Hacker News Reader

Comment by randlet | Hacker News Reader

My personal feeling is that funding has got to be the biggest issue with open source sustainability.

I'm the lead developer of an open source project[1] used in radiation therapy clinics around the world and I know I would be ecstatic to be able to get enough funding to work on the software full time. I'm trying to bootstrap a consulting business[2] around the software now, but it's tough getting people to open their wallets (and it's much less fun than writing code)!

I think having funding in place for OS projects might have trickle down effects as well. I know I would spend more time contributing patches back to other OS projects I use if I didn't have to worry about trying to build a business so I can put food on my kids table. I imagine there are many other project maintainers who feel the same.

[1] http://qatrackplus.com [2] https://www.multileaf.ca

View on HN

I also think the biggest issue in OSS is incentives and see two ways of handling this issue:

1) Bounties: Some mechanism for people to easily pay $100 for fixing the bug, $1000 for implementing a feature, and so on. If Github takes care of the payment part, I think it can even be used in big companies and would definitely incentivize people. Sites like bountysource.com show that the model already works, it just has to be handled by Github so adoption would definitely be higher.

2) Second one is more ambitious: Although bounties are a nice way for people make money, it still cannot allow people to just focus on their OSS work, since it does not offer a revenue stream. Github should become what Youtube is to video creators. If Github were to share a percent of its revenue with OSS maintainers, that'd make a huge difference in the OSS space and in the world.

This recent tweet from the creator of ESLint captures the essence of the status-quo really well: https://twitter.com/slicknet/status/1086053326007881728

I don't think it's fair to say the creator of ESLint is not making a buck out of his code. His twitter page for example is full of commercial links to his own products.

Complaining about "I do things for free" while your free product is the gateway to your paying products (in this case gaining followers and popularity to sell them other things or directing them to his ad-containing website) seems totally dishonest to me.

Doesn't mean he's not doing god's work with ESLint <3, it's just that this specific tweet is really not covering the full story. Maybe his books and website earns him pennies a month and it's a shame, maybe he does six figures with them, I won't hasard a guess.

Yet, I use eslint every day, I have money, I’m willing to pay, but I’m not familiar with the owner or his products, (nor inclined to seek them out), nor will I go find their Patreon page (although I do support several YouTuber Patreon pages).

I personally feel like npm and Github are sitting on goldmines, in a financial sense and in a simple solution sense, yet they are their own worst enemy, chasing all value to $0 as fast as possible.

GitHub/npm: just charge me $10-20+/more/month and distribute it out for me. I want to support the community, but I don’t want to deal with it. I code e-very-day. It’s worth it to me to support tools and the community, but don’t leave it up to my own arbitrary choices or timing. Maybe check my package.json or code coverage with said packages to dish out funds auto-magically. Just do something-charge me!

Side note — last week Github announced free private repos, while I was gladly paying. Why not instead just charge for the repos and create a massive fund to help solve the problem? Maybe the catch is: to receive funds you have to primarily host your source code on Github. That may help retain popular libs from leaving to other platforms.

Exactly my thoughts. Considering Github's recent numbers (300M USD/year revenue) and its recent acquisition by Microsoft, something like 30M USD/year would be enough to fund 250-1000 people a year full time. Maybe there might be an upper limit on how much you can make through the platform (like 10k USD/month), so instead of ending up with a few millionaires, a 10% revenue share would be enough to fund 250-1000 people full time, much more people half-time. With such a system in place, I think everyone would be better off, including Github - Microsoft.

> chasing all value to $0 as fast as possible.

The marginal cost of distribution of software is nearly zero. Therefore the cost of software, not just OSS, gets driven to zero. Hence why so many commercial services have switched to "advertising supported", "SaaS/hosted/online-only", or cloud subscription.

> Bounties + Allow pledging for issues with money. Here, have 5€ from me, and €3 from this and that for fixing that bug or implementing that feature.

> Github should become what Youtube is to video creators

What, a metrics-driven controversy/clickbait factory?

We'd be far better off with what Patreon is to creators, a system that gives people enough predictability of income that they can make a job of it.

You are right about what Youtube is, but what I meant by Youtube instead of Patreon is this: With Patreon, you have to work for building an audience, but Youtube pays you based on your views. A Github that pays people based on the usage of their code might not be the easiest problem to solve, but what I'm suggesting in the end is the same thing with you. Only time might show what such incentives may turn the platform into, but considering the general audience of the site, I doubt it'd turn out like Youtube.

Getting the money from the intermediary to the developer is only half the problem. First you have to get the money into the intermediary.

On youtube this is done with advertising. I can't imagine people being happy with that embedded in open source software. People got upset enough about Ubuntu and the Firefox/Pocket deal.

> A Github that pays people based on the usage of their code might not be the easiest problem to solve

A github that charges people to use code is even harder; that sounds like instant suicide.

I was happily paying 7 USD/month up until last week for the private repos, and they apparently had 300M USD/year revenue when Microsoft bought them a few months ago. I am not aware of their costs, but since they are part of Microsoft now and trying to foster adoption, integrating money into the system should be considerable.

As for bounties, I think it messes up with the OSS governance model. Let's say there's a bounty for feature X. You implement the feature, want to merge it in, but the maintainers don't like it and don't want to merge it. Now what?

Yeah. Science has a (some would argue) slightly more sophisticated approach to bounties in the form of grants. The inconvenient part is that many things ending in "Foundation" in open source have no resemblance to things like the NSF.

Bounties are full of problems. Adding them to GitHub introduces huge issues in the same way as a recent discussion brought out how AirBnB can be one thing early on but starts running into tons of problems at scale.

https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software... for further reference.

> Github should become what Youtube is to video creators

A surveillance advertising system tying your work to misc manipulative ads for things you don't endorse??

I also agree with this. While I don't (yet, but about to) have my own project to take care of we mostly consult on the Apache Big Data ecosystem. These tools are used by thousands of companies in major internal programs (e.g. "we're moving the whole companie to an Event Driven architecture based on Kafka" or "we're building a Data Lake in Hadoop") but there are major and minor issues which we see at every single customer and which go unfixed.

Each individual customer is not willing or can't commit the resources (which can be hours to weeks of development time) to fund us to fix those. If they were to pool the resources it'd be easier.

But that's not how those companies work. They have their purchasing processes and kicking that off for minor things is often too much work, kicking it off for major things may take ages and strain budgets.

All the other models I've seen so far (Patreon etc.) don't really fit into the corporate world as we currently see it.

We've tried asking for sponsorship directly, in conference talks or on Twitter (https://twitter.com/opencore/status/1057939697413079040) but so far have not found any sustainable way that works.

I'm convinced that solving this single issue will do more good for the OSS projects (which in turn might lead to better lives for people as can be seen in the example of your project) than any other action anyone could do.

We're eager to hear any model that worked for someone else.

Thought experiment: If you see problems with many customers, why don't you fund yourself or someone else to do the work? It would obviously save you time and energy dealing with each of the companies, and you could use that as a way to officially associate your company with the project. This is a similar calculation that happens with every one of your customers and every other company.

If you want a model that works, build your own open source projects or paid components around Apache Big Data. It's in your company name anyway .. open core, and it's a model employed by many companies like Sidekiq

> Thought experiment: If you see problems with many customers, why don't you fund yourself or someone else to do the work? It would obviously save you time and energy dealing with each of the companies, and you could use that as a way to officially associate your company with the project. This is a similar calculation that happens with every one of your customers and every other company.

To be really blunt: We are basically busy 100% of the time and it would not economically make sense for us to work for free on major issues. If you look at my Apache history (committer on various projects, contributor to more) you'll see that we DO contribute a lot. But it's mostly minor stuff that can be done within a day or so. For major stuff we just don't have the resources. We could add encryption to Kafka at our own expense and it'd take a couple of weeks of development time but we wouldn't have any immediate benefit from it. Companies like Cloudera or Amazon would benefit though.

This is how I see it at least but this is very much a plea for ideas. Maybe I'm just set in my ways.

> If you want a model that works, build your own open source projects or paid components around Apache Big Data. It's in your company name anyway .. open core, and it's a model employed by many companies like Sidekiq

Yep, that "just" requires us to have a good idea, plus the free cycles (basically investing money) plus we'd now need to learn how sales work etc. and to be honest...we're not good at that. We're really really good at the stuff we do now though. It's hard to change your own ways ;-)

This. Right now I'm basically on a year sabbatical where I'm doing almost entirely open source software without worrying about funding, but I also know that's not sustainable

I hope you manage to find some good balance that keeps your work funded!

Metoo, don't have that many options lately for health reasons. So I figured I might as well use the opportunity to have a go at the status quo.

Nailing the future down to worst case scenarios isn't very constructive from my experience, visualization is a powerful tool and cuts both ways.

It's not sustainable right now. But predicting the future is a fool's game, everything changes all the time and no one really knows anything for sure.

Try to picture where you want to go instead, it's more challenging but at least it has the potential to lead there.

And good luck to us all :)

I agree with this 100%. When you sit down and think about it, there are a lot of major projects used all over the world with just a few developers working on it, volunteering their time.

I would also love nothing more than to work on my open source project (OctoberCMS) full time too, but gotta pay the bills somehow.

The fact that you have such a widely used project and are still unable to make a living doing it is disheartening.

Instead of being dishearted, propose a solution to enable the ability to make a living. First thing that popped into my head was some sort of support model. CentOS vs RHEL. Give the farm away for free but consult how to run the farm...

Yes this is one of the two obvious potential solutions for that particular project (the other being a hosting service) but transitioning from open source project to open source company can be challenging!

Your farm has to be complex enough to need help using it. You either have to make an absolutely massive farm or intentionally make it hard to use/maintain.

You would think that at least one big company finds it in their interest to make sure the product is bug-free, at least enough to compensate core FOSS devs for their time.

It's a problem similar to the tragedy of the commons - why should I pay for something when company X, my competitor to boot, would not only benefit but clearly has more money/uses the software more/whatever other reason I feel justifies washing my hands of it.

The history of Openssl bugs before Heartbleed is at least one counter example.

@irishcoffee: “Instead of being dishearted, propose a solution to enable the ability to make a living. First thing that popped into my head was some sort of support model. CentOS vs RHEL. Give the farm away for free but consult how to run the farm...”

Seems perfectly reasonable to me, who down voted this and why?

Because it's so trite and obvious.. Oh really, support, geez why didn't I think of that? This discussion has been going on for 20+ years and the conclusion is simple: OS is not a viable business model in the vast majority of cases, and certainly not for those who only want to sit in their basements coding. Want to make money from software? Charge for it.

I think the vast majority of people who want to make money building software don't start off by finishing a product and then trying to sell it. A much more common scenario is building software for someone from the start (or building a service, but let's focus on "pure software" for now). In that case the developers are paid for time spent, not copies licenced, so using a FLOSS licence isn't a roadblock for making money.

If you're building software for someone & being paid your time for it, you typically don't get to license it & release it as open source.

It's not unique to software.

Go to any play or recital, and the program will have an entire page devoted to donations -- big companies up at the Platinum level, medium companies and rich folks at the Gold level, on down to random folks at the $0-50 level. Until you get up to the Hollywood movie / arena rock level, art always operates at a loss.

Hospitals and universities also frequently have wealthy patrons. I'm sure there are other fields, too, that I'm forgetting or don't know about.

Solving this problem for the field of software would be very cool, and it's always a great idea to start with one particular domain. The big picture remains: how can people continue to do good and worthwhile work, when the economics aren't on their side?

I know many people doing work they hate, and which isn't in any way worthwhile, just to pay their bills. When I was younger, I worked for 2 years on a "death march project" that never shipped. I was young enough to not realize that I couldn't make a difference. The older and more cynical people knew all along it would never ship. The Invisible Hand can't always deal with the complexities of modern life.

I'm not even convinced that money is part of the answer. I don't care about money, except in that I need it to pay taxes, rent, health care, and so on. Maybe I watched too much Star Trek as a kid, but it feels like a post-scarcity world shouldn't require citizens to worry about cash, unless they want to do something especially extravagant.

>I don't care about money, except in that I need it to pay taxes, rent, health care, and so on.

I do care about money: not only do I need it to pay rent, healthcare, (not taxes, that's just a portion of your income, so no income = no taxes) etc., but I also need to it buy things I enjoy and to enrich my life: foreign travel, for instance, costs money. If I had to sit around my apartment for the rest of my life because I couldn't afford to travel anywhere, my life would not be worth living.

> open source project used in radiation therapy clinics

If the software is something you yourself is using because you needed it (or is already capturing the value sufficiently), then opensourcing it is a no brainer.

However, if the software is being written, but not being used by you, then it doesn't really make sense to opensource it. The value being created by the software would then be captured by those who would otherwise have had to pay. This value should instead be captured by you, and that should then pay for the improvements. Eventually, when you decide to stop or when you feel you've made enough money and want to move on - then opensourcing it makes sense.

I mostly agree with you. However, I wrote it (and we released it) while I was working full time at a large Canadian cancer centre (and we really needed it!). I have stayed involved with it as a "hobby" for the last few years with the goal of being able to eventually generate enough income from the project to support myself full time.

> The value being created by the software would then be captured by those who would otherwise have had to pay

You mean potentially sick people that might not have access to this diagnosis if the software was not open source? Some times Open Source and co is just to help others! Not everything is profit-motivated :)

Not on the diagnostic side in this case but yes, open sourcing was both to help other cancer centres manage their QC data better and operate more efficiently as well as an attempt to attract others to contribute to the project.

The original poster was commenting on trying to obtain revenue from the open source product of their creation. You are right that sometimes things are just to help others, but its meaningless here unless we are strictly talking about the initial creation and not the continued support of it as the poster is now trying to monetize it.

Not that either is bad or good, but you're having your cake and eating it too.

I was recently told about Tidelift [0] who represents that it wants to improve funding for OSS. I was surprised that I hadn’t heard about it before on HN in similar discussions.

[0] https://tidelift.com

I think you probably won't hear much about it since, as far as I can tell, the general sentiment in previous discussions[0][1] about Tidelift here was quite critical, mostly due to their lack of transparency.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17957744

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18063250

The sustainability of your project, or the sustainability of open source?

I don't mean any disrespect, I'm genuinely trying to get to the bottom of the concerns around funding. There's no lack of funding mechanisms for open source (see oss.fund) and certainly no lack of money flowing into open source (see COSSCI) but arguably the 30M+ developers on GitHub don't see much of that.

The argument I often see floating around is that this isn't a new problem, there's just more of us and more money and from a different source this time around (VC) and yet open source has been "sustained" as a model.

Funding is the obvious biggest issue with open source sustainability. But it's arguably not the lowest hanging fruit. Because it seems to be a hard problem. Perhaps even a wicked problem.

Yes, exactly. It's the public-goods funding dilemma. The one that has only ever been really solved by mandatory taxation (with all its problems).

Snowdrift.coop is trying to (lacking resources itself for the same reasons) build an actual solution for as-good-as-we-can while being fully voluntary (unlike taxes).

A few friends of mine have been trying an alternative approach for funding FOSS software. I encourage HNers to check them out and give them a try: https://polyglot.network

Have you considered adding pro features on top of the free core that clinics could pay for? Similar to the redis model

I know theres a lot of blockchain-skeptics on HN (and rightfully so), but I'd like to just point out that...

All the money that goes into back offices on wall st in the old closed financial system, goes to Open Source in the blockchain ecosystem.

I hope that this trend continues and helps make OSS Funding a more mainstream thing as blockchain becomes more mainstream itself.

/me battens down the hatches inb4 blockchain-haters brigade me :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com