[Pandas-dev] Tidelift

Tue Jun 11 09:32:40 EDT 2019

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.

>
>> - 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).
>

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
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>>>>
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>>
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