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The problem here is marketing..... "sponsor pools" "sponsorships" and "donations" are all words that imply optional, not required requests for money as a favor

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.

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.