Episode 10: Sustaining Unified with Titus Wormer

Episode Summary

In this week's episode of Sustain Our software Titus Wormer joins
the panel to discuss his experience maintaining Unified.js. 
Titus is built Unified and is working fulltime maintain Unified.
He has a bachelor's in digital design and did his thesis on
fixing natural language in wed design using syntax trees.


 


The panel takes a moment to talk about abstract syntax trees.
Titus explains how abstract syntax trees help computers
understand what is going on in human languages, helping programs
like Babel and Google Translate.


 


Titus also does a lot of his work in markdown and the panel asks
him why he started working in markdown. Most developers work in
markdown and HTML explains Titus, plus markdown has some great
tools. In opensource he needs a lot of Read Me’s so Titus built
tools in markdown to check on his Read Me’s. 


 


Moving on to the sustaining of Unified the panel asks Titus about
the funding he is receiving for Unified. Titus explains a little
about the setup of Unified and what goes into maintaining it.
Unified has over 400 repositories on Github that need to be
maintained, and as Unified gained popularity so did the amount of
work needed to maintain the repositories. Titus shares how
stressful it was to come home from his everyday paying job to
find more and more requests piling up. 


 


Titus decided they needed a change, so last November they started
an open collective and looking for sponsors. Titus shares how
easy it was asking his users for money and the amount of support
they received. According to Titus, about 90% of their funding
comes from large company sponsors. The panel discusses his
experience in finding these companies and getting them to sponsor
Unified. 


 


The panel wonders how much time Titus spends fundraising. Titus
explains what it was like when they first started the open
collective. They were getting some funding but not enough to pay
someone to work full time maintaining Unified, so they didn’t
really know what to do with it. 


 


The panel brings up an article about developers working for
salaries under the poverty line because of the lack of sustaining
funds for opensource projects. They consider specific projects
and how much funding they receive annually.


 


Titus shares his opinion on this article. He believes people
support what they see that they are using, big visible projects
like Babel and Webpack receive tons of funding because not only
do a lot of people use this software but they see that they are
using it. He explains that smaller projects that are buried in a
stack don’t get funding because they are less visible to their
users. Relating this to Unified, Titus doesn’t think Unified fits
into either category. Unified is a bunch of smaller modules but
is advertised as one large monolith. Which is why they get as
much funding as they do. 


 


The Starbuck’s supply chain analogy is discussed by the panel.
The analogy is this, farmers grow the coffee beans to make the
coffee at Starbucks. While sitting Starbucks the coffee drinkers
never think of the farmers that put all the work into the coffee
just about Starbucks. Some opensource projects are the farmers,
small and unrecognized while others are visible and renowned like
Starbucks. The panel asks Titus about where he thinks Unified
fits into this analogy. 


 


Next, the panel discusses governance, asking Titus how he decides
who gets the money. He explains that in people would help out,
fixing things, and Titus would tell them to send in an invoice
and that he would give them some of the money. Many of the people
didn’t want the money, saying it was opensource and they were
happy to donate their time. Titus then decided to try maintaining
Unified fulltime and has been doing so since May.  He
explains all he does every day to maintain Unified. 



 


“What’s next for unified?” is the next question the panel wants
to be answered. Titus explains how they partnered with NDX and
announced a new project called micro mark. He’s is hoping to
finish up the new project by November when the money runs out. At
which time he will need to find a real job or find other
funding. 


 


The episode ends with a discussion about what it’s like being a
fulltime opensource maintainer. Titus explains that his current
situation and the fact that the Netherlands has a safety net for
its citizens making it less dangerous financially than it would
be in the United States. Titus and the panel explore the idea of
Titus being a contractor for unified as a way of making
money. 


 
Panelists



Eric Berry




Richard Littauer


Guest



Titus Wormer


Sponsors  



Adventures in DevOps




Adventures in Angular




Ruby Rogues




CacheFly


Links



https://opencollective.com/unified 




http://www.openmdx.org/ 




Software Below the Poverty Line 




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_85_Ways_to_Tie_a_Tie 




https://github.com/micromark 




https://github.com/mdx-js/mdx 




https://mdxjs.com/  




https://github.com/unifiedjs/governance 




https://github.com/unifiedjs/github-tools 




https://wooorm.com/




https://twitter.com/wooorm




https://www.facebook.com/Sustain-Our-Software-SOS-857471391289849/




https://twitter.com/sos_opensource


Picks

Eric Berry:




Chats with Kent 




https://codefund.io/partners/opencollective 




Richard Littauer:




https://nadiaeghbal.com/basic 




The Martian 




Titus Wormer:




Go for a walk more




https://www.burntfen.com/projects/francis-bacon-and-eggs/ 


Special Guest: Titus Wormer.