Edinburgh-based software developer Mike McQuaid is a project leader and long-time maintainer at Homebrew, a free and open-source package manager with 30 million users, created in 2009 by Max Howell.
According to McQuaid, if you work on a Mac operating system, you are likely to source many of your open-source tools in Homebrew, which is maintained by a team of just 30 people.
For the last fifteen years, McQuaid has balanced his voluntary maintainer role with various software engineer roles and was one of GitHub’s early employees (#232).
Last year, the software engineer cofounded Workbrew, which develops paid-for bespoke features that companies have requested from Homebrew, which it didn’t want to build, supply, or support.
TechInformed met McQuaid at last month’s annual State of Open Conference in East London, following a keynote by open-source software guru Bruce Perens, who declared that the economics of open source were “broken”.
Perens proposed creating a third-party non-profit body to distribute funds to voluntary developers and maintainers like McQuaid based on contributions to GitHub and other OS code repositories.
For the uninitiated: what is an open-source maintainer?
There are three groups of people working in open source. The biggest group is the users, which, with the state of technology now, is essentially everyone, whether they realise it or not.
Some who know they are using it might ask for help or support if something’s broken.
Then there are the contributors, who are a step above that. They’ve sent their own code, documentation, or design work into a repository such as GitHub, and that’s been included in the project.
However, these people need someone else to check their work to make sure it’s okay, and they agree to the terms and conditions. Those people are called the maintainers. They are essentially the gatekeepers.
Do you ever get paid for ‘maintaining’?
It depends on what the relationship is. I guess I’ve been indirectly paid in the past. I’ve done work in paid hours on open source.
Homebrew has now grown to the point where we can pay people a stipend. If you are active enough in a project and involved, we put money aside to pay you monthly.
I’ve taken that money in the past. It’s nowhere close to a market rate for the hours put in. It’s more like a ‘thank you’ and an acknowledgement.
Do the economics involved in open source worry you?
This is a pet subject of mine because my father-in-law is a professor of economics. We often talk about economics versus time.
We are in a capitalist country. He says it’s not necessarily about money but the allocation of scarce resources. In open source, the scarce resource isn’t money; it’s the time of the people who are working on it.
Putting money in my pocket doesn’t give me more hours to do things. The economics of open source that concern me are how we protect the time of the people involved and how we stop them from burning out.
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My father-in-law’s other point is that ‘free’ is a special thing. I remember the first time someone offered to pay me for an open-source project: I spent four hours sorting a problem out, and then they offered to PayPal me $10.
When it’s free, I’m happier than when it’s $2 an hour. When you throw money into the equation, it always becomes more ‘quid pro quo’.
Have any of the companies you’ve worked for in your paid roles objected to your voluntary ‘maintaining’?
Homebrew work has always been a very small part of my main job. Most of the time, it’s not been part of my job at all. Most of my employers have treated it as a ‘don’t’ ask, don’t tell’ kind of situation: if you are getting your work done.
It gets you through the door. They really like to see that stuff on your CV.
Did you agree with Bruce Perens’s earlier points about open source no longer being sustainable and creating a collection body?
We’re at a point in open source where there’s this kind of tricky middle ground. I strongly identify with what Bruce said about the problems; I somewhat identify with his proposed solutions.
But more specifically, the idea that you’d have one central body that takes money from everyone and allocates it to everyone seems unrealistic. To get that to happen across borders through the entire world, I don’t think it could happen.
I’m not a huge fan of free market economics, but when it comes to open source, there’s been this explosion of ideas that wouldn’t have happened had a centralised authority been in force.
How is Workbrew enabling you to make your open-source endeavours more sustainable?
We’re building stuff that, over the years, Homebrew has refused to do. We build things that are a bit more involved, require support contracts, and are specific for industries and companies.
We’re making a version of Homebrew that works much better for them but doesn’t dilute the Homebrew offering for everyone else. Everything in Homebrew is free; in Workbrew, we build the stuff on top that costs money.
It feels to me the most natural way of commercialising open-source projects.
As a maintainer, you’ve blogged about the importance of saying ‘no’…
That’s been a life lesson: saying no and setting boundaries. In open source, you constantly get people asking you for stuff, and you always get more people who want more from you than you can give.
For me, it’s the power to try to be kind to myself and the people around me.
Another way for maintainers to avoid burnout is therapy. Men aren’t always great about talking about their mental health and admitting when they’re struggling or going to someone else for help, but I’ve found that there really are benefits.
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