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Adam Stacoviak: Up next we're talking about funding experiments. Mocha was asked early on to participate in funding their project on Open Collective, and something unexpected happened. They started getting donations. More donations than they know what to do with. It became a challenge to know what to do with the money ... |
Money tends to complicate things and create conflict, so is money the real solution to sustain open source? If you have money, where does it go? How do you spend it efficiently? We ask these question and more after the break. |
**Break:** \[20:24\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Let's get into some funding experiments that you've gotten involved in. First, why don't you tell me a little bit about Open Collective and what made you wanna try that out as an experiment for getting the funding injected into Mocha? |
**Christopher Hiller:** I hadn't really considered going for funding before Open Collective. I can't recall, but I feel like that team actually approached me, and I can't recall why... But at the time, they hadn't had too much interest, I believe; there may have been a few projects that had what they call "collectives.... |
They talked to me, and I said "Free money? Sure, what could it hurt?" I also thought "Well, if this takes off, maybe it's a really good way to get some more attention around the project." Now, I went into it with no illusions that we were gonna get so many donations that I would be able to quit my job and go work on Mo... |
I felt that sort of thing was more of a means to an end. The end was community, and it wasn't really money per se that the project needed, it was time and attention, and I was hoping that by getting some funds injected into the project, we could use those funds to raise the profile of the project, or that sort of thing... |
\[23:58\] Now, I absolutely don't have any sort of marketing background, I don't know anything about social media; I don't know if I had the money, what would I do with it, and it turned out that not only did I not know what to do, but I didn't even have the time to spend the donations that we had. So it became kind of... |
Our monthly recurring expenses were $14/month before npm decided to give organizations to open source or public projects. They made that free, so now we have no expenses, but we have some money, and I don't really know what to do with it. I would love to figure out a way to maybe send T-shirts, or something, to a confe... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Where did that money come from? Is it from companies, individuals? How did you end up having $12,000/year? |
**Christopher Hiller:** We had like a one-time donation from Yahoo! of $500, I think. We had a one-time donation from [Auth0](https://auth0.com/) and the other thing was SoftLabs has been donating $500/month for quite a while now, so they're kind of Mocha's big sponsor in terms of corporate sponsorship. There aren't an... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a lot of people donating $2 or $5/month that adds up to the budget that you have now; it says something about people that love it enough to donate, I guess, right? |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, and there are quite a few of those people. What I wanted to do, and I was so excited when we got our first backer, and I sent out a tweet, I was like "Hey, thanks for backing!", and then the next five people that decided to back us and donate, I sent out tweets. Then there was like 100 peo... |
I don't know if Sean Larkin and Webpack have figured out how to do that. He spends a lot of time on Twitter, but you know... That doesn't scale. I would love to be able to do that, but I haven't found out a good way to do that yet that works for me. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, there's definitely a scale issue there. \[laughter\] I raised a very tiny amount of money in Git Bounty, or Bounty Source, or one of those back in the day, and I think the money is just still sitting there, because the Request project just could never figure out what to do with it; we've really... |
**Christopher Hiller:** \[28:04\] Yeah, we tried that, and there were a couple things that needed to happen, to get done. There was myself and a couple other maintainers; we worked on these tasks and build for it, and we had kind of decided, "Okay, we're gonna work on these and build for these. You do this, and I do th... |
That was kind of strange, and I thought "If I'm not having fun, why am I here? And if I can't make money doing thing that are fun, what's the point?" But the point is that people are gonna have different ideas about what is worth actual money. Money tends to complicate things. Who is to say that if I do some task and b... |
I'm not sure how -- I know Webpack has an idea of how to spend their funds; I haven't look too deeply into it, but I know it didn't work out well for us, and we had actually received advice from some other projects that says "You just wanna keep money out of the development, and use it for things like recurring expense... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I spoke with Sean a little while ago and one of the things that he said was that he focuses on things that nobody else wants to do because of this particular problem, but at the same time Sean has a full-time job and he's doing like 20 hours a week of work that nobody else wants to do on Webpac... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Something I think has been a recurring theme this season too, thinking about if you have money, where does the money go and how do you spend it efficiently, and for both of your stories -- you know, a small amount of money can be really awkward amounts of money, because what do you do with that? A big... |
The examples I've seen that have been successful are where the project itself can be sustainable in the sense of money is not coming in and out of the project - beyond, like you said, recurring expenses - but it's more about if someone already internally wants to work on the project and is able to find time, whether it... |
**Christopher Hiller:** \[32:26\] Well, I have a full-time job as well, so working on Mocha in any regular capacity is just kind of beyond me right now; I'm not able to do it, and of course, I tried, but I burned out. So if I was going to do that, it would need to be through an employer, but I have yet to have an emplo... |
It's a tough one, because Mocha is part of the test stack, so number one, your product manager or what have you is not going to care too much about what that test stack looks like, and is only going to really care if the software is quality. So basically, we're gonna leave the testing up to the developers, and that's t... |
It's really hard for developers to get visibility for these types of tools that they use, and justify to employers that "Yes, this tool we use is very important." There are other tools, like maybe a Webpack, that help build production websites, and that's big. That's something that they can kind of wrap their head arou... |
So it's kind of tough to just -- I can't even pitch it to my employer that I should spend time working on this thing, because I can't justify it to myself... Like, "Yeah, this project needs help, but it really has nothing to do with the business goals." It's just all about "Yeah, we want quality, so write the tests", b... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** If you were starting all over again and you had to think about -- or let's just say even if you were TJ and you were trying to figure out where this project goes long-term, is there anything that could have been done differently, or is this just sort of the inevitable way that projects unfold? |
**Christopher Hiller:** I don't wanna blame TJ, because it's not really his fault... If we as the open source community had known in 2011 (or whenever he wrote this) what we know now about how to grow and sustain a project, sure he would have done things differently. Why wouldn't he? |
If I was going to start over and do it again, sure, I would do it differently. I would make things much more friendly to contributors; I would work a little harder on documentation. We would maybe have chat rooms, forums, all sorts of other things that weren't really part of the idea. |
\[36:16\] I think Mocha was another project where a developer decided to scratch their own itch and make a tool that was useful for them. I don't know if he envisioned that it would get as large as it has - large in terms of the userbase - but yeah, definitely things would have been done differently if it was starting ... |
Actually, just today I merged a code of conduct for Mocha, and that was a long time coming. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Nice! |
**Christopher Hiller:** I can't remember who it was, but somebody sent a PR, and yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Awesome. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** You also joined the JavaScript Foundation recently, right? Did you pursue any other form of project-focused funding or support, any of those types of grants? |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, so Mozilla has an open source funding program called MOSS. What the program does is it awards grants to various open source projects. I thought "Well, maybe Mocha would be a good candidate for that." The reason I thought that was because Mozilla publishes a list of open source projects the... |
So part of that grant process is that you need an internal Mozilla employee to sponsor or vouch for the open source project, and I found somebody to do that, but I had also talked with a few people and I had listened to this podcast, the Request For Commits podcast, and sometime back there was an interview with Max Ogd... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yes! |
**Christopher Hiller:** And the whole episode was about grants and funding, and how to get a grant for your open source project. So I listened to that and I was kind of like "Eh, I don't think so..." \[laughter\] If you're doing that, if that's your thing and you have time to dedicate to that - sure. It sounds like the... |
\[39:55\] Another issue with Mozilla in particular was if they are to award a grant, they are -- I don't know if the text says they will not or that they're unlikely to, but it's something like they are unlikely to award a grant to an individual. So if I was to get a grant from MOSS, I would need some other entity, a l... |
So I went to the JS Foundation and asked "What if you went ahead and wear my legal entity if I was to apply for this MOSS grant?" The reaction was mixed again, because I don't think they've had great success with paying individual or disbursing funds to individuals for code, so I wasn't sure what the story was there, b... |
At that point I was like "I don't know... I don't have time to write up this grant proposal. I'm not even gonna embark on this if I'm not pretty sure I'm gonna get it", so I didn't. That's kind of the story of the MOSS grant. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm glad we played some small part in that decision. \[laughter\] I mean, one way to read it is it's a not ideal outcome to not have applied for a grant, but I think... I mean, this is my experience with adventure as well of people -- it's better than the belief that some people have of "This is just ... |
**Christopher Hiller:** Well, it's not even about me, it's just like I wouldn't have known that. I wouldn't have know that "Oh, it's not just free money; I can't just apply and wait for a track", you know? I wouldn't have known the difficulty because I don't know anything about grants - I've never applied for a grant -... |
Adam Stacoviak: In this last segment we ask questions like can a project do all it needs to do and be done? Can a project be done? When can a maintainer walk away and say "That's as good as it gets." Specifically, Nadia asks Christopher when does he feel like he can step away from Mocha and what keeps him from doing so... |
**Break:** \[43:29\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We've talked to other folks before who have talked about whether a project can just kind of be done at some point, and what that would mean to be a maintainer on a project that could just sort of be done. And you've talked a little bit about this, of trying to figure out the scope of Mocha moving forw... |
**Christopher Hiller:** Yeah, I think we can get there. It could be done now if we wanted it to be done. We could decide not to add any new features. There are certain things that we do have to keep adding, for example as the Node project adds new flags to its coming online client. Mocha kind of supports those and pass... |
Mocha simply is just not there, it's not where at least personally I am kind of happy with it. I don't really want it to be done, because it's -- I guess it's kind of personal; I feel like we could make not just myself happy by adding some things, or refactoring some things, but quite a lot of people, too. There's stil... |
So there's plenty of things that need to be fixed there. I don't really want Mocha to be done, but it works, and it works really well for a lot of people, and from what I can tell, it's pretty solid. Certainly, there's some issues that people come across from time to time. There are quite a few issues that have never b... |
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