[Pandas-dev] Tidelift

Andy Ray Terrel andy.terrel at gmail.com
Tue Jun 11 10:56:04 EDT 2019 

While the original lifter agreement was an individual contract, in our
negotiations with Tidelift, NumFOCUS has explicitly sought a model that
allows the project to split the money how they prefer. This was always
Tidelift's intention, it was just faster and easier to scale to focus on
paying individuals.

I do like the idea of paying for maintence work, I would recommend we set
up folks as contractors with NumFOCUS rather than just pocketing money. It
will give a lot more legal protection. Then if some folks don't want to
take the cash you they can donate their time and be recognized as in-kind
donations, which might have some tax deductions.

It is something I would volunteer to help manage in order to learn how
other projects might use the same techniques.

-- Andy

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 9:13 AM Wes McKinney <wesmckinn at gmail.com> wrote:

> > How you allocate the money to each other is something you can debate
> privately
>
> On this, I'm sure that you could set up a lightweight virtual
> "timesheet" so you can put yourselves "on the clock" when you're doing
> project maintenance work (there are many of these online, I just read
> about https://www.clockspot.com/ recently) to make time reporting a
> bit more accurate
>
> On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 9:09 AM Wes McKinney <wesmckinn at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Personally, I would recommend putting most of the money in your own
> > pockets. The whole idea of Tidelift (as I understand it) is for the
> > individuals doing work that is of importance to project users (to whom
> > Tidelift is providing indemnification and "insurance" against defects)
> > to get paid for their labor. So I think the most honest way to use the
> > money is to put it in your respective bank accounts. If you've getting
> > a little bit of money to spend on yourself, doesn't that make doing
> > the maintenance work a bit less thankless? If you don't pay
> > yourselves, I think it actually "breaks" Tidelift's pitch to customers
> > which is that open source projects need to have a higher fraction of
> > compensated maintenance and support work than they do now.
> >
> > How you allocate the money to each other is something you can debate
> privately
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 8:42 AM Joris Van den Bossche
> > <jorisvandenbossche at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Op di 11 jun. 2019 om 15:31 schreef Ralf Gommers <
> ralf.gommers at gmail.com>:
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 3:03 PM Tom Augspurger <
> tom.augspurger88 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>> On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 7:58 AM William Ayd via Pandas-dev <
> pandas-dev at python.org> wrote:
> > >>>>
> > >>>> Just some counterpoints to consider:
> > >>>>
> > >>>> - $ 3,000 a month isn’t really that much, and if it’s just a number
> that a well-funded company chose for us chances are they are benefiting
> from it way more than we are
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> "it's not really that much" is something I don't agree with. It
> doesn't employ someone, but it's enough to pay for things like developer
> meetups, hiring an extra GSoC student if a good one happens to come along,
> paying a web dev for a full redesign of the project website, etc. Each of
> those things is in the $5,000 - %15,000 range, and it's _very_ nice to be
> able to do them without having to look for funding first.
> > >>
> > >> Tidelift is a small (now ~25 employees) company by the way, and they
> have a real understanding of the open source sustainability issues and seem
> dedicated to helping fix it.
> > >>
> > >>>> - There is no such thing as free money; we have to consider how to
> account for and actually manage it (perhaps mitigated somewhat by NumFocus)
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>> Perhaps Ralph can share how this has gone for NumPy. I imagine it's
> not too work on their end, thanks to NumFOCUS.
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> NumFOCUS handles receiving the money and associated admin. As the
> project you'll be responsible for the setup and ongoing tasks. For NumPy
> and SciPy I have done those tasks. It's a fairly minimal amount of work:
> https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pulls?q=is%3Apr+tidelift+is%3Aclosed. The
> main one was dealing with GitHub not recognizing our license, and you don't
> have that issue for Pandas (it's reported correctly as BSD-3 in the UI at
> https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas).
> > >>
> > >> So it's probably a day of work for one person, to get familiar with
> the interface, check dependencies, release streams, paste in release notes,
> etc. And then ongoing maybe one or a couple of hours a month. So far it's
> been a much more effective way of spending time than, for example, grant
> writing.
> > >>
> > >>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>> - Advertising and ties to a corporate sponsorship may weaken the
> brand of pandas; at that point we may lose some creditability as open
> source volunteers
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>> Anecdotally, I don't think that's how the community views Tidelift.
> My perception (from Twitter, blogs / comments) is that it's been well
> received.
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> Agree, the feedback I've seen is all quite positive.
> > >
> > >
> > > Additionally, I don't think there is any "advertisement" involved, at
> least not in the classical sense of adding adds for third-party companies
> in a side bar to our website for which we get money. Of course we will need
> to mention Tidelift in some way, e.g. in our sponsors / institutional
> partners section, but we already do that for some other companies as well
> (that employ core devs).
> > >
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>> - We don’t (AFAIK) have a plan on how to spend or allocate it
> > >>>>
> > >>>> Not totally against it but perhaps the last point above is the main
> sticking one. Do we have any idea how much we’d actually pocket out of the
> $ 3k they offer us and subsequently what we would do with it? Cover travel
> expenses? Support PyData conferences? Scholarships?
> > >>>
> > >>>
> > >>> Agreed that we should set a purpose for this money (though, I have
> no objection to collecting while we set that dedicated purpose).
> > >>
> > >>
> > > Indeed we need to discuss this, but I don't think we already need to
> know *exactly* what we want to do with it before setting up a contract with
> Tidelift. It's good for me to alraedy start discussing it now, but maybe in
> a separate thread?
> > >
> > >>
> > >> For NumPy and SciPy we haven't earmarked the funds yet. It's nice to
> build up a buffer first. One thing I'm thinking of is that we're
> participating in Google Season of Docs, and are getting more high quality
> applicants than Google will accept. So we could pay one or two tech writers
> from the funds. Our website and high level docs (tutorial, restructuring of
> all docs to guide users better) sure could use it:)
> > >>
> > >> My abstract advice would be: pay for things that require money (like
> a dev meeting) or don't get done for free. Don't pay for writing code
> unless the case is extremely compelling, because that'll be a drop in the
> bucket.
> > >>
> > >> Cheers,
> > >> Ralf
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>> - Will
> > >>>>
> > >>>> On Jun 11, 2019, at 4:44 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>> On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 10:15 AM Joris Van den Bossche <
> jorisvandenbossche at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>> The current page about pandas (
> https://tidelift.com/lifter/search/pypi/pandas) mentions $3,000 dollar a
> month (but I am not fully sure this is what is already available from their
> current subscribers, or if it is a prospect).
> > >>>>
> > >>>>
> > >>>> It's not just a prospect, that's what you should/will get. NumPy
> and SciPy get the listed amounts too.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> Agreed that the NumPy amount is not that much. The amount gets
> determined automatically; it's some combination of customer interest,
> dependency analysis and size of the API surface.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> The current amounts are:
> > >>>> NumPy: $1000
> > >>>> SciPy: $2500
> > >>>> Pandas: $3000
> > >>>> Matplotlib: n.a.
> > >>>> Scikit-learn: $1500
> > >>>> Scikit-image: $50
> > >>>> Statsmodels: $50
> > >>>>
> > >>>> So there's an element of randomness, but the results are not
> completely surprising I think. The four libraries that get order thousands
> of dollars are the ones that large corporations are going to have the
> highest interest in.
> > >>>>
> > >>>> Cheers,
> > >>>> Ralf
> > >>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>>
> > >>>>> Op za 8 jun. 2019 om 22:54 schreef William Ayd <
> william.ayd at icloud.com>:
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>> What is the minimum amount we are asking for? The $1,000 a month
> for NumPy seems rather low and I thought previous emails had something in
> the range of $3k a month.
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>> I don’t think we necessarily need or would be that much improved
> by $12k per year so would rather aim higher if we are going to do this
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>> On Jun 7, 2019, at 12:53 PM, Joris Van den Bossche <
> jorisvandenbossche at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>> Hi all,
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>> We discussed this on the last dev chat, but putting it on the
> mailing list for those who were not present: we are planning to contact
> Tidelift to enter into a sponsor agreement for Pandas.
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>> The idea is to follow what NumPy (and recently also Scipy) did to
> have an agreement between Tidelift and NumFOCUS instead of an individual
> maintainer (see their announcement mail:
> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2019-April/079370.html
> ).
> > >>>>>> Blog with overview about Tidelift:
> https://blog.tidelift.com/how-to-start-earning-money-for-your-open-source-project-with-tidelift
> .
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>> We didn't discuss yet what to do specifically with those funds,
> that should still be discussed in the future.
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>> Cheers,
> > >>>>>> Joris
> > >>>>>> _______________________________________________
> > >>>>>> Pandas-dev mailing list
> > >>>>>> Pandas-dev at python.org
> > >>>>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pandas-dev
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>>>
> > >>>>> _______________________________________________
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> > >>>>
> > >>>>
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> > >>
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