[Pandas-dev] Tidelift

[Ralf Gommers]

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 7:51 PM Wes McKinney <wesmckinn at gmail.com> wrote:

> hi,
>
> On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 11:16 AM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > 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 $.
>
> More or less the _entire_ point of Tidelift is to incentivize people
> to do more maintenance work. I think it's worth at least attempting to
> use this money for its intended economic purpose.
>

You do realize that the other topics I suggested using money for are also
maintenance work right? Even if your sole goal is "get more maintenance
work done", spending funds with purpose is likely to be more effective than
just putting it in your own pockets.


> The maintainers are, as a first approximation, the ~10-15 active core
> members listed on
>
> https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas-governance
>
> IMHO those are the people that should get paid (going forward) -- if
> contributors are more motivated to become core team members /
> maintainers as a result of the Tidelift money, then it has had the
> desired outcome.
>
> > 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.
>
> This is true -- at least Jeff and maybe others fall into this
> category. In such cases their "cut" of the maintenance funds can go
> into the communal fund to pay for other stuff
>

That does not really seem fair. There must be better options. E.g. for
anyone in such a position, you could use the money to pay for travel and
hotel if they go to a dev meeting or conference. People can't accept money
as income in many cases, but everyone is usually able to get cost
reimbursements or accept a free ticket. And you don't have to pay income
tax over that, so the $ goes a lot further.


> > 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?).
>
> Hopefully we're talking just a 1099 from NumFOCUS with a single number
> to type in, but I'm the wrong person to judge since my taxes are more
> complicated than most people's =)
>

There's a lot more to it than typing in a single number if you go, e.g.,
from 1 to 2 sources of income. Also, NumFOCUS won't be able to give any
kind of paperwork for people outside the US. It'll all be up to them to do
correct tax reporting/withholding.

---

tl;dr this is a complicated topic, it's worth thinking about and making
informed choices that maximize the benefits and minimize the costs rather
than a simple "just put it in your pockets".

Now I'm not a Pandas dev, I just helped with getting the original
NumFOCUS-Tidelift agreement in place and wanted to share my experiences
with Tidelift. So I'll bow out here.

Cheers,
Ralf



> > 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.
>
> I think this is where the honest self-reporting of time spent comes
> in. The goal is to increase the average number of maintainer hours per
> month/year. It's sort of like a crypto-mining pool, but for open
> source software maintenance =) Obviously maintainers are accountable
> to the rest of the core team to behave with integrity
> (professionalism, honesty, etc.) or they can be voted to be removed if
> they are found to be dishonest.
>
>
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