How to pay professional maintainers

Filippo Valsorda · 17 Mar 2022

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A contribution is a cost to the maintainer, not a gift: it is taking part, not merely using the code, that consumes a project’s scarcest resource.

Their wordsI often read advice along the lines of “if you want to help a project send PRs” and I never understood it. Reviewing and iterating or pushing back on PRs is work! Often more than writing the code itself.

Also said by Nadia Asparouhova

Read the piece on words.filippo.io ↗

4 korrents from this piece ↓

Filippo Valsorda did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
A contribution is a cost to the maintainer, not a gift: it is taking part, not merely using the code, that consumes a project’s scarcest resource.
Mental modelTrade-offs

Their wordsI often read advice along the lines of “if you want to help a project send PRs” and I never understood it. Reviewing and iterating or pushing back on PRs is work! Often more than writing the code itself.
Our reading
A token monthly donation shows appreciation and achieves nothing else; sustaining a maintainer takes a real fraction of an engineering salary.

Their words$1,000/month without benefits is a nice way to show appreciation, but won’t achieve any other goals.
Our reading
Paying a maintainer must not buy a say in the project’s direction; funding and governance have to be kept as separate as possible.

Their wordsGovernance is a delicate and complex topic, and you want to leave it as orthogonal as possible to funding.
Our reading
Funding should pay for maintenance, not features, because every new feature adds to the burden the money was meant to relieve.
Mental modelEverything decays without maintenance

Their wordsFinally, the health of the project depends on issue triage, bug fixes, refactors, and design work more than on new features. In fact, new features increase the maintenance burden.

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