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I was almost able to sustain myself, and it just kept growing until it became -- today I'm pretty proud to say I'm fully sustained by open source work. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
After the break, Nadia and Mikeal talk with Evan about how he's been able to make open source his full-time job, treating it like a job for better balance in life, better balance with his family. We also talk about an often uncomfortable topic - funding. Who should get paid? Where should money be spent? Should this pro... |
**Break:** \[21:47\] |
**Evan You:** I felt that I wanted to work on Vue more as my full-time job... And I generally felt much, much better after I switched to working on Vue full-time, because now I can actually treat it like a job. I set hours for myself, I don't have to stay up late at night anymore, so I can actually spend time with fami... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** How many other contributors were there to the project when you started the Patreon campaign, and what does the team look like right now? |
**Evan You:** I can't remember exactly how many when I started the Patreon campaign... I would say probably only a few. Today we have a pretty decently sized team, but we have like 20-ish people in the Vue.js organization on GitHub. |
\[24:08\] The team is pretty loosely organized. Everyone is just contributing on a volunteer basis, and we don't have a very formal structure of assigning people tasks or expecting them to do something by a deadline. |
The team also grows pretty organically. Whenever someone makes quality contributions on a regular basis for a while, I just invite them to the organization and ask them "Do you want to do this on a regular basis? Do you want to become a part of the team?" but overall it's still pretty loose. I don't really feel comfort... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's pretty easy to put yourself in that same position, being that you were just doing that recently. You wouldn't want people assigning things to you when you were working on it in your own time, right? |
**Evan You:** Yeah, definitely. But I have to give a shoutout here, because the team is doing such an amazing job at dealing with the most tedious part of open source work, which is triaging the incoming issues. It think the amount of issues we get across the whole Vue.js organization is totally becoming unmanageable f... |
Other than that, obviously some of them also make high-quality contributions to the codebase itself, which are really helpful. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's interesting... I wanna hear more about that. You have a growing community, people are taking on more responsibility, a lot of new stuff is rolling in... How did you end up pricing the Patreon campaign? Because you know that you need your time, but like you were saying, you're already doing pre... |
How did you kind of price the Patreon campaign and what was the goal in terms of supplementing what was already going on on that community side? |
**Evan You:** I'm not sure how you would define pricing the Patreon campaign. It was more like... I just set the numbers based on just jumping up in tiers. I didn't really think that much about how to distribute it between contributors at that time, and I think Open Collective didn't even exist back then. Patreon was k... |
\[28:16\] At this moment, we're trying to somewhat -- one of the alternative ways we try to give back to these contributors is, for example, Chris has got a deal for working on educational content for O'Reilly, because he's part of the core team and we connected with O'Reilly. He was able to get that, which offers pret... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
**Evan You:** Yeah, but we just feel that direct allocation of money is somewhat tricky, because it's really hard to properly quantify it and we still don't feel there is a very elegant solution to this problem. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I mean, the Patreon campaign is really set up to fund you, really specifically... In fact, you could extend this to some other -- if you had another idea, you could allocate some work to that, right? People really are backing you and investing in you, even though you probably have enough left o... |
We've actually heard from other people too, it's like when you get money for the project, it's actually hard to figure out what to spend it on... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Right... What is the project, versus what are you doing... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, right. But when people are funding you, they're literally saying "I want you to work on open source full-time." |
**Evan You:** Yeah, that's a different way to look at it. In some way, this is basically the majority chunk of my income now. I need to use this money to pay the bills, I need to put these into my savings, even pay for retiring and all that stuff... So in some way Patreon is more directly connected to the creator, the ... |
It's a little different from the mindset or the model that Open Collective is pushing forward, where the funding is going to the project. I think it's an interesting dynamic, and it kind of depends on how the project is structured and how the creator or the maintainers want to frame the story. |
I just feel like this is an interesting difference between some of the different funding models that we see in some of the more popular open source projects. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I find it really fascinating. One of the hazards that we keep hearing about is that when you start paying some people, other people don't feel as valued sometimes... And it's interesting - you're not running into that. You actually have a pretty thriving community that's still growing, and even... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And it's really interesting to see how there are like other benefits to being a regular contributor that might not be "I'm getting paid to work on those, but my reputation grows, and then I have this book deal..." That's really interesting to think about. My brain's going in like 100 directions right ... |
**Evan You:** \[32:01\] Yeah, and another aspect that I wanted to mention is one of the core members actually started to work on a project that's fully dedicated to Vue resources... Kind of like making Vue videos and all that. I think it's somewhat like a way for him to both contribute to Vue and provide more content f... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Interesting. Do you say that was a Patreon campaign? |
**Evan You:** It's not a Patreon campaign, it's more like a subscription service, similar to Laracasts. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It'd be interesting to think about, like, if different contributors feel motivated to raise money to work on Vue for their own time, I guess, but it's still different from raising money for Vue; it's "Raising for my work on Vue", in this aspect. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. It's something Chris has been thinking of, too. He backed off, because he felt it could be distracting to have multiple campaigns that are in fact for the same project, and I think this increasingly reveals the problem between "How do we support the project? Do we support the people behind the proje... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes, that's exactly it. |
**Evan You:** I think this is something that we haven't really figured out at this point. I hope we can find a good model for this in the near future. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm wondering a little bit about just like the logistics of -- knowing all that now, is there a legal entity that's associated with Vue? Is there a company? |
**Evan You:** Currently no... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Wow, that's so interesting. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. I mean, I have a single-person LLC, but it really has nothing to do with how the project is organized; it's mostly just for me to send invoices, and stuff. But as far as I know, I also looked if it's possible to start a non-profit organization for it, but it's awkward because Vue is at a scale where... |
It's stuck in this awkward place where we're basically trying to figure out what to do with it. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah... That's so interesting, because people -- I refer to it as like "Vue is funded through Patreon", but really it's your work that's funded through Patreon, and Vue is still an open source project without an associated entity, which is actually really cool. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I have to ask the obvious question of like why didn't you decide to start a company and raise venture? I mean, you worked at Meteor - they kind of went that path? |
**Evan You:** Yeah, there were actually people asking me that. There were some VCs in China that actually wanted to give me money, but the biggest obvious problem is I don't have a very clear business model for making money off of Vue, because it's an open source project; it's MIT-licensed. I don't want to sell it. I d... |
I also don't want to feel the pressure of scaling and monetizing beyond what is enough to sustain myself, at least at this stage. That's something that's been put on the table before, but I just don't feel like it's the right choice, at least for now. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[36:25\] It makes sense. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Not having a business model hasn't seemed to stop most startups in San Francisco... \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, at least you're honest. \[laughs\] |
4: I think it's interesting, because frameworks like React and Angular are essentially backed by huge business entities, but Vue is completely independent, I would say. It's an independent open source project. For similar projects in the same boat with Vue, independent open source projects that are pretty popular but n... |
I kind of want to mention a project, which is Babel. Many people kind of have the impression that Babel is backed by Facebook, which in fact it is not... Although Sebastian, who is the original author of Babel, works for Facebook now. He actually no longer maintains the project. It's largely maintained by Henry Zhu, in... |
Henry worked at Behance, but he actually worked on Babel mostly in his spare time. I talk with Henry pretty often, and he's struggling with finding more time to work on Babel. He asked me for advice because he saw me have a pretty successful Patreon campaign. When we talked about how we could potentially fund his work ... |
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