> JessicaTegner/pypandoc Pypandoc provides a thin wrapper for pandoc, a universal document converter.
To be frank, that doesn’t seem like a project worthy of $20k to me. Not very many commits recently [0], it has 918 source lines of code in the main package, and 547 lines of test code — it even describes itself as a “thin” wrapper, and the only thing it does is converting some arguments to Pandoc flags and calling the Pandoc executable. How many more features could be added to this project? What is it missing now?
To be frank (and then polite and constructive), I think the relevant question is "What am I missing?" rather than "What is it missing?"
..and my guess would be that this is something like a cohort experiment. I'd bet they selected projects to have a broad sampling of kinds of projects, so they could see what working with them was like and what kind of impact they'd have - similar to a marketing trying out different audiences and types of ads, or startups running market experiments, or VCs shot-gunning to see what sticks, or developers doing 'probes' into problems and/or with technologies.
AFAICT, GitHub wanted to get some data around the questions "What's involved in us getting funding to open source projects / developers, and what kind of impact can that funding have?"
Even if your judgement of this specific project is apt (that it's weirdly small and inactive for receiving a grant), that may be the point.
Of course there are reasons beyond technical ones for including a project in an accelerator cohort. I attempted to view the application to see what types of questions GitHub asked, but they've taken it offline now. On a similar token, one of the other projects is an open source Linktree clone... the MVP of that concept is so simple and there are so many of these projects, that it suggests technical complexity was not a highly weighted factor in the selection process.
That said, I have a few ideas:
- Although it has very little recent activity, it has dozens of contributors, was a Hacktoberfest project, etc.
- There is also often the desire to create diversity in an accelerator cohort. Every accelerators faces pressure for diversifying demographics. This also creates a flywheel effect to improve diversity in future batches.
- Another idea is that perhaps someone saw the potential for this to be turned into a SaaS. Non-technical people need to convert document formats every day. Maybe this does something Pandoc doesn't or that would make it a candidate for that?
Don't do that. Don't diminish the work of someone simply because they are a woman. Even assuming that money was given as part of some diversity program, to imply that is the only reason she got an investment is to imply that there are simply no qualified women out there deserving of investment.
It's just like the criticism of Biden having appointed "so many" Black female judges. As if they are not perfectly qualified or even more qualified than a white male judge would have been. Not to mention the fact that "qualifications" has never really been the criteria for any of this.
In other words, merit is far too nebulous a concept for a true "meritocracy" to ever exist.
Completely disagree. The wokeness from these corporations, the DEI culture, the dividing contemptuous nature of this ideology needs to be openly and fiercely criticized. It’s destroying the very fabric of America.
The fact that we are not allowed to do that on HN speaks for its ideological and dangerous grip on free thinking. The chilling effect is real.
I think it's pretty clear from the parent commenters that they believe the developer /is/ being treated differently--with a bias/preference given that the developer is supposedly trans.
No, they don't. They insinuate that because it's a conveinient dogwhistle - the claim is always the same whenever a non cishet/white person attains any level of success.
Maybe I was being too equivocal. The parent commenters /do/ believe the developer is receiving preferential treatment based on one aspect of their declared identity. And it's not hard to share their sentiment: what warrants a thin Python wrapper library, which does not really bring new capabilities itself, receiving $20k when there are many other projects which could make an even bigger impact with that money? It seems unusual to me. Especially when considering they were choosing from a pool at GitHub scale, which is about as diverse as it gets in the open source software community.
I don't share the belief that "non cishet/white" people are unduly denigrated when they achieve success--not more than any other person on average, anyway. In fact, I see quite the opposite: there's tremendous amounts of pride when "non cishet/white" people achieve success.
> I don't share the belief that "non cishet/white" people are unduly denigrated when they achieve success--not more than any other person on average, anyway. In fact, I see quite the opposite: there's tremendous amounts of pride when "non cishet/white" people achieve success.
If that was the case you wouldn't be here to continue doubling down on casting doubt on someone's success.
You seem to mistakenly believe I'm someone who cares about the person's identity. I don't. The only object of consideration is the project, and only its recent "success" is in question: there are many other projects that I believe would benefit much more from the resources, more than a thin Python wrapper library.
When decisions are made specifically based on superficial characteristics like skin color and sex, you shouldn't be surprised when people wonder if decisions are/were made specifically based on superficial characteristics like skin color and sex.
The promise of the superficial characteristics came first. Then a solution (a candidate, in this case) was chosen from a limited solution set
When people do things like this, they make it clear they don't want optimal outcomes, with regards to performance and the like. They make it clear that other, superficial, characteristics carry greater weight.
This hurts any functioning society, certainly in the long-term. However, some people want that--for some societies.
Regardless of any "superficial" characteristic (I think many would argue that being Black in America in anything but superficial) what exactly do you think an optimal outcome is when selecting something like a judge? What is a high "performance" judge? Because even though for the first few hundred years of our nation's history, we selected judges only from a very large group of old, white, catholic/protestant men, we sure have come up with plenty of incompetence and corruption.
Should we hire judges based solely on their LSAT score? Or perhaps only judges from the most ivy league, selective law schools? Or maybe we should select for judges who can recite the law by memory?
Judges need to represent the people that they stand in judgement of. You want people that know what it is like to grow up poor or to grow up under racism or whatever. And Black women are severely underrepresented in the federal judiciary.
Of course, any person selected as a judge needs to meet a minimum level of competence (something that has usually been the case up until at least a few selections from the last administration). Regardless, the solution set of Black female attorneys and judges is plenty large to be able to find fully qualified candidates for many, many federal appointments.
Looking at the developer's profile, clearly GitHub recognized this developer's right to positive affirmation.
Proud of GitHub for not caring it is a 918 line thin wrapper, this developer deserves to be set aside and carried to the top because of the challenging path they are on.
Who cares if the better project gets the money after all.
Edit: This post is so ambiguous that first I was discouraged when it got upvoted. :)
I'm not saying this is a bad thing. But why $20k? It's obviously not a salary... It could pay for infrastructure if a project needed it, but if the project doesn't... I'm having a hard time understanding how it helps sustain the project. I personally wouldn't do both a full time job and work on an OSS project in all my spare time, for the money. If I really need that project I'm gonna do it regardless, and if I don't need that project, sacrificing all my free time isn't worth $20k.
It definitely depends on the maturity of the project and the country you live in.
I was selected to be part of this first cohort with Mockoon. I'm from Luxembourg, so 20k is surely not a life changing amount of money.
However, I quit my job two years ago to focus full-time on it. I think that I can make a living (probably a mix of paid services and sponsoring) while keeping the app open-source. But it's a long hard road and I am freelancing on the side which gave me the right balance but not complete peace of mind, financially speaking.
So, while it's not a life changing amount, it will buy me some precious time. I also feel really motivated by this awesome recognition (after 5 years of work on this project) and I am looking forward the 10 weeks of coaching. So, all in all, it's a bit of a life changing event for me :)
I maintain one of the selected projects. $20k means that I can focus on the project without taking any freelance work on the side for a while. Hopefully making the project more attractive to sponsors, hopefully snowballing into more OSS and less freelance.
$20k for 10 weeks of work seems like a good deal. It’s only 10 weeks so you can’t just quit your job; but if you are in between jobs, can go on leave, or (most likely case) work part-time and just don’t get paid enough, it’s a big help. And it’s certainly better than nothing which is what most OSS devs get unfortunately
FWIW, we (Dioxus) are using the $20K to fund an internship for one of our contributors. We're hoping the program will act like VC funding (marketing, really) and help us unlock larger corporate sponsorships.
Because it's just 10 weeks. It's very clearly not a "salary" (as "salary" is usually measured by years), but more like a contracted work that lasts 10 weeks. $20k is more than most jobs posted on Upworks (etc).
It'd depend on several factors, won't it? Those who are already working on OSS projects have found their balance (or willing to work despite challenges). This amount might make small or big difference for them. You should also consider that how much this is worth will depend on where they live too (for example, my yearly expense is less than $2000).
20k for 10 weeks is a pretty decent salary, even in the EU. Might not be super competitive for short term work but it's definitely enough to live on in most places.
Even in most (all?) Mediterranean countries, 2000/week is pretty good pay, would work out to 8000/month, which is on the upper-end when it comes to writing code for the usual web stuff. Pair it with that you get to work on FOSS, I'm having a hard time imagining a similar position with similar pay.
Middle income is $10-$20 per day[1]. $2k per week = $400 per day = 20x - 40x middle income. Minus taxes. And I guess you need to factor in that the figure includes people who are not employed. But still should leave you in the ~10x group.
Yeah that's not a lot of runway. But it could be reasonable for a student or for someone living in a low cost of living location. Or if you have savings from your job and just need a little boost to get started. Or if you're okay with living frugally, which seems to be how people like Andreas Kling or Andrew Kelley get by. But yeah it's not really a sustainable model.
I'd say this is more about positioning themselves as "someone who cares about open source" more than anything else.
Their main product is proprietary, and they have a looong history of vendor lock-in and anti-competitiveness (including: Extend, Embrace, Extinguish). Giving out these grants lets them present themselves as someone who cares and funds open source, even if their core business stands strongly against it.
Perhaps people in tech mostly now GitHub's and MicroSoft's reputation. But if says "we love open source and even give out grants", its easy to understand why legislators would believe that both parts of the statement to be true.
One side note, is that it appears to be $20k per maintainer vs per project.
From the post:
> GitHub Accelerator is a 10-week program where open source maintainers receive an initial sponsorship of $20K to work on their project ...
> The 2023 cohort has 20 projects, with 32 participants ...
As others have noted, it's not a lot of runway, but maybe enough to not have to freelance on the side and that full-time focus for 3 months could be enough to snowball into a full-time "ramen-profitable" business (maybe). It'll be interesting to see how the first cohort plays out.
"$20,000 stipend per project ($2,000 per week of participation) for the duration of the 10 week program. If there are multiple participants from a project, the stipend is divided evenly between them."
dropping work for three months for a $n fellowship is the same thing as switching to a $4n job without benefits that you know will fire you in three months. $20k is not enough for that sort of thing
Looks like they peppered in some weird projects in there as well. I'd have expected some "hard software engineering" projects as well, but I guess not everyone is ready to be a spokesman for github's view of the world.
https://github.com/EddieHubCommunity/LinkFree : "Your profile will have links to your social media and content. You can also add your timeline, testimonials, and upcoming events that you are participating in."
Sounds lame. Is this really worth including in this list?
It seems like a political statement by Microsoft. The list only has "trendy" stuff, carefully moves around any and all "AI" stuff, and none of it seems experimental at all. If I didn't know this was "Github Accelerator" and was shown the list, I'd have assumed this was some VC's list of prospective Open Source programs that could turn a penny or two down the road.
It seems pretty obvious to me that now that Github has cornered the "open source" market, it's on the "Extend" phase, looking to change how Open Source is approached.
It says "Github accelerator" not "Github community accelerator" or something. Pretty sure micro$oft had a big hand in it, they wouldn't allow the pilot for their program to be so "unsupervised".
Great to see Dioxus there. I was looking at Rust GUI libraries and Dioxus seemed like one of the most interesting to me, but still felt pretty early in development. I did notice in their 0.3 release post they mentioned "This release represents an absolutely massive jump forward for the Dioxus ecosystem. We hope to ship future features more quickly into stable now that many of the desired breaking changes have been incorporated into the core library." so I am excited to see how the project progresses!
We love LiveView and we love the developer experience. Dioxus recently launched support for HTML-over-websocket (LiveView) and we're slowly working on wrapping axum/hyper in a Dioxus-focused API.
Thanks for working on LiveView! Next to Rust, one of my favorite ecosystems is .NET and Blazor has been a game-changer when writing desktop apps. I'm looking forward to having something similar in Rust!
You can use the new Fine-grained Personal Access Tokens [1] (as opposed to the original ones, now called "Personal Access Tokens (Classic)".
With the fine-grained tokens, you can literally grant this site:
- Repository access: none
- User permissions: none
- Repository permissions: none
[Or if you want to be really paranoid, make a burner account... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.]
But also, star-history.com is not a random site — the repo [2] has 4k stars and has been around since 2015 and has been popular for over a year.
If you've ever tried to make a public app that depends on GitHub APIs, the limits without taking PATs are very, very low — totally insufficient for an app with any popularity, so there's not really an alternative.
I know I have access to fine grained access tokens (beta) which let you get very granular on a per repo. I’m not sure if this is generally available or only because we are on Github Enterprise though.
As the maintainer of one of the selected projects (https://codehike.org/), I really appreciate what GitHub is doing, putting the money and trying different approaches (last year it was $450K across 900 projects).
Very cool, this looks like a great list of projects. I like that it's not a bunch of well-known and big names. It looks like stuff that is just getting traction and having a push with dedicated time to maintain could be a huge benefit for them.
As a rubyist who loves ruby but isn't afraid to admit I see it declining in popularity... I can't help but notice there seems to be no ruby on the list. Plenty of python.
That looks awesome, when is the next batch coming? What are the conditions for the funding? My OSS project is a Dropbox like UI for S3, SFTP, FTP, NFS, SMB and pretty much every other file transfer protocol: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash Would that fit in your scope?
I've always been curious what sort of relationship https://nuxtjs.org/ has with Next.js and whether they will significantly diverge as their own entity (I haven't had the opportunity to use Nuxt 3 yet). Especially with all of the noise around projects like Remix.
I'm thrilled to see my project (https://mockoon.com) being part of this first cohort! It's a great opportunity but it's also good for open-source projects in general. It can only contribute to make our industry more sustainable.
Here is the list of the 20 projects that have been selected:
This list is great to see because as a supporter and user of open source projects, I am glad smaller projects are getting this too! Hopefully it keeps going!
Microsoft has had a fraught relationship with the developer community since, well, forever. They seemed to think that buying a developer favorite like GitHub would mend those fences.
To be frank, that doesn’t seem like a project worthy of $20k to me. Not very many commits recently [0], it has 918 source lines of code in the main package, and 547 lines of test code — it even describes itself as a “thin” wrapper, and the only thing it does is converting some arguments to Pandoc flags and calling the Pandoc executable. How many more features could be added to this project? What is it missing now?
[0] https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc/commits/master