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Funding Yourself as a Free Software Developer

343 points by mabynogy 9y ago

ukulele 9y ago
On the off chance that OP is site owner: this text is borderline unreadable on my phone. It's light light gray on a white background with thin font. I don't normally even notice low contrast color palettes, so my guess is this is pretty far beyond the threshold for comfortable reading. Suggestion would be to darken the font some.
- JofArnold 9y ago
  Agreed. And I can’t use iOS reader mode to make it more readable.
- tyil 9y ago
  OP is not the site owner. I haven't had any people saying they had any issues with the looks of the site, but I have updated the main font color to be black. I'll look into more improvements after I get the article updated.
staticelf 9y ago
Or just start a company and make money from your code. The code can still be open source and if you really want to write free software then just do it when you have enough money.
- JofArnold 9y ago
  At time of writing the above comment is getting down votes. Why? Is it the “just” bit people are having issues with?
  - allannienhuis 9y ago
    Yes, I think so. 'just start a company and make money' is exceptionally non-trivial. 'just' is usually used to infer the subject is easy. "It's not hard; just do it!" That type of phrasing can also be used sarcastically or meanly, so people may have interpreted it that way. "Why can't you do this? Just make it work!"
  - tenkabuto 9y ago
    I suspect that it's the "just", for reasons that sibling commenters have discussed. But the original comment might also wrongly come from the perspective that a given developer ought to tie themselves to a particular project by creating a business around it. Many projects are created and/or maintained by developers working on a broad number of projects, so total productivity might decrease if developers were settle down with only one or two projects which they're able to build a business around.
  - spacelizard 9y ago
    Because it's free as in freedom, not free as in price. Most popular free software is written by employed developers working for companies.
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  I personally don't like the "company" part of my work. I wish I could just write code and not have to deal with finding clients and signing contracts. If I could do as the author does and just take direct payments to work on an OSS project, I would. Maybe some day…
minimaxir 9y ago
> You have to solve a Google reCaptcha in order to register a new account. Even in the world of the free uber-cyberpunk hacker, why is reCaptcha considered a warning sign?
- Karunamon 9y ago
  I think people are okay with some token amount of work to check that they're not a bot, but Google is changing that into a token amount of work to help train their systems. I don't agree with it, but I understand it, especially if you have bad feelings about google.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    I think people have forgotten that recaptcha was originally designed to help Google transcribe books for their digital library, which is arguably a public good. Now they're training their self-driving cars with it, which really just benefits them.
    - gue5t 9y ago
      Google Books is not public: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happened-to-google-books https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happen...
      - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
        Yeah it didn't work out because publishers fought it tooth and nail in copyright court. But that was the original intention.
    - calcifer 9y ago
      > help Google transcribe books for their digital library, which is arguably a public good If they were doing it for a public library or releasing the text as public domain, that would be a public good. As it stands, it's just doing free work for an advertising company.
    - 9y ago
GuiA 9y ago
Patrick McKenzie had a great twitter thread on the topic recently: "The single biggest piece of advice I have for you: if you have someone’s email address (+ permission) you have an earned relationship. If you have to beg a platform to contact them, the platform owns the relationship. Get the email. Youtube subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and all analogous relationships are not defensible assets in the way that someone expecting mail from you is. They’re dependent on the week-to-week policies and quarter-to-quarter strategic imperatives of the platform. The platforms offer incredible reach! Incredible! Reach! And the bargain they offer is Faustian. Platforms need their creators to bake the cake; they then propose allocating 60~80%+ to them as an opening bid, do not contractualize that (for smaller creators), and smile. “What do you mean they do not contractualize that?” I mean that you have neither a contract nor even an understanding among equals that the terms you currently enjoy are the ones you will have in the future. Businesses sign contracts with vendors important to them. Do you remember the contract negotiation? No, because doesn’t work at scale but also because You Are Not One Of Their Important Accounts. Any term you think you’re entitled to is going to be renegotiated by Darth Vader: “I have altered the deal; pray I do not alter it further.” So back to the question of building your own platform: You want your own place on the Internet; I think that is, for most people, a website. You need, need, need an email list. Software for them is cheap to get started with. Above all things: “As an independent creator, I will comport all my conduct on other people’s platforms with the intentional, strategic goal of enticing some portion of the audience to join me on my platform, where the lion’s share of value I produce is, and where I make meaningful money.” https://mobile.twitter.com/i/status/939907045985107968 https://mobile.twitter.com/i/status/939907045985107968
Joeboy 9y ago
Just to put it out there, Ardour is a GPL2 project that also offers paid binaries. They've always got an amount of hate from the self-righteous freeloader community but they've apparently made $8815 so far this month and I get the impression it's become less controversial over the years.
- fundamental 9y ago
  While it is working currently it certainly hasn't been the most stable road in the past. Don't forget about their funding issues https://community.ardour.org/node/8288 https://community.ardour.org/node/8288 a few years back (not to mention how long it took to slowly build up a consistent crowd of subscribers).
- 72deluxe 9y ago
  I am glad to see this continuing. I subscribed for a year and a bit and in that time spent enough money to actually buy a version of Logic Pro X on the Mac; instead I paid monthly to hopefully reach the goal of having a usable DAW on the Mac. I eventually stopped when I realised I could have just bought Logic whilst spending the same amount. I am impressed that others would continue though, that's for certain. I remember it being very useful on Linux (along with RoseGarden and Muse, back in the day).
andrewaylett 9y ago
Channelling my inner patio11: Also consider offering a support contract, or selling licenses, rather than just soliciting donations. Especially if you're already intending to offer access in return for said donations! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939
- jcbrand 9y ago
  Could you point me to any resources that show what such a support contract generally looks like?
  - hayksaakian 9y ago
    It's less about what the words in the document say and more about the concept of offering technical support to your business class users. (Obviously you want that agreement in writing, but start by just getting conversations with users who would be qualified for this. Anybof your users with 50+ employees could be good candidates.)
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I think back to Caddy and how they offered this and they still had to resort to that controversial thing where they started replying with a special Caddy header with pre-compiled versions of their server. Even professionally, shops with good admins/devops will usually prefer CentOS/openSUSE over RHEL/SLES, since they can handle almost all the support themselves. The other model is tools like Gitlab/Alfresco/Magento where the enterprise version has closed source code not available in the OSS version. I wrote a thing about different OSS support philosophies a while back: http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...
  - busterarm 9y ago
    > Even professionally, shops with good admins/devops will usually prefer CentOS/openSUSE over RHEL/SLES, since they can handle almost all the support themselves. And shops with large enough IT budgets and huge downside risk (like finance) will pay for the SLA guarantee because ultimately it's really cheap insurance against the cost of catastrophic events. I've been in banks where the admins were the definitive authors of books written in their space, but where CentOS or RHEL on a server was chosen purely on the basis of the value of the service being hosted.
fundamental 9y ago
I'm currently trying to condense notes from my own FLOSS funding work, but for the moment I think it's helpful to see some of the great background research that the people over at the (mostly dormant) snowdrift.coop project have done. https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi... and https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software give you an idea on the other funding options out there.
- quadrangle 9y ago
  Snowdrift.coop is NOT quite "mostly dormant", it's just pushing ahead at the unfortunately-slow-pace that is common for all-volunteer projects. Regular activity happens every day moving toward full launch. See the activity links at the top of https://blog.snowdrift.coop/still-here/ https://blog.snowdrift.coop/still-here/
ralmidani 9y ago
I avoid proprietary software as much as I can, but if Free Software will ever be truly vindicated, I have a feeling it will happen via business applications. Convincing a sizable portion of consumers to even try free software--much less pay for it--is pretty much a lost cause. Consumers have made it abundantly clear they value convenience and "free" (as in gratis) over freedom, privacy, customizability, and any other ideal or benefit we can try to sell them on. The best hope for consumers is for a set of profitable, high-quality, free business software companies to rise, and for some of those companies to devote money, dev time, ingenuity, and vision to solving consumer problems. You cannot take on proprietary software with ideals alone; you need resources.
- swellep 9y ago
  Like Winrar
  - davexunit 9y ago
    Winrar is proprietary.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  On the other hand, most larger proprietary software businesses devote a surprisingly small amount of their operating budget to development. In my experience it's usually around 10%, but it depends on the company. I certainly haven't heard of anyone spending more than about 30% and there are quite a few big names that spend in the low single digits. Potentially, if you can leverage the benefits of free software to pay for some of the things you would usually have to manage yourself, then perhaps you can reach some kind of parity even if the vast majority of users do not pay money for the software. Mozilla currently pulls in relatively huge amounts of cash (hundreds of millions per year), but when they first started it was considerably smaller. Because they were able to concentrate on development rather than marketing and sales, they were able to get quite a lot done with that money. Where they did spend on marketing (for example the famous New York Times ad), they were quite careful about it. There are other successful free software plays. For me the biggest example is Red Hat. When these kinds of conversations appear, I always point people toward Michael Tiemann's chapter in "Open Sources: Voices From the Open Source Revolution" [0]. Cygnus software went from $6K to being sold to Red Hat for $600M, and Red Hat went on to great success with essentially the same business model. My favourite quote from that chapter, talking about discussing his ideas for a free software business model: "I never got farther than 'It's a great idea, but . . .,' when I had my second insight: if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!" Even now, I think there is virtually no competition in Red Hat's space because nobody thinks their business model will work. In the end, I think that developing free software business models is where it has to go. You can't charge for the software. I personally feel that dual licensing is not really a free software business model because you don't actually make money from free software -- you are just using it as a loss leader for your traditional proprietary software. Like you imply, in the enterprise space you can probably do well (for example, by copying Red Hat, or by making a foundation like Mozilla or Apache). But there is a lot of other software out there. I think in those spaces you have to be a lot more creative about what you charge money for. People will clearly spend money -- just look at the horrible, horrible "free to play" game market. The trick is to allow them to do so in a non-horrible way ;-) [0] - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.html http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.htm...
ravenstine 9y ago
I've been meaning to start giving more money to free software projects I've benefitted from. Sadly, a lot of them don't take donations or they use some convoluted payment processor. I would totally be willing to support a project through something like Patreon and pay something like $3 per minor release and $7 for a major release. This should be a no brainer for smaller companies that can only afford free software but also want that software to be well supported. Even as an individual, I don't know why I haven't set up donations on my github projects. Some of them have several stars, and you never know who will buy you a beer or a coffee.
- beisner 9y ago
  Hmm the idea of a Patreon donation per minor version is actually very interesting....
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    You can currently do that with Patreon. They support money per month or money per thing. David Firth does money per thing (video, music album, etc.) and you could easily do that with releases (although I'm not sure if you could do separate donation amounts per minor or major release).
- tyil 9y ago
  Most people don't do it because it's effort that's not directly associated to programming. It's also easy to think that you won't get any payoff from the effort invested, since it's rare to see to begin with, and even more rare to see anyone making a decent living off of it. More financial support to free software development would certainly be appreciated. Even a single cent just to show the developer you enjoy his software is a good incentive for a developer to keep going. It seems like most feedback developers get is negative, so anything positive is appreciated.
archagon 9y ago
This is completely anecdotal and almost certainly doesn't scale, but in proportion to its obscurity and especially the effort put in, I feel like I've gotten a surprising number of donations for my recent side-mouse-button-fixing OSS project[1]. I remember reading on HN that even the most popular and well-maintained OSS software basically sees nothing from donation links. My humble app nets about $5 every week. I'm pretty sure the reason is that I included a Donorbox link, since it lets you pay by credit card without having to deal with Paypal. It’s all been Donorbox so far — nothing from Paypal at all. [1]: http://sensible-side-buttons.archagon.net http://sensible-side-buttons.archagon.net
- azdle 9y ago
  Holy cow, I just figured this was impossible to do on OSX, downloaded & donated!
  - archagon 9y ago
    Thank you!
- aphextron 9y ago
  This is one of my biggest pet peeves ever in OSX. Thanks.
- epicide 9y ago
  Yeah, one of the best decisions/discoveries I've ever made was just putting a little PayPal donate button on fruitbasket.io. It's something I threw together in a few hours, but I guess it helped people. I'm still seeing a few donations here and there almost exactly a year later.
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  $5/week would easily pay for my hosting and AWS experiments. $10/week would let me pay for a proper Travis CI / AppVeyor plan (I mess around a lot with buildroot but it takes too long on single / dual thread workers) I've attracted a couple of one off donations, but never been able to get anything consistent. I imagine it'd be terrifying to run a project with actual expenses to cover.
Asparagirl 9y ago
One of my favorite discoveries of the past few months is OpenCollective — which is basically like Patreon for open source software and other semi-informal techie projects: https://opencollective.com https://opencollective.com They let any open source project with at least 100 stars on GitHub join under their umbrella where they will act as a host organization so that you can start collecting donations (both one-off and recurring) and paying expenses without the headache of setting up a 501(c)(3) and a formal structure. You just add a bunch of trusted admins and you can manage expenses and invoices. Open Collective holds the money for you. They’re built on open source code themselves and I’ve found then to be very responsive to newbie questions in their open Slack channel.
- Asparagirl 9y ago
  And as long as my comment is getting some eyeballs here, let me just shamelessly pimp the link for Archive Team’s brand new Open Collective page: https://opencollective.com/archiveteam https://opencollective.com/archiveteam If you like angry archivist nerds saving your shit for the Wayback Machine, please consider throwing us a few? A couple of dollars a month will help us bring new web crawl pipelines online and pay for developers to spend some hours cleaning up accumulated technical debt and cruft. (We qualified under Open Collective’s open source software umbrella because the code for our ArchiveBot project has >100 stars on GitHub.)
  - africajam 9y ago
    I signed up with opencollective some weeks ago and yesterday got my first backer: https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder . Only $2 a month but it still cheered me up. Fingers crossed it gains some momentum over the coming months. It is a good concept well implemented.
  - alexbecker 9y ago
    Looks like your homepage (archiveteam dot org, not linking for obvious reasons) has been hugged to death. I'm getting a "508 - Resource Limit Is Reached" response.
cavneb 9y ago
Over the past handful of months, I've built up the company Code Sponsor (https://codesponsor.io https://codesponsor.io). In December, I had to shut it down due to the inability to continue on GitHub. Here's an article I published on why funding open source is difficult: https://medium.com/@codesponsor/why-funding-open-source-is-hard-652b7055569d https://medium.com/@codesponsor/why-funding-open-source-is-h...
- tyil 9y ago
  I'll give it a read and see if I can incorporate anything!
- moeamaya 9y ago
  When I saw this topic pop up on HN, I instinctively went to check my CodeSponsor dashboard and saw no activity. Didn't think too much of it and came back here and saw the news :( That's too bad Github decided against continuing the service, it's such a great way for developers to maintain their roles and still provide a bit of funding. Good luck on your next version!
nemild 9y ago
Nadia Eghbal from Github also has a great guide: Lemonade Stand: A handy guide to financial support for open source https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand
- tyil 9y ago
  I'll read through this, and see if there's anything I can add to my article.
bringtheaction 9y ago
Tokenize your project and do an ICO. Get millions. $$$
lukego 9y ago
I am developing a LuaJIT fork nowadays (RaptorJIT) and I would love ideas about the best way to fund that! I have experience with commercial open source but I am not sure how well that translates to development tools like compilers/debuggers/profilers.
- sudouser 9y ago
  Big co wants support or bug fix? equals $ paid support
jankotek 9y ago
Too complicated, yet another bunch of websites to register at. What works for me: - Consulting. You need clear message what you offer and how you can help. Also clear way how consulting process works. Companies are happy to pay extra, if they get author. - Paypal donations, put 'Donate!' button on website, prefil some amount and offer recuring payments. Paypal even handles credit card. - Crypto coin donations. Setup wallets and put addresses on web. - T-Shirts or books for premium price.
- dboreham 9y ago
  I was wondering the same thing : why do you need a 3rd party site/service to do this? If you're a software developer then setting up something to get donations via PayPal or Stripe is easy.
  - fundamental 9y ago
    The network effect can make a reasonable case. Similar to how many open source projects benefit from centralized hosting options (e.g. github), projects can in theory benefit from more centralized funding platforms.
  - tyil 9y ago
    PayPal and Stripe are 3rd party services as well ;)
open-source-ux 9y ago
Why don't more open source projects simply state that if you are a business using their software you are required to purchase a license for X amount of money. The source code is still available for anyone to freely download and use. Businesses are free to install and evaluate the software for as long as they like (there are no onerous checks to verify you have purchased a license). While some businesses won't pay, many will. In fact, a self-hosted solution would probably appeal to many businesses over a SaaS-style per-employee pricing model. What's stopping open source projects from trying this approach?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Why don't more open source projects simply state that if you are a business using their software you are required to purchase a license for X amount of money. Because a license which requires that is not an open source license. It might be a source-available, free-for-non-commercial use license, but that's not the same thing. Further, if using a copyleft upstream license, this would be prohibited by the upstream license.
- Bogdanp 9y ago
  This is roughly the approach (AGPL + commercial license) I'm taking with Dramatiq[0]. Some interest but no purchases so far, though. [0]: https://dramatiq.io https://dramatiq.io
- alien_ 9y ago
  This already exists, check out LicenseZero and Faircode. The problem is this is against one of the criteria for a license to be approved by the Open Source Initiative, which states that the users are all treated equal regardless of the purpose for which they use the software, so you can't claim to be Open Source if you discriminate against businesses like this. I was actually contemplating to use LicenseZero for AutoSpotting, my largest and most successful project that can save companies a lot of money, but I'm afraid this will discourage users and would slow down contributions. So far I am playing with a dual license model somewhat similar to the way Redhat handles RHEL and Fedora. The software is open source under the MIT license, and anyone can use it from source if they are willing to compile it themselves. In addition I am now offering evaluation nightly builds that expire after two months, and I am selling for a relatively small fee stable and well tested builds that I verified to be working well. I am also only actively offering support and trying to fix issues for these stable builds, the other builds are supported by the community on a best effort basis. So far very few people were interested in the official builds, but the first evaluation builds will start to expire within a few days so I expect the number to grow.
tyil 9y ago
Thanks everyone for your comments, both here and via email! I'll work through the comments here and start working on updating the article with your feedback.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
enzo1982 9y ago
What worked great for me is to simply show a dialog with PayPal donation buttons after my app has been started 10 times. With the 10 starts threshold only regular users get the dialog and if they don't like it, they can uncheck a box and never see it again. On average, I get one donation for every 1000 downloads which appears to be a relatively good rate. [1]: https://github.com/enzo1982/freac https://github.com/enzo1982/freac
jahbrewski 9y ago
Hmm. I was hoping for a list of strategies, rather than a list of software platforms. To me, this seems more like a business problem than a software problem.
- tyil 9y ago
  If you have any strategic advise or know sources for such kind of information, I'd gladly read more about it and add more to the article.
Jack000 9y ago
I have a few open source projects that I consider "complete" ie not something I'm actively working on, eg. http://svgnest.com http://svgnest.com does liberapay/patreon makes sense? I've never bothered with a donate button because people have said they don't work, but do people specifically donate because of the patreon brand?
DoreenMichele 9y ago
A couple of thoughts: If you are trying to get money from people for your labor, stop using the word donations. People see that as charity, not as money for services rendered. Second, you can create a tip jar with Pay Pal. That has performed better for me than Pay Pal donate buttons. Info: http://independentdigitalworkers.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-hack-pay-pal-create-payment.html http://independentdigitalworkers.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to...
- tyil 9y ago
  How would you describe it if not using the word "donations" then?
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    I have a tip jar. You can become a patron via Patreon. In some cases, you can also support my work via whitelisting the site on your ad blocker, in cases where the site has ads. There are lots of different ways to talk about this.
    - tyil 9y ago
      Hmm. I personally find the "tip jar" less inviting, but I can talk about using different wording in the article if others agree that a different wording would be beneficial.
      - DoreenMichele 9y ago
        You need to talk about monetization, not donations. And what, you, personally find inviting isn't that important. What's important is what works. I straight up had someone tell me I was "panhandling the internet" to have donate buttons on my site when I was homeless. At that time, people would give me money and leave notes "Here, have something to eat." They very clearly did not see it as paying me for the value of my work. It was charity in their eyes. All that stopped when I switched to a tip jar and my take went up. YMMV, of course. But it ended up being an informative experiment. I like having Patreon plus a tip jar. Patreon is for on going support. A tip jar lets people leave a one time payment.
diyseguy 9y ago
Someone should invent GitCoin. A system in which developers who contribute to open source software are paid for their contributions. The users of the free software would agree to let it mine GitCoin for a few moments before the program launches. Or somesuch
- diyseguy 9y ago
  uhhh. wow, maybe they did. https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ Great minds

343 points by mabynogy 9y ago

On the off chance that OP is site owner: this text is borderline unreadable on my phone. It's light light gray on a white background with thin font. I don't normally even notice low contrast color palettes, so my guess is this is pretty far beyond the threshold for comfortable reading. Suggestion would be to darken the font some.

JofArnold 9y ago
Agreed. And I can’t use iOS reader mode to make it more readable.
tyil 9y ago
OP is not the site owner. I haven't had any people saying they had any issues with the looks of the site, but I have updated the main font color to be black. I'll look into more improvements after I get the article updated.

staticelf 9y ago

Or just start a company and make money from your code. The code can still be open source and if you really want to write free software then just do it when you have enough money.

JofArnold 9y ago
At time of writing the above comment is getting down votes. Why? Is it the “just” bit people are having issues with?
- allannienhuis 9y ago
  Yes, I think so. 'just start a company and make money' is exceptionally non-trivial. 'just' is usually used to infer the subject is easy. "It's not hard; just do it!" That type of phrasing can also be used sarcastically or meanly, so people may have interpreted it that way. "Why can't you do this? Just make it work!"
- tenkabuto 9y ago
  I suspect that it's the "just", for reasons that sibling commenters have discussed. But the original comment might also wrongly come from the perspective that a given developer ought to tie themselves to a particular project by creating a business around it. Many projects are created and/or maintained by developers working on a broad number of projects, so total productivity might decrease if developers were settle down with only one or two projects which they're able to build a business around.
- spacelizard 9y ago
  Because it's free as in freedom, not free as in price. Most popular free software is written by employed developers working for companies.
Cyberdog 9y ago
I personally don't like the "company" part of my work. I wish I could just write code and not have to deal with finding clients and signing contracts. If I could do as the author does and just take direct payments to work on an OSS project, I would. Maybe some day…

minimaxir 9y ago

> You have to solve a Google reCaptcha in order to register a new account. Even in the world of the free uber-cyberpunk hacker, why is reCaptcha considered a warning sign?

Karunamon 9y ago
I think people are okay with some token amount of work to check that they're not a bot, but Google is changing that into a token amount of work to help train their systems. I don't agree with it, but I understand it, especially if you have bad feelings about google.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  I think people have forgotten that recaptcha was originally designed to help Google transcribe books for their digital library, which is arguably a public good. Now they're training their self-driving cars with it, which really just benefits them.
  - gue5t 9y ago
    Google Books is not public: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happened-to-google-books https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happen...
    - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
      Yeah it didn't work out because publishers fought it tooth and nail in copyright court. But that was the original intention.
  - calcifer 9y ago
    > help Google transcribe books for their digital library, which is arguably a public good If they were doing it for a public library or releasing the text as public domain, that would be a public good. As it stands, it's just doing free work for an advertising company.
  - 9y ago

GuiA 9y ago

Patrick McKenzie had a great twitter thread on the topic recently: "The single biggest piece of advice I have for you: if you have someone’s email address (+ permission) you have an earned relationship. If you have to beg a platform to contact them, the platform owns the relationship. Get the email. Youtube subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and all analogous relationships are not defensible assets in the way that someone expecting mail from you is. They’re dependent on the week-to-week policies and quarter-to-quarter strategic imperatives of the platform. The platforms offer incredible reach! Incredible! Reach! And the bargain they offer is Faustian. Platforms need their creators to bake the cake; they then propose allocating 60~80%+ to them as an opening bid, do not contractualize that (for smaller creators), and smile. “What do you mean they do not contractualize that?” I mean that you have neither a contract nor even an understanding among equals that the terms you currently enjoy are the ones you will have in the future. Businesses sign contracts with vendors important to them. Do you remember the contract negotiation? No, because doesn’t work at scale but also because You Are Not One Of Their Important Accounts. Any term you think you’re entitled to is going to be renegotiated by Darth Vader: “I have altered the deal; pray I do not alter it further.” So back to the question of building your own platform: You want your own place on the Internet; I think that is, for most people, a website. You need, need, need an email list. Software for them is cheap to get started with. Above all things: “As an independent creator, I will comport all my conduct on other people’s platforms with the intentional, strategic goal of enticing some portion of the audience to join me on my platform, where the lion’s share of value I produce is, and where I make meaningful money.” https://mobile.twitter.com/i/status/939907045985107968 https://mobile.twitter.com/i/status/939907045985107968

Joeboy 9y ago

Just to put it out there, Ardour is a GPL2 project that also offers paid binaries. They've always got an amount of hate from the self-righteous freeloader community but they've apparently made $8815 so far this month and I get the impression it's become less controversial over the years.

fundamental 9y ago
While it is working currently it certainly hasn't been the most stable road in the past. Don't forget about their funding issues https://community.ardour.org/node/8288 https://community.ardour.org/node/8288 a few years back (not to mention how long it took to slowly build up a consistent crowd of subscribers).
72deluxe 9y ago
I am glad to see this continuing. I subscribed for a year and a bit and in that time spent enough money to actually buy a version of Logic Pro X on the Mac; instead I paid monthly to hopefully reach the goal of having a usable DAW on the Mac. I eventually stopped when I realised I could have just bought Logic whilst spending the same amount. I am impressed that others would continue though, that's for certain. I remember it being very useful on Linux (along with RoseGarden and Muse, back in the day).

andrewaylett 9y ago

Channelling my inner patio11: Also consider offering a support contract, or selling licenses, rather than just soliciting donations. Especially if you're already intending to offer access in return for said donations! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939

jcbrand 9y ago
Could you point me to any resources that show what such a support contract generally looks like?
- hayksaakian 9y ago
  It's less about what the words in the document say and more about the concept of offering technical support to your business class users. (Obviously you want that agreement in writing, but start by just getting conversations with users who would be qualified for this. Anybof your users with 50+ employees could be good candidates.)
djsumdog 9y ago
I think back to Caddy and how they offered this and they still had to resort to that controversial thing where they started replying with a special Caddy header with pre-compiled versions of their server. Even professionally, shops with good admins/devops will usually prefer CentOS/openSUSE over RHEL/SLES, since they can handle almost all the support themselves. The other model is tools like Gitlab/Alfresco/Magento where the enterprise version has closed source code not available in the OSS version. I wrote a thing about different OSS support philosophies a while back: http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...
- busterarm 9y ago
  > Even professionally, shops with good admins/devops will usually prefer CentOS/openSUSE over RHEL/SLES, since they can handle almost all the support themselves. And shops with large enough IT budgets and huge downside risk (like finance) will pay for the SLA guarantee because ultimately it's really cheap insurance against the cost of catastrophic events. I've been in banks where the admins were the definitive authors of books written in their space, but where CentOS or RHEL on a server was chosen purely on the basis of the value of the service being hosted.

fundamental 9y ago

I'm currently trying to condense notes from my own FLOSS funding work, but for the moment I think it's helpful to see some of the great background research that the people over at the (mostly dormant) snowdrift.coop project have done. https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi... and https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software give you an idea on the other funding options out there.

quadrangle 9y ago
Snowdrift.coop is NOT quite "mostly dormant", it's just pushing ahead at the unfortunately-slow-pace that is common for all-volunteer projects. Regular activity happens every day moving toward full launch. See the activity links at the top of https://blog.snowdrift.coop/still-here/ https://blog.snowdrift.coop/still-here/

ralmidani 9y ago

I avoid proprietary software as much as I can, but if Free Software will ever be truly vindicated, I have a feeling it will happen via business applications. Convincing a sizable portion of consumers to even try free software--much less pay for it--is pretty much a lost cause. Consumers have made it abundantly clear they value convenience and "free" (as in gratis) over freedom, privacy, customizability, and any other ideal or benefit we can try to sell them on. The best hope for consumers is for a set of profitable, high-quality, free business software companies to rise, and for some of those companies to devote money, dev time, ingenuity, and vision to solving consumer problems. You cannot take on proprietary software with ideals alone; you need resources.

swellep 9y ago
Like Winrar
- davexunit 9y ago
  Winrar is proprietary.
mikekchar 9y ago
On the other hand, most larger proprietary software businesses devote a surprisingly small amount of their operating budget to development. In my experience it's usually around 10%, but it depends on the company. I certainly haven't heard of anyone spending more than about 30% and there are quite a few big names that spend in the low single digits. Potentially, if you can leverage the benefits of free software to pay for some of the things you would usually have to manage yourself, then perhaps you can reach some kind of parity even if the vast majority of users do not pay money for the software. Mozilla currently pulls in relatively huge amounts of cash (hundreds of millions per year), but when they first started it was considerably smaller. Because they were able to concentrate on development rather than marketing and sales, they were able to get quite a lot done with that money. Where they did spend on marketing (for example the famous New York Times ad), they were quite careful about it. There are other successful free software plays. For me the biggest example is Red Hat. When these kinds of conversations appear, I always point people toward Michael Tiemann's chapter in "Open Sources: Voices From the Open Source Revolution" [0]. Cygnus software went from $6K to being sold to Red Hat for $600M, and Red Hat went on to great success with essentially the same business model. My favourite quote from that chapter, talking about discussing his ideas for a free software business model: "I never got farther than 'It's a great idea, but . . .,' when I had my second insight: if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!" Even now, I think there is virtually no competition in Red Hat's space because nobody thinks their business model will work. In the end, I think that developing free software business models is where it has to go. You can't charge for the software. I personally feel that dual licensing is not really a free software business model because you don't actually make money from free software -- you are just using it as a loss leader for your traditional proprietary software. Like you imply, in the enterprise space you can probably do well (for example, by copying Red Hat, or by making a foundation like Mozilla or Apache). But there is a lot of other software out there. I think in those spaces you have to be a lot more creative about what you charge money for. People will clearly spend money -- just look at the horrible, horrible "free to play" game market. The trick is to allow them to do so in a non-horrible way ;-) [0] - http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.html http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/tiemans.htm...

ravenstine 9y ago

I've been meaning to start giving more money to free software projects I've benefitted from. Sadly, a lot of them don't take donations or they use some convoluted payment processor. I would totally be willing to support a project through something like Patreon and pay something like $3 per minor release and $7 for a major release. This should be a no brainer for smaller companies that can only afford free software but also want that software to be well supported. Even as an individual, I don't know why I haven't set up donations on my github projects. Some of them have several stars, and you never know who will buy you a beer or a coffee.

beisner 9y ago
Hmm the idea of a Patreon donation per minor version is actually very interesting....
- djsumdog 9y ago
  You can currently do that with Patreon. They support money per month or money per thing. David Firth does money per thing (video, music album, etc.) and you could easily do that with releases (although I'm not sure if you could do separate donation amounts per minor or major release).
tyil 9y ago
Most people don't do it because it's effort that's not directly associated to programming. It's also easy to think that you won't get any payoff from the effort invested, since it's rare to see to begin with, and even more rare to see anyone making a decent living off of it. More financial support to free software development would certainly be appreciated. Even a single cent just to show the developer you enjoy his software is a good incentive for a developer to keep going. It seems like most feedback developers get is negative, so anything positive is appreciated.

archagon 9y ago

This is completely anecdotal and almost certainly doesn't scale, but in proportion to its obscurity and especially the effort put in, I feel like I've gotten a surprising number of donations for my recent side-mouse-button-fixing OSS project[1]. I remember reading on HN that even the most popular and well-maintained OSS software basically sees nothing from donation links. My humble app nets about $5 every week. I'm pretty sure the reason is that I included a Donorbox link, since it lets you pay by credit card without having to deal with Paypal. It’s all been Donorbox so far — nothing from Paypal at all. [1]: http://sensible-side-buttons.archagon.net http://sensible-side-buttons.archagon.net

azdle 9y ago
Holy cow, I just figured this was impossible to do on OSX, downloaded & donated!
- archagon 9y ago
  Thank you!
aphextron 9y ago
This is one of my biggest pet peeves ever in OSX. Thanks.
epicide 9y ago
Yeah, one of the best decisions/discoveries I've ever made was just putting a little PayPal donate button on fruitbasket.io. It's something I threw together in a few hours, but I guess it helped people. I'm still seeing a few donations here and there almost exactly a year later.
voltagex_ 9y ago
$5/week would easily pay for my hosting and AWS experiments. $10/week would let me pay for a proper Travis CI / AppVeyor plan (I mess around a lot with buildroot but it takes too long on single / dual thread workers) I've attracted a couple of one off donations, but never been able to get anything consistent. I imagine it'd be terrifying to run a project with actual expenses to cover.

Asparagirl 9y ago

One of my favorite discoveries of the past few months is OpenCollective — which is basically like Patreon for open source software and other semi-informal techie projects: https://opencollective.com https://opencollective.com They let any open source project with at least 100 stars on GitHub join under their umbrella where they will act as a host organization so that you can start collecting donations (both one-off and recurring) and paying expenses without the headache of setting up a 501(c)(3) and a formal structure. You just add a bunch of trusted admins and you can manage expenses and invoices. Open Collective holds the money for you. They’re built on open source code themselves and I’ve found then to be very responsive to newbie questions in their open Slack channel.

Asparagirl 9y ago
And as long as my comment is getting some eyeballs here, let me just shamelessly pimp the link for Archive Team’s brand new Open Collective page: https://opencollective.com/archiveteam https://opencollective.com/archiveteam If you like angry archivist nerds saving your shit for the Wayback Machine, please consider throwing us a few? A couple of dollars a month will help us bring new web crawl pipelines online and pay for developers to spend some hours cleaning up accumulated technical debt and cruft. (We qualified under Open Collective’s open source software umbrella because the code for our ArchiveBot project has >100 stars on GitHub.)
- africajam 9y ago
  I signed up with opencollective some weeks ago and yesterday got my first backer: https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder . Only $2 a month but it still cheered me up. Fingers crossed it gains some momentum over the coming months. It is a good concept well implemented.
- alexbecker 9y ago
  Looks like your homepage (archiveteam dot org, not linking for obvious reasons) has been hugged to death. I'm getting a "508 - Resource Limit Is Reached" response.

cavneb 9y ago

Over the past handful of months, I've built up the company Code Sponsor (https://codesponsor.io https://codesponsor.io). In December, I had to shut it down due to the inability to continue on GitHub. Here's an article I published on why funding open source is difficult: https://medium.com/@codesponsor/why-funding-open-source-is-hard-652b7055569d https://medium.com/@codesponsor/why-funding-open-source-is-h...

tyil 9y ago
I'll give it a read and see if I can incorporate anything!
moeamaya 9y ago
When I saw this topic pop up on HN, I instinctively went to check my CodeSponsor dashboard and saw no activity. Didn't think too much of it and came back here and saw the news :( That's too bad Github decided against continuing the service, it's such a great way for developers to maintain their roles and still provide a bit of funding. Good luck on your next version!

nemild 9y ago

Nadia Eghbal from Github also has a great guide: Lemonade Stand: A handy guide to financial support for open source https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand

tyil 9y ago
I'll read through this, and see if there's anything I can add to my article.

bringtheaction 9y ago

Tokenize your project and do an ICO. Get millions. $$$

lukego 9y ago

I am developing a LuaJIT fork nowadays (RaptorJIT) and I would love ideas about the best way to fund that! I have experience with commercial open source but I am not sure how well that translates to development tools like compilers/debuggers/profilers.

sudouser 9y ago
Big co wants support or bug fix? equals $ paid support

jankotek 9y ago

Too complicated, yet another bunch of websites to register at. What works for me: - Consulting. You need clear message what you offer and how you can help. Also clear way how consulting process works. Companies are happy to pay extra, if they get author. - Paypal donations, put 'Donate!' button on website, prefil some amount and offer recuring payments. Paypal even handles credit card. - Crypto coin donations. Setup wallets and put addresses on web. - T-Shirts or books for premium price.

dboreham 9y ago
I was wondering the same thing : why do you need a 3rd party site/service to do this? If you're a software developer then setting up something to get donations via PayPal or Stripe is easy.
- fundamental 9y ago
  The network effect can make a reasonable case. Similar to how many open source projects benefit from centralized hosting options (e.g. github), projects can in theory benefit from more centralized funding platforms.
- tyil 9y ago
  PayPal and Stripe are 3rd party services as well ;)

open-source-ux 9y ago

Why don't more open source projects simply state that if you are a business using their software you are required to purchase a license for X amount of money. The source code is still available for anyone to freely download and use. Businesses are free to install and evaluate the software for as long as they like (there are no onerous checks to verify you have purchased a license). While some businesses won't pay, many will. In fact, a self-hosted solution would probably appeal to many businesses over a SaaS-style per-employee pricing model. What's stopping open source projects from trying this approach?

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Why don't more open source projects simply state that if you are a business using their software you are required to purchase a license for X amount of money. Because a license which requires that is not an open source license. It might be a source-available, free-for-non-commercial use license, but that's not the same thing. Further, if using a copyleft upstream license, this would be prohibited by the upstream license.
Bogdanp 9y ago
This is roughly the approach (AGPL + commercial license) I'm taking with Dramatiq[0]. Some interest but no purchases so far, though. [0]: https://dramatiq.io https://dramatiq.io
alien_ 9y ago
This already exists, check out LicenseZero and Faircode. The problem is this is against one of the criteria for a license to be approved by the Open Source Initiative, which states that the users are all treated equal regardless of the purpose for which they use the software, so you can't claim to be Open Source if you discriminate against businesses like this. I was actually contemplating to use LicenseZero for AutoSpotting, my largest and most successful project that can save companies a lot of money, but I'm afraid this will discourage users and would slow down contributions. So far I am playing with a dual license model somewhat similar to the way Redhat handles RHEL and Fedora. The software is open source under the MIT license, and anyone can use it from source if they are willing to compile it themselves. In addition I am now offering evaluation nightly builds that expire after two months, and I am selling for a relatively small fee stable and well tested builds that I verified to be working well. I am also only actively offering support and trying to fix issues for these stable builds, the other builds are supported by the community on a best effort basis. So far very few people were interested in the official builds, but the first evaluation builds will start to expire within a few days so I expect the number to grow.

tyil 9y ago

Thanks everyone for your comments, both here and via email! I'll work through the comments here and start working on updating the article with your feedback.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

enzo1982 9y ago

What worked great for me is to simply show a dialog with PayPal donation buttons after my app has been started 10 times. With the 10 starts threshold only regular users get the dialog and if they don't like it, they can uncheck a box and never see it again. On average, I get one donation for every 1000 downloads which appears to be a relatively good rate. [1]: https://github.com/enzo1982/freac https://github.com/enzo1982/freac

jahbrewski 9y ago

Hmm. I was hoping for a list of strategies, rather than a list of software platforms. To me, this seems more like a business problem than a software problem.

tyil 9y ago
If you have any strategic advise or know sources for such kind of information, I'd gladly read more about it and add more to the article.

Jack000 9y ago

I have a few open source projects that I consider "complete" ie not something I'm actively working on, eg. http://svgnest.com http://svgnest.com does liberapay/patreon makes sense? I've never bothered with a donate button because people have said they don't work, but do people specifically donate because of the patreon brand?

DoreenMichele 9y ago

A couple of thoughts: If you are trying to get money from people for your labor, stop using the word donations. People see that as charity, not as money for services rendered. Second, you can create a tip jar with Pay Pal. That has performed better for me than Pay Pal donate buttons. Info: http://independentdigitalworkers.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to-hack-pay-pal-create-payment.html http://independentdigitalworkers.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-to...

tyil 9y ago
How would you describe it if not using the word "donations" then?
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  I have a tip jar. You can become a patron via Patreon. In some cases, you can also support my work via whitelisting the site on your ad blocker, in cases where the site has ads. There are lots of different ways to talk about this.
  - tyil 9y ago
    Hmm. I personally find the "tip jar" less inviting, but I can talk about using different wording in the article if others agree that a different wording would be beneficial.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      You need to talk about monetization, not donations. And what, you, personally find inviting isn't that important. What's important is what works. I straight up had someone tell me I was "panhandling the internet" to have donate buttons on my site when I was homeless. At that time, people would give me money and leave notes "Here, have something to eat." They very clearly did not see it as paying me for the value of my work. It was charity in their eyes. All that stopped when I switched to a tip jar and my take went up. YMMV, of course. But it ended up being an informative experiment. I like having Patreon plus a tip jar. Patreon is for on going support. A tip jar lets people leave a one time payment.

diyseguy 9y ago

Someone should invent GitCoin. A system in which developers who contribute to open source software are paid for their contributions. The users of the free software would agree to let it mine GitCoin for a few moments before the program launches. Or somesuch

diyseguy 9y ago
uhhh. wow, maybe they did. https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ Great minds