For two and a half years, from January 2024 to June 2026, Posit paid me as a contractor to maintain the R Markdown ecosystem (rmarkdown, knitr, bookdown, blogdown, pagedown, etc.). That contract was terminated in June this year. They offered to take the maintainership from me, but I chose to continue the maintenance on my own, because I didn’t want these packages to enter maintenance mode yet as they suggested (which means doing only the bare minimum work to keep them afloat on CRAN). At the same time, I agreed that if I could no longer maintain these packages someday, Posit could take over the maintainership, since I completely trust my former colleague Christophe Dervieux and I believe these packages will be well taken care of in his hands.
At this point, I’m still maintaining the R Markdown ecosystem. I’m just no longer paid to do so. Posit has kindly offered me sponsorship on GitHub for the next five years, which I truly appreciate (and thanks for the previous 2.5 years of financial support!). The sponsorship, if converted to time at my current hourly rate, is about 20 hours of work a year, which won’t be enough for the work.
That brings up the question: should I ask for sponsorship from the community?1 I have more and stronger reasons for “No” than “Yes”:
| Why “No” | Why “Yes” |
|---|---|
| I have contract jobs at Merck and Swiss Re, and I’m not too worried about my income (yet). I can afford the extra unpaid work. | I have 3 kids who haven’t started burning my money wildly yet (currently the obvious winner is the 2-year old—$20K a year for daycare). I also support some family members financially in China. |
| A great many (perhaps the vast majority) of open-source software developers are unpaid and even unnoticed. | I can have the extra money to sponsor or donate to these unpaid developers (e.g., Tomas Kalibera). |
| R Markdown appears to be less and less important as more people switch to Quarto, and my work will be less valuable. | Perhaps my work in knitr and rmarkdown still has some value. I just don’t know how much. |
| Even if no one pays me a cent, I’ll still do the work anyway. I love solving problems and helping people. | How about using the extra money to pay someone to free me from some daily chores so I can devote the time to the open-source work instead? Does anyone know that I have to check 26,000+ packages before I release new versions of knitr and rmarkdown to CRAN? |
| My sponsors/donors actually need the money more than me. | Perhaps I should seek corporate or organizational sponsorship instead of individual contributions? I’m not sure how many people would like me to “shut up and take their money”... |
| I don’t want my mind to be too closely attached to money. Once I receive it, I’ll naturally experience loss aversion later when the “free” money no longer flows to me, although it’s not too hard for me to overcome it. | |
| If I really want to make money, I should start another business instead, and then I wouldn’t need to struggle at all. |
Anyway, I’m listing ways to support me below, with zero expectation:
Venmo: @yihui_xie
Zelle: [email protected]
Paypal: https://paypal.me/YihuiXie (or find me on Paypal by my email
[email protected]). Please choose the payment type as “Family and Friends”
(instead of “Goods and Services”) to avoid extra fees.
Other ways:
| WeChat Pay (微信支付：谢益辉) | Alipay (支付宝：谢益辉) |
|---|---|
 |
 |
If you want it to be a genuine gift, please be sure to add a note “gift” or “donation”, so it won’t be treated as my taxable income. You can also sponsor me on GitHub, which will be treated as taxable: https://github.com/sponsors/yihui
Thank you!
As a freelancer (currently working as a contractor) and a dad of three kids, I truly appreciate your donation to support my writing and open-source software development! Your contribution helps me cope with financial uncertainty better, so I can spend more time on producing high-quality content and software. You can make a donation through methods below.
Venmo: @yihui_xie, or Zelle: [email protected]
Paypal
If you have a Paypal account, you can follow the link https://paypal.me/YihuiXie or find me on Paypal via my email [email protected]. Please choose the payment type as “Family and Friends” (instead of “Goods and Services”) to avoid extra fees.
If you don’t have Paypal, you may donate through this link via your debit or credit card. Paypal will charge a fee on my side.
Other ways:
| WeChat Pay (微信支付：谢益辉) | Alipay (支付宝：谢益辉) |
|---|---|
|
|
When sending money, please be sure to add a note “gift” or “donation” if possible, so it won’t be treated as my taxable income but a genuine gift. Needless to say, donation is completely voluntary and I appreciate any amount you can give.
Please feel free to email me if you prefer a different way to give. Thank you very much!
I’ll give back a significant portion of the donations to the open-source community and charities. For the record, I received about $30,000 in total (before tax) in 2024-25, and gave back about $15,000 (after tax).
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。