[Pandas-dev] Tidelift

Tue Jun 11 21:34:06 EDT 2019

I

> One risk to be aware of is that if a high profile
> project like pandas take's TL's money and none of the maintainers pay
> themselves with it, then the monthly number may not have as much of a
> chance of increasing (since current or prospective TL customers may
> observe that the subscription dollars aren't being used in the way
> that is being pitched).

I actually see the exact opposite here. A project of pandas stature that
decides to better the project is a pretty respectable goal.

I believe we would be in the letter and more importantly the spirit of
Tidelift for the pandas project itself to take this burden & receive the
income. Having the project itself with the combined
force of multiple maintainers actually would be much more comforting (from
the customer's perspective), than a single maintainer (who may not always
be there).

Furthermore, we could use these funds for the combined benefit of the
project, mainly I think for gatherings like the upcoming sprints. I am not
sure many of you know, but pandas has not actively solicited *any* monies,
and only received 2 largish contributions over the years, which are the
majority of our current funds. The tidelift agreement looks to provide a
stream of income which we currently do not have. With an income stream we
have options; without we don't.

We can always decide to remunerate maintainers who contribute to this
effort, though, this should be a separate discussion.

Jeff

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 5:10 PM Wes McKinney <wesmckinn at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 2:26 PM Andy Ray Terrel <andy.terrel at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 12:51 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.
> >>
> >> 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.
> >
> >
> > I would suggest leaving the decision to the project core team with the
> project Numfocus committee to be the overseer of the implementation.
> >
>
> Yes, of course, that's the governance that we have in place. I am just
> stressing that we should try to honor the intent of the asset that is
> being purchased by Tidelift customers. Tidelift is telling their
> customers that the money they are paying is going to end up in the
> pockets of the project maintainers
>
> https://tidelift.com/about/lifter
>
> If the pandas core team wishes to deny themselves the income (which,
> divided up, isn't going to be a life-changing amount of money) that's
> their prerogative -- I just wanted to be clear about where I stand on
> it, and there's nothing immoral about wanting to be compensated for
> one's time (given how much volunteered time has already gone
> uncompensated). One risk to be aware of is that if a high profile
> project like pandas take's TL's money and none of the maintainers pay
> themselves with it, then the monthly number may not have as much of a
> chance of increasing (since current or prospective TL customers may
> observe that the subscription dollars aren't being used in the way
> that is being pitched).
>
> >>
> >>
> >> > 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
> >>
> >
> > Yes such accommodation will need to be worked out.
> >
> >>
> >> > 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 =)
> >
> >
> > Generally it is done that way for US based folks and for folks out of
> the US we tend to let them handle their own taxes. We would need to work
> that out.
> >
> > Additionally, as in all dealings with businesses, we do the extra
> paperwork for the other benefits such as limiting the liability of a
> maintainer.
> >
> >>
> >>
> >> > 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.
> >
> >
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > 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
> >> >>> > >>>>>>
> >> >>> > >>>>>>
> >> >>> > >>>>> _______________________________________________
> >> >>> > >>>>> Pandas-dev mailing list
> >> >>> > >>>>> Pandas-dev at python.org
> >> >>> > >>>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pandas-dev
> >> >>> > >>>>
> >> >>> > >>>>
> >> >>> > >>>> _______________________________________________
> >> >>> > >>>> 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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