To apply, the project must place a funding.json in their public code repository or at a well-known uri location on their domain: https://dir.floss.fund/submit
That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you Llama Impact Grants, OpenAI Cybersecurity Grants, NLNet, & OpenTechFund.
---
Disclaimer: A project I co-develop was granted £3.75k in 2023 back when FOSS United grants were co-sponsored by Zerodha (the same company behind FLOSS/fund). The entire process was over in like 3 days from the date of application.
> That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you
I guess somebody has to point out the obvious ....
First, the process is probably simpler because the donation amounts are going to be smaller. If there's only $1M per year in the bank, I somehow don't see them giving out the sorts of large sums the others you mentioned do, e.g. OpenTechFund says it will give up to $400,000 ... I don't see that happening with a fund that only has $1M a year to give out.
Second, building on the above, giving out large sums involves a greater amount of due diligence.
Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
> Put money where the mouth is—a minimum of $10,000 and up to $100,000 for a single recipient, totaling $1 million per year, which we will increase once we understand the dynamics of running the fund.
I worked in non-profit funding for many a year, and in the more traditional charity space, there's zero -- even negative -- correlation between grant value and effort.
It's also not just about the initial (typically multi-stage) application, but then the reporting and compliance requirements, the random donor requests.
This sort of thing is often objectively worse for smaller funders, but also relatively worse with smaller amounts of money as it's harder to resource for people to deal with the crap. Grant money ain't free.
> Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
Does it though or does it sort out the projects who would rather focus on developing while selecting those better at marketing themselves than at building useful things aka the professional bullshitter class.
> Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
Opposite effect, actually. Longer forms get you a lot of the top 10%, but you miss out on the top 0.0001% who don't want to waste their time with people who aren't smart enough to design a brief form.
Applying for an nlnet grant generously takes like an afternoon. Like the entire rationale for their organization is to prevent you from having to write 20 pages of fluff to appeal to EU bureaucrats, so you can be to the point and chat with technically minded people instead.
Are you saying that as a good or bad thing (an afternoon)? I have no clue if that’s good or bad, never done this kinda thing (more of a sysadmin than a SWE).
I am curious, out of ignorance, if business many expenses are deductible anyway, what would be the fundamental difference between calling it a Marketing/Advertising expense to buy community good will compared with a charitable deduction?
I've maintained a fairly popular open source project for over 13 years[1]. The software is basically "complete." How does funding work for someone like me? I have no initiatives with it that require funding. Occasionally, I need to fix a bizarre obscure bug, or support a new python version/feature (async/await being the last big one). But otherwise, I just field questions a few times a month.
Truth be told, I'd rather be done with the project completely. It's like a little monkey on my back that I can never be rid of, that I must always tend to. But at the same time, since I can never realistically receive funding for it, the only value I get is the fact that my name is on it. I wish a big, legit company would just buy it off of me somehow, but there's no incentive for them either. I don't know how this ends.
I had the exact same experience with Nodemailer, a popular open-source project I started 14 years ago. My solution was to empty the README file and set up a dedicated documentation website. Since the project is popular, the documentation website receives around 70,000 visits per month. I initially tried paid ads, but they only netted about $200 per month—not great. So, I started a commercial project somewhat related to Nodemailer and added ads for my new project on Nodemailer’s documentation page. This brings in around 3,000 visits per month to my paid project through the ads on the documentation page. Even if the conversion rate is low, it’s essentially free traffic for my paid project, which is now approaching $10,000 MRR. Without the free visitor flow from my OSS project’s documentation page, I definitely wouldn’t have made it this far.
This is a really interesting approach, I hadn't thought of this!
Just out of curiosity, do you think the separate documentation page has better conversion than if you were to, say, include the ad directly into the readme inside the repo?
Thanks for sharing. It's an interesting idea, to try to trampoline it into another related commercial project. I just checked my RTD analytics, I get around 1k pageviews to `/` per month. Unfortunately I don't have a related commercial product either.
Very interesting! I wonder if, sadly, the rise of AI-assisted coding will chip away also at this potential revenue stream? As developers simply ask a local or cloud LLM how to use a piece a software instead of reading the documentation.
You can always just stop working on it. You aren't obligated to do anything further if it doesn't bring you joy. Update the README to say you've stopped maintaining it, and to add a bit about searching for a new maintainer.
If you believe you still get an ongoing benefit (reputational or whatever) by being its maintainer and continuing to support it, and if you still want that benefit, then you have to keep up the work. Very little in life is truly free, unfortunately.
You could also see if there's a way to monetize your work on it. If people want support or need bugs fixed, they can pay you to do so, for example. Might even look into GitHub Sponsors, if you haven't already. I do get that it's harder to solicit donations for something that's "finished", though.
It's always an option to just publicly announce that you will no longer maintain it anymore and that you are either looking for a successor, or encouraging the community to fork it.
* Fine print: For successful projects only, and up to $100K per year per project
——
From their FAQ:
> Currently, our focus is on supporting existing, widely used, and impactful projects to specifically contribute to their sustainability. Very new projects or projects with minimal usage are not considered for the time being.
> A project can apply for funding of up to $100,000 in one year. To keep the logistics and operational overhead of the fund reasonable, we accept requests in denominations of a minimum of $10,000 and multiples of $25,000 thereafter.
I was curious how they might handle something that isn't ready yet, but in the process of being built. But that answers it, it's not eligible. Oh well :( Plenty of good open source out there deserving as well.
So while this effort is commendable, it will do nothing to help open source projects that are good, but just have not become popular yet.
It makes you wonder how many projects are out there which have tremendous potential but still lack a critical feature or two that a bit of funding would help bring to fruition.
I wonder what projects will end up receiving money from this fund. It's nice that more funds are available, but my best guess would be that these will go to projects which probably don't really need them anyway.
From my experience, open source projects are either big and massively funded, able to pay their own developers a salary, or the projects end up in a void filled with burned-out maintainers whose only appreciation is an occasional $15 donation and issues filled with negativity and sometimes even hatred.
What does a one-time donation between $10k and $100k do to help the second case? Perhaps it will allow the maintainer to take a few months off and work full-time on the project, or maybe hire someone to clear the backlog. But what happens afterward? Without a clear pathway to making the project self-sustaining, you've merely postponed maintainer burnout by a couple of years at best.
The biggest problem with occasional $15 donations is that they're occasional. Sustainability requires a somewhat stable ARR.
In my experience developers as a whole are very stingy, even though they complain about companies not donating to open source all the time, and complain when companies do donate but the amount is too little for their liking. (For instance, when I google “microsoft foss fund payout” the first result after the official landing page is https://lobste.rs/s/wyvnuu/microsoft_foss_fund_winner_curl complaining about the amount.)
As a data point, my open source web app for a casual game received thousands of dollars of donations (not remotely covering the development cost if we go by hourly rate but that’s never the goal), while my open source developer tool with a couple thousand stars on GitHub received <$50 over several years. I don’t beg for donations in either case, just an inconspicuous link.
Disclosure: I donate a very modest amount to various projects every year.
1. The JSON spec validation seems to be problematic. For example, I get an error message and there's no obvious way to handle it: "entity.webpageUrl.url and manifest URL host and paths do not match. Expected entity.webpageUrl.wellKnown for provenance check at https://linktr.ee/joelparkerhenderson/*/.well-known/funding-..."
2. An opportunity for improvement is for the JSON spec to favor each project having all it's own information in the JSON file i.e. orient the file toward the project, rather than toward a specific developer, and definitely not toward the naming convention of "/.well-known" subdirectory (which doesn't exist in many projects and has a history of glitches because it's a hidden dot directory).
IMHO success looks like making the file spec simpler, even it means skipping some of the manifest capabilities.
1. Regarding the validation, this error seems to be related to the provenance check mechanism in the spec. This is to prove ownership of that project/domain. The wellKnown field is designed to handle cases where the webpageUrl doesn't match the manifest URL.
2. Will definitely be passing the feedback to our team and evaluate this further!
Thanks for the reply. It turns out the current JSON file approach can't prove ownership of the project nor the domain, so perhaps there's a gap in my understanding or your team's understanding...? Feel free to contact me about this a because I believe in your mission: joel@joelparkerhenderson.com
Some options that I use successfully with other donations services and funding services...
- A unique token per project published in a project file
- A unique token per domain published in a DNS TXT record
- A verification of the project's existing setup, such as using GitHub API access or OAuth
- A forwarding to the project's existing funding link, such as using a project's GitHub sponsors link
- A heuristic with the person's existing payment links, such as contact info being identical on GitHub and Venmo
- A challenge/response, such as verifying a small random payment
- A dedicated KYC process such as with a background checking service.
Would be even more interesting to start an endowment type fund. Donate some of that fund directly save some of it and extract the interest over time. After a while the fund would be self sufficiently pumping out donations.
> Has the project received any funding in the past? Is it in dire need of support, or is it doing reasonably well?
I think it would be better if funding for open source was more based on what it's worth to you then what the project needs, just like paying for a commercial product. That would more strongly encourage valuable open source projects, risks, creativity, efficiency.
Readit News
That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you Llama Impact Grants, OpenAI Cybersecurity Grants, NLNet, & OpenTechFund.
---
Disclaimer: A project I co-develop was granted £3.75k in 2023 back when FOSS United grants were co-sponsored by Zerodha (the same company behind FLOSS/fund). The entire process was over in like 3 days from the date of application.
I guess somebody has to point out the obvious ....
First, the process is probably simpler because the donation amounts are going to be smaller. If there's only $1M per year in the bank, I somehow don't see them giving out the sorts of large sums the others you mentioned do, e.g. OpenTechFund says it will give up to $400,000 ... I don't see that happening with a fund that only has $1M a year to give out.
Second, building on the above, giving out large sums involves a greater amount of due diligence.
Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
I've applied to each of those funds for ~£5k. The process remains the same.
> Put money where the mouth is—a minimum of $10,000 and up to $100,000 for a single recipient, totaling $1 million per year, which we will increase once we understand the dynamics of running the fund.
It's also not just about the initial (typically multi-stage) application, but then the reporting and compliance requirements, the random donor requests.
This sort of thing is often objectively worse for smaller funders, but also relatively worse with smaller amounts of money as it's harder to resource for people to deal with the crap. Grant money ain't free.
Does it though or does it sort out the projects who would rather focus on developing while selecting those better at marketing themselves than at building useful things aka the professional bullshitter class.
Opposite effect, actually. Longer forms get you a lot of the top 10%, but you miss out on the top 0.0001% who don't want to waste their time with people who aren't smart enough to design a brief form.
Zerodha is India's Robinhood.
In India, it's very difficult to get a deductible donation exemption because of how easy it would be to game.
Deleted Comment
Truth be told, I'd rather be done with the project completely. It's like a little monkey on my back that I can never be rid of, that I must always tend to. But at the same time, since I can never realistically receive funding for it, the only value I get is the fact that my name is on it. I wish a big, legit company would just buy it off of me somehow, but there's no incentive for them either. I don't know how this ends.
1. https://github.com/amoffat/sh
Just out of curiosity, do you think the separate documentation page has better conversion than if you were to, say, include the ad directly into the readme inside the repo?
If you believe you still get an ongoing benefit (reputational or whatever) by being its maintainer and continuing to support it, and if you still want that benefit, then you have to keep up the work. Very little in life is truly free, unfortunately.
You could also see if there's a way to monetize your work on it. If people want support or need bugs fixed, they can pay you to do so, for example. Might even look into GitHub Sponsors, if you haven't already. I do get that it's harder to solicit donations for something that's "finished", though.
Don't. Unless you already know someone you can trust it's better to just let someone fork it and build reputation for their fork on their own.
——
From their FAQ:
> Currently, our focus is on supporting existing, widely used, and impactful projects to specifically contribute to their sustainability. Very new projects or projects with minimal usage are not considered for the time being.
> A project can apply for funding of up to $100,000 in one year. To keep the logistics and operational overhead of the fund reasonable, we accept requests in denominations of a minimum of $10,000 and multiples of $25,000 thereafter.
https://floss.fund/faq/
A better title: Floss/fund: Up to $100K/year for popular open source projects
Still admirable though...
You should give a "why" with your statement.
It makes you wonder how many projects are out there which have tremendous potential but still lack a critical feature or two that a bit of funding would help bring to fruition.
From my experience, open source projects are either big and massively funded, able to pay their own developers a salary, or the projects end up in a void filled with burned-out maintainers whose only appreciation is an occasional $15 donation and issues filled with negativity and sometimes even hatred.
The biggest problem with occasional $15 donations is that they're occasional. Sustainability requires a somewhat stable ARR.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/membershttps://openjsf.org/membershttps://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/
It’s obviously not enough to give up the day job, but it dwarfs all other contributions I’ve had.
As a data point, my open source web app for a casual game received thousands of dollars of donations (not remotely covering the development cost if we go by hourly rate but that’s never the goal), while my open source developer tool with a couple thousand stars on GitHub received <$50 over several years. I don’t beg for donations in either case, just an inconspicuous link.
Disclosure: I donate a very modest amount to various projects every year.
These companies instead should carve out a matching donation program for employees funding FOSS projects.
1. Assertables is a Rust crate that provides assert macros for smarter testing: https://github.com/SixArm/assertables-rust-crate/blob/main/f...
2. BoldContacts is a mobile app that helps people who have disabilities: https://github.com/BoldContacts/boldcontacts-mobile-app-for-...
Results so far:
1. The JSON spec validation seems to be problematic. For example, I get an error message and there's no obvious way to handle it: "entity.webpageUrl.url and manifest URL host and paths do not match. Expected entity.webpageUrl.wellKnown for provenance check at https://linktr.ee/joelparkerhenderson/*/.well-known/funding-..."
2. An opportunity for improvement is for the JSON spec to favor each project having all it's own information in the JSON file i.e. orient the file toward the project, rather than toward a specific developer, and definitely not toward the naming convention of "/.well-known" subdirectory (which doesn't exist in many projects and has a history of glitches because it's a hidden dot directory).
IMHO success looks like making the file spec simpler, even it means skipping some of the manifest capabilities.
1. Regarding the validation, this error seems to be related to the provenance check mechanism in the spec. This is to prove ownership of that project/domain. The wellKnown field is designed to handle cases where the webpageUrl doesn't match the manifest URL.
2. Will definitely be passing the feedback to our team and evaluate this further!
Some options that I use successfully with other donations services and funding services...
- A unique token per project published in a project file
- A unique token per domain published in a DNS TXT record
- A verification of the project's existing setup, such as using GitHub API access or OAuth
- A forwarding to the project's existing funding link, such as using a project's GitHub sponsors link
- A heuristic with the person's existing payment links, such as contact info being identical on GitHub and Venmo
- A challenge/response, such as verifying a small random payment
- A dedicated KYC process such as with a background checking service.
https://youtu.be/4BH8DRXwVRw?t=317
Feel free to connect via email if you want to chat more breck7@gmail.com
I think it would be better if funding for open source was more based on what it's worth to you then what the project needs, just like paying for a commercial product. That would more strongly encourage valuable open source projects, risks, creativity, efficiency.