[Pandas-dev] Tidelift

Tue Jun 11 12:18:19 EDT 2019

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 4:56 PM Andy Ray Terrel <andy.terrel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>

+1 the project decides for themselves is the intent and a good principle.

> 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.
>

Keep in mind that this has a lot of potential issues. Examples:
1. Who decides who gets paid, and how? The pandas repo has 1500+
contributors. Lots of potential for friction over small amount of $.
2. Many people have employment contracts, those typically forbid
contracting on the side. So inherently unfair to distribute only to those
who are in a position to accept the money.
3. You're now introducing lots of extra paperwork and admin, both directly
and indirectly (who wants to deal with the extra complications when filing
your taxes?).
4. It may create other weird social dynamics. E.g. if money is now directly
coupled to a commit bit, that makes the "who do we give commit rights and
when" a potentially more loaded question.

And, dividing it into N chunks, the funding becomes nice beer money and a
thank you for volunteering. Could be exactly what you'd prefer as a team.
But that's imho more in line with the current version of Patreon or GitHub
Sponsors rather then with what Tidelift is aiming for.

I'd like the idea of "paying for maintenance" if there were enough money to
employ people. But realistically, that will take many years. The Tidelift
slogan on this is unrealistic for a project like Pandas where maintenance
effort is many FTEs; it's perhaps feasible for your typical Javascript
library that's popular but small enough for one person maintaining it
part-time.

> 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)
>>
>
Actually that's only partially true. Tidelift is paying for very specific
things, that allow them to do aggregated reporting on licensing,
dependencies, security vulnerabilities, release streams & release docs,
etc. - basically the stuff that helps large corporations do due diligence
and management of a large software stack.

It is explicitly out of scope to work on bugs or enhancements in the
NumFOCUS-Tidelift agreement (and working on particular technical items was
never their intention). So "insurance against defects" isn't part of this,
except in a very abstract sense of making the project healthier and
therefore reducing the risk of it being abandoned or a lot more buggy on
the many-year time scale.

Cheers,
Ralf

> 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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>> > >>>>> Pandas-dev at python.org
>> > >>>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pandas-dev
>> > >>>>
>> > >>>>
>> > >>>> _______________________________________________
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>> > >>
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