs train journeys shakes out. (Obviously geography and political climate will play a huge role there…) Longhaul is the one where planes are very hard to replace and energy density becomes paramount. Longhaul flights on jet planes already spend a significant proportion of their fuel on… transporting the fuel.

@feld @encthenet @bitcoaxer For almost anything but aviation/aerospace, batteries have an acceptable power density; combined with an electric drive train, they’re more efficient than ICEs, jet engines, fuel cells, etc. Their current incarnation certainly has its share of problems, but nowhere near the issues H2 gets you.
For aviation, we’ll see. I suspect synthetic hydrocarbons are more likely than H2 there; but batteries might get good enough too

@feld @encthenet @bitcoaxer I don’t think those are near the top 3 problems.
1. It takes a colossal amount of electricity to split water molecules. Unless there’s >100% renewables supply, you’re causing an increase in fossil fuel consumption to source it. At best true at a small/local scale during peak production.
2. H2 is a pain to store and transport.
2a. Molecules are so tiny they escape.
2b. Extremely volatile.
2c. Needs to be pressurised.