17 ms·

Funds for Open Source

282 points by BerislavLopac 6y ago

maxrev17 6y ago
Love the idea!
atomashpolskiy 6y ago
So this is only for projects with paying or willing to pay customers, right? Say, I have a small, permissively licensed personal project (bittorrent implementation), that has some userbase, including for-profit companies. There is a lot of shit code in there, and many features are missing. Let us assume for the sake of the argument that given sufficient time I would be able to turn it into a state-of-the-art reference library. But given the current state of my financials I'm finding it hard to justify putting any effort into it for free at the moment and end up purchasing other opportunities not related to OSS. I'm pretty sure it is not a unique situation and wonder if there are any solutions for this (e.g. angels, incubators, something like that?)
- choeger 6y ago
  For such a small-scale project, I suggest you seek out the corporate users of your project and offer consulting / development contracts as a freelancer. This can be on a per-ticket basis on their side. If it turns out that they have real use cases for your software they should be glad for the offering. Make sure to either request a high rate, as you are the leading developer and leading expert for the software. This high rate basically pays for further development (as a kind of training or investment into your offering). If they don't have a use case, code quality might not be as important and you can thus justify to scale down your involvement until such use cases appear.
  - atomashpolskiy 6y ago
    Did consulting, yes. Two concerns: 1) Some guys want IP on improvements to the original codebase 2) When I work on client's problems, I have less time to work on the original codebase, so the earned money is not exactly reinvested into the project, which is the primary point of donations.
- 7steps2much 6y ago
  Yes, the way I understood this is that customers can contribute to projects more easily. If you don't have any customers / users willing to pay then you don't get any money. As for your situation, put a notice up on your project that you are willing to fix bugs / code new features for a fee? If these companies use your library they might be interested in sponsoring your work. If they are not however, then I don't think there is a way to fund your development. As for incubators etc., they are probably not all that interested in a BitTorrent implementation, considering how many are already around? Unless of course the library provided some value nobody else does.
  - atomashpolskiy 6y ago
    Yeah, right. So this is not what I had in mind -- a way for the society to invest into projects that might not have an obvious immediate business value. Like society invests in raising and educating kids, for example, hoping that some of these kids will bring positive value to the world when they grow up.
artembugara 6y ago
There is one basic thing about open source and market economy: 1. People open source for free. They already do that. So, there is no real need to pay them as they are willing to do so for free. Greatest minds work for open-sourced projects. 2. If you want to pay/fund/support open source. Great, but these numbers we're talking about (like $1k/mo) are nowhere near what devs make at corporations. I think Funds for Open Source is a great initiative! I just do not think it can be a real alternative to a career path. I think the best open source support is done by big companies who open source their work. For example, Airflow by AirBnb.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  The problem is that projects by big companies are often encumbered by their business decisions. Companies rarely find privacy profitable, so it's usually the first feature to get rid of, but if they use or need an open source tool that respects privacy, they may pay for it. Funds from tech companies won't alone make open source development sustainable, but it'll help.
  - prepend 6y ago
    All projects are encumbered by business decisions. I think open source improves on this problem because now I can fork and extend because a company open sourced something. This is not perfect, but it’s better than when I can’t. I think a better approach is trying to encourage more of a gift economy with people working on stuff for free and sharing it. It’s funny how I’m willing to accept some hair and do work myself as part of a community, but if I have to pay for it, I lose that community motivation. For example, I’m willing to spend time writing up an issue for an OSS project with a test script, etc. but I won’t do that for a commercial company.
- cassepipe 6y ago
  I would rather make 1k a month and work on something I like on my terms than to have a stressful/meaningless job around the clock with unpaid working hours all around. There only so much shit you really need. And you need time for your friends/loved one. You'll live poorer but longer. Edit : This is not a fantasy about poverty being more genuine. Poverty makes you die sooner. My point is a life spent running after money and positions is a meaningless life. Edit 2: I may have a bias here since I live with under 1k a month, under my country's minimum wage that is .
pimterry 6y ago
How does this compare to https://tidelift.com/ https://tidelift.com/? My impression is they're fairly similar at first glance: companies can pay open-source funding to one central service, who redistribute to each of the appropriate individual maintainers & projects behind the scenes. I'm sure there's a bunch of practical differences in the details though?
- benjamuk 6y ago
  Hey, Head of Product at Open Collective (and former Tidelift employee) here: As far as I am aware Tidelift pays maintainers in exchange for a minimal set of commitments, which is used to sell the Tidelift subscription. They curate packages of ‘known good’ open source projects for enterprises and provide a set tools for users to better understand what software they depend upon. Funds is a little more free-format, facilitating a relationship between maintainers and organisations on their own terms. No contracts, no promises, no agendas. We take on the work of administrating payments to projects and of ensuring companies have what they need in their procurement processes. In doing so we hope to lower the barriers to the degree that we broaden access to funding for open source.
  - genericone 6y ago
    Doesn't this enable maintainers to look at someone's submitted code, deny its inclusion for any reason personal/financial, and include it at a later date and claim expense? Since the code submission is open-source, isn't a malicious maintainer able to basically copy the code in-spirit under a pseudo-account, and then claim the benefits from the fund for themself? I'm just saying that once monetary benefits are involved, incentives skew away from code quality and community, and towards number one. Maintainers are above the other developers, is there going to be some community oversight? Who decides how much expense can be claimed?
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    >we hope to lower the barriers to the degree that we broaden access to funding for open source. Q: who is the primary demographic of funders this is aimed at? Am I correct in saying it's mostly aimed at getting more corporate funding for OSS? (Non-rhetorical question)
david_allison 6y ago
Kudos to Open Collective (for this, and for existing in general). The article doesn't go into detail, but it also appears to streamline the workflow of requesting money from an open source project's perspective. Each fund[0] appears to have a "Request Grant" button, which is great, as it'll mean maintainers will hopefully have a curated list of contactable organisations if they need funding for a specific initiative. The barriers to entry here are extremely high: a few days ago I was looking into corporate sponsorship for a non open-source-related event, and after a couple of hours of Googling I was mostly unable to find contact details for relevant companies. It's definitely a natural barrier to entry which will be reduced with experience, but it will gatekeep a lot of interesting projects where organisers aren't experienced in fundraising. Reducing this friction for Open Source projects should allow the money to much more easily go to where it's needed. [0] Example fund: https://opencollective.com/indeed https://opencollective.com/indeed
- alannallama 6y ago
  Open Collective team member here. You're so right! We have been able to form partnerships with many big tech companies and grantmaking foundations, and it really opens up possibilities for projects to access them. Since we collectively represent so many projects we can use that scale to open doors, and on a practical level once we're in their supplier systems and have gone through their due diligence processes once, future funding is much easier.
hnedeotes 6y ago
Everything moving forward in this space is great. Ideal world - You declare your stack, from OS, distributor up to all dependencies used. Non-profit/individuals non-profit don't pay anything. Everyone else/companies pay $0.01 per dependency, per month. Each package (at each layer) describes its own dependencies. So a docker image, installing ubuntu (ubuntu declares its own dependencies - libc, curl, git, whatever), running npm, and all node packages, and you take a bill of cost from this "bundle". If dependencies share dependencies it only counts as 1 no matter how many times it's repeated in a single setup. If there's 1million servers running linux, that's 10k for the linux foundation per month. Probably there would need to be a tiering of cost/distribution, as a left-pad node package isn't worth the same as a linux distribution, and companies with + a certain threshold should perhaps pay more. The benefits would be that people would stop installing 10.000 npm libs as they gets expensive fast, so people would try to write more comprehensive libs and the quality would go up. You don't need to poke holes in the idea, it's basically an open ocean, but it would be nice to see something totally automated like this.
- atomashpolskiy 6y ago
  Easier to add OSS tax into the social security payments. The difficult part is collecting usage analytics so that funds get distributed "fairly".
  - zrail 6y ago
    UBI and universal healthcare would make this a complete non-issue, as well as benefiting the arts and humanities.
  - scaladev 6y ago
    TBH I have absolutely no desire to pay taxes for yet another JavaScript framework. I'd be happy to set aside, say, 5% of my monthly salary to be divided between the applications and libraries I actually use. (I do something like this, but manually and pretty unfairly, because it's difficult to cover thousands of projects with any meaningful sum as I don't have billions in my banking account). The OS of my choice has this: https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/ https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/ although it would probably be easy to inflate these numbers if your income depended on it.
prepend 6y ago
What’s the take for coordinating this Fund API? If I donate $1, what percent gets to projects and what percent is overhead? I want more open source software and more great open source software. But I think the best projects (Apache, Linux, etc) aren’t in need of funds and function more as common goods with multiple companies paying for work and contributing back. So I think their heart is in the right place, but the implementation won’t lead to better software.
- david_allison 6y ago
  Unsure whether they're using a different fee model for the "Fund" payments. But they're open about the fees for payments from individuals (each transaction on a collective's page shows the fee breakdown). > Open Collective takes 10% + credit card fees (usually 3% + $0.30/transaction) [0] A few concrete examples (dependent upon payment processor chosen) For $1, a collective got ~$0.56 For $100, a collective got ~$86.60 I was getting very close to the inter-bank exchange rate for payouts. [0] https://medium.com/open-collective/what-is-open-collective-how-it-works-c51bacc73d94#:~:text=Open%20Collective%20takes%2010%25%20%2B%20credit,admin%20of%20reimbursing%20their%20expenses https://medium.com/open-collective/what-is-open-collective-h....
  - piamancini 6y ago
    Hi! Pia here from Open Collective - In the FUNDS case the fees are taken when the Fund is created. Donations from the Fund are free of fees afterwards. Since the Funds are generally bank payments, there's no Stripe fees in this case.
    - lallysingh 6y ago
      So for bank payments, what kind of fees are we talking about?
      - piamancini 6y ago
        It's 10% which gets shared 5% & 5% between the platform and the non for profit that is the custodian of the funds (and provides compliance, tax filing, 1099s,etc)
rapnie 6y ago
> So, open source projects want to be supported, and companies who rely on open source want to invest in them but there’s a massive pain point: > In the open source world, formal contracts and partnership agreements don't happen the way they do in the business world. In a way what OpenCollective offers here is much needed. The OSS world has a really hard time to get funded, while at the same time big tech is thriving upon their works. Another pain point not mentioned in the article is that big tech corporate world also doesn't like FOSS (copyleft) licenses. They favor permissive licenses, as this is what their empires are built upon. I fear this funding initiative will favor OSS to the detriment of FOSS. I also feel that OpenCollective - which I found aligned with FOSS principles at the start, hence really attractive - is moving towards raking in the big money now.
- alannallama 6y ago
  Open Collective team member here. All the money involved in this initiative goes to Open Source Collective 501(c)(6). As a non-profit, all revenues are reinvested back into the mission of building health and sustainability in the open source ecosystem. We're not really "raking in the big money" but if we do, it will all go toward supporting open source. FWIW I agree with you about copyleft licenses, philosophically. But we've taken the approach of being very pragmatic when it comes to working with corporate sponsors, and we can't make them accept certain licenses, etc. Our approach is to build up funding for open source projects so they can be stronger and healthier and have the power to advocate for what they want to see in their ecosystem.
  - rapnie 6y ago
    I really appreciate your response. Thank you very much.
bombcar 6y ago
What I would like to see is a "Support Open Source" or similar add-on available at the cloud providers. For example my company pays Linode to do backups - I'd love to be add a similar "percentage of the VM cost" to each box for open source support (so it goes to support projects). Something like 10% of the VM cost would be great - easy to get approval for and doesn't have the "donation" wording around it.
caniszczyk 6y ago
Is OpenCollective a for profit company or non profit? The marketing is a bit confusing: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/opencollective https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/opencollective So a private company is taking a cut of each transaction headed to an open source project?
- piamancini 6y ago
  Hi Chris! Open Collective Inc. is a for profit company, we develop and run the open collective platform, opencollective.com The Open Source Collective is a non profit, a 501c6 that gives fiscal sponsorship to projects so they can receive project directed funding. The value prop is having both the platform to receive and disburse funds transparently and the non profit that holds the funds, does compliance, reports taxes, etc.
- LegitShady 6y ago
  Nailed it
- yyy888sss 6y ago
  If anything, a platform like this could also itself be an open source project.
  - piamancini 6y ago
    oh but it is! github.com/opencollective :)
pron 6y ago
Some people are under the impression that the corporate world and open-source are separate, whereas a very significant part of open-source is already corporate. Linux, Chromium, OpenJDK, V8, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tensor Flow, Elastic Search, Kubernetes, Redis, and many, many other of the biggest, most influential open source projects are overwhelmingly developed by people paid by for-profit corporations to work on those projects. Getting corporations to fund smaller, more independent, projects might be a good idea, but those two worlds are already just one.
- erhk 6y ago
  So how do you crowd source a project worth keeping right now? A tool that poisons data for Google analytics would hardly be funded by them. At a certain point we simply cannot allow companies to be the only ones holding the reigns.
  - wolftune 6y ago
    No easy answers. We're trying to address that at Snowdrift.coop but are ourselves struggling volunteers not getting fully launched still (but not giving up, still at it). Most efforts do seem focused on corporate open-source. The under-funding of that stuff is indeed an issue. But it doesn't result in real public goods that treat the public well if it's all upstream stuff that only serves to make proprietary downstream end-user products.
    - andrewaylett 6y ago
      Thank you for the work you've put into Snowdrift -- I'm still very excited for the project. Getting fairly close to my first charge now, actually :).
    - DetroitThrow 6y ago
      Hey wolftune, is there an open place for road maps and road blocks for Snowdrift? The idea seems to hit on a problem I describe just above you.
benatkin 6y ago
These funders are more like advertisers - paying for their logo on a web page.
varispeed 6y ago
The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end. It is crazy that companies make billions out of software they use without paying contributors a penny. Some companies were able to amass incredible wealth on the backs of volunteers. I think we should start pressurise politicians so that they force companies to pay royalties to open source contributors based on % of revenue. In many countries (for example in the UK) it is illegal to work for free (even if you want to) and every worker has to be paid at least a minimum wage. The same principle should apply to open source projects. If your company makes money over a certain threshold you should start paying. Open source software should only be free for individuals and small businesses.
- dt3ft 6y ago
  The change has to start with us. Developers should value their work, and stop going for virtual stars and points. I used to determine my self-worth through the number of stars my GitHub project had. Boy oh boy was that silly, looking back at it. 1.2k stars on GitHub... and god knows who profited off it. Me on the other hand? Meh. Would someone like to buy my 1.2k GitHub stars? :D
  - aaron-santos 6y ago
    Monetize your Github stars with a NFT.
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    Open source, like open science, is public good, that's value enough for me. It's a way to do good that's both aligned with my principles and personally stimulating. I'm not motivated by points or stars, recognition, money or self-worth, and I suspect I'm not in the minority.
  - thesource 6y ago
    I think developers do. Very much so. if they didn't every developer on this thread and this site would have been publishing their best work as open source. We know that is not the case. The people that write open source code are either academics, working on the project while being funded by their employers, have a business around it, trying to build up some resume credit or building or aspiring to build a business around their projects. There is of course the "hack project" or learning in progress project that one could publish, depending on one's reputation and standards People who are full time working professionals and have additional personal responsibilities could not be publishing and maintaining high quality open source. This is a shame, because those people would probably produce very high quality open source code if only they could afford to pay the bills in the meantime. What I am wondering though is whether the funding through something like this Open Collective initiative could ever match market rate a professional would command in a developed economy.
Sargos 6y ago
I prefer the quadratic funding method over direct corporate sponsorship as it allows more niche projects to get funded and average people to participate in the system. You can even have Google add $1million to a pool and then have individuals in the open source community distribute that out to projects based on need and utility. For background see https://wtfisqf.com/ https://wtfisqf.com/ and Gitcoin Grants. Quadratic funding has been used to fund Ethereum public goods for a few years and it works pretty well.
- piamancini 6y ago
  yes~ check this out: funoss.org coming soon (disclosure, I am Open collective co-founder)
- alannallama 6y ago
  Just correcting the quadratic funding link: https://fundoss.org https://fundoss.org - launching soon!
  - Sargos 6y ago
    Is this better for this specific case? I use wtfisqf.com since it explains the mechanism in an easy to understand way.
caniszczyk 6y ago
One problem with this approach is still that depending what country you're from, you're essentially creating an "open source gig economy" where developers work for scraps from company donations without health/retirement benefits: https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/ https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-... What I'd like to see instead of see people encouraging developers and open source maintainers start companies and create positive sum dynamics in wealth created.
- alannallama 6y ago
  Open Collective team member here. I totally agree that the gig economy approach is unhealthy. A big goal of ours is to help open source creators earn a decent living making open source that can rival what they'd get paid working for a commercial company. We've managed to facilitate that for quite a few projects, but as an ecosystem we have a long way to go. We need way more companies to step up to the plate and way more money flowing in. We also support projects who build companies and commercial offerings out of their open source projects, as long as they remain genuinely open source, and have many Collectives with parallel companies in addition.
shrubble 6y ago
OpenCollective as a company signed the open letter against RMS at: rms-open-letter.github.io . The FSF is in some ways a competitor to this for-profit company ... is that a fair statement?
- benjamuk 6y ago
  Hey Executive Director of Open Source Collective here. I signed the agreement on behalf of >2,500 open source projects (and the communities who maintain them) because I agree the call to action would strengthen the community, not weaken it. This is not about the FSF or the GNU Project, it’s about building a safe space for people to participate in and build a commons that is as diverse and welcoming as it is free and open.
  - undefined1 6y ago
    not exactly welcoming to neurodivergent individuals and those who don't perfectly conform to the approved orthodoxy. that letter is gross, slanderous and cult-like ("dangerous force", "These sorts of beliefs"). it's straight out of Scientology's Suppressive Person playbook. it does not speak for the open source community. it speaks for a small set of authoritarians who wield weaponized empathy and threat of banishment as a means to control people. please reconsider.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > I signed the agreement on behalf of >2,500 open source projects Did you ask them for a vote, or is there a general arrangement that you / OSC speaks for them?
  - erezsh 6y ago
    I'm generally a fan of the open collective, and I appreciate your contributions to open source. But I'm disappointed to learn that you took part in this irrational attack on the FSF. I feel that it has in fact made the open source space weaker and significantly less safe. I hope you will reconsider your stance on this issue. (I'm not a fan of RMS btw, this isn't about him at all. It's about principles and protocols)
  - 6y ago
kalyani9 6y ago
It should be free for cool people. Everybody else, pays. Like a club.
Qwertious 6y ago
Who is this intended to get funds from? From corporations, or from average consumers? IMO corporate funding is a death trap in the long run, because then they choose what gets priority and they have all the wrong incentives - they'll do right by the user when they can afford to. More corporate funding is useful as a stepping stone, but in long-term planning it's a mirage.
- alannallama 6y ago
  Open Collective team member here. This particular initiative is aimed at funding from major sponsors. Our platform also has crowdfunding functionality so projects can fundraise from individuals, too. Almost all the corporate funding we facilitate is no strings attached, meaning the project creators and maintainers stay in the driver's seat when it comes to prioritisation. Some projects opt to make other commitments to funders but that's totally up to the project.
rimutaka 6y ago
I would love to see their pitch deck with the TAM and that sweet x10000 ROI with their 10% fee! :) Although they may add value to OSS in the short term by bringing in the $$$ we wouldn't otherwise get, their ultimate purpose as a business is to maximize the return to the shareholders, who are not you or me. What we really need is more competition in this space to drive the fees down.
- caniszczyk 6y ago
  ...or use services that are run by non profits? there's a lot of funding platforms out there https://www.oss.fund https://www.oss.fund this type of service should be a public common good imho
- AKluge 6y ago
  The ultimate purpose is to fulfill the will of the shareholders. While this is usually dominated by profit concerns, other factors can come into play as well. Especially social good and community impact.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Who are the shareholders? Are they opensource developers?
mmgutz 6y ago
The problem I have with these funding platforms is how much of a percentage they take. TwitchAlerts, which was at the time, the best way to support Twitch streamers only took 1%. OpenCollective takes a whopping 10%. That seems a bit excessive.
thesource 6y ago
Do people still really care about open source?serious question. I wondered a lot when I saw docker images and shell scripts installers become so popular. It seems that a small percentage do care about the source and invest in investigating or improving in various ways. The vast majority however just want something that works, looks legit, looks like it won't be abandoned tomorrow. My intuition is that there is massive complacency going on and until the gift of open source stops on giving, no one is really interested in addressing the elephants in the room.
pauledge 6y ago
we should be able to do better with http://www.associate.com http://www.associate.com at some point. Come help us build it.
DocTomoe 6y ago
These corporate funds work for new, shiny OSS products - they generally stay clear from the bedrock, the core technologies that keep the world running, like, for instance, NTP. For that, there's Loadsharers, a true community-run distribution network, which I invite everyone to go and have a look: https://esr.gitlab.io/loadsharers/ https://esr.gitlab.io/loadsharers/
phendrenad2 6y ago
Open-source is just the noise floor. If a problem is so trivial that it's not worth selling as a product, open-source will step in and make it. The idea that companies benefit from open source is laughable. The cost of switching from Linux servers to a closed-source Unix would be very small. Linux is just used because it shaves a few beans off the bean count in the bean-counters spreadsheets. Likewise, recreating Preact or Angular from scratch is a few weeks of a developer's time. So yeah, this whole premise is flawed.

282 points by BerislavLopac 6y ago

Love the idea!

So this is only for projects with paying or willing to pay customers, right? Say, I have a small, permissively licensed personal project (bittorrent implementation), that has some userbase, including for-profit companies. There is a lot of shit code in there, and many features are missing. Let us assume for the sake of the argument that given sufficient time I would be able to turn it into a state-of-the-art reference library. But given the current state of my financials I'm finding it hard to justify putting any effort into it for free at the moment and end up purchasing other opportunities not related to OSS. I'm pretty sure it is not a unique situation and wonder if there are any solutions for this (e.g. angels, incubators, something like that?)

choeger 6y ago
For such a small-scale project, I suggest you seek out the corporate users of your project and offer consulting / development contracts as a freelancer. This can be on a per-ticket basis on their side. If it turns out that they have real use cases for your software they should be glad for the offering. Make sure to either request a high rate, as you are the leading developer and leading expert for the software. This high rate basically pays for further development (as a kind of training or investment into your offering). If they don't have a use case, code quality might not be as important and you can thus justify to scale down your involvement until such use cases appear.
- atomashpolskiy 6y ago
  Did consulting, yes. Two concerns: 1) Some guys want IP on improvements to the original codebase 2) When I work on client's problems, I have less time to work on the original codebase, so the earned money is not exactly reinvested into the project, which is the primary point of donations.
7steps2much 6y ago
Yes, the way I understood this is that customers can contribute to projects more easily. If you don't have any customers / users willing to pay then you don't get any money. As for your situation, put a notice up on your project that you are willing to fix bugs / code new features for a fee? If these companies use your library they might be interested in sponsoring your work. If they are not however, then I don't think there is a way to fund your development. As for incubators etc., they are probably not all that interested in a BitTorrent implementation, considering how many are already around? Unless of course the library provided some value nobody else does.
- atomashpolskiy 6y ago
  Yeah, right. So this is not what I had in mind -- a way for the society to invest into projects that might not have an obvious immediate business value. Like society invests in raising and educating kids, for example, hoping that some of these kids will bring positive value to the world when they grow up.

artembugara 6y ago

There is one basic thing about open source and market economy: 1. People open source for free. They already do that. So, there is no real need to pay them as they are willing to do so for free. Greatest minds work for open-sourced projects. 2. If you want to pay/fund/support open source. Great, but these numbers we're talking about (like $1k/mo) are nowhere near what devs make at corporations. I think Funds for Open Source is a great initiative! I just do not think it can be a real alternative to a career path. I think the best open source support is done by big companies who open source their work. For example, Airflow by AirBnb.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
The problem is that projects by big companies are often encumbered by their business decisions. Companies rarely find privacy profitable, so it's usually the first feature to get rid of, but if they use or need an open source tool that respects privacy, they may pay for it. Funds from tech companies won't alone make open source development sustainable, but it'll help.
- prepend 6y ago
  All projects are encumbered by business decisions. I think open source improves on this problem because now I can fork and extend because a company open sourced something. This is not perfect, but it’s better than when I can’t. I think a better approach is trying to encourage more of a gift economy with people working on stuff for free and sharing it. It’s funny how I’m willing to accept some hair and do work myself as part of a community, but if I have to pay for it, I lose that community motivation. For example, I’m willing to spend time writing up an issue for an OSS project with a test script, etc. but I won’t do that for a commercial company.
cassepipe 6y ago
I would rather make 1k a month and work on something I like on my terms than to have a stressful/meaningless job around the clock with unpaid working hours all around. There only so much shit you really need. And you need time for your friends/loved one. You'll live poorer but longer. Edit : This is not a fantasy about poverty being more genuine. Poverty makes you die sooner. My point is a life spent running after money and positions is a meaningless life. Edit 2: I may have a bias here since I live with under 1k a month, under my country's minimum wage that is .

pimterry 6y ago

How does this compare to https://tidelift.com/ https://tidelift.com/? My impression is they're fairly similar at first glance: companies can pay open-source funding to one central service, who redistribute to each of the appropriate individual maintainers & projects behind the scenes. I'm sure there's a bunch of practical differences in the details though?

benjamuk 6y ago
Hey, Head of Product at Open Collective (and former Tidelift employee) here: As far as I am aware Tidelift pays maintainers in exchange for a minimal set of commitments, which is used to sell the Tidelift subscription. They curate packages of ‘known good’ open source projects for enterprises and provide a set tools for users to better understand what software they depend upon. Funds is a little more free-format, facilitating a relationship between maintainers and organisations on their own terms. No contracts, no promises, no agendas. We take on the work of administrating payments to projects and of ensuring companies have what they need in their procurement processes. In doing so we hope to lower the barriers to the degree that we broaden access to funding for open source.
- genericone 6y ago
  Doesn't this enable maintainers to look at someone's submitted code, deny its inclusion for any reason personal/financial, and include it at a later date and claim expense? Since the code submission is open-source, isn't a malicious maintainer able to basically copy the code in-spirit under a pseudo-account, and then claim the benefits from the fund for themself? I'm just saying that once monetary benefits are involved, incentives skew away from code quality and community, and towards number one. Maintainers are above the other developers, is there going to be some community oversight? Who decides how much expense can be claimed?
- Qwertious 6y ago
  >we hope to lower the barriers to the degree that we broaden access to funding for open source. Q: who is the primary demographic of funders this is aimed at? Am I correct in saying it's mostly aimed at getting more corporate funding for OSS? (Non-rhetorical question)

david_allison 6y ago

Kudos to Open Collective (for this, and for existing in general). The article doesn't go into detail, but it also appears to streamline the workflow of requesting money from an open source project's perspective. Each fund[0] appears to have a "Request Grant" button, which is great, as it'll mean maintainers will hopefully have a curated list of contactable organisations if they need funding for a specific initiative. The barriers to entry here are extremely high: a few days ago I was looking into corporate sponsorship for a non open-source-related event, and after a couple of hours of Googling I was mostly unable to find contact details for relevant companies. It's definitely a natural barrier to entry which will be reduced with experience, but it will gatekeep a lot of interesting projects where organisers aren't experienced in fundraising. Reducing this friction for Open Source projects should allow the money to much more easily go to where it's needed. [0] Example fund: https://opencollective.com/indeed https://opencollective.com/indeed

alannallama 6y ago
Open Collective team member here. You're so right! We have been able to form partnerships with many big tech companies and grantmaking foundations, and it really opens up possibilities for projects to access them. Since we collectively represent so many projects we can use that scale to open doors, and on a practical level once we're in their supplier systems and have gone through their due diligence processes once, future funding is much easier.

hnedeotes 6y ago

Everything moving forward in this space is great. Ideal world - You declare your stack, from OS, distributor up to all dependencies used. Non-profit/individuals non-profit don't pay anything. Everyone else/companies pay $0.01 per dependency, per month. Each package (at each layer) describes its own dependencies. So a docker image, installing ubuntu (ubuntu declares its own dependencies - libc, curl, git, whatever), running npm, and all node packages, and you take a bill of cost from this "bundle". If dependencies share dependencies it only counts as 1 no matter how many times it's repeated in a single setup. If there's 1million servers running linux, that's 10k for the linux foundation per month. Probably there would need to be a tiering of cost/distribution, as a left-pad node package isn't worth the same as a linux distribution, and companies with + a certain threshold should perhaps pay more. The benefits would be that people would stop installing 10.000 npm libs as they gets expensive fast, so people would try to write more comprehensive libs and the quality would go up. You don't need to poke holes in the idea, it's basically an open ocean, but it would be nice to see something totally automated like this.

atomashpolskiy 6y ago
Easier to add OSS tax into the social security payments. The difficult part is collecting usage analytics so that funds get distributed "fairly".
- zrail 6y ago
  UBI and universal healthcare would make this a complete non-issue, as well as benefiting the arts and humanities.
- scaladev 6y ago
  TBH I have absolutely no desire to pay taxes for yet another JavaScript framework. I'd be happy to set aside, say, 5% of my monthly salary to be divided between the applications and libraries I actually use. (I do something like this, but manually and pretty unfairly, because it's difficult to cover thousands of projects with any meaningful sum as I don't have billions in my banking account). The OS of my choice has this: https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/ https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/ although it would probably be easy to inflate these numbers if your income depended on it.

prepend 6y ago

What’s the take for coordinating this Fund API? If I donate $1, what percent gets to projects and what percent is overhead? I want more open source software and more great open source software. But I think the best projects (Apache, Linux, etc) aren’t in need of funds and function more as common goods with multiple companies paying for work and contributing back. So I think their heart is in the right place, but the implementation won’t lead to better software.

david_allison 6y ago
Unsure whether they're using a different fee model for the "Fund" payments. But they're open about the fees for payments from individuals (each transaction on a collective's page shows the fee breakdown). > Open Collective takes 10% + credit card fees (usually 3% + $0.30/transaction) [0] A few concrete examples (dependent upon payment processor chosen) For $1, a collective got ~$0.56 For $100, a collective got ~$86.60 I was getting very close to the inter-bank exchange rate for payouts. [0] https://medium.com/open-collective/what-is-open-collective-how-it-works-c51bacc73d94#:~:text=Open%20Collective%20takes%2010%25%20%2B%20credit,admin%20of%20reimbursing%20their%20expenses https://medium.com/open-collective/what-is-open-collective-h....
- piamancini 6y ago
  Hi! Pia here from Open Collective - In the FUNDS case the fees are taken when the Fund is created. Donations from the Fund are free of fees afterwards. Since the Funds are generally bank payments, there's no Stripe fees in this case.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    So for bank payments, what kind of fees are we talking about?
    - piamancini 6y ago
      It's 10% which gets shared 5% & 5% between the platform and the non for profit that is the custodian of the funds (and provides compliance, tax filing, 1099s,etc)

rapnie 6y ago

> So, open source projects want to be supported, and companies who rely on open source want to invest in them but there’s a massive pain point: > In the open source world, formal contracts and partnership agreements don't happen the way they do in the business world. In a way what OpenCollective offers here is much needed. The OSS world has a really hard time to get funded, while at the same time big tech is thriving upon their works. Another pain point not mentioned in the article is that big tech corporate world also doesn't like FOSS (copyleft) licenses. They favor permissive licenses, as this is what their empires are built upon. I fear this funding initiative will favor OSS to the detriment of FOSS. I also feel that OpenCollective - which I found aligned with FOSS principles at the start, hence really attractive - is moving towards raking in the big money now.

alannallama 6y ago
Open Collective team member here. All the money involved in this initiative goes to Open Source Collective 501(c)(6). As a non-profit, all revenues are reinvested back into the mission of building health and sustainability in the open source ecosystem. We're not really "raking in the big money" but if we do, it will all go toward supporting open source. FWIW I agree with you about copyleft licenses, philosophically. But we've taken the approach of being very pragmatic when it comes to working with corporate sponsors, and we can't make them accept certain licenses, etc. Our approach is to build up funding for open source projects so they can be stronger and healthier and have the power to advocate for what they want to see in their ecosystem.
- rapnie 6y ago
  I really appreciate your response. Thank you very much.

bombcar 6y ago

What I would like to see is a "Support Open Source" or similar add-on available at the cloud providers. For example my company pays Linode to do backups - I'd love to be add a similar "percentage of the VM cost" to each box for open source support (so it goes to support projects). Something like 10% of the VM cost would be great - easy to get approval for and doesn't have the "donation" wording around it.

caniszczyk 6y ago

Is OpenCollective a for profit company or non profit? The marketing is a bit confusing: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/opencollective https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/opencollective So a private company is taking a cut of each transaction headed to an open source project?

piamancini 6y ago
Hi Chris! Open Collective Inc. is a for profit company, we develop and run the open collective platform, opencollective.com The Open Source Collective is a non profit, a 501c6 that gives fiscal sponsorship to projects so they can receive project directed funding. The value prop is having both the platform to receive and disburse funds transparently and the non profit that holds the funds, does compliance, reports taxes, etc.
LegitShady 6y ago
Nailed it
yyy888sss 6y ago
If anything, a platform like this could also itself be an open source project.
- piamancini 6y ago
  oh but it is! github.com/opencollective :)

pron 6y ago

Some people are under the impression that the corporate world and open-source are separate, whereas a very significant part of open-source is already corporate. Linux, Chromium, OpenJDK, V8, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tensor Flow, Elastic Search, Kubernetes, Redis, and many, many other of the biggest, most influential open source projects are overwhelmingly developed by people paid by for-profit corporations to work on those projects. Getting corporations to fund smaller, more independent, projects might be a good idea, but those two worlds are already just one.

erhk 6y ago
So how do you crowd source a project worth keeping right now? A tool that poisons data for Google analytics would hardly be funded by them. At a certain point we simply cannot allow companies to be the only ones holding the reigns.
- wolftune 6y ago
  No easy answers. We're trying to address that at Snowdrift.coop but are ourselves struggling volunteers not getting fully launched still (but not giving up, still at it). Most efforts do seem focused on corporate open-source. The under-funding of that stuff is indeed an issue. But it doesn't result in real public goods that treat the public well if it's all upstream stuff that only serves to make proprietary downstream end-user products.
  - andrewaylett 6y ago
    Thank you for the work you've put into Snowdrift -- I'm still very excited for the project. Getting fairly close to my first charge now, actually :).
  - DetroitThrow 6y ago
    Hey wolftune, is there an open place for road maps and road blocks for Snowdrift? The idea seems to hit on a problem I describe just above you.

benatkin 6y ago

These funders are more like advertisers - paying for their logo on a web page.

varispeed 6y ago

The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end. It is crazy that companies make billions out of software they use without paying contributors a penny. Some companies were able to amass incredible wealth on the backs of volunteers. I think we should start pressurise politicians so that they force companies to pay royalties to open source contributors based on % of revenue. In many countries (for example in the UK) it is illegal to work for free (even if you want to) and every worker has to be paid at least a minimum wage. The same principle should apply to open source projects. If your company makes money over a certain threshold you should start paying. Open source software should only be free for individuals and small businesses.

dt3ft 6y ago
The change has to start with us. Developers should value their work, and stop going for virtual stars and points. I used to determine my self-worth through the number of stars my GitHub project had. Boy oh boy was that silly, looking back at it. 1.2k stars on GitHub... and god knows who profited off it. Me on the other hand? Meh. Would someone like to buy my 1.2k GitHub stars? :D
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  Monetize your Github stars with a NFT.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  Open source, like open science, is public good, that's value enough for me. It's a way to do good that's both aligned with my principles and personally stimulating. I'm not motivated by points or stars, recognition, money or self-worth, and I suspect I'm not in the minority.
- thesource 6y ago
  I think developers do. Very much so. if they didn't every developer on this thread and this site would have been publishing their best work as open source. We know that is not the case. The people that write open source code are either academics, working on the project while being funded by their employers, have a business around it, trying to build up some resume credit or building or aspiring to build a business around their projects. There is of course the "hack project" or learning in progress project that one could publish, depending on one's reputation and standards People who are full time working professionals and have additional personal responsibilities could not be publishing and maintaining high quality open source. This is a shame, because those people would probably produce very high quality open source code if only they could afford to pay the bills in the meantime. What I am wondering though is whether the funding through something like this Open Collective initiative could ever match market rate a professional would command in a developed economy.

Sargos 6y ago

I prefer the quadratic funding method over direct corporate sponsorship as it allows more niche projects to get funded and average people to participate in the system. You can even have Google add $1million to a pool and then have individuals in the open source community distribute that out to projects based on need and utility. For background see https://wtfisqf.com/ https://wtfisqf.com/ and Gitcoin Grants. Quadratic funding has been used to fund Ethereum public goods for a few years and it works pretty well.

piamancini 6y ago
yes~ check this out: funoss.org coming soon (disclosure, I am Open collective co-founder)
alannallama 6y ago
Just correcting the quadratic funding link: https://fundoss.org https://fundoss.org - launching soon!
- Sargos 6y ago
  Is this better for this specific case? I use wtfisqf.com since it explains the mechanism in an easy to understand way.

caniszczyk 6y ago

One problem with this approach is still that depending what country you're from, you're essentially creating an "open source gig economy" where developers work for scraps from company donations without health/retirement benefits: https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/ https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-... What I'd like to see instead of see people encouraging developers and open source maintainers start companies and create positive sum dynamics in wealth created.

alannallama 6y ago
Open Collective team member here. I totally agree that the gig economy approach is unhealthy. A big goal of ours is to help open source creators earn a decent living making open source that can rival what they'd get paid working for a commercial company. We've managed to facilitate that for quite a few projects, but as an ecosystem we have a long way to go. We need way more companies to step up to the plate and way more money flowing in. We also support projects who build companies and commercial offerings out of their open source projects, as long as they remain genuinely open source, and have many Collectives with parallel companies in addition.

shrubble 6y ago

OpenCollective as a company signed the open letter against RMS at: rms-open-letter.github.io . The FSF is in some ways a competitor to this for-profit company ... is that a fair statement?

benjamuk 6y ago
Hey Executive Director of Open Source Collective here. I signed the agreement on behalf of >2,500 open source projects (and the communities who maintain them) because I agree the call to action would strengthen the community, not weaken it. This is not about the FSF or the GNU Project, it’s about building a safe space for people to participate in and build a commons that is as diverse and welcoming as it is free and open.
- undefined1 6y ago
  not exactly welcoming to neurodivergent individuals and those who don't perfectly conform to the approved orthodoxy. that letter is gross, slanderous and cult-like ("dangerous force", "These sorts of beliefs"). it's straight out of Scientology's Suppressive Person playbook. it does not speak for the open source community. it speaks for a small set of authoritarians who wield weaponized empathy and threat of banishment as a means to control people. please reconsider.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > I signed the agreement on behalf of >2,500 open source projects Did you ask them for a vote, or is there a general arrangement that you / OSC speaks for them?
- erezsh 6y ago
  I'm generally a fan of the open collective, and I appreciate your contributions to open source. But I'm disappointed to learn that you took part in this irrational attack on the FSF. I feel that it has in fact made the open source space weaker and significantly less safe. I hope you will reconsider your stance on this issue. (I'm not a fan of RMS btw, this isn't about him at all. It's about principles and protocols)
- 6y ago

kalyani9 6y ago

It should be free for cool people. Everybody else, pays. Like a club.

Qwertious 6y ago

Who is this intended to get funds from? From corporations, or from average consumers? IMO corporate funding is a death trap in the long run, because then they choose what gets priority and they have all the wrong incentives - they'll do right by the user when they can afford to. More corporate funding is useful as a stepping stone, but in long-term planning it's a mirage.

alannallama 6y ago
Open Collective team member here. This particular initiative is aimed at funding from major sponsors. Our platform also has crowdfunding functionality so projects can fundraise from individuals, too. Almost all the corporate funding we facilitate is no strings attached, meaning the project creators and maintainers stay in the driver's seat when it comes to prioritisation. Some projects opt to make other commitments to funders but that's totally up to the project.

rimutaka 6y ago

I would love to see their pitch deck with the TAM and that sweet x10000 ROI with their 10% fee! :) Although they may add value to OSS in the short term by bringing in the $$$ we wouldn't otherwise get, their ultimate purpose as a business is to maximize the return to the shareholders, who are not you or me. What we really need is more competition in this space to drive the fees down.

caniszczyk 6y ago
...or use services that are run by non profits? there's a lot of funding platforms out there https://www.oss.fund https://www.oss.fund this type of service should be a public common good imho
AKluge 6y ago
The ultimate purpose is to fulfill the will of the shareholders. While this is usually dominated by profit concerns, other factors can come into play as well. Especially social good and community impact.
imtringued 6y ago
Who are the shareholders? Are they opensource developers?

mmgutz 6y ago

The problem I have with these funding platforms is how much of a percentage they take. TwitchAlerts, which was at the time, the best way to support Twitch streamers only took 1%. OpenCollective takes a whopping 10%. That seems a bit excessive.

thesource 6y ago

Do people still really care about open source?serious question. I wondered a lot when I saw docker images and shell scripts installers become so popular. It seems that a small percentage do care about the source and invest in investigating or improving in various ways. The vast majority however just want something that works, looks legit, looks like it won't be abandoned tomorrow. My intuition is that there is massive complacency going on and until the gift of open source stops on giving, no one is really interested in addressing the elephants in the room.

pauledge 6y ago

we should be able to do better with http://www.associate.com http://www.associate.com at some point. Come help us build it.

DocTomoe 6y ago

These corporate funds work for new, shiny OSS products - they generally stay clear from the bedrock, the core technologies that keep the world running, like, for instance, NTP. For that, there's Loadsharers, a true community-run distribution network, which I invite everyone to go and have a look: https://esr.gitlab.io/loadsharers/ https://esr.gitlab.io/loadsharers/

phendrenad2 6y ago

Open-source is just the noise floor. If a problem is so trivial that it's not worth selling as a product, open-source will step in and make it. The idea that companies benefit from open source is laughable. The cost of switching from Linux servers to a closed-source Unix would be very small. Linux is just used because it shaves a few beans off the bean count in the bean-counters spreadsheets. Likewise, recreating Preact or Angular from scratch is a few weeks of a developer's time. So yeah, this whole premise is flawed.