3 ms·

We need to get better at finding ways to pay people to develop foss. Micro transactions, Patreons, and industry groups are all good ideas. What else is there?

hkt 6y ago
I've always liked the idea of getting companies to sign up to second staff members for a month or two to full or part time open source work. They could get a nice friendly looking "open source supporter" badge for it, like the Fair Tax Mark. It'd take a small organisation being clever to do it but I think it'd work and free up lots and lots of hours of work to be done on valuable stuff.
- kodah 6y ago
  If it were tax donation incentives I bet people/companies would do it.
  - hkt 6y ago
    Of course they would. But given the beneficiaries of open source software it would be hard to construe as charity, really. Just a bung to tech companies.
rublev 6y ago
Nothing will flourish under capitalism. Everything will be the husk of its original self after the vultures have picked off their share to allow it to even exist in any form. This is why most people do not even bother.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
The problem is people only pay for the cool and fancy stuff. Thats why projects like blender and krita are killing it while bluetooth audio and gui libraries are in such a dire state. Competitors have an advantage where you buy a macbook and the profits go to every single part and not just the eye catching features.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  The solution here is for authors of the eye-catching features to re-spend some of the rewards on infrastructure they depend on. If a blender dev wants to improve perf and finds that the bottleneck is in some Linux kernel component, they should post a bounty for improving that component.
  - ludston 6y ago
    The problem with this is that they could also just pocket the money, and then they have more money.
    - atoav 6y ago
      Yeah, that is not how the blender institute works. The question how to balance spending on Blender features vs dependencies is a legit one though. Blender "is killing it" because for years they never chose the easy fix or the low hanging fruit over sustainable changes. In addition to that the Blender dev community is really goal oriented. Not many holy cows, everybody is just focused on the result. Imagine how Blender's 2.80 changes would've panned out in any typical Open Source project — often they can't strike the balance between old and new users, a lot of bikeshedding, infighting, forks, ... Blender is killing it because there is a great community that is focused on the results. The influx of money could also have derailed the Blender project, but it didn't, which is further proof that they are doing something right.
- noobermin 6y ago
  May be do it that way, like pay for freedesktop.org and have it filter down.
- jsilence 6y ago
  Well, if the fancy projects are killing it, they could always give back to the giants shoulders or piles of dwarfs they are standing on.
  - kevincox 6y ago
smichel17 6y ago
https://wiki.snowdrift.coop https://wiki.snowdrift.coop Disclosure: I am a Snowdrift.coop cofounder. I have no financial stake in the project (we're a non-profit cooperative and currently a fully volunteer team), although I hope in the future we'll have the income to hire me, for a modest salary.
- dorgo 6y ago
  > Snowdrift.coop, a non-profit cooperative platform for funding freely-licensed works everyone can use and share without limitations. >Our core feature is a new fundraising approach we call crowdmatching. Patrons donate together by all agreeing to match one another instead of donating unilaterally. Edit: so, everybody donates the minimum donation of all donations? The "How it works" page is not clear enough.
jhoechtl 6y ago
We need money being able to be transfered to the once doing open source. Still many of them hack voluntarily and out of pure altruism. What should be transparent is the amount of money they receive. It should be the oss project leaders responsibility to further distribute the donations. Using bitcoin for transparency. Nobody is going to work for an oss project where the leader gets all the money and doesn't redistribute. Many intermediaries, institutions and paperwork will ruin that. My 2c.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Public infrastructure gets financed through taxes and is performed via executive departments or government contracts, sometimes as academic research. Software may need to adopt this model. It's ocurred to me that ancient symbolic megaprojects (e.g., pyramid-building) may have played roles in developing and maintaining technical skills, supply chains, and generaal interest. All the cool hard problems, great minds, and stable funding.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Do you want political control over key internet infrastructure? Because that's how you get political control over key internet infrastructure...
  - sofixa 6y ago
    There is already implicit political control. If the US wants to ban X, or forbid encryption, it will impact almost everyone on the planet. Much less so if it were Afghanistan, of course. The EU has a funs that donates money and runs bug bounty programs for critical FOSS software it uses. It should be expanded to include more underlying libraries and lower-level projects, but it's a pretty good start and doesn't come with strings attached.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      > doesn't come with strings attached. yet
    - rolandog 6y ago
      The EU sounds like a great approach; do you know if and how often they re-evaluate the impact and level of their dependencies?
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    What we have now is corporate control, often with covert government influence, and benign-to-malicious neglect. I'm willing to risk public support in at least part.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Writing to standards, such that when one implementation is in trouble, there's a migration path to use another one, and a motivation for multiple implementations to exist in the first place, via a layered and contained API that can be implemented from scratch (unlike browsers and over-reaching desktop and system frameworks). Of course, this doesn't work with our ADHD-driven development scene longing for fresh programming languages all the time which gets you half-finished implementations until the next thing comes along.
specialist 6y ago
I keep floating the idea of royalties. FOSS purists object, leading to the libre vs gratis rabbit hole. I'm now revisiting Hintjens' (ZeroMQ) advice around trademarks and licensing. Maybe there's an angle around trademarks. Like maybe you can call your fork "SuperWidget™ compatible", for a fee. Dual licensing seems obvious. But maybe we need some new revenue sharing licenses better suited for cloud providers and SAAS. (A life time ago, I used libraries in my shrink-wrap. So negotiating price feels familiar to me.) Libraries kinda "feel" like music sampling. So I've been skim reading how that world handles royalties. I like that they have boilerplate for all the most common scenarios. I'm also alert to case studies and financial reports about existing efforts, successful, failed, or otherwise. This solution to funding might just be as simple as mimicking success.

hkt 6y ago

I've always liked the idea of getting companies to sign up to second staff members for a month or two to full or part time open source work. They could get a nice friendly looking "open source supporter" badge for it, like the Fair Tax Mark. It'd take a small organisation being clever to do it but I think it'd work and free up lots and lots of hours of work to be done on valuable stuff.

kodah 6y ago
If it were tax donation incentives I bet people/companies would do it.
- hkt 6y ago
  Of course they would. But given the beneficiaries of open source software it would be hard to construe as charity, really. Just a bung to tech companies.

rublev 6y ago

Nothing will flourish under capitalism. Everything will be the husk of its original self after the vultures have picked off their share to allow it to even exist in any form. This is why most people do not even bother.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

The problem is people only pay for the cool and fancy stuff. Thats why projects like blender and krita are killing it while bluetooth audio and gui libraries are in such a dire state. Competitors have an advantage where you buy a macbook and the profits go to every single part and not just the eye catching features.

londons_explore 6y ago
The solution here is for authors of the eye-catching features to re-spend some of the rewards on infrastructure they depend on. If a blender dev wants to improve perf and finds that the bottleneck is in some Linux kernel component, they should post a bounty for improving that component.
- ludston 6y ago
  The problem with this is that they could also just pocket the money, and then they have more money.
  - atoav 6y ago
    Yeah, that is not how the blender institute works. The question how to balance spending on Blender features vs dependencies is a legit one though. Blender "is killing it" because for years they never chose the easy fix or the low hanging fruit over sustainable changes. In addition to that the Blender dev community is really goal oriented. Not many holy cows, everybody is just focused on the result. Imagine how Blender's 2.80 changes would've panned out in any typical Open Source project — often they can't strike the balance between old and new users, a lot of bikeshedding, infighting, forks, ... Blender is killing it because there is a great community that is focused on the results. The influx of money could also have derailed the Blender project, but it didn't, which is further proof that they are doing something right.
noobermin 6y ago
May be do it that way, like pay for freedesktop.org and have it filter down.
jsilence 6y ago
Well, if the fancy projects are killing it, they could always give back to the giants shoulders or piles of dwarfs they are standing on.
- kevincox 6y ago

smichel17 6y ago

https://wiki.snowdrift.coop https://wiki.snowdrift.coop Disclosure: I am a Snowdrift.coop cofounder. I have no financial stake in the project (we're a non-profit cooperative and currently a fully volunteer team), although I hope in the future we'll have the income to hire me, for a modest salary.

dorgo 6y ago
> Snowdrift.coop, a non-profit cooperative platform for funding freely-licensed works everyone can use and share without limitations. >Our core feature is a new fundraising approach we call crowdmatching. Patrons donate together by all agreeing to match one another instead of donating unilaterally. Edit: so, everybody donates the minimum donation of all donations? The "How it works" page is not clear enough.

jhoechtl 6y ago

We need money being able to be transfered to the once doing open source. Still many of them hack voluntarily and out of pure altruism. What should be transparent is the amount of money they receive. It should be the oss project leaders responsibility to further distribute the donations. Using bitcoin for transparency. Nobody is going to work for an oss project where the leader gets all the money and doesn't redistribute. Many intermediaries, institutions and paperwork will ruin that. My 2c.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Public infrastructure gets financed through taxes and is performed via executive departments or government contracts, sometimes as academic research. Software may need to adopt this model. It's ocurred to me that ancient symbolic megaprojects (e.g., pyramid-building) may have played roles in developing and maintaining technical skills, supply chains, and generaal interest. All the cool hard problems, great minds, and stable funding.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
Do you want political control over key internet infrastructure? Because that's how you get political control over key internet infrastructure...
- sofixa 6y ago
  There is already implicit political control. If the US wants to ban X, or forbid encryption, it will impact almost everyone on the planet. Much less so if it were Afghanistan, of course. The EU has a funs that donates money and runs bug bounty programs for critical FOSS software it uses. It should be expanded to include more underlying libraries and lower-level projects, but it's a pretty good start and doesn't come with strings attached.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    > doesn't come with strings attached. yet
  - rolandog 6y ago
    The EU sounds like a great approach; do you know if and how often they re-evaluate the impact and level of their dependencies?
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  What we have now is corporate control, often with covert government influence, and benign-to-malicious neglect. I'm willing to risk public support in at least part.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Writing to standards, such that when one implementation is in trouble, there's a migration path to use another one, and a motivation for multiple implementations to exist in the first place, via a layered and contained API that can be implemented from scratch (unlike browsers and over-reaching desktop and system frameworks). Of course, this doesn't work with our ADHD-driven development scene longing for fresh programming languages all the time which gets you half-finished implementations until the next thing comes along.

specialist 6y ago

I keep floating the idea of royalties. FOSS purists object, leading to the libre vs gratis rabbit hole. I'm now revisiting Hintjens' (ZeroMQ) advice around trademarks and licensing. Maybe there's an angle around trademarks. Like maybe you can call your fork "SuperWidget™ compatible", for a fee. Dual licensing seems obvious. But maybe we need some new revenue sharing licenses better suited for cloud providers and SAAS. (A life time ago, I used libraries in my shrink-wrap. So negotiating price feels familiar to me.) Libraries kinda "feel" like music sampling. So I've been skim reading how that world handles royalties. I like that they have boilerplate for all the most common scenarios. I'm also alert to case studies and financial reports about existing efforts, successful, failed, or otherwise. This solution to funding might just be as simple as mimicking success.