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.
>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.
I feel this misses a larger point: a large chunk of valuable OSS work isn't about innovation, but about maintenance: keeping the same things working in a developing ecosystem.
As long as we keep framing all software development as "innovation", there will never be enough money for the infrastructure underpinning the real innovative work, and that both makes it appear that innovation is much more expensive than it really is, and that software development is somehow maintenance-free.
One of my bigger wishes is that any software paid for with tax money needs to be FOSS. Of course you can't do the switch easily for with all the legacy systems running everywhere, but there must be some path from paying SAP and Microsoft Gigabucks in perpetuity to building an ecosystem of free software that everybody can use.
The EU is funding lots of new projects struggling to get off the ground though; you'll encounter lots of them on the Fediverse: https://mastodon.xyz/@ngizero
I've been wishing for the UE to take care of the Mozilla Corporation for quite some time. This would reduce the influence of Google, and also force the Mozilla Foundation to stop using their money to sabotage Firefox and paying huge salaries to higher ups. I wish the EU would take tech seriously. Have people in the TC39, have people on the Rust board, have people working on Linux, things like that.
I've long been impressed by https://simplesamlphp.org/ which is led by UNINETT, a state-owned company responsible for Norway's National Research and Education Network.
It's a serious competitor to Shibboleth in the SAML space.
The problem with government solutions is that they are so easily corrupted. For example, here in Washington State, USA a law recently passed mandating long term care insurance. Sounds nice right? The reality is that this will be funded by an income tax that will then pay $116,000 per year person in a long term care facility. I have a friend who's dad owns a big chain of these, and they are profitable beyond any of our wildest imaginings. What started out with the legislature's nice intentions is really just a massive pork benefit for old and corrupt businesses.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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 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.
> 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
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. 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. :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
I've just dedicated the best part of 2.5 years to working on my open source project[1] almost full-time. During that time I've managed to rewrite the entire library from scratch, discover a new purpose for its existence and (very selfishly) have a lot of fun with the library, pushing its boundaries and re-evaluating its 'API' as I discovered/explored the world of generative art.
Sadly my personal funds have run out and I've not been successful finding sponsors etc. But the work has helped me land a new/exciting full-time job so I've wasted nothing through my endeavour. I wish Will McGugan all the best at the start of his adventure, and hope he has as much fun as I've had over the next year or two!
The title made it already clear that this is an instance of "I am fighting the good fight, so please give me your money." I am an open source/FLOSS enthusiast since 25 years, but such calls still sound pathetic to me. These days even more then 10 years ago. Its a bit like going "I volunteer as an ambulance driver, do you have a few dollars?" I can see that some people dream of becoming financially independent from just coding open source. I have dreams as well. But the truth is, only a very select few ever reach that point. Joey Hess with git-annex comes to mind. I guess he just hit a nail at the right time, and wrote something that many people actually use. But if you're just that tad below the "everyone knows your tool"-line, you will never ever make your living from donations.
Nonetheless, you do seem to acknowledge that it’s possible while saying one should not even try. And yet this is oblivious to the fact that the only people who succeeded were among the people who tried in the first place.
OK, lets put it another way. If everyone who deserves support for their work is going to be posted on HN, its going to take a long time until the last one gets their money.
This is shifting rapidly. We are not living 25 years ago.
Kickstarter initiated a trend of paying for things we want by funding people that are creating in our niche areas of interest.
Platforms like Patreon and Ko-fi let you support the creators you want directly. You can do it on a subscription basis and have a 1:1 channel to talk with the creator. You can get custom work, support, advice, etc.
Github introduced recurring donations directly on user pages, making it seamless to contribute to open source creators. I chip in $5-30/mo to my favorite projects. I'm not the only one doing this, and the money adds up.
Twitch and YouTube introduced subscriptions, bits, and channel points, which gamify contributions and make you feel involved. These have resulted in a massive windfall for creators, and that same technique will propagate into open source. "Get your name in the README", etc., distributed on millions of machines is a compelling technique.
I give a couple bucks a month to a few creative people I appreciate. I don't get anything for it, and I don't care. I just want to support them. There's nothing majorly controversial about any of this. I read the article and the guy seems super humble and there's no degree of "pathetic begging" whatsoever. Great post (with a nice clean site design I should add).
If I were to give $1 monthly to everyone who substantially contributed to the software I am using on a daily basis, I believe my salary wouldn't suffice and I'd have to go live on the street. I know about Patreon, yes. But I also know that only the most prominent figures will actually earn enough to make it worthwhile. And in a sense, they are making money off the fact that the other 99% does not try to get payed for what they volunteered for.
The dudes got savings and career to fallback on—he might be dreaming but it's not like it'll hurt to try. Not to mention he's already popular in Python circles (i.e. tech workers with disposable income) and has an existing group of sponsors.
Sounds like you only read the title. The OP is planning on living off his savings for a while. I'm sure he would love for sponsorship to make his work self-sustaining, but he would settle for paying a few bills.
Rich looks incredible. I wish I had known about it about a year ago (and was more proficient in Python which I am now). I was creating an app to manage running all of our companies microservices locally on our laptops. I started out with ink-react (a text renderer for console apps that uses React). It was pretty cool in concept, but in execution it couldn't line up large boxes correctly and often failed. I don't know if it fixed all those issues.
Instead I just moved to Electron and now my app is a huge motherf__ing beast.
One interesting open source funding method I stumbled on recently was Tidelift which I posted recently[1].
Otherwise I see contributing to open source as essential for my company and we are still quite small but already have one dev that has been full time supporting a critical open source project for about 6 months. I'm not sure why others don't see it that way.
People are coming up with crazy workarounds for funding. Taxes, subscriptions, government programs, begging profit-driven corporations to donate…
As programmers in a lucrative field, you can get financial independence (https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...). Then you can work on whatever you want without hoping for the rest of the world to change so you can pursue your passions.
I would hate to see the future of open source go the way of the open core model. Open source has become a very popular way for startups to get traction and lead gen, for their revenue generating, fully-featured, open-core version. I understand why this exists, and there's nothing wrong with it, but I'd love a Richard Stallman rant on the subject.
I think it would be a good idea for open-core startups to grant options to EFF or the equivalent, at the beginning. I'd very much like to see the community directly benefit from the corporations that bootstrap themselves off of the communities back.
I gotta admit, I like the open core model. When it's done right, it seems like a reasonable way to monetize while still getting development done and encouraging a community and ecosystem. I've been looking at how Ghost[0] set things up[1] and it seems to be working very well. The company is non-profit and has certain restrictions in place to ensure that they don't become evil. Still, it won't work for everything and it can't work for smaller libraries.
I agree. Open core is the least objectionable way to deal with the fact that properly developing most open source projects costs money.
Obviously there are exceptions (Firefox, popular programming languages, etc.).
I especially like that you can often put enterprisey features like LDAP integration and auditing into the "paid" bit which gives a nice way to encourage companies to pay without affecting hobbyists.
I had no idea you could drive 60fps animations in the terminal. How’s that even possible? I only had limited experience with curses ages ago. Is he just spewing control characters crazy fast and the terminal is keeping up fine?
Anyway, this guy is a genius and I hope the funding goes well. His other projects look amazing as well.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager the browser is the minimum common denominator, not the terminal. But I’d like to live in such a world.
Readit News
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.
As long as we keep framing all software development as "innovation", there will never be enough money for the infrastructure underpinning the real innovative work, and that both makes it appear that innovation is much more expensive than it really is, and that software development is somehow maintenance-free.
Ban Microsoft and Oracle from public procurement, and invest the money in Europe.
We have no Tech industry and pitiful wages because we've bowed down to this US colonisation for decades via neoliberal policies.
It's a serious competitor to Shibboleth in the SAML space.
maybe some push by OSS activists to expose how much current govt software relies on their projects?
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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.
Once the dust settled, do the same with the next project.
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.)
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.
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...)
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.
https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-source-8790e...
My sense is that a large company prefer, and feel more comfortable, partnering with organizations like the Linux Foundation or Apache Software Foundation.
[1] https://tidelift.com/
That's how it should work - users contributing back.
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.
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.
I agree. But then, how do you decide where the money goes ?
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.
https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981
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/
[0] https://www.patreon.com/
[0] https://liberapay.com/
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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?
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.
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...
I am currently favoring the 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.
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/
[1] https://opensource.google/docs/growing/peer-bonus/
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/80-monetizing-open-source-proje...
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.
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.
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Dead Comment
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!
Sadly my personal funds have run out and I've not been successful finding sponsors etc. But the work has helped me land a new/exciting full-time job so I've wasted nothing through my endeavour. I wish Will McGugan all the best at the start of his adventure, and hope he has as much fun as I've had over the next year or two!
[1] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas
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What does "enthusiast" mean here exactly?
>if you're just that tad below the "everyone knows your tool"-line, you will never ever make your living from donations.
I wouldn't be so sure. https://awesomekling.github.io/I-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-Ser...
Kickstarter initiated a trend of paying for things we want by funding people that are creating in our niche areas of interest.
Platforms like Patreon and Ko-fi let you support the creators you want directly. You can do it on a subscription basis and have a 1:1 channel to talk with the creator. You can get custom work, support, advice, etc.
Github introduced recurring donations directly on user pages, making it seamless to contribute to open source creators. I chip in $5-30/mo to my favorite projects. I'm not the only one doing this, and the money adds up.
Twitch and YouTube introduced subscriptions, bits, and channel points, which gamify contributions and make you feel involved. These have resulted in a massive windfall for creators, and that same technique will propagate into open source. "Get your name in the README", etc., distributed on millions of machines is a compelling technique.
The world is changing.
Instead I just moved to Electron and now my app is a huge motherf__ing beast.
Otherwise I see contributing to open source as essential for my company and we are still quite small but already have one dev that has been full time supporting a critical open source project for about 6 months. I'm not sure why others don't see it that way.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28487153
Edit: Just realized he develops the package that lead me to discovering Tidelift, small world.
As programmers in a lucrative field, you can get financial independence (https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...). Then you can work on whatever you want without hoping for the rest of the world to change so you can pursue your passions.
I think it would be a good idea for open-core startups to grant options to EFF or the equivalent, at the beginning. I'd very much like to see the community directly benefit from the corporations that bootstrap themselves off of the communities back.
[0] https://ghost.org/ [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a...
Obviously there are exceptions (Firefox, popular programming languages, etc.).
I especially like that you can often put enterprisey features like LDAP integration and auditing into the "paid" bit which gives a nice way to encourage companies to pay without affecting hobbyists.
Software, as an industry may have evolved past that naive stage. It just kinda makes me a little sad.
Anyway, this guy is a genius and I hope the funding goes well. His other projects look amazing as well.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager the browser is the minimum common denominator, not the terminal. But I’d like to live in such a world.
How do you hardware accelerate control characters?