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We need better ways to fund Open Source projects. We all benefit tremendously by them. I think, this is one way it can work. Companies pledge to donate $X USD

We need better ways to fund Open Source projects. We all benefit tremendously by them. I think, this is one way it can work. Companies pledge to donate $X USD amount per year per software engineer (SE) to a foundation (or whatever legal entity). Then each SE is able to choose which percentage of the money goes to which projects. Channeling the money to the projects that they themselves find more useful. It makes sense because companies benefit but it is the SEs that know what they are using most.

mattbk1 5y ago
As articulated four years ago: https://gratipay.news/your-company-should-probably-pay-2000-per-person-for-open-source-9205443e209d https://gratipay.news/your-company-should-probably-pay-2000-...
- kosasbest 5y ago
  RIP Gratipay: https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981 https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981
otoburb 5y ago
Tidelift[1] is one such approach to encourage cashflows in a sustainable manner for open source projects. [1] https://tidelift.com/ https://tidelift.com/
- yoyohello13 5y ago
  I love the idea of tidelift, and wish I could convince my org to use them. Unfortunately, $1500/month is pretty steep. It's a hard sell when competitors are an order of magnitude cheaper.
kosasbest 5y ago
Well there's a few services to help[0], and I see many Github projects with a link in the readme asking for donations and such. But then the project is basically `donationware` and the income is unreliable. I think we need more /reliable/ streams of income instead of digital panhandling. [0] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ [0] https://www.patreon.com/ https://www.patreon.com/ [0] https://liberapay.com/ https://liberapay.com/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>We need better ways to fund Open Source projects. Yeah well, at least in the EU, we could start funding the awesome OSS projects that already exist around here, like KDE, OpenSUSE, and many more, with some of those billions of taxpayer money the EU has promised for "innovation", instead of shoving them in the pockets of publicly traded 100-year-old corporations like Siemens, VW, Daimler, T-Systems, Dassault-Systemes, etc. But of course, that would only work if those funds were actually for innovation and not a hidden form of wealth transfer and corporate charity.
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  this; govt and taxing might quickly get at least some money into the right hands maybe some push by OSS activists to expose how much current govt software relies on their projects?
  - fabianhjr 5y ago
    Heartbleed barely made a dent in funding.
    - jareklupinski 5y ago
      scaring people into paying only really works for criminals maybe we should place some ad-tech veterans in the EFF :)
  - WJW 5y ago
    Unless you can back this up with a threat of "we won't continue maintenance unless you pay up", this strategy is unlikely to make much of an impression. The OSS community has demonstrated to be quite willing to work for free, so why would you suddenly start paying them? Big organizations only change course when something is already broken and it is hindering the organization. In places where everything is just humming along, nothing changes. (This often applies to careers as well btw)
    - jareklupinski 5y ago
gitgud 5y ago
Good companies fund open-source, great companies contribute.
- simonw 5y ago
  Disagree. The problem with companies contributing to existing open source projects is that it creates even more unpaid labor for the maintainers, who now have to review and discuss and commit to future maintenance of those contributions. Meanwhile they still aren't learning any money to allow them to commit more of their own time to the projects!
  - zaphar 5y ago
    Depends on what you mean by contribute. If you contribute by hiring the maintainer to do maintainer work then that falls in the great company category. If you contribute by just shoveling a bunch of patches at already overworked maintainers then not so much.
    - allset_ 5y ago
      I see it the opposite way. If a company hires a core maintainer (often the only maintainer), they have huge amounts of power over the direction of the project as they can threaten to fire the maintainer who is now dependent on the company for income. Contributing improvements externally allows the project to remain independent. And if the maintainer is overburdened they can decline the patches or postpone review. Nobody is forcing them to accept the changes.
      - asiachick 5y ago
        Do you any evidence this is is common? Plenty of heads of open source projects are hired by large companies. I've seen zero evidence of them not remaining independent but maybe I'm just unaware of those cases.
        simonw 5y ago
Unklejoe 5y ago
I like the model of charging for open source software, perhaps with slightly better support in return. It doesn't have to be as serious as the RedHat model either. Something like how Bitwarden does it seems reasonable to me. You can run your own server if you buy a license, or you could just take their source and comment out the license check, but the license is so cheap so why bother? I do wish they had a lifetime license though. I hate subscriptions.
chrisseaton 5y ago
Many companies get their engineers to contribute to the open source projects they use as a normal part of their responsibilities. That's how it should work - users contributing back.
bipvanwinkle 5y ago
I just convinced the company that i work for to do exactly this. We’re small so there isn’t a lot of extra cash lying around, but we just started with a low number and we’ll increase it as we go along.
pbiggar 5y ago
I wrote a post about this! the problem is not that there is no money, or that they don't want to donate, it's that there isn't a good way for them to donate. https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-source-8790e42e10fe https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-source-8790e...
- mch82 5y ago
  You’re on target with this. Companies can’t contribute to random OSS on GitHub. In order to receive donations from large corporations (money and/or commits), OSS must be affiliated with a nonprofit that is properly structured and has recognized governance practices in place. My sense is that a large company prefer, and feel more comfortable, partnering with organizations like the Linux Foundation or Apache Software Foundation.
tibbon 5y ago
I keep trying to bring this up at work. We use a ton of FOSS software. We pay thousands per month to AWS, Datadog, etc... but nothing for the "free" software we use. People are generally in support of the idea, but then it falls away as a priority, and there's the question of which projects to fund and for how much. We'd have to talk to the finance department, figure out a budget, etc. So it doesn't happen.
- rectang 5y ago
  Hire the core maintainers of projects which are mission-critical. It's an old idea, and a proven one. Anecdotally, I made my living as a such a hire for nearly a decade. Another good plan, mentioned elsethread: have your current devs contribute. Opportunities to contribute always arise, and contributing is in the company's interest. The only thing typically standing in the way is codifying an open source policy (which is a good idea for large organizations.)
- acdha 5y ago
  That question of targeting is important: I would argue that the most effective way most companies support open source is by buying Red Hat or Ubuntu licenses simply because it's a model which every accountant understands and you can make a single payment which will filter to tons of projects either in the form of direct employment of maintainers or patch contributions. I'm aware of various attempts to collect payments or offer support plans but I don't think anyone's hit a combination which is as corporate-friendly. Everyone understands the idea of paying for support and it's usually much easier to give six figures to one party than 3 figures to a dozen projects, _especially_ when the latter doesn't get you some kind of guaranteed benefit easily explained to the accountants.
- pgeorgi 5y ago
  If you have a particular project to support, ask a dev if they can offer a "support contract" (even if that only means "clients can send me, the developer, an email if they have issues and I'll reply within 3 business days, I'll also take care of releasing at least once every 6 months"). That way there's something for the finance department to work with. Once the dust settled, do the same with the next project.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
goodpoint 5y ago
Donations are very unnatural for for-profit companies, unlike payments for services, requiring a lot of work to prove the legitimacy of a donation. Furthermore, funding public goods with donations creates ethical issues: in a competitive environment freeloaders have a competitive advantage over donors. Is there a way to contribute equally and fairly to public goods? Yes: taxation.
- corpMaverick 5y ago
  > Yes: taxation. I agree. But then, how do you decide where the money goes ?
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    The same way it's been done when public money funded all the groundwork for semiconductors and early computers, GPS, GSM, satellites, fiber optics, LCDs, touchscreens, spread spectrum, particle physics, space exploration, industrial chemistry, nuclear power and so on. You create international projects and hire very skilled people to decide funding allocation and hired skilled people to do the work. Without the distortions caused by the interests of for-profit companies (or the whims of some billionaire) you have a more efficient innovation process.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      To be fair, you often end up with the whims of some billionaire replaced by the whims of some bureaucrat. Thus, a key part of any such arrangement is transparency and accountability before the society it's supposed to benefit.
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        Sure, but even a corrupt and poorly implemented democracy is more transparent and accountable to the public than any private company belonging to said billionaire. Being removed from the public eye is the whole point of the word "private".
    - 5y ago
kdasme 5y ago
This resonates with me so much. Yes, we absolutely need better ways to support FOSS. The companies I've worked with never contributed any funds to FOSS, and very rarely contributed the code back. It felt so unjust, I started working on (what I think might be) a decent solution for some FOSS projects — https://srv.io/open-source-developers https://srv.io/open-source-developers. The MVP is up and running, not taking any payments yet, but feedback from developers has been nothing but positive. If you'll have a moment to check this out, please let me know what you think. :)
divbzero 5y ago
Could we popularize versions of popular open source licenses (MIT, LGPL, etc) for which commercial entities with positive revenue are required to donate X amount?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  So, support open-source by creating and pushing for the use of non-open-source licenses?
  - divbzero 5y ago
    The software would still be open-source to all, and cost-free for those without revenue.
    - david_allison 5y ago
      It won't be an OSI-approved license, therefore corporations won't consider it to be open source > The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale. https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd
tombert 5y ago
I also wish companies would just adopt the even simpler solution: just "donate" developer resources to a project that that engineer thinks is cool. If the tech giants would budget N days per month for developers to contribute to projects they like, I think that would a) help morale, and b) help the open source world.
cryptica 5y ago
I keep hearing this narrative about "We need to help open source developers" but it feels as empty as the narrative around gender and race diversity in corporate environments. People within big corporations talk about the problem as a substitute for actually solving it. They could easily solve it. It would cost them very little. They just don't want to solve it. Big corporate directors hate open source developers. They think we're all a bunch of communists. They don't want to incentivize value creation via open source. Instead of trying to figure out how to leverage network effects to capture some value from open source and help grow innovative ecosystems, they'd rather smother innovation and incentivize cronyism, dirty politics and bureaucracy instead.
- bruce511 5y ago
  Big corporate doesn't hate open source. That's a myth OSS promotes because it suits the narrative of being an underdog. Mostly big corporate (ie the whole world outside IT) has no idea what a software license is - if you polled all the workers at Wallmart they'd look at you blankly - and I'm talking management here... 99% of companies don't pay for their OSS because its free. Companies don't make donations to suppliers. They pay the sticker price and move on. Wanna give it to me for free? Great. Wanna charge me for it? Great. But give it to me for free, then expect me to suddenly start donating? How am I supposed to explain that to the board and shareholders? If you want companies to pay for your work, slap a price tag on it. If you want to give it away for free then do that. But don't expect companies to create a new funding model for you - that's not their business.
  - cryptica 5y ago
    > If you want companies to pay for your work, slap a price tag on it. Without VC funding and personal connections to insiders, no corporation will ever work with you no matter how good your product is and no matter what the price tag is. Open source used to be one of the very few ways to get a foot in the door if you didn't have personal connections to insiders. Doesn't work anymore. It's a red mark. They severed the last remaining meritocratic mechanism for earning money in the tech sector... Now the only way to get money is through prostitution or fraud.
tagolli 5y ago
I had the same idea! https://pay.builders/ https://pay.builders/
aswinmohanme 5y ago
Note to self
david_allison 5y ago
> Companies pledge to donate $X USD amount per year per software engineer (SE) to a foundation (or whatever legal entity). The tides are slowly changing Indeed have a fund[0] for this, and other companies seem to be taking the same approach. The disadvantage is that funds are restricted to projects used by the business, therefore this focuses more on infrastructure and development tooling rather than end user applications. Google has an Open Source Peer Bonus[1], where a Google Employee can nominate external OSS contributors to receive a payment [0] http://opensource.indeedeng.io/FOSS-Contributor-Fund/ http://opensource.indeedeng.io/FOSS-Contributor-Fund/ [1] https://opensource.google/docs/growing/peer-bonus/ https://opensource.google/docs/growing/peer-bonus/
fgonzag 5y ago
I've lately become convinced of the same thing. An idea i've had is instituting some sort of digital marketing tax (which doesn't reach consumers directly) and using the money raised to directly fund open source projects (especially desktop OSS projects which have much less resources than server oriented ones). I'm thinking straight up paying for developers salaries directly as long as you can prove you are working full time on a OSS project that has a minimum user base, as long as the project is completely non-commercial. Obviously each country would only hire their citizens / permanent residents, so it can also be considered a jobs programs of sorts. 200 billion dollars were spent on advertising last year. A 1% tax would net 2 billion a year, assuming your average OSS developer will work for 150,000, that's 13,000 developers you could fund with that tax. This also avoids Mozilla type situations who need 300 million a year to develop a browser by directly paying for developers instead of funding companies which spend on marketing, executives, and god knows what else.
- bruce511 5y ago
  Interesting idea. But how do i A) prove I'm working on OSS full time? What is full time? 40 hours a week? 5 hours a week? I'd this govt dept gonna have to hire managers, code reviewers? B) am I govt employee? Do I get benefits? Vacation time maybe? Medical? Will the govt need to hire HR people to manage those benefits? C) how do i apply to get this job? Who evaluates my application? What if there are 26000 initial applications and 1000 more a week after that? More HR? D) how long is this contact for? Month to month? Life? Somewhere in between? Can I be fired? Who is evaluating and firing me? E) how many users is a minimum user base? A million people? What about niche software like hospitals or train operators? How do i begin to prove number of users? With a mechanism that can't be gamed? If those numbers drop can I be fired? If someone forks my project and can claim to be more popular can I be fired? How many forks of my project will the govt pay for? Is someone deciding which forks are more worth? I could go on but you get the point. Distributing 2 billion is expensive. My guess is that half or more will simply go to funding this new department. The best jobs program to come out of it will be in the new govt HR department. And recipients of this new money will get to spend half their time writing reports on what they worked on, user numbers, and all the good things dutiful employees do...
bruce511 5y ago
For 30 years I've been hearing how open source needs proper funding, so far with little success. Everyone agrees that open source is valuable, but at the same time its very model removes the most direct way of extracting that value from the user - ie by primarily selling the code (in source or binary format). Compare this to proprietary binary software which has identified "this software has value, this is the price..." for them it's not complicated - create value, sell value. Conversely with open source it's create value, give value away, try and get customers to pony up cash for some other reason (support, donations, whatever) which is a hard sell because that is minimal added value. In my career I found a balance - I ship code not compiled binaries, so users are free to do whatever they like, they can ship binaries, but not my source code. That works at personal scale, and I make enough to keep working. It's not ideal, but I charge for the value, and there are lots of honest users. Big projects, Linux etc, get enough volunteers and funding. Some (chromium et al) are corporate sponsored. But for the long tail of one-man projects perhaps a pure open source model is not the best idea. Maybe there's space for something between closed binaries and source code for free?
RNCTX 5y ago
Companies could pay taxes rather than pay politicians less to not-pay-taxes (1). 1. Taxes could fund grants that instead of being passed around among friends of friends at certain universities are paid to those who provide the tools most useful to the most people (2). 2. People could be defined as actual living, breathing people, not corporations (3). 3. Corporations that complain about #2 could have their executives held personally liable for crimes, frauds, etc. These things are human problems, not technical problems or infrastructure problems. There is nothing stopping the US and UK from doing them (as for other countries, there's the US and UK intelligence services mulling around in their back yards to stop anyone from doing them...)
- prancer_or_vix 5y ago
  "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" -Audre Lorde
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    "1917" -- Some Russian factory workers. "Spartacus" -- Spartacus "Haiti" -- Hatians
    - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
      1. Probably starved to death or were shot shortly afterwards. 2. Crucified. 3. Forced to spend over a century paying reparations to the slave owners for their lost slaves resulting in one of the most impoverished countries in the world. Not a great track record.
- VirusNewbie 5y ago
  I can't think of a more inefficient way of paying for OSS than giving more money to congress to have them divy it up between various pork barrel/military spending and hoping it eventually finds it's way into a competent programmer's hands. Maybe just giving random people money in hopes one of them could become an OSS programmer, but even then, debatable. I think it makes a lot more sense to have the companies just hire people to work on OSS more often.
rglullis 5y ago
I like the idea (and even asked for something similar at some previous jobs), but it can be easily gamed. I could for instance just send the funds to myself or to a friend. I am currently favoring the https://gitcoin.co https://gitcoin.co model: individuals make donations to the projects they want to support, companies contribute to the fund only to match the individual donations, and quadratic voting rules determine how much each project ends up receiving in the end. Quadratic voting works to ensure that no single whales benefit from the matching funds and that the distribution is more even. I've also have been contributing some of the BAT I receive from Brave to creators that are registered and I'd like to support (hi @geerlingguy!). It seems that if more people did that we could put some of the money from the ad industry into good use.
rapind 5y ago
This sound great! Unfortunately many companies would rather exert influence over an open source project by writing a cheque with conditions. Letting each of their SEs pick and choose means it's less likely they get their company specific obscure feature added.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
I've been tracking the problem 'Monetizing open-source projects' and possible solutions on my problem validation platform[1], Can I quote your comment there? Or better if you're interested you can comment there yourself. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/80-monetizing-open-source-projects-monetisation-opensource https://needgap.com/problems/80-monetizing-open-source-proje...

mattbk1 5y ago

As articulated four years ago: https://gratipay.news/your-company-should-probably-pay-2000-per-person-for-open-source-9205443e209d https://gratipay.news/your-company-should-probably-pay-2000-...

kosasbest 5y ago
RIP Gratipay: https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981 https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981

otoburb 5y ago

Tidelift[1] is one such approach to encourage cashflows in a sustainable manner for open source projects. [1] https://tidelift.com/ https://tidelift.com/

yoyohello13 5y ago
I love the idea of tidelift, and wish I could convince my org to use them. Unfortunately, $1500/month is pretty steep. It's a hard sell when competitors are an order of magnitude cheaper.

kosasbest 5y ago

Well there's a few services to help[0], and I see many Github projects with a link in the readme asking for donations and such. But then the project is basically `donationware` and the income is unreliable. I think we need more /reliable/ streams of income instead of digital panhandling. [0] https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ [0] https://www.patreon.com/ https://www.patreon.com/ [0] https://liberapay.com/ https://liberapay.com/

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

>We need better ways to fund Open Source projects. Yeah well, at least in the EU, we could start funding the awesome OSS projects that already exist around here, like KDE, OpenSUSE, and many more, with some of those billions of taxpayer money the EU has promised for "innovation", instead of shoving them in the pockets of publicly traded 100-year-old corporations like Siemens, VW, Daimler, T-Systems, Dassault-Systemes, etc. But of course, that would only work if those funds were actually for innovation and not a hidden form of wealth transfer and corporate charity.

jareklupinski 5y ago
this; govt and taxing might quickly get at least some money into the right hands maybe some push by OSS activists to expose how much current govt software relies on their projects?
- fabianhjr 5y ago
  Heartbleed barely made a dent in funding.
  - jareklupinski 5y ago
    scaring people into paying only really works for criminals maybe we should place some ad-tech veterans in the EFF :)
- WJW 5y ago
  Unless you can back this up with a threat of "we won't continue maintenance unless you pay up", this strategy is unlikely to make much of an impression. The OSS community has demonstrated to be quite willing to work for free, so why would you suddenly start paying them? Big organizations only change course when something is already broken and it is hindering the organization. In places where everything is just humming along, nothing changes. (This often applies to careers as well btw)
  - jareklupinski 5y ago

gitgud 5y ago

Good companies fund open-source, great companies contribute.

simonw 5y ago
Disagree. The problem with companies contributing to existing open source projects is that it creates even more unpaid labor for the maintainers, who now have to review and discuss and commit to future maintenance of those contributions. Meanwhile they still aren't learning any money to allow them to commit more of their own time to the projects!
- zaphar 5y ago
  Depends on what you mean by contribute. If you contribute by hiring the maintainer to do maintainer work then that falls in the great company category. If you contribute by just shoveling a bunch of patches at already overworked maintainers then not so much.
  - allset_ 5y ago
    I see it the opposite way. If a company hires a core maintainer (often the only maintainer), they have huge amounts of power over the direction of the project as they can threaten to fire the maintainer who is now dependent on the company for income. Contributing improvements externally allows the project to remain independent. And if the maintainer is overburdened they can decline the patches or postpone review. Nobody is forcing them to accept the changes.
    - asiachick 5y ago
      Do you any evidence this is is common? Plenty of heads of open source projects are hired by large companies. I've seen zero evidence of them not remaining independent but maybe I'm just unaware of those cases.
      - simonw 5y ago

Unklejoe 5y ago

I like the model of charging for open source software, perhaps with slightly better support in return. It doesn't have to be as serious as the RedHat model either. Something like how Bitwarden does it seems reasonable to me. You can run your own server if you buy a license, or you could just take their source and comment out the license check, but the license is so cheap so why bother? I do wish they had a lifetime license though. I hate subscriptions.

chrisseaton 5y ago

Many companies get their engineers to contribute to the open source projects they use as a normal part of their responsibilities. That's how it should work - users contributing back.

bipvanwinkle 5y ago

I just convinced the company that i work for to do exactly this. We’re small so there isn’t a lot of extra cash lying around, but we just started with a low number and we’ll increase it as we go along.

pbiggar 5y ago

I wrote a post about this! the problem is not that there is no money, or that they don't want to donate, it's that there isn't a good way for them to donate. https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-source-8790e42e10fe https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-source-8790e...

mch82 5y ago
You’re on target with this. Companies can’t contribute to random OSS on GitHub. In order to receive donations from large corporations (money and/or commits), OSS must be affiliated with a nonprofit that is properly structured and has recognized governance practices in place. My sense is that a large company prefer, and feel more comfortable, partnering with organizations like the Linux Foundation or Apache Software Foundation.

tibbon 5y ago

I keep trying to bring this up at work. We use a ton of FOSS software. We pay thousands per month to AWS, Datadog, etc... but nothing for the "free" software we use. People are generally in support of the idea, but then it falls away as a priority, and there's the question of which projects to fund and for how much. We'd have to talk to the finance department, figure out a budget, etc. So it doesn't happen.

rectang 5y ago
Hire the core maintainers of projects which are mission-critical. It's an old idea, and a proven one. Anecdotally, I made my living as a such a hire for nearly a decade. Another good plan, mentioned elsethread: have your current devs contribute. Opportunities to contribute always arise, and contributing is in the company's interest. The only thing typically standing in the way is codifying an open source policy (which is a good idea for large organizations.)
acdha 5y ago
That question of targeting is important: I would argue that the most effective way most companies support open source is by buying Red Hat or Ubuntu licenses simply because it's a model which every accountant understands and you can make a single payment which will filter to tons of projects either in the form of direct employment of maintainers or patch contributions. I'm aware of various attempts to collect payments or offer support plans but I don't think anyone's hit a combination which is as corporate-friendly. Everyone understands the idea of paying for support and it's usually much easier to give six figures to one party than 3 figures to a dozen projects, _especially_ when the latter doesn't get you some kind of guaranteed benefit easily explained to the accountants.
pgeorgi 5y ago
If you have a particular project to support, ask a dev if they can offer a "support contract" (even if that only means "clients can send me, the developer, an email if they have issues and I'll reply within 3 business days, I'll also take care of releasing at least once every 6 months"). That way there's something for the finance department to work with. Once the dust settled, do the same with the next project.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

goodpoint 5y ago

Donations are very unnatural for for-profit companies, unlike payments for services, requiring a lot of work to prove the legitimacy of a donation. Furthermore, funding public goods with donations creates ethical issues: in a competitive environment freeloaders have a competitive advantage over donors. Is there a way to contribute equally and fairly to public goods? Yes: taxation.

corpMaverick 5y ago
> Yes: taxation. I agree. But then, how do you decide where the money goes ?
- goodpoint 5y ago
  The same way it's been done when public money funded all the groundwork for semiconductors and early computers, GPS, GSM, satellites, fiber optics, LCDs, touchscreens, spread spectrum, particle physics, space exploration, industrial chemistry, nuclear power and so on. You create international projects and hire very skilled people to decide funding allocation and hired skilled people to do the work. Without the distortions caused by the interests of for-profit companies (or the whims of some billionaire) you have a more efficient innovation process.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    To be fair, you often end up with the whims of some billionaire replaced by the whims of some bureaucrat. Thus, a key part of any such arrangement is transparency and accountability before the society it's supposed to benefit.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      Sure, but even a corrupt and poorly implemented democracy is more transparent and accountable to the public than any private company belonging to said billionaire. Being removed from the public eye is the whole point of the word "private".
  - 5y ago

kdasme 5y ago

This resonates with me so much. Yes, we absolutely need better ways to support FOSS. The companies I've worked with never contributed any funds to FOSS, and very rarely contributed the code back. It felt so unjust, I started working on (what I think might be) a decent solution for some FOSS projects — https://srv.io/open-source-developers https://srv.io/open-source-developers. The MVP is up and running, not taking any payments yet, but feedback from developers has been nothing but positive. If you'll have a moment to check this out, please let me know what you think. :)

divbzero 5y ago

Could we popularize versions of popular open source licenses (MIT, LGPL, etc) for which commercial entities with positive revenue are required to donate X amount?

sokoloff 5y ago
So, support open-source by creating and pushing for the use of non-open-source licenses?
- divbzero 5y ago
  The software would still be open-source to all, and cost-free for those without revenue.
  - david_allison 5y ago
    It won't be an OSI-approved license, therefore corporations won't consider it to be open source > The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale. https://opensource.org/osd https://opensource.org/osd

tombert 5y ago

I also wish companies would just adopt the even simpler solution: just "donate" developer resources to a project that that engineer thinks is cool. If the tech giants would budget N days per month for developers to contribute to projects they like, I think that would a) help morale, and b) help the open source world.

cryptica 5y ago

I keep hearing this narrative about "We need to help open source developers" but it feels as empty as the narrative around gender and race diversity in corporate environments. People within big corporations talk about the problem as a substitute for actually solving it. They could easily solve it. It would cost them very little. They just don't want to solve it. Big corporate directors hate open source developers. They think we're all a bunch of communists. They don't want to incentivize value creation via open source. Instead of trying to figure out how to leverage network effects to capture some value from open source and help grow innovative ecosystems, they'd rather smother innovation and incentivize cronyism, dirty politics and bureaucracy instead.

bruce511 5y ago
Big corporate doesn't hate open source. That's a myth OSS promotes because it suits the narrative of being an underdog. Mostly big corporate (ie the whole world outside IT) has no idea what a software license is - if you polled all the workers at Wallmart they'd look at you blankly - and I'm talking management here... 99% of companies don't pay for their OSS because its free. Companies don't make donations to suppliers. They pay the sticker price and move on. Wanna give it to me for free? Great. Wanna charge me for it? Great. But give it to me for free, then expect me to suddenly start donating? How am I supposed to explain that to the board and shareholders? If you want companies to pay for your work, slap a price tag on it. If you want to give it away for free then do that. But don't expect companies to create a new funding model for you - that's not their business.
- cryptica 5y ago
  > If you want companies to pay for your work, slap a price tag on it. Without VC funding and personal connections to insiders, no corporation will ever work with you no matter how good your product is and no matter what the price tag is. Open source used to be one of the very few ways to get a foot in the door if you didn't have personal connections to insiders. Doesn't work anymore. It's a red mark. They severed the last remaining meritocratic mechanism for earning money in the tech sector... Now the only way to get money is through prostitution or fraud.

tagolli 5y ago

I had the same idea! https://pay.builders/ https://pay.builders/

aswinmohanme 5y ago

Note to self

david_allison 5y ago

> Companies pledge to donate $X USD amount per year per software engineer (SE) to a foundation (or whatever legal entity). The tides are slowly changing Indeed have a fund[0] for this, and other companies seem to be taking the same approach. The disadvantage is that funds are restricted to projects used by the business, therefore this focuses more on infrastructure and development tooling rather than end user applications. Google has an Open Source Peer Bonus[1], where a Google Employee can nominate external OSS contributors to receive a payment [0] http://opensource.indeedeng.io/FOSS-Contributor-Fund/ http://opensource.indeedeng.io/FOSS-Contributor-Fund/ [1] https://opensource.google/docs/growing/peer-bonus/ https://opensource.google/docs/growing/peer-bonus/

fgonzag 5y ago

I've lately become convinced of the same thing. An idea i've had is instituting some sort of digital marketing tax (which doesn't reach consumers directly) and using the money raised to directly fund open source projects (especially desktop OSS projects which have much less resources than server oriented ones). I'm thinking straight up paying for developers salaries directly as long as you can prove you are working full time on a OSS project that has a minimum user base, as long as the project is completely non-commercial. Obviously each country would only hire their citizens / permanent residents, so it can also be considered a jobs programs of sorts. 200 billion dollars were spent on advertising last year. A 1% tax would net 2 billion a year, assuming your average OSS developer will work for 150,000, that's 13,000 developers you could fund with that tax. This also avoids Mozilla type situations who need 300 million a year to develop a browser by directly paying for developers instead of funding companies which spend on marketing, executives, and god knows what else.

bruce511 5y ago
Interesting idea. But how do i A) prove I'm working on OSS full time? What is full time? 40 hours a week? 5 hours a week? I'd this govt dept gonna have to hire managers, code reviewers? B) am I govt employee? Do I get benefits? Vacation time maybe? Medical? Will the govt need to hire HR people to manage those benefits? C) how do i apply to get this job? Who evaluates my application? What if there are 26000 initial applications and 1000 more a week after that? More HR? D) how long is this contact for? Month to month? Life? Somewhere in between? Can I be fired? Who is evaluating and firing me? E) how many users is a minimum user base? A million people? What about niche software like hospitals or train operators? How do i begin to prove number of users? With a mechanism that can't be gamed? If those numbers drop can I be fired? If someone forks my project and can claim to be more popular can I be fired? How many forks of my project will the govt pay for? Is someone deciding which forks are more worth? I could go on but you get the point. Distributing 2 billion is expensive. My guess is that half or more will simply go to funding this new department. The best jobs program to come out of it will be in the new govt HR department. And recipients of this new money will get to spend half their time writing reports on what they worked on, user numbers, and all the good things dutiful employees do...

bruce511 5y ago

For 30 years I've been hearing how open source needs proper funding, so far with little success. Everyone agrees that open source is valuable, but at the same time its very model removes the most direct way of extracting that value from the user - ie by primarily selling the code (in source or binary format). Compare this to proprietary binary software which has identified "this software has value, this is the price..." for them it's not complicated - create value, sell value. Conversely with open source it's create value, give value away, try and get customers to pony up cash for some other reason (support, donations, whatever) which is a hard sell because that is minimal added value. In my career I found a balance - I ship code not compiled binaries, so users are free to do whatever they like, they can ship binaries, but not my source code. That works at personal scale, and I make enough to keep working. It's not ideal, but I charge for the value, and there are lots of honest users. Big projects, Linux etc, get enough volunteers and funding. Some (chromium et al) are corporate sponsored. But for the long tail of one-man projects perhaps a pure open source model is not the best idea. Maybe there's space for something between closed binaries and source code for free?

RNCTX 5y ago

Companies could pay taxes rather than pay politicians less to not-pay-taxes (1). 1. Taxes could fund grants that instead of being passed around among friends of friends at certain universities are paid to those who provide the tools most useful to the most people (2). 2. People could be defined as actual living, breathing people, not corporations (3). 3. Corporations that complain about #2 could have their executives held personally liable for crimes, frauds, etc. These things are human problems, not technical problems or infrastructure problems. There is nothing stopping the US and UK from doing them (as for other countries, there's the US and UK intelligence services mulling around in their back yards to stop anyone from doing them...)

prancer_or_vix 5y ago
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" -Audre Lorde
- RNCTX 5y ago
  "1917" -- Some Russian factory workers. "Spartacus" -- Spartacus "Haiti" -- Hatians
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    1. Probably starved to death or were shot shortly afterwards. 2. Crucified. 3. Forced to spend over a century paying reparations to the slave owners for their lost slaves resulting in one of the most impoverished countries in the world. Not a great track record.
VirusNewbie 5y ago
I can't think of a more inefficient way of paying for OSS than giving more money to congress to have them divy it up between various pork barrel/military spending and hoping it eventually finds it's way into a competent programmer's hands. Maybe just giving random people money in hopes one of them could become an OSS programmer, but even then, debatable. I think it makes a lot more sense to have the companies just hire people to work on OSS more often.

rglullis 5y ago

I like the idea (and even asked for something similar at some previous jobs), but it can be easily gamed. I could for instance just send the funds to myself or to a friend. I am currently favoring the https://gitcoin.co https://gitcoin.co model: individuals make donations to the projects they want to support, companies contribute to the fund only to match the individual donations, and quadratic voting rules determine how much each project ends up receiving in the end. Quadratic voting works to ensure that no single whales benefit from the matching funds and that the distribution is more even. I've also have been contributing some of the BAT I receive from Brave to creators that are registered and I'd like to support (hi @geerlingguy!). It seems that if more people did that we could put some of the money from the ad industry into good use.

rapind 5y ago

This sound great! Unfortunately many companies would rather exert influence over an open source project by writing a cheque with conditions. Letting each of their SEs pick and choose means it's less likely they get their company specific obscure feature added.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

I've been tracking the problem 'Monetizing open-source projects' and possible solutions on my problem validation platform[1], Can I quote your comment there? Or better if you're interested you can comment there yourself. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/80-monetizing-open-source-projects-monetisation-opensource https://needgap.com/problems/80-monetizing-open-source-proje...