Should I Ask for Sponsorship?
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? 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:
xie@yihui.name - Paypal: https://paypal.me/YihuiXie (or find me on Paypal by my email
xie@yihui.name). 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!
- I saw the post Should Academics Promote Themselves? by David Broniatowski the other day, which describes a similar struggle.
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