The 3 traps of open source funding models | Wes McKinney (pandas, Voltron Data, Posit)
The 3 traps of open source funding models | Wes McKinney (pandas, Voltron Data, Posit)
Wes is the creator of the pandas library, co-founder of Voltron Data and now the principal architect at Posit.
From creating one of the Python’s most influential libraries to co-founding Voltron Data, Wes joins the show to chat about why the book cover of the pandas book doesn’t feature a panda, open source pitfalls to avoid, the pros and cons of hiring engineers at a non-profit, and more.
Ronak & Guang’s Picks
#1 Open source historically has been a privileged activity.
It’s hard to contribute to open source outside of a full time job if you have small children to take care of, or if you’re doing a second job to make ends meet.
Wes makes an interesting point that “the early story of open source software and part of the reason that the open source world has significant inclusivity and diversity issues is indeed because open source development started out as a very privileged activity.”
And this is why Wes has advocating for creating more full-time jobs in open source and has pointed out recent progress in this - “what's great now is that startups and large companies have made open source an essential part of their strategy. Microsoft, from the Steve Ballmer days has transformed itself into being a very open source friendly company. And Guido van Rosum works at Microsoft on making CPython faster and and Microsoft has made enormous contributions to the open source world.”
#2 Set clear boundaries to avoid the consulting trap if you want to work on open source
According to Wes, “the consulting trap is where you have an open source project and you find consulting gigs where you work for a company that's using the open source project. And maybe they partly are paying you to fix bugs and customize the project for their needs.
But what can happen is that you end up spending a lot more time working on the company's internal software projects. You become more or less a software developer of that company and your work on the open source project can become incidental or something that you do on the side when ideally you would spend 50% of your time working on building things for the company and 50% of the time on the open source project or even more time on the open source project. But it's not uncommon to see the shift and it ended up being, 10, 20 percent of your time on the open source project and 80, 90 percent of your time building custom solutions for the client.”
The solution? set clear expectation in the contract or statement of work to guard your time.
Segments:
(00:02:50) Guang’s complaint about the pandas book cover
(00:04:38) Quarto and Open Access Publishing
(00:12:00) Convincing Wall Street to Open Source
(00:15:31) Publishing the first python package over Christmas
(00:18:01) Doubling Down on Building pandas
(00:23:23) Personal sacrifices for the sake of impact
(00:26:28) The Evolution of Open-Source
(00:29:19) “Open source development started out as a very privileged activity”
(00:32:40) The Consulting Trap
(00:35:17) The Startup Trap
(00:39:29) The Corporate User Trap
(00:44:21) Avoiding the Startup Trap
(00:46:54) Non-Profit vs. For-Profit
(00:48:09) The Challenges of Hiring Engineers in a Non-Profit Setting
(00:50:08) The Benefits of Remote Work for Open Source Development
(00:52:15) Balancing Open Source and Enterprise Interests
(00:57:25) New Funding Models for Open Source?
(01:00:01) Getting into VC
(01:06:19) The Future of Composable Data Systems
Show Notes:
online edition of pandas book: https://wesmckinney.com/book/
the new digital publishing tool that Wes recommends:
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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en