[HN Gopher] Cognitect and Nubank Are Sponsoring Open Source Deve...
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Cognitect and Nubank Are Sponsoring Open Source Developers
Author : puredanger
Score : 230 points
Date : 2020-12-15 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cognitect.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cognitect.com)
| casion wrote:
| While many companies support LARGE open source projects by
| supplying dev time, I'm glad to see this sort of corporate
| monetary support that helps developers pay for dinner.
|
| This appears to be a great side effect of Cognitect joining
| Nubank.
| macmac wrote:
| Great move.
| banjomet wrote:
| I think it is crazy that a brazillian bank owns Cognitect, the
| creator of Clojure, and Plataformatec, the creator of Elixir. I
| had never heard of them or new about them being acquired by the
| same company until a few weeks ago. It must be a really
| interesting bank to work at :)!
| puredanger wrote:
| FYI, the creator of Elixir, Jose Valim, was at Platformatec,
| but then formed Dashbit.
| thegginthesky wrote:
| As a user of their services, I'm really happy. It's the only
| bank I have used with no bureaucracy, zero fees, good phone
| app, fast and reliable customer support. It's no wonder they
| have grown so much.
|
| I've also only heard great things about the company culture,
| specially in the engineering side.
| phoinix wrote:
| Sponsoring of open source projects is a problem that bitcoin aims
| to solve. That and many others. The electronic cash bitcoin not
| the currency bitcoin. The owners of the project will be able to
| construct an electronic company, and any value that a user gives,
| will be shared to the shareholders, in line of the shares any
| shareholder has to the project, i.e. how much he has contributed.
| A user wants a new feature or a fix of a bug? He gives coins to
| the open source company, and they will implement it. This will
| give incentive for programmers to increase the quality of the
| code, better documentation etc.
| casion wrote:
| Besides the fact that existing systems work fine for this, the
| idea that users pay for a fix or feature is ludicrious.
|
| Users are terrible project managers. They report things as bugs
| that aren't bugs, they request features that don't improve the
| product, they in general have a low hitrate in terms of
| providing successful direction for a project.
|
| Setting up a system where users pay for a _specific_ thing to
| happen is just asking for trouble.
|
| Users paying for development they already find useful, or for
| concepts that they believe have promise - that's the way to do
| it.
| phoinix wrote:
| Yeah, that's all true, that users sometimes think of
| something as useful and it is not. Nothing to be done about
| it, except education. But let's say some users want of an
| open source program to integrate some graphs somewhere. They
| go to a social media and they ask the users. "How many find
| useful these graphs?" The users hit like to the feature, and
| they immediately transfer a small value to the owners of the
| project. In case the sum of all the values of all the users
| is enough, the owners of the project may go forward, accept
| the funds and allocate resources to implement this feature.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| I don't understand how existing systems of money are incapable
| of doing this. The problem is the _will_ , not the _way_.
| phoinix wrote:
| Well if a company wants to give a large sum of money to an
| open source project for a feature, say a hundred dollars, or
| a thousand then it is the same. Electronic cash, i.e. bitcoin
| work better than the traditional ways of payment when there
| is a necessity for crowdfunding a little bit of money less
| than a penny, a 1/10 of a penny or 1/100, or 1/1000, from
| thousands of users. The reason bitcoin works better in that
| case, is because bitcoin is absolutely automated while in
| traditional payment systems a human is required to oversee
| the payments in case there is a fraud somewhere. That means a
| human is required to be paid, and humans are expensive to
| employ. That increases the cost of every transaction, as well
| as increases the minimal amount of the transferable value.
| 35fbe7d3d5b9 wrote:
| "I have a hammer, who needs something nailed?"
| sova wrote:
| >That increases the cost of every transaction, as well as
| increases the minimal amount of the transferable value.
|
| You seem to be blissfully unaware of transaction fees in
| bitcoinland
| phoinix wrote:
| The electronic money that are known now as bitcoin, took
| a different turn from the white paper of Satoshi. That's
| why i said the electronic cash Bitcoin, not the currency
| Bitcoin. Some people wanted to take that electronic cash
| idea, and turn it into currency. That's a bad idea.
| cj wrote:
| I run a small ~10 person startup and we spend $2-3k/mo sponsoring
| various open source projects we use.
|
| I highly encourage other founders to do the same. It doesn't
| require your company to be massively profitable with hundreds of
| employees to make a $20-30k annual commitment to supporting open
| source.
| PradeetPatel wrote:
| We applaud you for your altruism, but how does this benefit
| your firm?
|
| It's been established that this may be achievable for a small
| startup. However convincing key stakeholders that this would
| lead to an increase in a quarterly return may prove to be a
| unique challenge.
| deberon wrote:
| Perhaps their mission statement extends slightly beyond "an
| increase in quarterly return".
| tubbyjr wrote:
| Literally instead of having to hire potentially dozens of
| software engineers to reinvent the wheel, they are able to
| use open-source software, and this altruism is peanuts
| compared to what the former would cost.
| dman wrote:
| You will be surprised how far even a small amount of support
| goes in having your issues prioritized on future roadmaps and
| in attracting help from the community during pressing
| critical bug reports.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Helping to ensure the stability and continued evolution of
| the software the company depends on? I don't see how this is
| such a difficult concept for some to understand.
| petercooper wrote:
| _We applaud you for your altruism, but how does this benefit
| your firm?_
|
| Separate from a 'what will the shareholders think?' vantage
| point, this is a valuable question depending on your tax
| jurisdiction. In the UK, such sponsorships will be tax
| deductible only if you can answer this question in a
| satisfactory manner (or if the recipient is a registered
| charity, which is unlikely).
| [deleted]
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Easy to convince stakeholders.
|
| When you donate a sizable amount to an open source
| dependency, you get clout with the devs of that dependency,
| it's easier to rely on them for support if you need it. You
| can expect them to care more about the bug reports you send
| in vs. other people, etc.
|
| In addition, you ensure that the project is healthy, less
| likely to have serious bugs and issues that could destroy the
| value of your firm, etc.
|
| This is also why many open source developers sell support
| contracts or paid support in any shape or form.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Thank you for giving back and setting a great example.
| nsandell123 wrote:
| What exactly do cognitect and nubank do? Never heard of these
| companies.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Nubank is a Brazilian fintech company of some kind. Cognitect
| employs the Clojure core developers and also does (did?)
| consulting work: they were recently acquired by NuBank.
| casion wrote:
| Cognitect does Datomic as well, a pretty awesome database.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Yeah, I believe NuBank uses Datomic heavily, which is part
| of the reason they acquired Cognitect
| andreterron wrote:
| Nubank is a digital bank with operations focused in Latin
| America
| blunte wrote:
| I think google is back up...
| an_opabinia wrote:
| This is great. They should also consider spending money on less
| mainstream or well-adopted Clojure projects.
|
| After all, if an open source project hits off with users without
| the money, it clearly didn't need the money. While who knows what
| really great things die because the authors needed to focus on
| stuff that pays them directly instead.
| bpringe wrote:
| I agree. This is being done currently by the Clojurists
| Together organization. They fund 4 open source Clojure projects
| per quarter, and based on the desires of their members (anyone
| who pays into it), I think they fund 50% established projects
| and 50% speculative.
| dantiberian wrote:
| Hey! Secretary for Clojurists Together Foundation here. This
| is roughly correct. It's not a strict 50/50 split from
| quarter to quarter as it depends on applications and what our
| members are looking for, but we try to fund a mix of
| established and experimental projects.
|
| This quarter we funded Calva and clj-kondo which are more
| established, and O'Doyle Rules and ClojisR which are more
| experimental.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| The Clojure community seems to be getting open source support
| right.
|
| puredanger - how does this overlap or affect the Clojurists
| Together support effort?
| puredanger wrote:
| Clojurists Together is an independent effort with different
| goals and funding model.
| munificent wrote:
| Imagine you have a bunch of fishermen surrounding a lake. After a
| while, they notice that each year they catch fewer and fewer
| fish. One realizes that what they're doing is unsustainable and
| they need to change their practices. He buys a billboard that
| says, "We must stop fishing at the lake." The others correctly
| point out that _he_ still fishes there. "Fine", he says. "I'll
| stop." So he stops, and his income stops. Eventually he can't
| afford to keep that billboard up. Meanwhile, the others are doing
| better than ever now that the man isn't taking any fish out. They
| use the extra income to put up billboards saying, "Fishing here
| is fine."
|
| In general, I'm a big fan of leading by example. But in
| situations like open source where there's a tragedy of the
| commons effect, leading by example can simply mean deliberately
| putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. Companies that
| pay open source developers are doing the right thing morally, but
| end up with less money available to compete against other
| companies that don't.
|
| I don't know what the right solution is. Maybe it requires
| organized action and legislation. Maybe it requires the open
| source developers themselves to restrict who they let use their
| code. (Sort of like the fish choosing which fishermen get to
| catch them.) I don't know. I applaud what Cognitect is doing, but
| I don't know if it will have any ability to influence other
| companies that extract value from open source without giving
| anything back. It may just make them relatively more powerful.
| richhickey wrote:
| Companies still compete to attract and retain top devs. What if
| those devs insisted that the companies they work for sponsor
| open source, and prefer sponsoring companies when making
| decisions about where they'll work? If companies spent just
| somewhere near 1% of what they spend on devs on open source
| sponsorship they could transform the ecosystem. As a result
| they'd have more and better open source to leverage. That's
| before you consider the risk mitigation of ensuring stable
| suppliers.
| jwr wrote:
| I am nowhere near their numbers, but I run a boostrapped business
| that would never be possible if it wasn't for Clojure (and
| specifically ClojureScript). A while ago I decided that I'd be
| permanently setting aside a percentage of revenue that will go
| towards sponsoring open-source developers that write and maintain
| libraries that my project uses. The contributions are very small,
| but growing steadily.
|
| I think what matters mostly is not the contribution size, but the
| mindset. If every company using open source contributed at least
| a little, we would have a healthy ecosystem.
| tubbyjr wrote:
| hope to do the same myself some day! And really hope businesses
| who do benefit and have the means, also support.
| ithrow wrote:
| _but I run a boostrapped business that would never be possible
| if it wasn 't for Clojure (and specifically ClojureScript)._
|
| Something doesn't sound right.
| mouldysammich wrote:
| That is very cool of you to do, and I'm sure goes well
| appreciated!
| sharms wrote:
| This is potentially the savviest of business models. For
| companies which can't employ full time staff to work on open
| source they use, they still need the ecosystem to provide
| updates, features, fixes, and tools for integration. There are an
| infinite number of startups to be born based on leveraging open
| source software, and getting engaged to ensure software is
| reliable, secure, and robust is key to a successful launch.
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