9 ms·

I feel like there ought to be a way to publicly fund FOSS developers full-time because they often produce software used by everybody and therefore a product for

by cm3 10y ago

I feel like there ought to be a way to publicly fund FOSS developers full-time because they often produce software used by everybody and therefore a product for the common good, just like someone working at an NGO. You may laugh and say it's a stretch to compare it to working with disadvantaged people or similar work, but software is used everywhere and we rely it on it in all kinds of situations now. So, why shouldn't there be a FOSS org that collects donations to compensate maintainers of projects? Right now, this exists as fundraisers on a project basis and therefore only a couple high profile projects manage to a few of their developers to focus on it more than just on weekends. One might argue this should be supported at least financially or with a do-not-starve stipend by the government, but this may again be controversial. The government could start by making taxation easier for people who could get donations or many small one-time payments aka nano-contracting (prioritized bug fix for pay). In most countries the tax code is not on the side of a hobby programmer who would accept many small payments but isn't already a freelancer.

gaius 10y ago
So, why shouldn't there be a FOSS org that collects donations to compensate maintainers of projects? GNU does this I believe...
- raverbashing 10y ago
  How effective are them at this? Which high importance projects have they financed? Legitimate questions, I'm not implying anything here
  - gaius 10y ago
    GCC and Emacs spring to mind :-)
    - cm3 10y ago
      I'm unaware of any Emacs or GCC dev being paid by the FSF. From what I recall, the Emacs maintainers do it as a hobby, and the GCC maintainers are employed by the likes of Red Hat to work on it. However, if what you're implying is true, I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong :).
      - gaius 10y ago
        Perhaps not at the moment, but you can read all about the woes Zawinski had with the guy GNU hired to work on Emacs that led to the XEmacs fork...
        raverbashing 10y ago
        Interesting read https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
        draven 10y ago
        There's a redirect to imgur if the referrer is hacker news.
        cm3 10y ago
        Not many people other than JWZ can pull that off without pissing off people. Reminds of the time when MSN.com hot-linked to some poor guy's website in a front-page article. What did the guy do? Replace the image with a copy of the original goatse photo.
  - danieldk 10y ago
    There are some organisations/groups which seem to be effective in actually paying people. There is a group of Debian developers that collect funding and pay Debian developers/maintainers to maintain LTS for Debian releases: https://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html https://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html https://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/Freexian+LTS/ https://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/Freexian+LTS/ The FreeBSD Foundation also hires developers to do actual work: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.html#The-FreeBSD-Foundation https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.h... https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/projects/#current-projects https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/projects/#curre... However, I think such initiatives are typically highly underfunded. Like OpenSSH/{Open,Libre}SSL/GnuPG, everyone uses the software, few companies/individuals chip in in a significant way.
    - snassar 10y ago
      Getting a copy of "The Debian Administrator's Handbook" also helps support Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas keep doing good work. I purchased a recent copy of the book (covering Debian 8), and while there are things I'd like more details about, I find it a good resource to have on hand.
- pixelbeat 10y ago
  FSF collects money for infrastructure etc. Generally the GNU project maintainers are not paid by the FSF. Mostly they're paid through the likes of Red Hat etc., with varying overlap between day job and maintainership
jventura 10y ago
I think the words you are looking for are "infrastructural software".. Software that works as infrastructure, such as linux, web browsers, databases, ie, mostly anything that we can build other more specific software on top of, has the tendency to become open source. And one cannot deny the increased value that that software brings, for instance, linux servers and open source browsers and all the economy around the internet..
pudo 10y ago
I think there's a special niche with civic technology, the kind of public-benefit projects this is also aimed at: most European societies already have this deal. It's public broadcasting systems. In Germany, the pot is 7.6bn per year - basically, because we believe it's a good idea to have a well-funded set of institutions in the public sphere. I'd argue that doing stuff like GPG, a web site to track bills through Parliament or some important infra isn't actually that much different. So if we can decide to get rid of an old radio station or two, there's plenty of money already allocated - it just needs to be shuffled around a bit.
- cm3 10y ago
  Even though the public broadcasting system started to produce more fluff content on ARD and ZDF in the last decade, they also opened a couple channels like Phoenix and ZDF Info which are aiming to reach the quality level of BBC productions. I don't know if it's just having more money and therefore the quality content growing in proportion. Either way, the original purpose of the publicly funded broadcasting service is very limited and the funds are misused for fluff. If half of the programming is similar to what you find on the US hallmark or bravo networks, it's easy to understand people's reluctance to pay the per-household mandatory tax (legally not a tax, but technically the same thing). I mean, given that people need access chips with a per annum fee for many HD channels today, I could totally get behind a scheme where the publicly funded channels are reduced to what they have to provide by law and thereby requiring just a tiny part of the funds they do now. Then either the mandatory fee is reduced or used for, as you suggested, FOSS code. Anyway, I like your train of thought. We could start by making the national tax tool open source so that there's a proper Linux port, because it's written with Qt already. GPG, due to the safety requirements and reliance in critical situations, would do well with a rewrite in a different language that can still expose a C API. For good integration of the C API (aka no GC) there aren't many languages available to build it in. Maybe ATS2 or Rust. Such a rewrite is something the GPG devs are highly unlikely to do for obvious reasons, but it's something that can be publicly funded as a long-term project.
  - allendoerfer 10y ago
    They are buying the rights to the Olympics and to the World and European Cup every time, getting into bidding wars with private stations. Their argument is, that many people will stick around to watch the news in the half-time so they can fulfill their educational mandate. They could save billions buy just letting RTL or Pro7/Sat1 show sports. UEFA and FIFA restrict the material anyways, so the main difference would be more boulevard half-time news while everybody is getting up to get a new beer. They stopped showing Tour de France a few years ago, when the doping scandals hit its highs and literally nobody cares. Also - and here comes the fucked up part: Showing the events publicly on a stage was forbidden recently, since this requires another set of licensing so you have to pay to visit these stages even though every German household already paid for the license through ARD/ZDF. Fun fact 2: Austrians do not pay and can watch it anyway.
gotchange 10y ago
You might be interested in viewing this GitHub project [1] that explores in details a multitude of the available options for financing FOSS projects. A very handy guide if you ask me. [1]: https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand

by cm3 10y ago

gaius 10y ago

So, why shouldn't there be a FOSS org that collects donations to compensate maintainers of projects? GNU does this I believe...

raverbashing 10y ago
How effective are them at this? Which high importance projects have they financed? Legitimate questions, I'm not implying anything here
- gaius 10y ago
  GCC and Emacs spring to mind :-)
  - cm3 10y ago
    I'm unaware of any Emacs or GCC dev being paid by the FSF. From what I recall, the Emacs maintainers do it as a hobby, and the GCC maintainers are employed by the likes of Red Hat to work on it. However, if what you're implying is true, I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong :).
    - gaius 10y ago
      Perhaps not at the moment, but you can read all about the woes Zawinski had with the guy GNU hired to work on Emacs that led to the XEmacs fork...
      - raverbashing 10y ago
        Interesting read https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
        draven 10y ago
        There's a redirect to imgur if the referrer is hacker news.
        cm3 10y ago
        Not many people other than JWZ can pull that off without pissing off people. Reminds of the time when MSN.com hot-linked to some poor guy's website in a front-page article. What did the guy do? Replace the image with a copy of the original goatse photo.
- danieldk 10y ago
  There are some organisations/groups which seem to be effective in actually paying people. There is a group of Debian developers that collect funding and pay Debian developers/maintainers to maintain LTS for Debian releases: https://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html https://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html https://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/Freexian+LTS/ https://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/Freexian+LTS/ The FreeBSD Foundation also hires developers to do actual work: https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.html#The-FreeBSD-Foundation https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.h... https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/projects/#current-projects https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/projects/#curre... However, I think such initiatives are typically highly underfunded. Like OpenSSH/{Open,Libre}SSL/GnuPG, everyone uses the software, few companies/individuals chip in in a significant way.
  - snassar 10y ago
    Getting a copy of "The Debian Administrator's Handbook" also helps support Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas keep doing good work. I purchased a recent copy of the book (covering Debian 8), and while there are things I'd like more details about, I find it a good resource to have on hand.
pixelbeat 10y ago
FSF collects money for infrastructure etc. Generally the GNU project maintainers are not paid by the FSF. Mostly they're paid through the likes of Red Hat etc., with varying overlap between day job and maintainership

jventura 10y ago

I think the words you are looking for are "infrastructural software".. Software that works as infrastructure, such as linux, web browsers, databases, ie, mostly anything that we can build other more specific software on top of, has the tendency to become open source. And one cannot deny the increased value that that software brings, for instance, linux servers and open source browsers and all the economy around the internet..

pudo 10y ago

I think there's a special niche with civic technology, the kind of public-benefit projects this is also aimed at: most European societies already have this deal. It's public broadcasting systems. In Germany, the pot is 7.6bn per year - basically, because we believe it's a good idea to have a well-funded set of institutions in the public sphere. I'd argue that doing stuff like GPG, a web site to track bills through Parliament or some important infra isn't actually that much different. So if we can decide to get rid of an old radio station or two, there's plenty of money already allocated - it just needs to be shuffled around a bit.

cm3 10y ago
Even though the public broadcasting system started to produce more fluff content on ARD and ZDF in the last decade, they also opened a couple channels like Phoenix and ZDF Info which are aiming to reach the quality level of BBC productions. I don't know if it's just having more money and therefore the quality content growing in proportion. Either way, the original purpose of the publicly funded broadcasting service is very limited and the funds are misused for fluff. If half of the programming is similar to what you find on the US hallmark or bravo networks, it's easy to understand people's reluctance to pay the per-household mandatory tax (legally not a tax, but technically the same thing). I mean, given that people need access chips with a per annum fee for many HD channels today, I could totally get behind a scheme where the publicly funded channels are reduced to what they have to provide by law and thereby requiring just a tiny part of the funds they do now. Then either the mandatory fee is reduced or used for, as you suggested, FOSS code. Anyway, I like your train of thought. We could start by making the national tax tool open source so that there's a proper Linux port, because it's written with Qt already. GPG, due to the safety requirements and reliance in critical situations, would do well with a rewrite in a different language that can still expose a C API. For good integration of the C API (aka no GC) there aren't many languages available to build it in. Maybe ATS2 or Rust. Such a rewrite is something the GPG devs are highly unlikely to do for obvious reasons, but it's something that can be publicly funded as a long-term project.
- allendoerfer 10y ago
  They are buying the rights to the Olympics and to the World and European Cup every time, getting into bidding wars with private stations. Their argument is, that many people will stick around to watch the news in the half-time so they can fulfill their educational mandate. They could save billions buy just letting RTL or Pro7/Sat1 show sports. UEFA and FIFA restrict the material anyways, so the main difference would be more boulevard half-time news while everybody is getting up to get a new beer. They stopped showing Tour de France a few years ago, when the doping scandals hit its highs and literally nobody cares. Also - and here comes the fucked up part: Showing the events publicly on a stage was forbidden recently, since this requires another set of licensing so you have to pay to visit these stages even though every German household already paid for the license through ARD/ZDF. Fun fact 2: Austrians do not pay and can watch it anyway.

gotchange 10y ago

You might be interested in viewing this GitHub project [1] that explores in details a multitude of the available options for financing FOSS projects. A very handy guide if you ask me. [1]: https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand