16 ms·

A new funding model for open source software

354 points by colinmcd 6y ago

colinmcd 6y ago
OP here. I'd love to see something like this exist. Let me know if it does already, or if someone is trying, and I'll link it below. EDIT: This model is used by Flattr [0]. Unfortunately Flattr isn't targeted at open-source software; an OSS-specific approach (ideally implemented by a highly visible, established player) is (probably) necessary for something like this to reach its potential. [0] https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/
- verdverm 6y ago
  Have a look at https://coss.media https://coss.media and Sid of GitLab interview with Joe Jacks
- quadrangle 6y ago
  What you propose exists. It's https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/ It hasn't made enough impact over its long history. That's not necessarily because the model doesn't work. However, it does set up a zero-sum game. Each click to another project takes away from the ones you already support. Thus, it won't really change the overall economic situation much. There are also foundations that sponsor multiple projects. E.g. Apache. There are meta-level projects like Ubuntu. In principle these larger downstream projects should do what's necessary to support their upstream dependencies. That doesn't always happen though. Tidelift does funding that emphasizes awareness of upstream dependencies and supporting them. ## On microdonations and fees This is a payment-processor issue. I believe that Stripe and some others have the capacity to process aggregate charges without all separate. So, if in a platform, you donate $10 to 15 different projects and so do many others, they could charge you the one charge of $10 and give the recipients their single payment from everyone. Each donor would get one processing fee, not one for every project they support. This is key. And it cannot be solved at the platform level because holding funds in escrow is only feasible if you are a limited specific set of incorporated projects (that's what Open Collective helps support, they can do this approach with one donation fee for each Collective you donate to, even though the Collective could include a lot of projects. A specific Collective there could offer your system. In other words: Open Collective could do what you're asking somewhat. You donate to a Collective. They don't just have the money for any of their members, the Collective offers a tool for you to vote on which of the members you want to support. That's another way to see your proposal: An org that accepts donations and you get to vote on which projects they give grants to. ## On downstream vs upstream funding Anyway, the bigger problem in free/libre/open funding is that it relies too much on proprietary end-user products that have paywalls or ad-driven business models. If a product is designed to reach all the way to downstream users, everyone can freeride. So, freerider problem, game-theory dilemmas. You might be interested in the ideas at https://snowdrift.coop https://snowdrift.coop which is aiming to build downstream patronage via crowdmatching. The wiki there also has reviews of the issues: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/existing-mechanisms https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/existing-mechanisms https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics and this is a thorough review of all the existing funding platforms: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi... There's a long history of failed efforts, some mentioned at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software Cheers
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    One thing that Flattr and many others like them got wrong, in my view, was collecting too little and levying too little from it. Too many schemes were $5/month or $3/month, then collecting 10% or thereabouts. You cannot build a sustainable business with high risk exposure for less than a fraction of cup of coffee per customer per month. But people kept bloody trying.
- zaarn 6y ago
  https://liberapay.com/ https://liberapay.com/ Liberapay sort of does it that way, though their payment processor has made it somewhat difficult. Basically you pay them 50$ and then you decide how much you're going to sent to projects and how often. For example, I donate about 0.50ct each month to mastodon (sadly I do not have much expendable income at the moment). But it means I can spread little money into donations over an entire year. I think they still need to make a percentage-mode, where I allocate money from my pool on percentages (ie, 20% of the money to mastodon over a year, every month, results in 0.83$ every month being transferred, or 10$ over the year)
- smichel17 6y ago
  Hi, I'm one of the Snowdrift.coop cofounders. We actually planned on a wallet approach early on, and still consider it the superior option in many ways Not all), but we're launching with a monthly charge model because holding money is more complicated legally. To avoid higher fees for microtransactions, we're delaying donations until they total high enough to keep fees below 10%, then doing one charge for several months (ie, charging in arrears). You don't need a wallet approach to do one-click, though. Just the ability to do many:many charges, which several payment platforms support (usually under "services for ecommerce platforms", like Stripe connect, if I'm remembering the name correctly). That lets you send one bill to each patron that totals their donations to projects, and one paycheck to each project, that totals all the individual donations from various patrons, avoiding a fee per patron-project-month combination. --- Broadly, we don't agree that friction is the core barrier to donations (although lower friction certainly helps!). Instead, we think the barrier is people's reluctance to be the first to donate. Colloquially: people would pitch in if they knew it would lead to enough funding to be useful (ie, actually pay full time developer salaries), but nobody wants to be the chump wasting their money on 2 minutes of developer time per month (which will really be 0 minutes per month, because you can't hire 0.01% of a developer). That's why crowdmatching donations start small and grow as more people support the same project as you. Coming back to the article, I'd argue that both big and small projects alike have trouble soliciting donations from individuals (for the reason above). The difference is, large infrastructure projects can solicit funding from large companies that depend on them. These companies can donate enough money to single-handedly make a difference, so there's no coordination problem. Consider LibreOffice: they're a large project, and their potential audience is even larger. But, their primary benefactors are end users, and they struggle to make ends meet. Snowdrift.coop won't address the small-project funding issue right away, since in order to actually get launched some time this decade we're restricting our initial scope to large projects with the potential to really change the software landscape if they were well funded -- but we do want to expand our focus later, both to smaller projects and areas outside of software, like journalism, music, and research, which suffer from similar coordination problems.
prepend 6y ago
> Existing open source funding models don't work for small projects. Is this true? It seems to me that open source small projects flourish and continue to grow [0]. Although, oddly, I can’t find a simple chart of python or npm packages added over time, I expect it is. Since the article is based on a seemingly false premise, it’s hard to consider the rest of the article. [0] https://octoverse.github.com/ https://octoverse.github.com/
- colinmcd 6y ago
  That page argues (convincingly!) that open source is growing faster and faster in terms of contributors, projects, commits, etc. This is definitely the case, despite the fact that the funding problem is unsolved. But who knows how much faster OSS would be growing if it was solved?
  - wolco 6y ago
    Want a new idea? Sell direction of the project. Offer roadmap milestones. Sell priority over features maybe even bug features. Sell hats/logos/branded hosting environments. Sell access to internal conversation. Sell invites to internal product Zoom meetings. Sell access to private jira boards/trello cards.
    - colinmcd 6y ago
      One of the projects I had in mind when writing this post is the "color" module on npm. It's a fantastic utility for reading in colors in different formats (hex, decimal, CMYK), applying transformations, and getting a modified color back (in your format of choice). For all intents and purposes this module is "done". It's extremely mature and has already implemented everything it set out to do. It has 3.3k stars and 8M monthly downloads. When I look at your list of proposals, none of them really apply to "color". The projects you have in your head are big, ambitious projects, not the smaller utility projects I describe in the article.
      - wolco 6y ago
wolco 6y ago
It could work for a select group. The reason why other donation models are successful is because they offer something (insider access/game earlier) that makes you feel special without the badge.
- colinmcd 6y ago
  This is something else I've been thinking about! Caleb Porzio's post from last month describes a Patreon-style "insider access" service built on top of GitHub Sponsors. I think it's a phenomenal idea. Ideally GitHub would also implement something like that "natively" as part of the Sponsors program.
jacques_chester 6y ago
I termed this model "microsubscriptions" when I was pursuing it in the context of website funding. There are difficulties. Gaming the system Folks will absolutely distort their software, buy fake github stars, spam out bazillions of typosquatting packages etc. We know this because there is already a weak financial incentive to subvert: supply chain attacks for cryptominers. Direct cash will be a much stronger incentive for fuckery. Banking In general, financial institutions don't like services that aggregate and transmit funds. They attract extensive regulatory burden and more importantly, they attract fraud and chargebacks. Chargebacks and fraud are expensive to deal with, banks hate it, so they generally tell you to just sod off entirely. Regulation You are on the hook too. Anti money laundering laws are complex and can come with criminal charges for failures. Taxes are complicated and you need to keep correct books. Got it wrong? Too bad, you owe the taxman cash you don't have. Credit card money laundering in general This is where someone with a stolen card uses your service to launder money taken from it. They sign up with the card, patronise their own software, then run off with the cash. Later a chargeback arrives which is levied against you, not the attacker. The easiest defense is to limit the subscription amount, so that an attacker with a stolen card can't benefit much. But they can still use you to test that the card is active. A second defense is to hold the funds for a period of time, so that you can pay chargebacks. Even so, you will be looked at poorly by any banks or processor companies if your chargebacks pile up, regardless of whether you could cover them or not. Trusts This one is the biggest mistake I see, and I see it again and again. If you receive money from person A so that you can pay it to person B on A's behalf, you are a trustee. You generally don't need a document to become a trustee and you don't even need to intend to be a trustee. Trusteeship arises from the facts. What does trusteeship entail? Fiduciary duty. That is a high bar and you almost certainly don't meet it. Mingling funds from multiple donors without incredibly scrupulous accounting? Problematic. Mingling donor funds with your own funds? You're in deep shit. Further: trusts have purposes, which the trustee has to abide by. These again can arise from the mere facts. If you said you would take funds from A to pay to B, that's all you can do with it. Can't find B? Stiff shit. B doesn't want the funds? Stiff shit again. You now have money that is like radioactive waste: it's dangerous, you are responsible for it and it won't go away. ---- In general I like microsubscriptions as a model for some things. I spent a lot of time, emotion and treasure on doing it myself. But it is harder than it looks.
z3t4 6y ago
The problem with OSS funding is that it becomes a popularity contest. There need to be a model that is not zero sum.
- wyattpeak 6y ago
  I think this is probably inherent to donations, at least if you're targeting individuals. My priorities can be shifted with respect to what I might donate to, but I'm not likely to substantially increase the total amount I donate in a given year.
TimJRobinson 6y ago
I would love something like this + automatically adding all the NPM packages I use to the pool (or similar for Cargo, PIP etc). So that I don't have to manually find the packages, and can easily contribute to everyone who's code I'm using.
- GordonS 6y ago
  What about transitive packages? With NPM in particular, I have a feeling that donations would be diluted to the point of being meaningless.
C50VGicCxmHC 6y ago
I think the open source model is fundamentally flawed and enables the big corporations to profit at the cost of the little people. The large corporations benefit disproportionately from open source as opposed to the maintainers. I thing what would be useful would be a programmer's "guild". * There is a yearly due - say $100/year * When you write software, you assign a license to anyone in the programmer's guild to be able to use that software. The requirement is that you have to contribute back changes. * Only people in the programmer's guild can use that code. * Anyone can join the programmer's guild, as long as they pay. * A guild member can allocate up to half their year due to support a guild open source project or projects. * You use the annual dues, to support widely used infrastructure that a lot of programmers are using. A big example would be NNTP This has number of very nice benefits. First of all, it ensures a massive pool of money to support worthwhile open source projects, that everybody is using (think NNTP, or projects like that). With that pool of money, we could add benefits for guild members such as employment contract legal review, immigration assistance, etc. If you increased the annual dues, you would be able to do more, but at the cost of excluding more people.
- erikpukinskis 6y ago
  Everything is fundamentally flawed so it doesn’t say much to state it. But personally I think the open source model has been wildly successful. Before open source you needed to get a job working for a company to see any really cool code. Now you can see and play with a world class version of almost anything: a world class OS, a world class 3D rendering engine, a world class video editor... it’s awesome.
andrekorol 6y ago
I recommend taking a look at Gitcoin [0] and quadratic funding [1]. [0] https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ [1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html
ZinniaZirconium 6y ago
OK my project is open source. I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero users. How much do I get paid? Zero? But I wrote open source code that solves a real problem. It's open source. I should deserve to get paid. Because open source software. I don't think your funding model works.
- colinmcd 6y ago
  You don't get paid unless someone adds you to their sponsor pool. If no one knows about your thing, you don't get paid. Am I misunderstanding your question?
  - rsa25519 6y ago
    > If no one knows about your thing And if nobody knows that software exists, then it's not helping anybody. My phrasing sounds cruel, but I can't think of a better way to express it
- imtringued 6y ago
  I don't think the article made the argument that you should be paid unconditionally. It only suggested that it should become easier to donate to multiple projects with a single click. I'm not convinced that a funding model doesn't work because it pays nothing to a project nobody (not even its own creator) has heard of.
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  > I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero users. > I should deserve to get paid. Why? I drew a picture of a giraffe. I should deserve to get paid because art.
- master_korin 6y ago
  You are absolutely right. Github popularity != usefulness. There's plenty of crucial work that does not lead to any github star: - Linux distribution work, including packaging, reliability, security - Security research: finding vulnerabilities and notifying the authors - Configuration, tuning, benchmarking, finding bugs...
anurag 6y ago
It's worth looking at Tidelift (https://tidelift.com https://tidelift.com): they're making the model work with pooled corporate subscriptions that create the right incentives.
- dblock 6y ago
  That actually seems to be working. I maintain ruby grape, a mid sized project. We get $144/month from Tidelift. As more companies signup for corporate sponsorship the $ amount increases. It’s a pool.
boogies 6y ago
> That's because there's currently no way to make a donation to the abstract concept of "open source software" This isn't absolutely true, there are the FSF and the Software Freedom Conservancy, who fund many medium-ish projects, including ones that include some small utilities.
- Galanwe 6y ago
  And also fund a lot of evangelists that don't code at all but spend their time playing open source cops on mailing lists, forums and tech conventions.
  - boogies 6y ago
    (IOW, their idea of supporting the abstract idea of open source software. Although I'm not sure who you're talking about: Stallman I guess fits the description now but wrote his fair share of code in his day.)
  - pabs3 6y ago
    Both the FSF and Conservancy do pay people to code and do other technical work.
- colinmcd 6y ago
  Fair enough. Though the ability to curate your personal pool is an important piece of the puzzle.
  - boogies 6y ago
    Right, there's not a perfect way to make a donation to open source software, and this proposal seems absolutely worth trying as a way to make it more easy to contribute to more projects that are more valuable to you.
tnash 6y ago
I love this idea as a rework of github sponsors.
andrekorol 6y ago
If you're willing to move away from your proposed GitHub route, you could try implementing it on something like Gitcoin. The "wallet" you mentioned in the article could be a smart-contract that by the end of each month (or any desired period) would automatically make the donations directly to the crypto wallets of the projects that you chose to include in your sponsor pool. That way, you jump over some of the implementational and regulatory hurdles. There would be no intermediary, such as GitHub, paying for the transaction fees. The transaction fees necessary for using the smart-contract on a given blockchain would be paid directly by the person making the donations.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tzs 6y ago
  > There would be no intermediary, such as GitHub, paying for the transaction fees It sounds like there would also be no intermediary handling taxes. Each person receiving donations would be liable for dealing with taxes themselves, which could involve having to deal with the tax systems in every country/state in which one of their donors resides. Unless your plan is to just ignore taxes and hope any tax authority that might want to come after you won't be able to obtain jurisdiction, you really want anything that involves accepting money from all over the world to go through some intermediary that operates in such a way as that intermediary is the merchant of record for the transaction. There also might be issues with sanctions. If your country has sanctions against country X and you accept donations from someone in country X that might violate your country's laws. An intermediary can handle keeping track of that, making sure you only get donations from places that your country allows. This could be even worse than the tax issues--at least with the tax issues it is other countries that might be trying to sue and/or prosecute you. With sanctions violations it is your own country, which is usually a lot harder to successful blow off.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  Blockchain-based solutions are a legal minefield. They attract AML and tax scrutiny and, if you've become a trustee, make it incredibly difficult to unwind the mess. "Your Honour, blockchain transactions are immutable and ledgers are composed of mixed units of account that can't be controlled and smart contracts are irreversible" will attract about as much sympathy as spitting on the gavel. When a court decides to impose equitable remedies, it won't care that you can't return gitcoin. It will seize, lien or garnish any old thing you own, because actual law is smart and smart contracts aren't. Old-school financial arrangements aren't as cool, are much more complicated and much more expensive. But they are also vastly more robust against many, many edge conditions. High-level expertise is plentifully available to pretty much any degree of specialisation required.
neatze 6y ago
Seems like solution to a problem that does not exist, there are many motivations for open source projects and not all of them have generating income purpose. Furthermore, generating income via dual licensing is fairly straight forward way, assuming you have solution that is in demand and works.
musingsole 6y ago
Everyone thinks they deserve a dollar and can never imagine that the relative value of their code is effectively zero no matter how much it solves a particular problem. >Big projects — operating systems, frameworks, CMSs, or fully self-hostable applications — are in a privileged position to extract more value from their users, especially corporate ones Big projects aren't privileged to extract more value. They're privileged to solve enough of a problem for enough people that the scraps thrown their way amount to a meaningful warchest. Corporate big projects are privileged to extract wealth. That's the part that pays crazy SWE salaries.
- colinmcd 6y ago
  You seem to be reacting against the term "privileged" in a way I didn't intend. I don't mean to say that they have some unfair advantage. They just have a more foundational role in the tech stack of the products built on top of them, so companies have a bigger incentive to keep the wheels turning.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jart 6y ago
    I'd love to learn more specific details about your leveraging strategy. Keep in mind even someone like Torvalds only serves at the pleasure of big corporations. Let's keep gift economies in alignment with public interest folks. It's difficult to imagine a competent developer needing to squeeze people, for cash money to pay rent, considering how much coders get paid.
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      Two-thirds of projects on GitHub have 1-2 maintainers, as of 2015.[1][2] I’m sure many of those people are in other areas or occupations, or in other countries, where these high-paying jobs may not exist. Some people simply don’t wish to work at a company, and those folks still may produce value to those other than themselves. Let’s not appeal to productivity too hard; learners and those of lesser coding capability also create value in the form of skills and knowledge. It’s hard to identify and quantify those whose contributions helped most, but I feel all contributions are worthwhile. Not all code may be tip-worthy, but I don’t feel chagrin toward those collecting, however they do so. > Only three projects—less than 3 percent of the study’s sample—had more than 50 contributors.[1] [1] https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer-projects/ https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462
pabs3 6y ago
Sponsor pools sounds a bit like snowdrift: https://snowdrift.coop/ https://snowdrift.coop/
joelwass 6y ago
Have you checked out flossbank, it feels like an automated version of what you’re describing
dnautics 6y ago
What would be fantastic is if this service scaled contributions across projects whose code you are actually using in your repos. Minor nitpick: I don't think a badge is really considered virtue signaling because you've already put your wallet where your mouth is.
- colinmcd 6y ago
  I like that idea too. Though it definitely may lead to some troubling scenarios where bad actors try to get their modules listed as dependencies of popular projects to piggyback on their downloads. You could alleviate this by not funding dependencies of dependencies but there are some low-level tools (say, CSS autoprefixers) that are rarely used in their "raw form". It's tricky.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    I see this being a major issue in the NPM ecosystem, lol. One thing is you could make transitive dependencies strictly opt-in, or have a decay function.
    - SCLeo 6y ago
      Or each package's maintainer can set a proportion for each of its dependencies, so that every time a donation is received, a certain amount of that donation is automatically transferred to those dependencies according to the proportion set by the maintainer. The donation sent to those dependencies is then propagated to their dependencies automatically according to ratios set by the maintainers of those dependencies.
- matsemann 6y ago
  It has to be scaled correctly somehow. For instance some big project uses isEven, which depends on isOdd, which depends on isNumber. All different npm modules. There are some people notoriously making these really small functions, and then creating a huge web by depending on other modules by the same author. Then just hoping one of them will get traction.
jjcm 6y ago
If anyone is interested, I have a simulator for pool-based funding as I'm working on a side project that uses the same approach: http://syd.jjcm.org/soci/ http://syd.jjcm.org/soci/ My project is essentially a reddit-esque site that hosts images/blogs/video/audio content. Each vote on a piece of content gives it one share of your funding pool for that month. The pool based approach is definitely the best for simple usability, but there's another aspect to it as well: it means you weigh your vote more. In the case of a social sharing/news site, low-effort content will get upvoted less, as you have to consider that every vote will dilute the pool. I'm really bought in on this as an overall concept and I think it's something that will be extremely healthy for the web overall. Previously this was a model that was used by Flattr, but they had a major issue that not everyone was on their platform, so often times creators wouldn't get money out of a donation (because they didn't know the donation existed). I definitely agree with the author here that if this were to be done, Github themselves would have to implement it. As soon as a third party who isn't hosting the content implements it, an enormous percentage of creators wont know they have funding waiting for them and things fall apart.
galaxyLogic 6y ago
What happens when an open source-project gets funding? How is the money distributed inside the project, among different contributors?
- dkersten 6y ago
  The same way it currently does, if they opt into GitHub sponsorship or another sponsorship system.
- colinmcd 6y ago
  I added a footnote to address this. I admit I hadn't thought this bit out fully. Basically there needs to be a mechanism by which the set of maintainers divvy up the money. A pattern I expect will arise (actually it probably already exists): there can be different "contribution tiers", a fixed percentage of the proceeds go to each tier, for each tier the allocated percentage is be distributed evenly.
kumarvvr 6y ago
I remember a company doing this some time ago. You have an account, filled with a monthly recurring amount, what ever amount that is. Then you click these "contribute" buttons, placed by the open source project webmasters in their pages. Each click of button registers that project to your account and the site distributes your monthly amount among those registered projects. Not able to recollect the name of the company though. Spreadrr, or Poolr or something. Edit: Another comment got it. It's Flattr
ahnick 6y ago
The root of the problem is that open-source donations are made on a per-project basis. To support a project via GitHub Sponsors or OpenCollective, you must create hyet another auto-renewing monthly subscription for each project you want to support. I don't think the author's description of GitHub Sponsors is exactly correct. Technically, the sponsorship is at the user/organization level, so if you make a donation it goes to the organization/user, which may have MULTIPLE projects going on. This is the way I have set it up for our company Plyint (https://github.com/sponsors/plyint https://github.com/sponsors/plyint). Although I would very much like GitHub to implement a pool of organizations/users, which is maybe what the author meant?
- colinmcd 6y ago
  Good point, that characterization isn't exactly accurate. Though the first-order point is that you have to go through a separate "checkout process" each time you want to sponsor a new thing. I actually think it's important that the pools themselves contain projects not users/organizations. There are definitely complications I hadn't considered if multiple entities/organizations are listed as maintainers of a particular project. Presumably the set of maintainers would have a way to "split" the incoming donations among themselves as they see fit. [edit] I added a footnote to address this.
peteforde 6y ago
I think that this essay is fundamentally brilliant, but doesn't come out and yell the self-evident truth: the ONLY way this ever takes off is if Github does it. And man, do I ever hope that they do. There's no other entity in the ecosystem that even approaches the role Github plays, with all due respect to Gitlab and the rest of the also-rans. It'd be wonderful if they did the same thing, but in the end, they are going to be the contrarian 2%. It's important to remember that GH sponsors isn't even out of beta, yet - you still have to apply and make sure that all of your tax docs are in order. One small proposal I'd make is that I suggest Sponsors and Pool could exist happily in parallel. I believe that there's a meaningful difference between being the patron of a developer and feeling like you're backing a creator with feelings and a story and a family... and wanting to be a good citizen that has an approved list of projects that I benefit from and want to support. I can sponsor Matz, get his updates and feel good about knowing I am counted as a supporter AND set aside $$$ per month to contribute to all of the tools I use in my projects simply because it's the right thing to do and I want those projects to exist for the long term. They are completely different initiatives. Patreon vs Humble Bundle, if you will. Perhaps most critically, Github could keep absorbing the cost of processing payments to sponsored developers but also announce that they plan to hold back 3% of your monthly pool amount to cover CC processing fees. I think most people would be more than fine with this. But if Github isn't on board, this is all just speculative fiction. Please, if you work at Github, make this happen.
- colinmcd 6y ago
  Author here - 100% agree on all fronts! I was dancing around this conclusion but it really does need to be GitHub. And I agree people would be fine paying their own fees if it came to that. Also, in that case, if someone is donating a non-trivial amount, they're incentivized to fund their wallet with a cheaper payment method like an ACH transfer.
  - black_puppydog 6y ago
    I just want to point out that in Europe we have 0-fee SEPA transfers that also work for regular payments. I'm not sure why nobody makes use of that more really. There are simple-as-paypal solutions for it, and given the amount that CC processing costs I'd have expected it to be picked up more. Maybe someone here has practical experience to share on why it's not that easy?
deleted 6y ago
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smashah 6y ago
An odd side effect of trying to monetise an open source project is another repo popping up just outright copying it with no attribution. Amazingly, some people expect that if you make an open source project on GitHub therefore every single feature related to that project should also be open sourced. It's very disheartening.
unsungNovelty 6y ago
I am glad people are thinking more about Open Source software and how to fund them. I think among other problems, Open Source have 2 main root issues when it comes to funding. 1. Silver bullet is a myth. The OSS users are forced to use one medium for funding the software. Maybe Patreon, Github Sponsors, Paypal, Librepay and more not than one or all of them in most cases. Using more funding method have their own challenges, but it depending on the prject should definitely be more than one. I take the inspiration from POSSE concept from Indieweb (https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE). It talks about publishing your content (blogs etc) once and distributing through various channels like FB, Twitter, HN etc instead of forcing people to your website which is just one medium. We should give the same level or freedom and choices to people who want to donate to your OSS project so that they will use a method which they are already using. Reducing the friction. And Flattr or the new proposed will only be one of the ways or should be one of the ways. 2. A lot of people don't know the difference between FOSS/FLOSS and OSS. Especially people after the Millennials (i think). To them, it is a FREE material. It is not! We should make awareness about what free software movement was. Before you jump the gun here, please read the GNU page about selling free software - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html. Open Source forever have been about "free as in freedom" not about "free as in beer". The whole reason for it to start was because the software was not allowed to be redistributed and modified among other things. There definitely was freeware and other software models which were FREE even before Open Source was coined. Stop using FOSS/FLOSS everywhere if you don't mean it and make awareness about the differences about FOSS/FLOSS and OSS. The effort and time of the maintainer should be rewarded with whatever he/she/they want, either recognition or money. We should make it a new normal. Making money from OSS should be OK. Being rich (if you can that is :D )from OSS should be OK. Hope funding in OSS gets more momentum!
renewiltord 6y ago
FYI I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to put a recurring amount of money into open source software. It isn't that it's hard. I just don't want to do it.
dimitrios1 6y ago
I like the idea but instead of pools going arbitrarily every which way or to the discretion of the donator, it should be automatically applied across that open source project's dependencies as well. If I am open source software A, and I make ample use of open source software B within my project, your pool donation should automatically apply some to B, relative to it's usage in the project.
- colinmcd 6y ago
  Agreed this would be nice, though this layer of complexity introduces a bigger attack surface for bad actors. They could try to get their modules listed as dependencies of popular projects to piggyback on their downloads. On the flip side there are some low-level tools (say, the `stylis` CSS autoprefixer) that are almost never used in their "raw form" but are the backbone of several massively popular projects. It's a tricky balance.
  - JimDabell 6y ago
    Is this really a concern though? In this situation, adding a dependency to your project means making a decision to divert some of your funding to them as well. It gives an incentive to avoid adding unnecessary dependencies.
    - NameDoesntExist 6y ago
      Workaround: fork all your dependencies with minimal if any changes and add them back to your main project. This allows you to cut-off the trickle-down funds in bad faith.
      - OJFord 6y ago
        If you're willing to do the extra maintenance of keeping them up to date (or else on the hook for their issues) ... maybe that's 'ok'? I don't mean that it's a service worth paying for, just that maybe it doesn't seem like it's worth the extra (presumably minor) cut of initial donation and people wouldn't really do it (more than once / for long / on a big project with significant donations) anyway.
inputmice 6y ago
Two issues here: Models like these existed. Flattr and Liberapay. The latter had to switch away from the pooling model because turns out when you do the pooling you essentially become a bank and that’s difficult to do legally. Those models only work if users actually visit your website or your Github. I’m developing an app targeted at end users and I bet 90% of them have never been on Github or even know what that is.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  I totally take your second point. But for the niche of apps that is developed for tech folks (think sth like ripgrep) this seems pretty viable. For user-facing apps, it should always be the platform(s) distributing it that should have a pool mechanism. So google for android apps, Apple for iOS. Yeah, I know, that'll be a cold day in hell... PC software is a tough one there since there's no one app store. Which is the PC platform's strength, but yeah, that makes a pool difficult. As you said, Liberapay tried something like this. Would be cool if something like this could become big enough to justify the legal legwork necessary for this.
- OJFord 6y ago
  But if you're targetting end users who haven't been to GitHub... aren't you just billing them for access to your app? Seems like a different problem to getting paid for OSS by people who do know how to find and use it for free.
- sbuttgereit 6y ago
  I think an even larger issue is that, I might know what OSS projects I make use of and will elect to support. But I might not have visibility into the OSS projects that _those_ projects themselves rely upon and really should be getting a cut. So as I see it the proposed solution does remove friction to supporting a large number of projects, but doesn't solve the visibility issue very well as I expect most projects to be in that "used by something I use" category.
ggurgone 6y ago
I like this idea! I had a similar one a while back https://giuseppegurgone.com/github-sponsors-oss-sustainability/#paid-packages https://giuseppegurgone.com/github-sponsors-oss-sustainabili...
felixge 6y ago
This sounds great! That being said, I wonder how well this would work out for smaller projects. Spotify uses a very similar model, and from what I hear, lesser known artists make very little money on their platform.
- RileyJames 6y ago
  The Spotify model is similar. The key difference is that while users pay into the pool, they don’t determine determine how the pool, or their portion of the pool, is distributed. Plays determine distribution, but not a single users plays, all plays. If all github users donations entered a single pool, and that pool was distributed to projects based on the number of clones each repo received, that would be similar to the spotify model. But I don’t believe that’s being proposed. Rather, a user sets up a donation amount, which is then distributed to the projects they include in their “sponsor pool”.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Spotify uses a global pool which is completely different.
ex3ndr 6y ago
Isn't that pay models already exists? And they all failed.
iamleppert 6y ago
If the kind of open source you mention were actually valuable, there would be a market for it. You make a common mistake many people make when trying to calculate value: it has nothing to do with how much something is used, it has to do with the incentives for those creating it. People do not casually write open source to make money (unless sponsored by a company). They do it for the recognition and for vanity, and I’d argue that popular open source software is not scarce as evidenced by how much there is of it. People will in fact rush to fill the void of open source such that the popular open source is more of a fluke than anything: if it wasn’t the react-router it would be something other nearly identical, where there are plenty of people waiting in line behind that.
- i_cannot_hack 6y ago
  1. It feels like you are at risk of some survivorship bias here. Yes, the software that currently exist were apparently made anyway, and is popular enough to be replaced if it went missing. But you have no way to quantify how many possibly useful or innovative OSS projects were never made because of the lack of financial opportunities. 2. I feel the whole idea of this kind of open source patronage / funding is to decouple the market value of the software (which is $0) from the compensation to the contributors for their time and effort (which I think should be above $0 in an ideal world)
- imtringued 6y ago
  I have a very nice pet project with a user base in the single digits and I'd like to keep it that way. I know all my users personally and I am even using it for several hours per week myself. I couldn't care less about recognition or vanity. People create opensource software because they have an itch they need to scratch, not because they want to get attention. Attention is expensive and involves scratching other people's itches, not yours. It means nagging users who demand things from you and drain your sanity all while making money off of your work. It's only natural that you want something in return. >If the kind of open source you mention were actually valuable, there would be a market for it. This argument makes no sense. If the software isn't valuable (as in worth a lot) then nobody would use it. Opensource software cannot become popular without providing value. Open source software is not valuable in the sense that it cannot be valued. You can't put a price tag on a non exclusive good if you're not selling it in the first place. Another flaw in your argument is that you are assuming that because there is no market for something there will never be one. Github sponorships, liberapay, patreon and lots of other platforms are clearly in the process of creating a market for these things. People are clearly willing to fund opensource software if it is possible. Just take a look at neovim! [0] [0] https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/neovim https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/neovim
fermienrico 6y ago
This is amazing and I have a gut feeling that it will revolutionize OSS. I usually want to give say $30/month to OSS (personal use) and as a professional, I would have the authority to donate $300/month. This would be great to not worry about individual donations, and just based on one-click or even just divide up the funds equally amongst all of my starred projects.
andrewstuart 6y ago
The problem here is marketing..... "sponsor pools" "sponsorships" and "donations" are all words that imply optional, not required requests for money as a favor. i.e. begging. The way to monetise open source is for payments to be required in some way. i.e. provide a core feature set that is valuable on its own and monetise by providing additional valuable features under a commercial license.
- sjellis 6y ago
  This "open core" model has been used for a long time, and it might work for commercial vendors that have large products with a plugin architecture, but it's a constant source of friction and inefficiency. Not everybody can or will be able to pay, and introducing licensing and payment systems complicates everything.
- sqrt17 6y ago
  You're missing the point here. The point is not to find ways to sell/rent out software (these already exist) but to monetize open source projects in a non-forced, non-compulsory way. So, instead of selling your songs on a CD for a fixed price, that approach would be more like busking or having your music streamed on music services (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc.). It's unlike begging in that you do provide valuable goods with the expectation that the community is paying, and that providing better value (more catchy songs) will get you more revenue. Non-required payments already work ok in a number of shapes for music and video creators, and we've seen some success in terms of feature bounties and direct sponsorship in software. Given that enough people are willing to support the software they use, there are two things missing in the equation - an entity collecting, pooling, and distributing money in a transparent (enough) fashion - the prime candidate would be GitHub because it already has sponsorships and the necessary bits of information - an attribution model; and this is a bit harder for software than for music or videos where you can simply use watchtime as an attribution metric. Software has a more complex dependency graph, and arguably open source software is the silver bullet that allows us to stand on the shoulders of a herd of giants instead of implementing our bloom filters, routers etc. ourselves. This is a hard problem, and arguably one in danger of not being solved "correctly" in that an entity collecting money could do something intransparent and unfair and people might still sign up because it's the only game in town and they want the warm fuzzy feels and the convenience of not having to write 0.50$ checks to a gazillion small-project maintainers.
imtringued 6y ago
I expected Youtube Red to work like this. Each person has its own pool. Channels should have been weighed by watch time with a minimum weight so that small channels get something as well. If I watch one channel then that channel should get the whole $10 (minus youtube cut). Instead we got a stupid global pool based on global popularity that primarily benefits PewDiePie even if I don't watch him. The compensation was barely enough to cover the lost ad revenue so it failed to actually provide a viable funding alternative for channels that aren't getting millions of views. I hope the same thing doesn't happen with this model. If 100 people sign up at $10/month to only support CatacylsmDDA and minetest then these two projects should get $500 each (minus transaction fees). That money should not be diverted to Angular, React, Vue, ... and then when its time for the two mentioned projects they only get a pittance like $5 per month.
- deleted 6y ago
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- coldpie 6y ago
  Can you link to an article or something about how YouTube Red's payment model works? I've always been curious.
  - jedimastert 6y ago
    Here you go[0]. Basically they're treating it like ad revenue, where each view nets you a certain amount. [0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Red_revenue_2 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Re...
- 86J8oyZv 6y ago
  I generally agree, though I'd say donated money should go to every sponsored individual/party equally by default, with donors able to set weights to recipients in their preferences. Weighting videos on watch time, or GitHub sponsorship amounts based on number of repos, creates perverse incentives. High quality tutorial videos that get to the point and communicate ideas efficiently get less money than those with a minute-and-a-half intro and two minutes talking up a sponsorship at the end. Similarly, GitHub projects that are broken up into many repos, even needlessly, get more money. Same as the microservices hell that many software companies have faced when they drink too much of that koolaid.
Bloggerzune 6y ago
This is amazing and I have a gut feeling that it will revolutionize OSS. I usually want to give say $30/month to OSS (personal use) and as a professional, I would have the authority to donate $300/month. This would be great to not worry about individual donations, and just based on one-click or even just divide up the funds equally amongst all of my starred projects. I termed this model "microsubscriptions" when I was pursuing it in the context of website funding. There are difficulties. Gaming the system Folks will absolutely distort their software, buy fake github stars, spam out bazillions of typosquatting packages etc. We know this because there is already a weak financial incentive to subvert: supply chain attacks for cryptominers. Direct cash will be a much stronger incentive for fuckery. https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/How-to-improve-your-blog.html https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/How-to-improve-your-blog...
deleted 6y ago
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noxer 6y ago
Concept is very similar to Coil.com s "donation" for web content. But Coil actually does "pay by usage" and should therefore be more fair at distributing the money. Its hard to define usage for an open source project.
twoleftfeets 6y ago
I guess I'm old. GOML! This doesn't sound like a way for open source projects to get money to me. It sounds like a way to get thousands and thousands of bad developers to spam me to support their tiny open source no effort project. For them to fork someone else's project and ask for money for their fork. etc... Note, a similar thing already happens on patreon where people ask for support for their piracy activities. They run a blogspot blog with pirated movies/anime/porn and expect you to sign up to support them on patreon for helping you pirate stuff. Basically the easier you make it collect money from random people the stronger the incentive is for bad actors to try to get some of it. I don't have a solution but in my defense I do sponsor 3 open source projects at $!00 a month each. But I'm sure my money is going to people/teams who are really dedicated to their project and not just one hoping for some coffee money for their tiny thing.
transitivebs 6y ago
Any approach to OSS funding based on donations fundamentally doesn't scale because the economic incentives just aren't there. Whether you're donating to one person, one project, or a pool of projects, the business model just doesn't work out.
katzgrau 6y ago
> The marginal cost — both psychological and financial — of supporting additional projects would drop to zero Great idea for redistributing existing funds and preventing winner take all, but the bigger hurdle is increasing the overall funds (eg, getting more people to give a shit in the first place) I have a lot of experience with non profits and independent projects, and funding success is partly based on merit, but more frequently on how clear, consistent and obvious calls to action for funding are. At some point it stops being a problem you can fix with software. It's not like there's a mountain of funding that just needs to be unlocked. It's more about growing the funding in the first place, which when successfully done (in my experience) starts to look a lot like aggressive marketing, advertising, and tweaking of missions to appeal to whatever is hot/fundable at the time, similar to the VC industry. True story, and kind of an anecdote that money turns everything to shit eventually.
justjosias 6y ago
Another good idea would be for projects to list other projects they depend on, and set aside a certain amount of their GitHub sponsor income to go to those projects. Thus Users -> Projects -> Dependencies flows naturally with the same model.
andrey_utkin 6y ago
This addresses the lack of convenience in existing tooling, but not the core of the problem of FOSS sustainability. I believe to solve the problem two things must happen: * Users evaluate how exactly much they benefit from particular software and services, and how much they'd lose in utility if their option of choice disappeared. * Maintainers find out what matters to real users and offer them good bargains to fund their development roadmap and maintenance service level. See https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd91750a1214443a283546391b72 https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd917...
dilandau 6y ago
For fucks sake if you are trying to make money, why are you doing open source? Or, to put it another way, if you are doing open source, why are you so hung up on getting paid for it?
bullen 6y ago
I'm going to offer users something if they sponsor the project by looking in the GraphQL data. Today there are no simple ways of just asking github: "for how much $ does user X sponsor user Y" and much less per project! I think that is the only way to get open source revenue! Unfortunately that means you either need a service or some closed source part that guarantees that revenue.
muazzam 6y ago
Yet another model that has probably been never used on high scale: letting people sponsor tickets (GitHub issues). The donation would go to the contributor who closes the ticket to the satisfaction of the main contributors. The amount, of course, will be decided by how a ticket is perceived as important.
- OJFord 6y ago
  What about the satisfaction of the person who raised the issue?
  - muazzam 6y ago
    Of course, I should've added that but that's not the main point.
EGreg 6y ago
If I may, a totally different way of funding open source projects is possible too, that doesn’t rely on charity mechanisms: I will submit it to HN now as a link under the title “A Decentralized Model for Funding Open Source”. Look tor it there.
maelito 6y ago
Change "open source projet" with "online newspaper" and everything applies. I want to be able to give 20€/month to whatever news article I read with just one click. Instead of liking something, I want to be able to pay quality writings. The browser is the perfect way to do this. I don't understand why Mozilla did not implement that. Brave is close, but Brave wants us to view ads. I don't want to pay for a newspaper article talking about climate change through watching their ad for the latest diesel SUV. I want to pay them, but without filling my bank details for a monthly payment. In France, the largest national newspaper lemonde.fr lets you subscribe in 1 click for 1€, but then you have to send them an tracked postal letter costing 7€ to cancel your subscription.
kseifried 6y ago
The entities that most benefit monetarily from OpenSource are companies that sell products and services based on them. Why would they contribute to this? It's an added expense they don't have to pay. In fact a major tenant of OpenSource is that you can choose to make money or give. it away for free, but you generally have to release the source code, which is what the companies want, so again, why would they pay for it? To make a more sustainable ecosystem? Hahaha. As for individuals funding this, Open Source developers are not cheap, to make it worthwhile (e.g. comparable to a part time contracting gig) we're talking a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars per year per developer. We're not going to get anywhere near these numbers with individuals contributing. I write this as the guy that tried to help the OpenSource world by assigning CVEs for security issues (several thousand...), I'd have had to charge 1-200$ per CVE to make a living at this while I was doing it. That's not going to be sustained by personal donations. And even though a CVE will easily save companies a few tens to hundreds of dollars (time spent tracking all these issues when they don't have CVEs...) there's no way I'm going to get companies to pay me. The good news is that this doesn't really matter. We've had many decades of OpenSource, there's enough good people working on this because it's their passion/hobby/day job that it's mostly sustainable on average, but specific bits may be sickly, and that's ok. Some related listening and reading: Episode 205 – The State of Open Source Security with Alyssa Miller from Snyk https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/07/12/episode-205-the-state-of-open-source-security-with-alyssa-miller-from-snyk/ https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/07/12/episode-205-the-sta... Episode 185 – Is it even possible to fix open source security? https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/03/02/episode-185-is-it-even-possible-to-fix-open-source-security/ https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/03/02/episode-185-is-it-e... Episode 182 – Does open source owe us anything? https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/02/10/episode-182-does-open-source-owe-us-anything/ https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/02/10/episode-182-does-op...

354 points by colinmcd 6y ago

OP here. I'd love to see something like this exist. Let me know if it does already, or if someone is trying, and I'll link it below. EDIT: This model is used by Flattr [0]. Unfortunately Flattr isn't targeted at open-source software; an OSS-specific approach (ideally implemented by a highly visible, established player) is (probably) necessary for something like this to reach its potential. [0] https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/

verdverm 6y ago
Have a look at https://coss.media https://coss.media and Sid of GitLab interview with Joe Jacks
quadrangle 6y ago
What you propose exists. It's https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/ It hasn't made enough impact over its long history. That's not necessarily because the model doesn't work. However, it does set up a zero-sum game. Each click to another project takes away from the ones you already support. Thus, it won't really change the overall economic situation much. There are also foundations that sponsor multiple projects. E.g. Apache. There are meta-level projects like Ubuntu. In principle these larger downstream projects should do what's necessary to support their upstream dependencies. That doesn't always happen though. Tidelift does funding that emphasizes awareness of upstream dependencies and supporting them. ## On microdonations and fees This is a payment-processor issue. I believe that Stripe and some others have the capacity to process aggregate charges without all separate. So, if in a platform, you donate $10 to 15 different projects and so do many others, they could charge you the one charge of $10 and give the recipients their single payment from everyone. Each donor would get one processing fee, not one for every project they support. This is key. And it cannot be solved at the platform level because holding funds in escrow is only feasible if you are a limited specific set of incorporated projects (that's what Open Collective helps support, they can do this approach with one donation fee for each Collective you donate to, even though the Collective could include a lot of projects. A specific Collective there could offer your system. In other words: Open Collective could do what you're asking somewhat. You donate to a Collective. They don't just have the money for any of their members, the Collective offers a tool for you to vote on which of the members you want to support. That's another way to see your proposal: An org that accepts donations and you get to vote on which projects they give grants to. ## On downstream vs upstream funding Anyway, the bigger problem in free/libre/open funding is that it relies too much on proprietary end-user products that have paywalls or ad-driven business models. If a product is designed to reach all the way to downstream users, everyone can freeride. So, freerider problem, game-theory dilemmas. You might be interested in the ideas at https://snowdrift.coop https://snowdrift.coop which is aiming to build downstream patronage via crowdmatching. The wiki there also has reviews of the issues: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/existing-mechanisms https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/existing-mechanisms https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics and this is a thorough review of all the existing funding platforms: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi... There's a long history of failed efforts, some mentioned at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software Cheers
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  One thing that Flattr and many others like them got wrong, in my view, was collecting too little and levying too little from it. Too many schemes were $5/month or $3/month, then collecting 10% or thereabouts. You cannot build a sustainable business with high risk exposure for less than a fraction of cup of coffee per customer per month. But people kept bloody trying.
zaarn 6y ago
https://liberapay.com/ https://liberapay.com/ Liberapay sort of does it that way, though their payment processor has made it somewhat difficult. Basically you pay them 50$ and then you decide how much you're going to sent to projects and how often. For example, I donate about 0.50ct each month to mastodon (sadly I do not have much expendable income at the moment). But it means I can spread little money into donations over an entire year. I think they still need to make a percentage-mode, where I allocate money from my pool on percentages (ie, 20% of the money to mastodon over a year, every month, results in 0.83$ every month being transferred, or 10$ over the year)
smichel17 6y ago
Hi, I'm one of the Snowdrift.coop cofounders. We actually planned on a wallet approach early on, and still consider it the superior option in many ways Not all), but we're launching with a monthly charge model because holding money is more complicated legally. To avoid higher fees for microtransactions, we're delaying donations until they total high enough to keep fees below 10%, then doing one charge for several months (ie, charging in arrears). You don't need a wallet approach to do one-click, though. Just the ability to do many:many charges, which several payment platforms support (usually under "services for ecommerce platforms", like Stripe connect, if I'm remembering the name correctly). That lets you send one bill to each patron that totals their donations to projects, and one paycheck to each project, that totals all the individual donations from various patrons, avoiding a fee per patron-project-month combination. --- Broadly, we don't agree that friction is the core barrier to donations (although lower friction certainly helps!). Instead, we think the barrier is people's reluctance to be the first to donate. Colloquially: people would pitch in if they knew it would lead to enough funding to be useful (ie, actually pay full time developer salaries), but nobody wants to be the chump wasting their money on 2 minutes of developer time per month (which will really be 0 minutes per month, because you can't hire 0.01% of a developer). That's why crowdmatching donations start small and grow as more people support the same project as you. Coming back to the article, I'd argue that both big and small projects alike have trouble soliciting donations from individuals (for the reason above). The difference is, large infrastructure projects can solicit funding from large companies that depend on them. These companies can donate enough money to single-handedly make a difference, so there's no coordination problem. Consider LibreOffice: they're a large project, and their potential audience is even larger. But, their primary benefactors are end users, and they struggle to make ends meet. Snowdrift.coop won't address the small-project funding issue right away, since in order to actually get launched some time this decade we're restricting our initial scope to large projects with the potential to really change the software landscape if they were well funded -- but we do want to expand our focus later, both to smaller projects and areas outside of software, like journalism, music, and research, which suffer from similar coordination problems.

prepend 6y ago

> Existing open source funding models don't work for small projects. Is this true? It seems to me that open source small projects flourish and continue to grow [0]. Although, oddly, I can’t find a simple chart of python or npm packages added over time, I expect it is. Since the article is based on a seemingly false premise, it’s hard to consider the rest of the article. [0] https://octoverse.github.com/ https://octoverse.github.com/

colinmcd 6y ago
That page argues (convincingly!) that open source is growing faster and faster in terms of contributors, projects, commits, etc. This is definitely the case, despite the fact that the funding problem is unsolved. But who knows how much faster OSS would be growing if it was solved?
- wolco 6y ago
  Want a new idea? Sell direction of the project. Offer roadmap milestones. Sell priority over features maybe even bug features. Sell hats/logos/branded hosting environments. Sell access to internal conversation. Sell invites to internal product Zoom meetings. Sell access to private jira boards/trello cards.
  - colinmcd 6y ago
    One of the projects I had in mind when writing this post is the "color" module on npm. It's a fantastic utility for reading in colors in different formats (hex, decimal, CMYK), applying transformations, and getting a modified color back (in your format of choice). For all intents and purposes this module is "done". It's extremely mature and has already implemented everything it set out to do. It has 3.3k stars and 8M monthly downloads. When I look at your list of proposals, none of them really apply to "color". The projects you have in your head are big, ambitious projects, not the smaller utility projects I describe in the article.
    - wolco 6y ago

wolco 6y ago

It could work for a select group. The reason why other donation models are successful is because they offer something (insider access/game earlier) that makes you feel special without the badge.

colinmcd 6y ago
This is something else I've been thinking about! Caleb Porzio's post from last month describes a Patreon-style "insider access" service built on top of GitHub Sponsors. I think it's a phenomenal idea. Ideally GitHub would also implement something like that "natively" as part of the Sponsors program.

jacques_chester 6y ago

I termed this model "microsubscriptions" when I was pursuing it in the context of website funding. There are difficulties. Gaming the system Folks will absolutely distort their software, buy fake github stars, spam out bazillions of typosquatting packages etc. We know this because there is already a weak financial incentive to subvert: supply chain attacks for cryptominers. Direct cash will be a much stronger incentive for fuckery. Banking In general, financial institutions don't like services that aggregate and transmit funds. They attract extensive regulatory burden and more importantly, they attract fraud and chargebacks. Chargebacks and fraud are expensive to deal with, banks hate it, so they generally tell you to just sod off entirely. Regulation You are on the hook too. Anti money laundering laws are complex and can come with criminal charges for failures. Taxes are complicated and you need to keep correct books. Got it wrong? Too bad, you owe the taxman cash you don't have. Credit card money laundering in general This is where someone with a stolen card uses your service to launder money taken from it. They sign up with the card, patronise their own software, then run off with the cash. Later a chargeback arrives which is levied against you, not the attacker. The easiest defense is to limit the subscription amount, so that an attacker with a stolen card can't benefit much. But they can still use you to test that the card is active. A second defense is to hold the funds for a period of time, so that you can pay chargebacks. Even so, you will be looked at poorly by any banks or processor companies if your chargebacks pile up, regardless of whether you could cover them or not. Trusts This one is the biggest mistake I see, and I see it again and again. If you receive money from person A so that you can pay it to person B on A's behalf, you are a trustee. You generally don't need a document to become a trustee and you don't even need to intend to be a trustee. Trusteeship arises from the facts. What does trusteeship entail? Fiduciary duty. That is a high bar and you almost certainly don't meet it. Mingling funds from multiple donors without incredibly scrupulous accounting? Problematic. Mingling donor funds with your own funds? You're in deep shit. Further: trusts have purposes, which the trustee has to abide by. These again can arise from the mere facts. If you said you would take funds from A to pay to B, that's all you can do with it. Can't find B? Stiff shit. B doesn't want the funds? Stiff shit again. You now have money that is like radioactive waste: it's dangerous, you are responsible for it and it won't go away. ---- In general I like microsubscriptions as a model for some things. I spent a lot of time, emotion and treasure on doing it myself. But it is harder than it looks.

z3t4 6y ago

The problem with OSS funding is that it becomes a popularity contest. There need to be a model that is not zero sum.

wyattpeak 6y ago
I think this is probably inherent to donations, at least if you're targeting individuals. My priorities can be shifted with respect to what I might donate to, but I'm not likely to substantially increase the total amount I donate in a given year.

TimJRobinson 6y ago

I would love something like this + automatically adding all the NPM packages I use to the pool (or similar for Cargo, PIP etc). So that I don't have to manually find the packages, and can easily contribute to everyone who's code I'm using.

GordonS 6y ago
What about transitive packages? With NPM in particular, I have a feeling that donations would be diluted to the point of being meaningless.

C50VGicCxmHC 6y ago

I think the open source model is fundamentally flawed and enables the big corporations to profit at the cost of the little people. The large corporations benefit disproportionately from open source as opposed to the maintainers. I thing what would be useful would be a programmer's "guild". * There is a yearly due - say $100/year * When you write software, you assign a license to anyone in the programmer's guild to be able to use that software. The requirement is that you have to contribute back changes. * Only people in the programmer's guild can use that code. * Anyone can join the programmer's guild, as long as they pay. * A guild member can allocate up to half their year due to support a guild open source project or projects. * You use the annual dues, to support widely used infrastructure that a lot of programmers are using. A big example would be NNTP This has number of very nice benefits. First of all, it ensures a massive pool of money to support worthwhile open source projects, that everybody is using (think NNTP, or projects like that). With that pool of money, we could add benefits for guild members such as employment contract legal review, immigration assistance, etc. If you increased the annual dues, you would be able to do more, but at the cost of excluding more people.

erikpukinskis 6y ago
Everything is fundamentally flawed so it doesn’t say much to state it. But personally I think the open source model has been wildly successful. Before open source you needed to get a job working for a company to see any really cool code. Now you can see and play with a world class version of almost anything: a world class OS, a world class 3D rendering engine, a world class video editor... it’s awesome.

andrekorol 6y ago

I recommend taking a look at Gitcoin [0] and quadratic funding [1]. [0] https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/ [1] https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html

ZinniaZirconium 6y ago

OK my project is open source. I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero users. How much do I get paid? Zero? But I wrote open source code that solves a real problem. It's open source. I should deserve to get paid. Because open source software. I don't think your funding model works.

colinmcd 6y ago
You don't get paid unless someone adds you to their sponsor pool. If no one knows about your thing, you don't get paid. Am I misunderstanding your question?
- rsa25519 6y ago
  > If no one knows about your thing And if nobody knows that software exists, then it's not helping anybody. My phrasing sounds cruel, but I can't think of a better way to express it
imtringued 6y ago
I don't think the article made the argument that you should be paid unconditionally. It only suggested that it should become easier to donate to multiple projects with a single click. I'm not convinced that a funding model doesn't work because it pays nothing to a project nobody (not even its own creator) has heard of.
diffeomorphism 6y ago
> I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero users. > I should deserve to get paid. Why? I drew a picture of a giraffe. I should deserve to get paid because art.
master_korin 6y ago
You are absolutely right. Github popularity != usefulness. There's plenty of crucial work that does not lead to any github star: - Linux distribution work, including packaging, reliability, security - Security research: finding vulnerabilities and notifying the authors - Configuration, tuning, benchmarking, finding bugs...

anurag 6y ago

It's worth looking at Tidelift (https://tidelift.com https://tidelift.com): they're making the model work with pooled corporate subscriptions that create the right incentives.

dblock 6y ago
That actually seems to be working. I maintain ruby grape, a mid sized project. We get $144/month from Tidelift. As more companies signup for corporate sponsorship the $ amount increases. It’s a pool.

boogies 6y ago

> That's because there's currently no way to make a donation to the abstract concept of "open source software" This isn't absolutely true, there are the FSF and the Software Freedom Conservancy, who fund many medium-ish projects, including ones that include some small utilities.

Galanwe 6y ago
And also fund a lot of evangelists that don't code at all but spend their time playing open source cops on mailing lists, forums and tech conventions.
- boogies 6y ago
  (IOW, their idea of supporting the abstract idea of open source software. Although I'm not sure who you're talking about: Stallman I guess fits the description now but wrote his fair share of code in his day.)
- pabs3 6y ago
  Both the FSF and Conservancy do pay people to code and do other technical work.
colinmcd 6y ago
Fair enough. Though the ability to curate your personal pool is an important piece of the puzzle.
- boogies 6y ago
  Right, there's not a perfect way to make a donation to open source software, and this proposal seems absolutely worth trying as a way to make it more easy to contribute to more projects that are more valuable to you.

tnash 6y ago

I love this idea as a rework of github sponsors.

andrekorol 6y ago

If you're willing to move away from your proposed GitHub route, you could try implementing it on something like Gitcoin. The "wallet" you mentioned in the article could be a smart-contract that by the end of each month (or any desired period) would automatically make the donations directly to the crypto wallets of the projects that you chose to include in your sponsor pool. That way, you jump over some of the implementational and regulatory hurdles. There would be no intermediary, such as GitHub, paying for the transaction fees. The transaction fees necessary for using the smart-contract on a given blockchain would be paid directly by the person making the donations.

deleted 6y ago
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tzs 6y ago
> There would be no intermediary, such as GitHub, paying for the transaction fees It sounds like there would also be no intermediary handling taxes. Each person receiving donations would be liable for dealing with taxes themselves, which could involve having to deal with the tax systems in every country/state in which one of their donors resides. Unless your plan is to just ignore taxes and hope any tax authority that might want to come after you won't be able to obtain jurisdiction, you really want anything that involves accepting money from all over the world to go through some intermediary that operates in such a way as that intermediary is the merchant of record for the transaction. There also might be issues with sanctions. If your country has sanctions against country X and you accept donations from someone in country X that might violate your country's laws. An intermediary can handle keeping track of that, making sure you only get donations from places that your country allows. This could be even worse than the tax issues--at least with the tax issues it is other countries that might be trying to sue and/or prosecute you. With sanctions violations it is your own country, which is usually a lot harder to successful blow off.
jacques_chester 6y ago
Blockchain-based solutions are a legal minefield. They attract AML and tax scrutiny and, if you've become a trustee, make it incredibly difficult to unwind the mess. "Your Honour, blockchain transactions are immutable and ledgers are composed of mixed units of account that can't be controlled and smart contracts are irreversible" will attract about as much sympathy as spitting on the gavel. When a court decides to impose equitable remedies, it won't care that you can't return gitcoin. It will seize, lien or garnish any old thing you own, because actual law is smart and smart contracts aren't. Old-school financial arrangements aren't as cool, are much more complicated and much more expensive. But they are also vastly more robust against many, many edge conditions. High-level expertise is plentifully available to pretty much any degree of specialisation required.

neatze 6y ago

Seems like solution to a problem that does not exist, there are many motivations for open source projects and not all of them have generating income purpose. Furthermore, generating income via dual licensing is fairly straight forward way, assuming you have solution that is in demand and works.

musingsole 6y ago

Everyone thinks they deserve a dollar and can never imagine that the relative value of their code is effectively zero no matter how much it solves a particular problem. >Big projects — operating systems, frameworks, CMSs, or fully self-hostable applications — are in a privileged position to extract more value from their users, especially corporate ones Big projects aren't privileged to extract more value. They're privileged to solve enough of a problem for enough people that the scraps thrown their way amount to a meaningful warchest. Corporate big projects are privileged to extract wealth. That's the part that pays crazy SWE salaries.

colinmcd 6y ago
You seem to be reacting against the term "privileged" in a way I didn't intend. I don't mean to say that they have some unfair advantage. They just have a more foundational role in the tech stack of the products built on top of them, so companies have a bigger incentive to keep the wheels turning.
- deleted 6y ago
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- jart 6y ago
  I'd love to learn more specific details about your leveraging strategy. Keep in mind even someone like Torvalds only serves at the pleasure of big corporations. Let's keep gift economies in alignment with public interest folks. It's difficult to imagine a competent developer needing to squeeze people, for cash money to pay rent, considering how much coders get paid.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    Two-thirds of projects on GitHub have 1-2 maintainers, as of 2015.[1][2] I’m sure many of those people are in other areas or occupations, or in other countries, where these high-paying jobs may not exist. Some people simply don’t wish to work at a company, and those folks still may produce value to those other than themselves. Let’s not appeal to productivity too hard; learners and those of lesser coding capability also create value in the form of skills and knowledge. It’s hard to identify and quantify those whose contributions helped most, but I feel all contributions are worthwhile. Not all code may be tip-worthy, but I don’t feel chagrin toward those collecting, however they do so. > Only three projects—less than 3 percent of the study’s sample—had more than 50 contributors.[1] [1] https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer-projects/ https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462

pabs3 6y ago

Sponsor pools sounds a bit like snowdrift: https://snowdrift.coop/ https://snowdrift.coop/

joelwass 6y ago

Have you checked out flossbank, it feels like an automated version of what you’re describing

dnautics 6y ago

What would be fantastic is if this service scaled contributions across projects whose code you are actually using in your repos. Minor nitpick: I don't think a badge is really considered virtue signaling because you've already put your wallet where your mouth is.

colinmcd 6y ago
I like that idea too. Though it definitely may lead to some troubling scenarios where bad actors try to get their modules listed as dependencies of popular projects to piggyback on their downloads. You could alleviate this by not funding dependencies of dependencies but there are some low-level tools (say, CSS autoprefixers) that are rarely used in their "raw form". It's tricky.
- dnautics 6y ago
  I see this being a major issue in the NPM ecosystem, lol. One thing is you could make transitive dependencies strictly opt-in, or have a decay function.
  - SCLeo 6y ago
    Or each package's maintainer can set a proportion for each of its dependencies, so that every time a donation is received, a certain amount of that donation is automatically transferred to those dependencies according to the proportion set by the maintainer. The donation sent to those dependencies is then propagated to their dependencies automatically according to ratios set by the maintainers of those dependencies.
matsemann 6y ago
It has to be scaled correctly somehow. For instance some big project uses isEven, which depends on isOdd, which depends on isNumber. All different npm modules. There are some people notoriously making these really small functions, and then creating a huge web by depending on other modules by the same author. Then just hoping one of them will get traction.

jjcm 6y ago

If anyone is interested, I have a simulator for pool-based funding as I'm working on a side project that uses the same approach: http://syd.jjcm.org/soci/ http://syd.jjcm.org/soci/ My project is essentially a reddit-esque site that hosts images/blogs/video/audio content. Each vote on a piece of content gives it one share of your funding pool for that month. The pool based approach is definitely the best for simple usability, but there's another aspect to it as well: it means you weigh your vote more. In the case of a social sharing/news site, low-effort content will get upvoted less, as you have to consider that every vote will dilute the pool. I'm really bought in on this as an overall concept and I think it's something that will be extremely healthy for the web overall. Previously this was a model that was used by Flattr, but they had a major issue that not everyone was on their platform, so often times creators wouldn't get money out of a donation (because they didn't know the donation existed). I definitely agree with the author here that if this were to be done, Github themselves would have to implement it. As soon as a third party who isn't hosting the content implements it, an enormous percentage of creators wont know they have funding waiting for them and things fall apart.

galaxyLogic 6y ago

What happens when an open source-project gets funding? How is the money distributed inside the project, among different contributors?

dkersten 6y ago
The same way it currently does, if they opt into GitHub sponsorship or another sponsorship system.
colinmcd 6y ago
I added a footnote to address this. I admit I hadn't thought this bit out fully. Basically there needs to be a mechanism by which the set of maintainers divvy up the money. A pattern I expect will arise (actually it probably already exists): there can be different "contribution tiers", a fixed percentage of the proceeds go to each tier, for each tier the allocated percentage is be distributed evenly.

kumarvvr 6y ago

I remember a company doing this some time ago. You have an account, filled with a monthly recurring amount, what ever amount that is. Then you click these "contribute" buttons, placed by the open source project webmasters in their pages. Each click of button registers that project to your account and the site distributes your monthly amount among those registered projects. Not able to recollect the name of the company though. Spreadrr, or Poolr or something. Edit: Another comment got it. It's Flattr

ahnick 6y ago

The root of the problem is that open-source donations are made on a per-project basis. To support a project via GitHub Sponsors or OpenCollective, you must create hyet another auto-renewing monthly subscription for each project you want to support. I don't think the author's description of GitHub Sponsors is exactly correct. Technically, the sponsorship is at the user/organization level, so if you make a donation it goes to the organization/user, which may have MULTIPLE projects going on. This is the way I have set it up for our company Plyint (https://github.com/sponsors/plyint https://github.com/sponsors/plyint). Although I would very much like GitHub to implement a pool of organizations/users, which is maybe what the author meant?

colinmcd 6y ago
Good point, that characterization isn't exactly accurate. Though the first-order point is that you have to go through a separate "checkout process" each time you want to sponsor a new thing. I actually think it's important that the pools themselves contain projects not users/organizations. There are definitely complications I hadn't considered if multiple entities/organizations are listed as maintainers of a particular project. Presumably the set of maintainers would have a way to "split" the incoming donations among themselves as they see fit. [edit] I added a footnote to address this.

peteforde 6y ago

I think that this essay is fundamentally brilliant, but doesn't come out and yell the self-evident truth: the ONLY way this ever takes off is if Github does it. And man, do I ever hope that they do. There's no other entity in the ecosystem that even approaches the role Github plays, with all due respect to Gitlab and the rest of the also-rans. It'd be wonderful if they did the same thing, but in the end, they are going to be the contrarian 2%. It's important to remember that GH sponsors isn't even out of beta, yet - you still have to apply and make sure that all of your tax docs are in order. One small proposal I'd make is that I suggest Sponsors and Pool could exist happily in parallel. I believe that there's a meaningful difference between being the patron of a developer and feeling like you're backing a creator with feelings and a story and a family... and wanting to be a good citizen that has an approved list of projects that I benefit from and want to support. I can sponsor Matz, get his updates and feel good about knowing I am counted as a supporter AND set aside $$$ per month to contribute to all of the tools I use in my projects simply because it's the right thing to do and I want those projects to exist for the long term. They are completely different initiatives. Patreon vs Humble Bundle, if you will. Perhaps most critically, Github could keep absorbing the cost of processing payments to sponsored developers but also announce that they plan to hold back 3% of your monthly pool amount to cover CC processing fees. I think most people would be more than fine with this. But if Github isn't on board, this is all just speculative fiction. Please, if you work at Github, make this happen.

colinmcd 6y ago
Author here - 100% agree on all fronts! I was dancing around this conclusion but it really does need to be GitHub. And I agree people would be fine paying their own fees if it came to that. Also, in that case, if someone is donating a non-trivial amount, they're incentivized to fund their wallet with a cheaper payment method like an ACH transfer.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  I just want to point out that in Europe we have 0-fee SEPA transfers that also work for regular payments. I'm not sure why nobody makes use of that more really. There are simple-as-paypal solutions for it, and given the amount that CC processing costs I'd have expected it to be picked up more. Maybe someone here has practical experience to share on why it's not that easy?

deleted 6y ago

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smashah 6y ago

An odd side effect of trying to monetise an open source project is another repo popping up just outright copying it with no attribution. Amazingly, some people expect that if you make an open source project on GitHub therefore every single feature related to that project should also be open sourced. It's very disheartening.

unsungNovelty 6y ago

I am glad people are thinking more about Open Source software and how to fund them. I think among other problems, Open Source have 2 main root issues when it comes to funding. 1. Silver bullet is a myth. The OSS users are forced to use one medium for funding the software. Maybe Patreon, Github Sponsors, Paypal, Librepay and more not than one or all of them in most cases. Using more funding method have their own challenges, but it depending on the prject should definitely be more than one. I take the inspiration from POSSE concept from Indieweb (https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE). It talks about publishing your content (blogs etc) once and distributing through various channels like FB, Twitter, HN etc instead of forcing people to your website which is just one medium. We should give the same level or freedom and choices to people who want to donate to your OSS project so that they will use a method which they are already using. Reducing the friction. And Flattr or the new proposed will only be one of the ways or should be one of the ways. 2. A lot of people don't know the difference between FOSS/FLOSS and OSS. Especially people after the Millennials (i think). To them, it is a FREE material. It is not! We should make awareness about what free software movement was. Before you jump the gun here, please read the GNU page about selling free software - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html. Open Source forever have been about "free as in freedom" not about "free as in beer". The whole reason for it to start was because the software was not allowed to be redistributed and modified among other things. There definitely was freeware and other software models which were FREE even before Open Source was coined. Stop using FOSS/FLOSS everywhere if you don't mean it and make awareness about the differences about FOSS/FLOSS and OSS. The effort and time of the maintainer should be rewarded with whatever he/she/they want, either recognition or money. We should make it a new normal. Making money from OSS should be OK. Being rich (if you can that is :D )from OSS should be OK. Hope funding in OSS gets more momentum!

renewiltord 6y ago

FYI I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to put a recurring amount of money into open source software. It isn't that it's hard. I just don't want to do it.

dimitrios1 6y ago

I like the idea but instead of pools going arbitrarily every which way or to the discretion of the donator, it should be automatically applied across that open source project's dependencies as well. If I am open source software A, and I make ample use of open source software B within my project, your pool donation should automatically apply some to B, relative to it's usage in the project.

colinmcd 6y ago
Agreed this would be nice, though this layer of complexity introduces a bigger attack surface for bad actors. They could try to get their modules listed as dependencies of popular projects to piggyback on their downloads. On the flip side there are some low-level tools (say, the `stylis` CSS autoprefixer) that are almost never used in their "raw form" but are the backbone of several massively popular projects. It's a tricky balance.
- JimDabell 6y ago
  Is this really a concern though? In this situation, adding a dependency to your project means making a decision to divert some of your funding to them as well. It gives an incentive to avoid adding unnecessary dependencies.
  - NameDoesntExist 6y ago
    Workaround: fork all your dependencies with minimal if any changes and add them back to your main project. This allows you to cut-off the trickle-down funds in bad faith.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      If you're willing to do the extra maintenance of keeping them up to date (or else on the hook for their issues) ... maybe that's 'ok'? I don't mean that it's a service worth paying for, just that maybe it doesn't seem like it's worth the extra (presumably minor) cut of initial donation and people wouldn't really do it (more than once / for long / on a big project with significant donations) anyway.

inputmice 6y ago

Two issues here: Models like these existed. Flattr and Liberapay. The latter had to switch away from the pooling model because turns out when you do the pooling you essentially become a bank and that’s difficult to do legally. Those models only work if users actually visit your website or your Github. I’m developing an app targeted at end users and I bet 90% of them have never been on Github or even know what that is.

black_puppydog 6y ago
I totally take your second point. But for the niche of apps that is developed for tech folks (think sth like ripgrep) this seems pretty viable. For user-facing apps, it should always be the platform(s) distributing it that should have a pool mechanism. So google for android apps, Apple for iOS. Yeah, I know, that'll be a cold day in hell... PC software is a tough one there since there's no one app store. Which is the PC platform's strength, but yeah, that makes a pool difficult. As you said, Liberapay tried something like this. Would be cool if something like this could become big enough to justify the legal legwork necessary for this.
OJFord 6y ago
But if you're targetting end users who haven't been to GitHub... aren't you just billing them for access to your app? Seems like a different problem to getting paid for OSS by people who do know how to find and use it for free.
sbuttgereit 6y ago
I think an even larger issue is that, I might know what OSS projects I make use of and will elect to support. But I might not have visibility into the OSS projects that _those_ projects themselves rely upon and really should be getting a cut. So as I see it the proposed solution does remove friction to supporting a large number of projects, but doesn't solve the visibility issue very well as I expect most projects to be in that "used by something I use" category.

ggurgone 6y ago

I like this idea! I had a similar one a while back https://giuseppegurgone.com/github-sponsors-oss-sustainability/#paid-packages https://giuseppegurgone.com/github-sponsors-oss-sustainabili...

felixge 6y ago

This sounds great! That being said, I wonder how well this would work out for smaller projects. Spotify uses a very similar model, and from what I hear, lesser known artists make very little money on their platform.

RileyJames 6y ago
The Spotify model is similar. The key difference is that while users pay into the pool, they don’t determine determine how the pool, or their portion of the pool, is distributed. Plays determine distribution, but not a single users plays, all plays. If all github users donations entered a single pool, and that pool was distributed to projects based on the number of clones each repo received, that would be similar to the spotify model. But I don’t believe that’s being proposed. Rather, a user sets up a donation amount, which is then distributed to the projects they include in their “sponsor pool”.
imtringued 6y ago
Spotify uses a global pool which is completely different.

ex3ndr 6y ago

Isn't that pay models already exists? And they all failed.

iamleppert 6y ago

If the kind of open source you mention were actually valuable, there would be a market for it. You make a common mistake many people make when trying to calculate value: it has nothing to do with how much something is used, it has to do with the incentives for those creating it. People do not casually write open source to make money (unless sponsored by a company). They do it for the recognition and for vanity, and I’d argue that popular open source software is not scarce as evidenced by how much there is of it. People will in fact rush to fill the void of open source such that the popular open source is more of a fluke than anything: if it wasn’t the react-router it would be something other nearly identical, where there are plenty of people waiting in line behind that.

i_cannot_hack 6y ago
1. It feels like you are at risk of some survivorship bias here. Yes, the software that currently exist were apparently made anyway, and is popular enough to be replaced if it went missing. But you have no way to quantify how many possibly useful or innovative OSS projects were never made because of the lack of financial opportunities. 2. I feel the whole idea of this kind of open source patronage / funding is to decouple the market value of the software (which is $0) from the compensation to the contributors for their time and effort (which I think should be above $0 in an ideal world)
imtringued 6y ago
I have a very nice pet project with a user base in the single digits and I'd like to keep it that way. I know all my users personally and I am even using it for several hours per week myself. I couldn't care less about recognition or vanity. People create opensource software because they have an itch they need to scratch, not because they want to get attention. Attention is expensive and involves scratching other people's itches, not yours. It means nagging users who demand things from you and drain your sanity all while making money off of your work. It's only natural that you want something in return. >If the kind of open source you mention were actually valuable, there would be a market for it. This argument makes no sense. If the software isn't valuable (as in worth a lot) then nobody would use it. Opensource software cannot become popular without providing value. Open source software is not valuable in the sense that it cannot be valued. You can't put a price tag on a non exclusive good if you're not selling it in the first place. Another flaw in your argument is that you are assuming that because there is no market for something there will never be one. Github sponorships, liberapay, patreon and lots of other platforms are clearly in the process of creating a market for these things. People are clearly willing to fund opensource software if it is possible. Just take a look at neovim! [0] [0] https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/neovim https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/neovim

fermienrico 6y ago

andrewstuart 6y ago

The problem here is marketing..... "sponsor pools" "sponsorships" and "donations" are all words that imply optional, not required requests for money as a favor. i.e. begging. The way to monetise open source is for payments to be required in some way. i.e. provide a core feature set that is valuable on its own and monetise by providing additional valuable features under a commercial license.

sjellis 6y ago
This "open core" model has been used for a long time, and it might work for commercial vendors that have large products with a plugin architecture, but it's a constant source of friction and inefficiency. Not everybody can or will be able to pay, and introducing licensing and payment systems complicates everything.
sqrt17 6y ago
You're missing the point here. The point is not to find ways to sell/rent out software (these already exist) but to monetize open source projects in a non-forced, non-compulsory way. So, instead of selling your songs on a CD for a fixed price, that approach would be more like busking or having your music streamed on music services (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc.). It's unlike begging in that you do provide valuable goods with the expectation that the community is paying, and that providing better value (more catchy songs) will get you more revenue. Non-required payments already work ok in a number of shapes for music and video creators, and we've seen some success in terms of feature bounties and direct sponsorship in software. Given that enough people are willing to support the software they use, there are two things missing in the equation - an entity collecting, pooling, and distributing money in a transparent (enough) fashion - the prime candidate would be GitHub because it already has sponsorships and the necessary bits of information - an attribution model; and this is a bit harder for software than for music or videos where you can simply use watchtime as an attribution metric. Software has a more complex dependency graph, and arguably open source software is the silver bullet that allows us to stand on the shoulders of a herd of giants instead of implementing our bloom filters, routers etc. ourselves. This is a hard problem, and arguably one in danger of not being solved "correctly" in that an entity collecting money could do something intransparent and unfair and people might still sign up because it's the only game in town and they want the warm fuzzy feels and the convenience of not having to write 0.50$ checks to a gazillion small-project maintainers.

imtringued 6y ago

I expected Youtube Red to work like this. Each person has its own pool. Channels should have been weighed by watch time with a minimum weight so that small channels get something as well. If I watch one channel then that channel should get the whole $10 (minus youtube cut). Instead we got a stupid global pool based on global popularity that primarily benefits PewDiePie even if I don't watch him. The compensation was barely enough to cover the lost ad revenue so it failed to actually provide a viable funding alternative for channels that aren't getting millions of views. I hope the same thing doesn't happen with this model. If 100 people sign up at $10/month to only support CatacylsmDDA and minetest then these two projects should get $500 each (minus transaction fees). That money should not be diverted to Angular, React, Vue, ... and then when its time for the two mentioned projects they only get a pittance like $5 per month.

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coldpie 6y ago
Can you link to an article or something about how YouTube Red's payment model works? I've always been curious.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  Here you go[0]. Basically they're treating it like ad revenue, where each view nets you a certain amount. [0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Red_revenue_2 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276#YouTube_Re...
86J8oyZv 6y ago
I generally agree, though I'd say donated money should go to every sponsored individual/party equally by default, with donors able to set weights to recipients in their preferences. Weighting videos on watch time, or GitHub sponsorship amounts based on number of repos, creates perverse incentives. High quality tutorial videos that get to the point and communicate ideas efficiently get less money than those with a minute-and-a-half intro and two minutes talking up a sponsorship at the end. Similarly, GitHub projects that are broken up into many repos, even needlessly, get more money. Same as the microservices hell that many software companies have faced when they drink too much of that koolaid.

Bloggerzune 6y ago

This is amazing and I have a gut feeling that it will revolutionize OSS. I usually want to give say $30/month to OSS (personal use) and as a professional, I would have the authority to donate $300/month. This would be great to not worry about individual donations, and just based on one-click or even just divide up the funds equally amongst all of my starred projects. I termed this model "microsubscriptions" when I was pursuing it in the context of website funding. There are difficulties. Gaming the system Folks will absolutely distort their software, buy fake github stars, spam out bazillions of typosquatting packages etc. We know this because there is already a weak financial incentive to subvert: supply chain attacks for cryptominers. Direct cash will be a much stronger incentive for fuckery. https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/How-to-improve-your-blog.html https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/How-to-improve-your-blog...

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noxer 6y ago

Concept is very similar to Coil.com s "donation" for web content. But Coil actually does "pay by usage" and should therefore be more fair at distributing the money. Its hard to define usage for an open source project.

twoleftfeets 6y ago

I guess I'm old. GOML! This doesn't sound like a way for open source projects to get money to me. It sounds like a way to get thousands and thousands of bad developers to spam me to support their tiny open source no effort project. For them to fork someone else's project and ask for money for their fork. etc... Note, a similar thing already happens on patreon where people ask for support for their piracy activities. They run a blogspot blog with pirated movies/anime/porn and expect you to sign up to support them on patreon for helping you pirate stuff. Basically the easier you make it collect money from random people the stronger the incentive is for bad actors to try to get some of it. I don't have a solution but in my defense I do sponsor 3 open source projects at $!00 a month each. But I'm sure my money is going to people/teams who are really dedicated to their project and not just one hoping for some coffee money for their tiny thing.

transitivebs 6y ago

Any approach to OSS funding based on donations fundamentally doesn't scale because the economic incentives just aren't there. Whether you're donating to one person, one project, or a pool of projects, the business model just doesn't work out.

katzgrau 6y ago

> The marginal cost — both psychological and financial — of supporting additional projects would drop to zero Great idea for redistributing existing funds and preventing winner take all, but the bigger hurdle is increasing the overall funds (eg, getting more people to give a shit in the first place) I have a lot of experience with non profits and independent projects, and funding success is partly based on merit, but more frequently on how clear, consistent and obvious calls to action for funding are. At some point it stops being a problem you can fix with software. It's not like there's a mountain of funding that just needs to be unlocked. It's more about growing the funding in the first place, which when successfully done (in my experience) starts to look a lot like aggressive marketing, advertising, and tweaking of missions to appeal to whatever is hot/fundable at the time, similar to the VC industry. True story, and kind of an anecdote that money turns everything to shit eventually.

justjosias 6y ago

Another good idea would be for projects to list other projects they depend on, and set aside a certain amount of their GitHub sponsor income to go to those projects. Thus Users -> Projects -> Dependencies flows naturally with the same model.

andrey_utkin 6y ago

This addresses the lack of convenience in existing tooling, but not the core of the problem of FOSS sustainability. I believe to solve the problem two things must happen: * Users evaluate how exactly much they benefit from particular software and services, and how much they'd lose in utility if their option of choice disappeared. * Maintainers find out what matters to real users and offer them good bargains to fund their development roadmap and maintenance service level. See https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd91750a1214443a283546391b72 https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd917...

dilandau 6y ago

For fucks sake if you are trying to make money, why are you doing open source? Or, to put it another way, if you are doing open source, why are you so hung up on getting paid for it?

bullen 6y ago

I'm going to offer users something if they sponsor the project by looking in the GraphQL data. Today there are no simple ways of just asking github: "for how much $ does user X sponsor user Y" and much less per project! I think that is the only way to get open source revenue! Unfortunately that means you either need a service or some closed source part that guarantees that revenue.

muazzam 6y ago

Yet another model that has probably been never used on high scale: letting people sponsor tickets (GitHub issues). The donation would go to the contributor who closes the ticket to the satisfaction of the main contributors. The amount, of course, will be decided by how a ticket is perceived as important.

OJFord 6y ago
What about the satisfaction of the person who raised the issue?
- muazzam 6y ago
  Of course, I should've added that but that's not the main point.

EGreg 6y ago

If I may, a totally different way of funding open source projects is possible too, that doesn’t rely on charity mechanisms: I will submit it to HN now as a link under the title “A Decentralized Model for Funding Open Source”. Look tor it there.

maelito 6y ago

Change "open source projet" with "online newspaper" and everything applies. I want to be able to give 20€/month to whatever news article I read with just one click. Instead of liking something, I want to be able to pay quality writings. The browser is the perfect way to do this. I don't understand why Mozilla did not implement that. Brave is close, but Brave wants us to view ads. I don't want to pay for a newspaper article talking about climate change through watching their ad for the latest diesel SUV. I want to pay them, but without filling my bank details for a monthly payment. In France, the largest national newspaper lemonde.fr lets you subscribe in 1 click for 1€, but then you have to send them an tracked postal letter costing 7€ to cancel your subscription.

kseifried 6y ago

The entities that most benefit monetarily from OpenSource are companies that sell products and services based on them. Why would they contribute to this? It's an added expense they don't have to pay. In fact a major tenant of OpenSource is that you can choose to make money or give. it away for free, but you generally have to release the source code, which is what the companies want, so again, why would they pay for it? To make a more sustainable ecosystem? Hahaha. As for individuals funding this, Open Source developers are not cheap, to make it worthwhile (e.g. comparable to a part time contracting gig) we're talking a minimum of tens of thousands of dollars per year per developer. We're not going to get anywhere near these numbers with individuals contributing. I write this as the guy that tried to help the OpenSource world by assigning CVEs for security issues (several thousand...), I'd have had to charge 1-200$ per CVE to make a living at this while I was doing it. That's not going to be sustained by personal donations. And even though a CVE will easily save companies a few tens to hundreds of dollars (time spent tracking all these issues when they don't have CVEs...) there's no way I'm going to get companies to pay me. The good news is that this doesn't really matter. We've had many decades of OpenSource, there's enough good people working on this because it's their passion/hobby/day job that it's mostly sustainable on average, but specific bits may be sickly, and that's ok. Some related listening and reading: Episode 205 – The State of Open Source Security with Alyssa Miller from Snyk https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/07/12/episode-205-the-state-of-open-source-security-with-alyssa-miller-from-snyk/ https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/07/12/episode-205-the-sta... Episode 185 – Is it even possible to fix open source security? https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/03/02/episode-185-is-it-even-possible-to-fix-open-source-security/ https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/03/02/episode-185-is-it-e... Episode 182 – Does open source owe us anything? https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/02/10/episode-182-does-open-source-owe-us-anything/ https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/02/10/episode-182-does-op...