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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 techi

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.
  - Asparagirl 9y ago
    It’s back up now.
bacon_waffle 9y ago
Thanks for the link! FreeCAD (https://freecadweb.org https://freecadweb.org) has had some discussions about various funding methods, but hasn't really got a good answer to the "how do I contribute money?" question yet. Open collective looks like it could be that answer.
kartickv 9y ago
I have a related idea of a commercial reuse license: https://kartick-log.blogspot.in/2016/11/a-commercial-reuse-license-can-be-best.html https://kartick-log.blogspot.in/2016/11/a-commercial-reuse-l... Related in the sense that they address the question of "how can we reuse other people's code without reimplementing, in a way that's financially viable for the original authors?"
olejorgenb 9y ago
There's also https://liberapay.com/ https://liberapay.com/ if you want a minimal fee alternative. Opencollective is 10% + transaction costs IIRC while liberpay is only transaction costs. They're funded through their own platform. It doesn't provide all the features of opencollective (like 501(c)(3)) though. https://opencollective.com/faq https://opencollective.com/faq (Fee info) https://liberapay.com/about/faq https://liberapay.com/about/faq (Fee info)

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.
- Asparagirl 9y ago
  It’s back up now.

bacon_waffle 9y ago

Thanks for the link! FreeCAD (https://freecadweb.org https://freecadweb.org) has had some discussions about various funding methods, but hasn't really got a good answer to the "how do I contribute money?" question yet. Open collective looks like it could be that answer.

kartickv 9y ago

I have a related idea of a commercial reuse license: https://kartick-log.blogspot.in/2016/11/a-commercial-reuse-license-can-be-best.html https://kartick-log.blogspot.in/2016/11/a-commercial-reuse-l... Related in the sense that they address the question of "how can we reuse other people's code without reimplementing, in a way that's financially viable for the original authors?"

olejorgenb 9y ago

There's also https://liberapay.com/ https://liberapay.com/ if you want a minimal fee alternative. Opencollective is 10% + transaction costs IIRC while liberpay is only transaction costs. They're funded through their own platform. It doesn't provide all the features of opencollective (like 501(c)(3)) though. https://opencollective.com/faq https://opencollective.com/faq (Fee info) https://liberapay.com/about/faq https://liberapay.com/about/faq (Fee info)