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Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSSH, Firefox, Apache, etc. In addition, some projects that are not well-funded as a project are "funded" in the sense that companies pay pe

Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSSH, Firefox, Apache, etc. In addition, some projects that are not well-funded as a project are "funded" in the sense that companies pay people to work on them, for example Microsoft paying Simon Peyton Jones to work on GHC.

davidw 12y ago
It's a complex topic, so I think it's best to look at different funding models differently. Ubuntu is funded by Canonical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth in other words. So one big donor. Debian... seems to mostly get by on volunteer labor and be ok with it, or it did when I was involved with them. Has that changed? I suspect that in some ways Debian is underfunded given the amount of work they do. Perhaps money would make some things happen faster there. The Apache Software Foundation does a decent job at fundraising, and even employs a few people to do stuff like administration. Most of the projects get by with companies that pay people to work on them, which seems to work out pretty well. Firefox/Mozilla make most of their money with deals: Google and Yahoo, last I remember. I don't know about OpenSSH. It's possible, but mostly donations don't seem to work unless it's big chunks of money from companies.
- ryanlol 12y ago
  AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation.
  - davidw 12y ago
    I've never heard one way or the other whether it is or not; I'd be curious to see some data.
  - Alupis 12y ago
    > AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation. Unfortunately, that is very far from true. Ubuntu was negative $21 million USD in 2013[1]. Canonical would literally make money by just not doing Ubuntu anymore.[2] (Every time Canonical is on the verge of bankruptcy, Shuttleworth re-seeds back into the company from his personal checkbook) [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical-Group-Limited-Annual-Accounts-2013 http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical-Group-Limited-... (the numbers are represented in thousands, so 21,343 is 21,343,000) [2] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/13/mark-shuttleworth-canonical-ubuntu http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/13/mark-shuttlew... The significant losses due to Ubuntu development and related expenses are why Canonical as-of-late has been turning focus away from Ubuntu towards other markets such as Mobile and especially Enterprise (a la Red Hat's turf).
    - Maken 12y ago
      Ubuntu itself is a central part of their cloud business, so Ubuntu is indeed profitable for them. What's not profitable is their desktop and end users' market.
      - Alupis 12y ago
        That's not quite how it gets expensed (nor how it works). Canonical's cloud business might be profitable (even though Canonical as a whole is very-mush-so-not), however their cloud business is not coupled to Ubuntu, ie. they could use any Linux Distro, or any OS for the matter. Ubuntu is a total loss center for Canonical. It's surprising to a lot of people given it's popularity... but popularity doesn't equal profitability... especially when most users don't pay anything for the software (not even support fees).
        raverbashing 12y ago
        "Ubuntu is a total loss center for Canonical" Typical beancounter mentality. Probably comes with a suggestion of closing this division and going with something else OF COURSE this department loses money. But it is a net gain for the company, and in fact without it the rest wouldn't exist.
        Alupis 12y ago
        > OF COURSE this department loses money. Not sure what "of course" means here... it's very possible to be profitable off your OS Development division... look at Red Hat, SUSE, etc. They pay for the development from support payments... they collect support payments because enterprise wants their OS... it's a positive feedback loop. The better the OS, the more enterprise pays, the more funding RH can put into the OS dev team, the better the OS gets, the more support fees they collect, etc etc etc... Canonical has not been able to successfully charge for support like RH and SUSE have figured out. > But it is a net gain for the company, and in fact without it the rest wouldn't exist. It's not a net gain unless the company can be profitable as a whole and subsidize (and justify the enormous expense) off-put by tertiary services, etc. ... right now Ubuntu project is responsible for Canonical being perpetually in the red... every quarter, since their foundation. Canonical could very well just run enterprise support contracts, or push their cloud services. They don't have to use Ubuntu... any OS would suffice. They aren't somehow coupled to Ubuntu to the point if Ubuntu didn't exist, Canonical wouldn't either.
- rectang 12y ago
  > The Apache Software Foundation does a decent job at > fundraising, and even employs a few people to do stuff > like administration. Most of the projects get by with > companies that pay people to work on them, which seems > to work out pretty well. The ASF budget is roughly 1.2 million a year, the bulk of which goes to maintaining infrastructure for 200+ projects. https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2014/board_minutes_2014_08_20.txt https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2014/board... As a 501c(3) non-profit, it is constrained as to what it can do with donations.
morb 12y ago
Firefox is kinda special because they get a lot money from whoever pays them to be the default search engine, doesn't matter if it's Google or Microsoft or Yahoo. There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't. All of the Debian developers are volunteers, am I wrong? Slackware can barely support one employee, the founder. OpenSSH falls under OpenBSD, which also supports just the founder, everyone else volunteers, and they DO volunteer some serious time and do important things. They also had problems raising funds, there were discussions on HN about that here, and I'm sure there will be more in a year or two. From: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html : * If $10 were given for every installation of OpenBSD in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If $2 were given for every download of the OpenSSH source code in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal. This is kinda depressing. Is there someone from the Debian project here? I'm wondering if they could afford to run their own mirrors around the world if they had to. Could they cover hardware, colo and bandwidth costs, if they had to? I'm just curious.
- bigiain 12y ago
  Perhaps GPG should annually auction off which nation-state security service or online advertising company's public key gets automatically added to the recipients list for each encrypted message? </cynical>
- mattlutze 12y ago
  > There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't. That's the point -- the ones that can should support the ones that can't, which are often foundational components of the reason the ones that can, can get money in the first place.

davidw 12y ago

It's a complex topic, so I think it's best to look at different funding models differently. Ubuntu is funded by Canonical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth in other words. So one big donor. Debian... seems to mostly get by on volunteer labor and be ok with it, or it did when I was involved with them. Has that changed? I suspect that in some ways Debian is underfunded given the amount of work they do. Perhaps money would make some things happen faster there. The Apache Software Foundation does a decent job at fundraising, and even employs a few people to do stuff like administration. Most of the projects get by with companies that pay people to work on them, which seems to work out pretty well. Firefox/Mozilla make most of their money with deals: Google and Yahoo, last I remember. I don't know about OpenSSH. It's possible, but mostly donations don't seem to work unless it's big chunks of money from companies.

ryanlol 12y ago
AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation.
- davidw 12y ago
  I've never heard one way or the other whether it is or not; I'd be curious to see some data.
- Alupis 12y ago
  > AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation. Unfortunately, that is very far from true. Ubuntu was negative $21 million USD in 2013[1]. Canonical would literally make money by just not doing Ubuntu anymore.[2] (Every time Canonical is on the verge of bankruptcy, Shuttleworth re-seeds back into the company from his personal checkbook) [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical-Group-Limited-Annual-Accounts-2013 http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical-Group-Limited-... (the numbers are represented in thousands, so 21,343 is 21,343,000) [2] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/13/mark-shuttleworth-canonical-ubuntu http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/13/mark-shuttlew... The significant losses due to Ubuntu development and related expenses are why Canonical as-of-late has been turning focus away from Ubuntu towards other markets such as Mobile and especially Enterprise (a la Red Hat's turf).
  - Maken 12y ago
    Ubuntu itself is a central part of their cloud business, so Ubuntu is indeed profitable for them. What's not profitable is their desktop and end users' market.
    - Alupis 12y ago
      That's not quite how it gets expensed (nor how it works). Canonical's cloud business might be profitable (even though Canonical as a whole is very-mush-so-not), however their cloud business is not coupled to Ubuntu, ie. they could use any Linux Distro, or any OS for the matter. Ubuntu is a total loss center for Canonical. It's surprising to a lot of people given it's popularity... but popularity doesn't equal profitability... especially when most users don't pay anything for the software (not even support fees).
      - raverbashing 12y ago
        "Ubuntu is a total loss center for Canonical" Typical beancounter mentality. Probably comes with a suggestion of closing this division and going with something else OF COURSE this department loses money. But it is a net gain for the company, and in fact without it the rest wouldn't exist.
        Alupis 12y ago
        > OF COURSE this department loses money. Not sure what "of course" means here... it's very possible to be profitable off your OS Development division... look at Red Hat, SUSE, etc. They pay for the development from support payments... they collect support payments because enterprise wants their OS... it's a positive feedback loop. The better the OS, the more enterprise pays, the more funding RH can put into the OS dev team, the better the OS gets, the more support fees they collect, etc etc etc... Canonical has not been able to successfully charge for support like RH and SUSE have figured out. > But it is a net gain for the company, and in fact without it the rest wouldn't exist. It's not a net gain unless the company can be profitable as a whole and subsidize (and justify the enormous expense) off-put by tertiary services, etc. ... right now Ubuntu project is responsible for Canonical being perpetually in the red... every quarter, since their foundation. Canonical could very well just run enterprise support contracts, or push their cloud services. They don't have to use Ubuntu... any OS would suffice. They aren't somehow coupled to Ubuntu to the point if Ubuntu didn't exist, Canonical wouldn't either.
rectang 12y ago
> The Apache Software Foundation does a decent job at > fundraising, and even employs a few people to do stuff > like administration. Most of the projects get by with > companies that pay people to work on them, which seems > to work out pretty well. The ASF budget is roughly 1.2 million a year, the bulk of which goes to maintaining infrastructure for 200+ projects. https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2014/board_minutes_2014_08_20.txt https://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2014/board... As a 501c(3) non-profit, it is constrained as to what it can do with donations.

morb 12y ago

Firefox is kinda special because they get a lot money from whoever pays them to be the default search engine, doesn't matter if it's Google or Microsoft or Yahoo. There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't. All of the Debian developers are volunteers, am I wrong? Slackware can barely support one employee, the founder. OpenSSH falls under OpenBSD, which also supports just the founder, everyone else volunteers, and they DO volunteer some serious time and do important things. They also had problems raising funds, there were discussions on HN about that here, and I'm sure there will be more in a year or two. From: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html : * If $10 were given for every installation of OpenBSD in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If $2 were given for every download of the OpenSSH source code in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal. This is kinda depressing. Is there someone from the Debian project here? I'm wondering if they could afford to run their own mirrors around the world if they had to. Could they cover hardware, colo and bandwidth costs, if they had to? I'm just curious.

bigiain 12y ago
Perhaps GPG should annually auction off which nation-state security service or online advertising company's public key gets automatically added to the recipients list for each encrypted message? </cynical>
mattlutze 12y ago
> There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't. That's the point -- the ones that can should support the ones that can't, which are often foundational components of the reason the ones that can, can get money in the first place.