Funds for Open Source | Hacker News Reader

Funds for Open Source

blog.opencollective.com

282 pointsBerislavLopac190 comments

Some people are under the impression that the corporate world and open-source are separate, whereas a very significant part of open-source is already corporate. Linux, Chromium, OpenJDK, V8, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tensor Flow, Elastic Search, Kubernetes, Redis, and many, many other of the biggest, most influential open source projects are overwhelmingly developed by people paid by for-profit corporations to work on those projects. Getting corporations to fund smaller, more independent, projects might be a good idea, but those two worlds are already just one.

So how do you crowd source a project worth keeping right now? A tool that poisons data for Google analytics would hardly be funded by them. At a certain point we simply cannot allow companies to be the only ones holding the reigns.

No easy answers. We're trying to address that at Snowdrift.coop but are ourselves struggling volunteers not getting fully launched still (but not giving up, still at it).

Most efforts do seem focused on corporate open-source. The under-funding of that stuff is indeed an issue. But it doesn't result in real public goods that treat the public well if it's all upstream stuff that only serves to make proprietary downstream end-user products.

Thank you for the work you've put into Snowdrift -- I'm still very excited for the project. Getting fairly close to my first charge now, actually :).

Hey wolftune, is there an open place for road maps and road blocks for Snowdrift? The idea seems to hit on a problem I describe just above you.

Not sure what you mean by "open place", we (too messily right now) are tracking stuff at https://gitlab.com/groups/snowdrift/-/issues and there's a needs-updating semi-outdated page https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/planning

We could certainly use help from anyone who would like to do some project management. In general, we have https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/community/how-to-help

We have weekly audio meetings and have Matrix and IRC discussions, and people are welcome to pop in.

Not sure if these are the things you were asking about

This structural disadvantage of small experiments which provide no value for market forces or privately owned entities but does provide a perhaps significant public value goes beyond software by the way - and I'm not sure simply stating that the best alternative we have in many or most cases is to decrease the public good in order to yield some level of profitability.

In the mean time, if your service can only exist as something outside the public domain, I don't think people will complain much if you're honest in your communications about it.

nit-pick: Elastic Search is not open-source (anymore)

Indeed, that should say Open Distro for Elasticsearch.

nit-pick: Only according to the OSI, whose credibility within the community isn't what it once was.

Also according to many people in and outside of the community. OSI or free software definitions are meant to give the contributor the same rights which they don't have for a "source available" license. Under a "source available" license ES would have never gained the same popularity nor commercial success. (Don't understand me wrong: ES can do what they want with their code but advertising it as "it is the same for most people" is untrue)

I'm not saying Elastic's model is the open-source ideal. But a product that can't find a financial model won't exist either.

ES may not give their contributors the same rights on paper, but in practice there is no discernable difference, other than that the contributors aren't allowed to directly compete with them (iirc).

So open but not free.

The epipen design might have been "open to public inspection", but I think most descriptions of it are accompanied by the term proprietary rather than open because of the nature of it being closed for them to use exclusively.

In contrast to the patent on insulin being made open for all to inspect, use, and build upon - SSPL does not smell very "open source" if it's similarly opposed to forking or being the foundation for something someone takes in a different direction.

>other than that the contributors aren't allowed to directly compete with them (iirc).

No, the wording in their SSPL is much more broad than that, such that creating any logging facet would put you in legal ambiguity at best - the worst case, which unfortunately now two licensing lawyers I've watched be adamant about this being the realistic interpretation in court (/dev/lawyer and one who advised our and other software companies), is that you really can't be in compliance without releasing your entire software stack.

I totally agree with the idea that a business becomes before project/idealism considerations though, if you're a company trying to finance an OSS project you need to think about your financials/survival before any licensing purity - which I don't think anyone is criticizing them about in this scenario anyways.

That being said, you can make changes to your project for your business but do so on terms that the internal and external community don't find disingenuous, don't characterize those whom are upset with a withdrawal from previous promises(1) made to them as conspiring to spread misinfo, or even to have taken many in the community's suggestion for dual licensing under copyleft license and commercial license that provides a hedge against large cloud providers.

Anyways, if Elastic's response to going back on a promise is to gaslight their own (reasonably) begrudged customers and contributors about how the company going public shortly is the real little guy/victim, then I think most already know whether to trust their lawyers or the company.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20200120104750/https:/www.elasti...

It is not Open Source™, but it is open source.

Wait, I'm pretty sure you're that guy from the original "Elastisearch doubling down on [gaslighting the OSS community]" thread!

The same guy who defended the Elastisearch exec by claiming that by turning an OSS project into proprietary software was equivalent to companies open sourcing previously closed software, despite the former benefiting from contributions+customers which had been misled by communications about it not being or becoming proprietary!

Just curious - why do you invent your own meanings for terms that have different meaning for the vast majority of readers?

This is a genuine question since I don't think the doublespeam comes off as either sincere to those in the community or helpful to those learning about the subject, who are still only just a Google search away from finding that no one else besides those benefitting from taking away user rights describe such projects as open source: https://opensource.org/node/1099

I'm definetly not the same guy from whatever thread you're remembering.

I just feel like the new license doesn't take away any of the freedoms I care about, the source is open, I can run and modify it without issue. I can even run it on a AWS instance. I want more open source companies to figure out sustainable business models so we can have more open source software. Amazon taking all open source revenue streams will lead to less open source software.

I feel like OSI plays all these word games that are in bad faith, calling SSPL "proprietary" which is just wrong.

How do you know that for "the vast majority of readers" open source means exactly the 11 point definition that OSDI came up with?

(I realize that by replying I'll probably garner another -4 HN points, but I'm willing to spend the karma since you said it was a genuine question.)

Don't worry, I won't contribute to negative internet points, this is a substantial response.

I agree no one should be religious about OSI's standards, but open source colloquially means "open for people to modify/fork/use" - I think the FOSS movement has created a similar colloquial definition even if FSF isn't the end all be all for free software. The differentiator "free as in freedom, not beer" is a great and uncontroversial litmus test for the community.

OSD 6 I think presents something similarly uncontroversial and closely tied to the colloquial definition of OSS (unlike other parts of their directive) which is "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" for licenses. It's not very open if one can't fork the project should their vision diverge, which is explicitly what both of Elastic's reasonably both paid and unpaid proprietary licenses will restrict - it keeps the software closed to their domain rather than fully open.

This is in contrast to open copyleft licenses which only require that you return contributions that you make to the codebase - something very comparable and that open source businesses have successfully worked with is dual licensing AGPL. With it I have no restrictions on how I use the software, but if I consider it a business need to begin running it, I have to be *open* about what I'm running.

It's not going against the broadly almost anyone's understanding of OSS to say "fork it, do whatever" or "fork it, just be open" - but it is going against most people's definition when it's "fork it, but you don't use it if you fall into a category that competes with our monopoly". Patent rights are an apt comparison - just because a patent is available for the public to view doesn't necessarily mean it's open for the public to expand on without paying a proprietor!

And what you say about the SSPL just being okay to run for your own purposes isn't true either - I've been advised by two lawyers at this point that section 13 I believe is so broad that it's viral enough to require you basically publish everything that you run in a stack because of how open they leave the language to interpretation, and their stipulation that it's "not that broad" in a FAQ does not supersede the language used in a license - Google attempted that defense early on in their battle with Oracle about how Java namespaces were previously advertised as open. It turns out the law prioritizes licenses over box stickers every time, and I don't think any business redistributing ES in any form can guarantee they're complying with the license (which redistributing in Elastic's SSPL's terms could be a logging facet for an application that's just backed by ES).

Anyways, I totally back companies making great software proprietary or closed, it pushes our industry forward - I just find it abhorrent the argument being out forward is that anyone can redefine "proprietary" if they're up against a massive company (even when they're a commercial and not so tiny business themselves) and especially if they're gaslighting the broader community about how they're doubling down on open without any irony or explanations about what the majority thinks open means in contrast.

I think GPL software can be USED for any purpose, but has restrictions on redistribution.

Many of these other "open source" licenses have restrictions on who can use and how the software can be used. They're basically created out of fear to prevent competition.

You see it as "restrictions" because you must be a developer.

GPL licenses mainly benefit the user of the software, and for the user these are not restrictions but rights (e.g. the right to see the source).

GPL licenses greatly benefit contributors as well! Not only does that mean improvements are required to be introduced into the public domain for other contributors to build upon further, but it also allows contributors to take their own direction with an (open) fork.

Much of the benefits the user has here is also what benefits good contributors ironically, in contrast to licenses like SSPL which restrict contributors from freely and openly diverging (and perhaps competing with for the benefit of users) from a proprietor.

How does seeing source helps someone who is not a developer?

Free software is not about seeing the source code.

Same way free speech helps someone who is not a journalist or right to repair helps someone who is not a mechanic.

If there is some free software I like, but it is is missing a feature I want, I can pay anyone to make these changes for me.

If the software is proprietary, I can try asking the owners. They say no. The end.

Kudos to Open Collective (for this, and for existing in general).

The article doesn't go into detail, but it also appears to streamline the workflow of requesting money from an open source project's perspective.

Each fund[0] appears to have a "Request Grant" button, which is great, as it'll mean maintainers will hopefully have a curated list of contactable organisations if they need funding for a specific initiative.

The barriers to entry here are extremely high: a few days ago I was looking into corporate sponsorship for a non open-source-related event, and after a couple of hours of Googling I was mostly unable to find contact details for relevant companies. It's definitely a natural barrier to entry which will be reduced with experience, but it will gatekeep a lot of interesting projects where organisers aren't experienced in fundraising.

Reducing this friction for Open Source projects should allow the money to much more easily go to where it's needed.

[0] Example fund: https://opencollective.com/indeed

Open Collective team member here. You're so right! We have been able to form partnerships with many big tech companies and grantmaking foundations, and it really opens up possibilities for projects to access them. Since we collectively represent so many projects we can use that scale to open doors, and on a practical level once we're in their supplier systems and have gone through their due diligence processes once, future funding is much easier.

The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end. It is crazy that companies make billions out of software they use without paying contributors a penny. Some companies were able to amass incredible wealth on the backs of volunteers. I think we should start pressurise politicians so that they force companies to pay royalties to open source contributors based on % of revenue. In many countries (for example in the UK) it is illegal to work for free (even if you want to) and every worker has to be paid at least a minimum wage. The same principle should apply to open source projects. If your company makes money over a certain threshold you should start paying. Open source software should only be free for individuals and small businesses.

The change has to start with us. Developers should value their work, and stop going for virtual stars and points.

I used to determine my self-worth through the number of stars my GitHub project had. Boy oh boy was that silly, looking back at it. 1.2k stars on GitHub... and god knows who profited off it. Me on the other hand? Meh. Would someone like to buy my 1.2k GitHub stars? :D

Monetize your Github stars with a NFT.

Open source, like open science, is public good, that's value enough for me. It's a way to do good that's both aligned with my principles and personally stimulating. I'm not motivated by points or stars, recognition, money or self-worth, and I suspect I'm not in the minority.

I think developers do. Very much so. if they didn't every developer on this thread and this site would have been publishing their best work as open source. We know that is not the case. The people that write open source code are either academics, working on the project while being funded by their employers, have a business around it, trying to build up some resume credit or building or aspiring to build a business around their projects. There is of course the "hack project" or learning in progress project that one could publish, depending on one's reputation and standards People who are full time working professionals and have additional personal responsibilities could not be publishing and maintaining high quality open source. This is a shame, because those people would probably produce very high quality open source code if only they could afford to pay the bills in the meantime. What I am wondering though is whether the funding through something like this Open Collective initiative could ever match market rate a professional would command in a developed economy.

I don't disagree with the sentiment but I do disagree with the implementation part of way Free Software (free as in speech) works is because I can do whatever I want with it, if I don't want to charge I shouldn't be forced to. Tbh what you are suggesting sounds like getting rid of FOSS entirely and bringing it back under the guise of Freeware.

If you really don't want corporations to benefit off your work without contributing back go GPL or stop maintaining it.

The thing is that not every developer is in a privileged position to provide work without payment. Good example are unpaid internships - if you want to gain experience, but you are coming from a poor background, you are unlikely going to sign up for such internship, because you will not have means to pay bills and so you are forced to find job that pays, not even necessarily in the field you would want. This creates divide, because only people from privileged backgrounds can gain experience this way and in the end get better jobs. That's why in many countries (for example in the UK) unpaid internships are illegal to create a level playing field. I think it should not be allowed to give away your work for free (to corporations) because of that. Then if you really don't want this money, you could send it to a charity of your choice. Such way would be much fairer to everyone.

Sure but we are talking about developing FOSS software not unpaid internships. So what relevance does your comment have towards me wanting to realease Free Software?

Not every developer is in a privileged position to contribute to open source projects, because they have bills to pay and have to commit time to do paid work. This can compromise their changes at getting better jobs, as employers tend to look whether someone has open source contributions in their resume. Very often it is not even possible to show any code from previous jobs, because it is confidential. This is just one of angles where this kind of model creates social divide.

Sure, its not everyone. On the other hand it also suck to be forced to pay.

Yes, so the first step is to stop demonizing projects that opt for alternative "source available" licenses, and stop idolizing one canonical definition of capital O "Open-Source" licenses.

Despite most everyone implicitly associating open source with gratis, it's not a requirement or even preferable in my opinion. The benefits of OSS to users are all still there with paid software.

Tangentially this makes me think of a recent phenomenon I'm sure many OSS advocates love to ridicule or trivialize, but which shows at least an attempt to solve the problem of compensation for freely replicable work: NFTs. If you manage to see past the mainstream view that people are "buying links to jpeg files", and rather understand that people are paying for public recognition of patronage, there's something to be said about their ability to get people to pay for "open source" work.

Can you list a project with a big community that has a "source available" license right from the start? I won't demonize these projects but people prefer "open source" over "source available" for a reason.

JWPlayer

Unreal Engine is a pretty big and successful one. In the cryptocurrency space: Metamask[1], and the upcoming Uniswap V3[2].

Of course, given the choice, myself included, users prefer the more permissive license. The question is what strikes the right balance of incentives for developers and respect of users.

[1]: https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/

[2]: https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3/

The problem is that sources available destroys the antitrust forking feature that's core to open source.

MySQL/MariaDB, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, Cyanogenmod/LineageOS, a couple others had the IP go to someone who didn't have an incentive to develop it properly, so didn't. Source Available permits this with no real recourse.

Agreed on the NFT comment, BTW.

you are on to something. It is really interesting how much double standard I see on developers forums: "oh it is not open source, why?" "oh it is open source or free, and you raising vc funding...probably gonna end up acquired" It is sad.

This is not a double standard. If it's not FLOSS, then users have no essential rights: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

> In many countries (for example in the UK) it is illegal to work for free (even if you want to) and every worker has to be paid at least a minimum wage.

This is slightly off-topic, but how does volunteering work?

The exemption is for charities and not for profit organisations.

Surely I can, say, build a fence for my pensioner neighbor without them having to form a non profit or pay me?

Yes you can, as long as you are not building it for his company.

This is silly. The vast majority of non-toy open source is written by corporations. I’ve made substantial open source contributions over the years but I’ve consumed far more value than I ever created, all for free. Maybe you think I should be paying those corporations?

And the vast majority of that is built on top of typically well maintained by a small number of people libraries and tooling. Let's not forget, much of the "non-toy open source by big corporations" is increasingly becoming Trojan horses either by sheer complexity making it all but impractical to run on anything other than Big C's cloud OR computational resource hungry allowing you to "toy" locally but again need Big C's cloud services

Majority of FOSS development is paid for - by big companies.

There is this sticky idea of imaginary army of open source developers who produce full time job worth of effort and live from thin air and don't have to pay rent. And who do all that boring routine and difficult work of maintaining, merging, reviewing, patching, testing and so on for passion alone.

This is not true except for very specific projects like the Linux Kernel.

On other projects that weren't started in companies from the start you see paid FOSS developers doing maintenance.

Whether that is money well spent or if these developers ever do anything creative or original is another question.

> On other projects that weren't started in companies from the start you see paid FOSS developers doing maintenance

How is that not development paid by companies and how exactly is that exploitation by big companies? You literally claimed it is paid by them.

> I think we should start pressurise politicians so that they force companies to pay royalties to open source contributors based on % of revenue.

...If someone makes something and gives it out for free, the government can't retroactively force users to pay for it. It's up to the creator to choose a different lisence.

The government makes people retroactively pay for stuff all the time. It's the basis for torts.

It is not retroactive, but "from now on" with a grace period. Granting a free license will not be legal, except for individuals, charities, non-profit organisations and SME. You may think that this is wrong, because this has been a status quo and big corporations were doing a great PR to keep it that way, but this is extremely damaging to society.

>> The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end.

GPLv3 plus a commercial license will go a long way toward that.

I was about to post the same. Pragmatically a collective company that could help carry the administrative work with open source projects would be interesting. Project with a nominal GPLv3 license while allowing paid relaxation of the terms (GPLv2 or commercial, etc) could bring in some revenue.

Something like this ? https://licensezero.com/

It may sound unfair but that is exactly what an open source license means: you release something for others to use without a payment requirement. If you are a developer and your intention is to make money then you should create a business around your project or if you find it unfair just stop releasing it under open source :)

> The exploitation of developers by big corporation must end.

Why do people choose to work for free on open source projects that are mostly used by businesses? I can completely understand making things that are hard to monetize, user facing applications, or trying to learn something. But when I see free contributions to things like infrastructure management I just don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you just get a job doing this if there’s obviously a business demand for it? If I made something for free that was primarily used by people who made money off of my work it would completely kill my motivation and I would feel taken advantage of.

people do not stay on projects forever and then they are literally stolen. Or companies adopt a project and then throw their weight around.

for the former case: do you think former gnome contributors (who started the project exactly because their feared the ossification of window managers trying to copy windows, see their https://web.archive.org/web/19990224084927/http://www.gnome.... manifesto) would be happy with designers that ignore users and copy everything from osx?

for the second case, just look up how much linus fought against tainted kernel and still ended up giving up because of corporate/funding pressure. Also how google employees do whatever they want to chromium, for example, removing every single contribution to restrict referrer because that is how they made money from clicks on google search ads.

In my opinion those people are in privileged position - they already have money, they don't have to worry what they are going to eat if they don't do work and so on, so they show off. It's kind of like a rich person driving around in his or hers Lambo. They do this work for free and then there is less work for people who cannot work for free. Why would company hire anyone if they get free contributions.

Is there really a lack of demand for software developers of the level that can contribute quality open source contributions?

I would like to add that the exploitation of the community of open source software and their authors must end. If the community _cares_ about the source being free, why are contributions relative to consumption as low as they are?

but isnt that already possible with a license?

How does this compare to https://tidelift.com/?

My impression is they're fairly similar at first glance: companies can pay open-source funding to one central service, who redistribute to each of the appropriate individual maintainers & projects behind the scenes. I'm sure there's a bunch of practical differences in the details though?

Hey, Head of Product at Open Collective (and former Tidelift employee) here:

As far as I am aware Tidelift pays maintainers in exchange for a minimal set of commitments, which is used to sell the Tidelift subscription. They curate packages of ‘known good’ open source projects for enterprises and provide a set tools for users to better understand what software they depend upon.

Funds is a little more free-format, facilitating a relationship between maintainers and organisations on their own terms. No contracts, no promises, no agendas. We take on the work of administrating payments to projects and of ensuring companies have what they need in their procurement processes.

In doing so we hope to lower the barriers to the degree that we broaden access to funding for open source.

Doesn't this enable maintainers to look at someone's submitted code, deny its inclusion for any reason personal/financial, and include it at a later date and claim expense? Since the code submission is open-source, isn't a malicious maintainer able to basically copy the code in-spirit under a pseudo-account, and then claim the benefits from the fund for themself? I'm just saying that once monetary benefits are involved, incentives skew away from code quality and community, and towards number one.

Maintainers are above the other developers, is there going to be some community oversight?

Who decides how much expense can be claimed?

>we hope to lower the barriers to the degree that we broaden access to funding for open source.

Q: who is the primary demographic of funders this is aimed at? Am I correct in saying it's mostly aimed at getting more corporate funding for OSS? (Non-rhetorical question)

OpenCollective as a company signed the open letter against RMS at: rms-open-letter.github.io .

The FSF is in some ways a competitor to this for-profit company ... is that a fair statement?

Hey Executive Director of Open Source Collective here.

I signed the agreement on behalf of >2,500 open source projects (and the communities who maintain them) because I agree the call to action would strengthen the community, not weaken it.

This is not about the FSF or the GNU Project, it’s about building a safe space for people to participate in and build a commons that is as diverse and welcoming as it is free and open.

not exactly welcoming to neurodivergent individuals and those who don't perfectly conform to the approved orthodoxy. that letter is gross, slanderous and cult-like ("dangerous force", "These sorts of beliefs"). it's straight out of Scientology's Suppressive Person playbook. it does not speak for the open source community. it speaks for a small set of authoritarians who wield weaponized empathy and threat of banishment as a means to control people.

please reconsider.

> I signed the agreement on behalf of >2,500 open source projects

Did you ask them for a vote, or is there a general arrangement that you / OSC speaks for them?

I'm generally a fan of the open collective, and I appreciate your contributions to open source. But I'm disappointed to learn that you took part in this irrational attack on the FSF. I feel that it has in fact made the open source space weaker and significantly less safe. I hope you will reconsider your stance on this issue.

(I'm not a fan of RMS btw, this isn't about him at all. It's about principles and protocols)

Another fan of Open Collective here donating to projects. Please reconsider your decision. There is zero basis for all accusations and if Stallman did something bad, let’s put him in front of a judge and let’s prove him guilty. Otherwise live with it.

Related discussion by supporters of free software: https://forums.puri.sm/t/stop-sponsoring-the-free-software-f...

I am on open collective, you claim to represent 2500 projects, but no ... you do not represent those projects, you are not the spokesperson for them either.

I recommend that your organization officially stays away from the internal politics of other free software organizations, because you do not represent 2500 projects and are not a spokesperson for them.

Everything moving forward in this space is great.

Ideal world - You declare your stack, from OS, distributor up to all dependencies used.

Non-profit/individuals non-profit don't pay anything.

Everyone else/companies pay $0.01 per dependency, per month. Each package (at each layer) describes its own dependencies. So a docker image, installing ubuntu (ubuntu declares its own dependencies - libc, curl, git, whatever), running npm, and all node packages, and you take a bill of cost from this "bundle". If dependencies share dependencies it only counts as 1 no matter how many times it's repeated in a single setup.

If there's 1million servers running linux, that's 10k for the linux foundation per month. Probably there would need to be a tiering of cost/distribution, as a left-pad node package isn't worth the same as a linux distribution, and companies with + a certain threshold should perhaps pay more.

The benefits would be that people would stop installing 10.000 npm libs as they gets expensive fast, so people would try to write more comprehensive libs and the quality would go up.

You don't need to poke holes in the idea, it's basically an open ocean, but it would be nice to see something totally automated like this.

Easier to add OSS tax into the social security payments. The difficult part is collecting usage analytics so that funds get distributed "fairly".

UBI and universal healthcare would make this a complete non-issue, as well as benefiting the arts and humanities.

TBH I have absolutely no desire to pay taxes for yet another JavaScript framework. I'd be happy to set aside, say, 5% of my monthly salary to be divided between the applications and libraries I actually use. (I do something like this, but manually and pretty unfairly, because it's difficult to cover thousands of projects with any meaningful sum as I don't have billions in my banking account).

The OS of my choice has this:

https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/

although it would probably be easy to inflate these numbers if your income depended on it.

That sounds very confusing and requires invasive license auditing to enforce.

You can also do this by just paying into a commercial stack. The beauty of OSS is that it’s easy to use and reuse.

I’d rather just pay Microsoft than use a scheme where I pay by the number of dependencies.

Also, not that I release a ton of packages, but I do contribute some here and there. I would not contribute to commercial packages where my labor benefits some org.

And I would still release packages under a permissive license that allows for reuse without any compensation to me.

Just for sports.

> I’d rather just pay Microsoft than use a scheme where I pay by the number of dependencies.

So you wouldn't want to support OSS, you would rather support a company.

> I would not contribute to commercial packages where my labor benefits some org.

That would be your call for sure.

> And I would still release packages under a permissive license that allows for reuse without any compensation to me.

This would be your prerogative as well.

Let's pretend we have in place the infrastructure. A place where anyone can submit a bill of usage, and do payments, and this holds the payments and a person can register their software there. For your use case it would have even the possibility of you redirecting the funds you don't want into other projects. Perhaps a badge on your profile, "redirector", "open hands", wtv.

Let's imagine that every piece of software besides a "readme.md" file, has a file describing its dependencies. NPM would be able to do this like they can build a dependency graph. Your OS would be able to do this because each programs/lib would be able to do this/provide their own.

Let's say there's a piece of software that can pick all these little files and coalesce them into a single one.

Now you could build a "package" of what it would cost you, see what is in there and then just make it part of your monthly payroll.

There's no bureaucracy. If you are a company using software and not paying for it, you would be under breach of contract and could be sued legally.

> So you wouldn't want to support OSS, you would rather support a company.

If I’m paying for it, it’s not open source. I’d rather pay a single company with a “simple”license, than something that costs me more when someone uses a leftpad package than just writing their own. I don’t want to have to have cost decisions factor into my design at that level.

Having the legal support to plan out if I’m under breach or not is expensive.

One of the things I like about OSS is I can avoid that. Paying and still having that threat is the worse of both worlds.

Also, unpredictable prices are really hard in my org. Having my payroll vary month to month on what’s happening is really hard. Do I pay based on when I compile? When I run? What if I want to have 10 test environments, so I pay times 10. What if I need to archive and might never run it, but need to make sure I can run it, do I pay. Etc etc. There’s a million different permutations based on project needs that vary by people.

With OSS, I can clearly plan and address all these. With commercial licenses, I usually can since I get a perpetual license per seat or cpu or whatever.

This new scheme would be really complex and include a lot of latent risk, and require that I’m constantly open to audit by some org. And audits are expensive to receive and support. No thanks, I’ll just skip using it and use OSS versions.

It's open source except if you're profiting for it.

I don't know if my english is rudimentary or something. No, you would pay per month, it would be automated. We could throw it on the block chain, or have an AI calculate it.

If you never run it you never run it, if it's part of your business backup plan you pay it.

With OSS for sure, you just go 0$ monthly payments, most straightforward payment plan ever, can't argue with that.

> I usually can since I get a perpetual license per seat or cpu or whatever.

Well, subscriptions are the future.

> Well, subscriptions are the future.

I hope not. Subscriptions for software are a pain and something I try to avoid.

Me too :)

> If I’m paying for it, it’s not open source.

Open source and free are two separate things.

There are many projects out there that require a license for commercial use of the software because it's an attempt to make the project more sustainable.

Don't be surprised if more and more projects go down this route. The current model of giving corporations big freebies to make lots of money off of, and then often getting no financial or developer support for that, isn't sustainable and there's a massive burnout problem because of that. Times are good now, but just wait until a few things in your core infrastructure don't get patched or worse, they get archived, because the maintainer is tired of spending evenings fixing your problems for free.

> Open source and free are two separate things.

When I use the term open source, I mean “OSI license” as that’s what I think is most important. That means free.

Projects are free to do whatever they want, and choosing a closed source license that’s not free is their prerogative. More power to them. I probably will never buy anything from them, but I harbor no ill will.

But when it comes to supporting OSS, I’ll do it as I’ve been for the past few decades; using and contributing to it.

Note this is different than “fixing your problems for free” and I’ve funded a shitload of consulting to fix my problems with OSS. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a problem to be fixed for free. Just like it’s unreasonable to expect that I must pay certain developers to fix problems in open source.

I find it funny when people say things aren’t sustainable and there are 20-50 year old projects and communities that are clearly sustainable and on multiple generations of developers.

“Not sustainable for me to do it” is very different from “not sustainable.” It’s ok that not everyone who wants to make a living doing something can’t afford to do it, that’s not a problem we need to solve as a society.

This is so awful. Can you imagine how people would redesign tools to minmax their income?

Add my left pad library as a dependency pull request.

The damage this would do to OSS would be irreversible.

Exactly. I agree to split my components into 5 pieces and use 3 of yours as dependencies. In exchange, you agree to depend on at least 3 of mine.

Next year, we each achieve 33% YoY growth by splitting one of our deps into two pieces 'for increased modularity' or some other reason totally not financially motivated.

Given it was open source you could see that happening? You could just like, choose the dependencies you wanted to use. Like vote with your wallet or something.

If there's a non-trivial amount of money at stake, I can 100% see that happening. I'd bet a nearly unlimited amount of money that it would happen.

Find a way to get something into a popular Linux distro and you can micro-split the downstream dependencies over time.

“Every time I apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y, my monthly bill goes up; I better stop doing that...”

Yeah definitively. But when I wrote that, I meant you as an individual consumer wouldn't need to worry about that. Or someone who writes libraries or packages. Only if you were running a for profit business. The remaining would have to be on trust of the community running the packages but I can definitively entertain the idea of it not working as expected.

I'm both an individual consumer and a professional working for a for-profit business in most computing circumstances at home. Same for my permanently working-from-home freelancer spouse.

My network gear and proxmox server and TrueNAS and Synology all run open-source software and all four of those support both personal and for-profit activities to different degrees.

The Plex container is clearly fully personal, but the Unifi controller and backups use cases are mixed, and the standalone Ubuntu container is fully for-profit, all running on a mixed Proxmox. Which ones get charged and which ones are free?

Yeah. I Agree with you.

Also been thinking about a similar concept for a while. For the negative effects some have mentioned, one could also argue the possibility of a positive effect to make things more open and result in better quality / funded / open projects.

As an idea an addition to this could be a community trust score where users also get to vote on a few aspects of a project, like ‘is it well maintained?’, ‘do you understand changes in version updates?’ etc. maybe bad examples, but a few simple metrics which can give a project a good or bad rep based on what the maintainers does as presented by the community - not just nit-picked twitter quotes. Yes, these will need to be crafted carefully so that maintainer cannot game them but the result could be projects getting paid well for doing things that builds trust and makes the project more accessible.

Of course I could just look at the PR history and issues etc before I use a new package, but I would trust community feedback more than my 30 min deep dive.

Today we only have very vague metrics like npm popularity or github stars, which is very hard to accurately judge what package to choose or not.

Well, given that you could decide the things you use, I would imagine things would move towards some sort of cleanup?

And open source maintainers would be open to refuse PR's like they're now?

> I’d rather just pay Microsoft than use a scheme where I pay by the number of dependencies.

The beauty here is if Microsoft was using OSS they would need to pay still on their own bills of usage.

Microsoft actually has a pretty cool OSS funding campaign that bypasses a lot of the "ugh, but the paperwork to get this funded is insane" stuff and just lets engineers nominate and vote on projects: https://github.com/microsoft-sponsorships/microsoft-foss-fun...

I've voted several times and think it's a great model. It was pioneered by Indeed and is likely also adopted elsewhere.

I think it's better than nothing to be honest. The only thing is, it's voluntary, so in that sense it's always a bit like charity, and it's always towards a given project at large and not spread. But I have no horse in this race.

That contributions are voluntary can be a strength, not a weakness.

"Everyone else/companies pay $0.01 per dependency, per month."

Yup. Open ocean. Because that just creates incentive to make a looooong dependency list.

Also, don't you think the complexity of packages are very different and it is therefore not fair, to make them all equal?

Of course, but even $500 per month is more than $0.

> Yup. Open ocean. Because that just creates incentive to make a looooong dependency list.

Well, perhaps no? Since those things don't get into your list by themselves I would think that it would incentivise the opposite. If whatever lib you're using has 100 dependencies, one for left-pad, the other for right, one for switching underscores for hyphens, this would make someone come and say, I can make this with much less cruft.

But still, if the dependencies are repeated across dependencies they wouldn't increase. So if you use 2 packages that both use say "curl", for your "bundle" it would still be only 1 entry for curl.

If money is involved, fraudsters will get involved.

You want to argue with people that their long dependency list is totally unneccecary? That will become the norm, if this is the metric on how much income everyone would get. The higher the number of packages - the higher the pay.

Does not reflect reality, where one package can be a million times more complex, than simple 100 packages.

Companies optimize for cost. If a package scams you by having too many dependencies then you simply don't use it.

Linux is one of the world's most popular open source projects and represents the collaborative efforts of tens of thousands of software engineers. $10,000 per month might pay for two full time engineers.

Thankfully, that's not what OC is proposing.

That was an example, with an explicit note about it. Geez. Nothing would prevent people or companies to further invest, donate or write love songs about it.

10.000 would still be 10.000 more than 0 right or is my math wrong?

A platitude can often be worse than nothing at all. You've "solved" the problem, and now we can all go back to ignoring it. I'm more interested in real, scalable, sustainable funding solutions, than in continuing to give FOSS devs whatever crumbs may fall off of the SV dinner table. I'm certainly not going to pat anyone on the back for it.

Sure, let's just move forward with the cake then.

> $10,000 per month might pay for two full time engineers

A good kernel engineer is paid well above $60K a year.

Aye, hence the "might". They'd have to accept well below market rates.

...or the projects would have to accept not-so-good engineers. :(

Unfortunately, money brings in risks around project quality and integrity.

The last thing we need is to reward libraries by popularity and quantity rather than quality.

Just like in academia and industry, our work should be reviewed by peers with relevant and proven experience.

The fact that some thing of NPM installs, github stars and reddit upvotes as a measure of merit says a lot about the immaturity of the software industry.

This would be rewarded by usage?

> Non-profit/individuals non-profit don't pay anything.

> Everyone else/companies pay $0.01 per dependency, per month.

I don't get that dichotomy? People can do what they want, no? So are you simply saying that individual would be far less likely to fund open source software, while companies and assimilated would?

Or you would just want it to be mandatory for companies?

If the latter, that would be completely incompatible with Open Source.

Yes, imagining what I was saying it would be mandatory if your company was making a profit while using software that agreed to this.

The difference would be if you're setting up a blog to share your permaculture posts, you wouldn't need to pay, or something like that.

If you as a software author didn't want you could always put that the cost to use your package was $0?

What if the company was losing money? What if the permaculture blog was monetized by AdSense or something else?

There is not even a "what if" to apply; it would be fundamentally contrary to Open Source and Free Software (violates freedom 0)

And I've nothing against people who want to invent new models. Just: this can't apply to the whole current Open Source / Free Software corpus and ecosystem. And this new model will never be able to mix.

Payed license does not need to be created anyway. This already widely exist and this is just proprietary software. And among proprietary software, there are also licenses that are incompatible between each others. And proprietary licenses that don't require monetary paiement from individuals.

So does creating new proprietary licenses that would be obviously incompatible with Free Software licenses, and probably incompatible with most other proprietary licenses, would achieve anything interesting? I doubt it.

You've summed up the problem I have with OP's arguments.

OSS already has a number of available licenses of varying levels of freedom that lets the creator decide how their creation should be used.

This entire discussion reads like "you developers are idiots who don't realize you're being taken advantage of." Whenever someone starts their argument with the (implicit or explicit) assumption that they are smarter than everyone else, my experience tells me that there's a hidden agenda in there somewhere. In this case it seems to be as trite as "corporations bad, people good" which, not to put too fine a point on it, is bullshit.

Yeah, the illuminati agenda.

Yeah the word profit was badly used. We could imagine it would be a regular cost and just like you wouldn't be able to forfeit paying for printer paper because you're not turning a profit you wouldn't either in this case.

The AdSense and other forms of monetisation would be indeed trickier, as well as more complex usage patterns. Like if a business spins up a lot of machines, how would that go, perhaps charging for each machine the same would be too expensive. But charging just once would be unfair. Perhaps that could be somehow split/incorporated into what is charged to the end user, where it would just be a cost of running the service, the providers would do it on their end. Perhaps the licensing would be flexible, so you paid for some cloud provider they did the payment and as part of the invoice you would have this bill of usage as well. I would also imagine that no one would try to prosecute a guy using a blog, at the same time if they're doing adsense that blog/domain would be registered.

It's not like I've spent more than the time it took me to write that thinking about it. If it was to work I also doubt it would be something that would come out right at the first iteration(s). It was more like, "wouldn't it be great if we had some sort of automatic distribution of credit that would somehow flow directly back to the source" but at the same time keeping the spirit of open source. It could possibly also align further, in a symbiotic way, service providers and open source as better software would mean lower costs, better integration, more time for tooling, etc. Or it could work the opposite and give rise to a gamed ecosystem.

See my response to /u/temac below. I think the entire problem with your argument is that you're trying to decide what someone should do with their work.

If I decide to spend thousands of hours writing software (or building a boat for that matter) and give it away for someone to make a profit with, that should be entirely my decision. The entire discussion is so patronizing I'm having trouble believing that I'm reading this. People aren't stupid: don't assume you know what's good for them better than they do. We all have our various motivations whether or not they make sense to someone else on the outside.

> "wouldn't it be great if we had some sort of automatic distribution of credit that would somehow flow directly back to the source"

You mean like GPL2?

The only one being patronising is you? How would this, hypothetical vapourware distribution system, steal your, or anyone, choice of doing whatever you want with your code? I think that if you read this and that's your conclusion it would seem that the only one assuming something would be you? You can just scroll up and read my post again.

It seems you're the one saying that others shouldn't have the choice of doing that? What would it matter to you if someone decided to do that for their own packages. How would that be different from using GPL on their own volition?

That isn't ideal at all. That's gittip - people forced to publicly receive contributions whether they want them or not.

Well perhaps this vapourware platform would have an option for you to redirect whatever funds to somewhere else?

(while making it clear on your package page that you were doing so)

You are thinking of tip4commit. Gittip later became Gratipay and then closed (but the fork at Liberapay still exists). Gittip never collected contributions for people who didn't first sign up. Gittip/Gratipay did other reckless things, but that's a separate matter.

> Non-profit/individuals non-profit don't pay anything.

>Everyone else/companies pay $0.01 per dependency, per month.

This isn't going to be both scalable and sustainable. You will find that people will calculate the cost of this vs. the cost of being a non-profit. It also isn't going to work where a small dependency gets the same payout as a more complicated dependency.

So, if 0 is sustainable, this would also be?

You mean they would become a non-profit so they wouldn't have to shell 50 bucks a month?

The dependency values wouldn't need to be $0.01. Maybe if the theory about free markets is true, then it would somehow be guided by the invisible hand, and we would let linux charge the amount of $0.10 per month. With 1M commercial servers that would be 100k per month. Not faang salaries I know. Maybe left pad could be paid in bitcoin, so we could have like fractionality towards infinity.

It's interesting to look at other copyright collective approaches in other copyrightable works like music. Though I'm sure the exact models actually shouldn't be followed, it bears looking at, with ASCAP being an interesting example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_collective

Is OpenCollective a for profit company or non profit? The marketing is a bit confusing: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/opencollective

So a private company is taking a cut of each transaction headed to an open source project?

Hi Chris! Open Collective Inc. is a for profit company, we develop and run the open collective platform, opencollective.com The Open Source Collective is a non profit, a 501c6 that gives fiscal sponsorship to projects so they can receive project directed funding. The value prop is having both the platform to receive and disburse funds transparently and the non profit that holds the funds, does compliance, reports taxes, etc.

Nailed it

If anything, a platform like this could also itself be an open source project.

oh but it is! github.com/opencollective :)

> So, open source projects want to be supported, and companies who rely on open source want to invest in them but there’s a massive pain point:

> In the open source world, formal contracts and partnership agreements don't happen the way they do in the business world.

In a way what OpenCollective offers here is much needed. The OSS world has a really hard time to get funded, while at the same time big tech is thriving upon their works.

Another pain point not mentioned in the article is that big tech corporate world also doesn't like FOSS (copyleft) licenses. They favor permissive licenses, as this is what their empires are built upon.

I fear this funding initiative will favor OSS to the detriment of FOSS. I also feel that OpenCollective - which I found aligned with FOSS principles at the start, hence really attractive - is moving towards raking in the big money now.

Open Collective team member here. All the money involved in this initiative goes to Open Source Collective 501(c)(6). As a non-profit, all revenues are reinvested back into the mission of building health and sustainability in the open source ecosystem. We're not really "raking in the big money" but if we do, it will all go toward supporting open source.

FWIW I agree with you about copyleft licenses, philosophically. But we've taken the approach of being very pragmatic when it comes to working with corporate sponsors, and we can't make them accept certain licenses, etc. Our approach is to build up funding for open source projects so they can be stronger and healthier and have the power to advocate for what they want to see in their ecosystem.

I really appreciate your response. Thank you very much.

Do people still really care about open source?serious question. I wondered a lot when I saw docker images and shell scripts installers become so popular. It seems that a small percentage do care about the source and invest in investigating or improving in various ways. The vast majority however just want something that works, looks legit, looks like it won't be abandoned tomorrow. My intuition is that there is massive complacency going on and until the gift of open source stops on giving, no one is really interested in addressing the elephants in the room.

What I would like to see is a "Support Open Source" or similar add-on available at the cloud providers.

For example my company pays Linode to do backups - I'd love to be add a similar "percentage of the VM cost" to each box for open source support (so it goes to support projects). Something like 10% of the VM cost would be great - easy to get approval for and doesn't have the "donation" wording around it.

So this is only for projects with paying or willing to pay customers, right?

Say, I have a small, permissively licensed personal project (bittorrent implementation), that has some userbase, including for-profit companies.

There is a lot of shit code in there, and many features are missing. Let us assume for the sake of the argument that given sufficient time I would be able to turn it into a state-of-the-art reference library. But given the current state of my financials I'm finding it hard to justify putting any effort into it for free at the moment and end up purchasing other opportunities not related to OSS.

I'm pretty sure it is not a unique situation and wonder if there are any solutions for this (e.g. angels, incubators, something like that?)

For such a small-scale project, I suggest you seek out the corporate users of your project and offer consulting / development contracts as a freelancer. This can be on a per-ticket basis on their side.

If it turns out that they have real use cases for your software they should be glad for the offering. Make sure to either request a high rate, as you are the leading developer and leading expert for the software. This high rate basically pays for further development (as a kind of training or investment into your offering).

If they don't have a use case, code quality might not be as important and you can thus justify to scale down your involvement until such use cases appear.

Did consulting, yes. Two concerns: 1) Some guys want IP on improvements to the original codebase 2) When I work on client's problems, I have less time to work on the original codebase, so the earned money is not exactly reinvested into the project, which is the primary point of donations.

Yes, the way I understood this is that customers can contribute to projects more easily. If you don't have any customers / users willing to pay then you don't get any money.

As for your situation, put a notice up on your project that you are willing to fix bugs / code new features for a fee? If these companies use your library they might be interested in sponsoring your work.

If they are not however, then I don't think there is a way to fund your development.

As for incubators etc., they are probably not all that interested in a BitTorrent implementation, considering how many are already around? Unless of course the library provided some value nobody else does.

Yeah, right. So this is not what I had in mind -- a way for the society to invest into projects that might not have an obvious immediate business value. Like society invests in raising and educating kids, for example, hoping that some of these kids will bring positive value to the world when they grow up.

One problem with this approach is still that depending what country you're from, you're essentially creating an "open source gig economy" where developers work for scraps from company donations without health/retirement benefits: https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-...

What I'd like to see instead of see people encouraging developers and open source maintainers start companies and create positive sum dynamics in wealth created.

Open Collective team member here. I totally agree that the gig economy approach is unhealthy. A big goal of ours is to help open source creators earn a decent living making open source that can rival what they'd get paid working for a commercial company. We've managed to facilitate that for quite a few projects, but as an ecosystem we have a long way to go. We need way more companies to step up to the plate and way more money flowing in. We also support projects who build companies and commercial offerings out of their open source projects, as long as they remain genuinely open source, and have many Collectives with parallel companies in addition.

The problem I have with these funding platforms is how much of a percentage they take. TwitchAlerts, which was at the time, the best way to support Twitch streamers only took 1%. OpenCollective takes a whopping 10%. That seems a bit excessive.

I prefer the quadratic funding method over direct corporate sponsorship as it allows more niche projects to get funded and average people to participate in the system. You can even have Google add $1million to a pool and then have individuals in the open source community distribute that out to projects based on need and utility.

For background see https://wtfisqf.com/ and Gitcoin Grants. Quadratic funding has been used to fund Ethereum public goods for a few years and it works pretty well.

yes~ check this out: funoss.org coming soon (disclosure, I am Open collective co-founder)

Just correcting the quadratic funding link: https://fundoss.org - launching soon!

Is this better for this specific case? I use wtfisqf.com since it explains the mechanism in an easy to understand way.

Who is this intended to get funds from? From corporations, or from average consumers?

IMO corporate funding is a death trap in the long run, because then they choose what gets priority and they have all the wrong incentives - they'll do right by the user when they can afford to.

More corporate funding is useful as a stepping stone, but in long-term planning it's a mirage.

Open Collective team member here. This particular initiative is aimed at funding from major sponsors. Our platform also has crowdfunding functionality so projects can fundraise from individuals, too.

Almost all the corporate funding we facilitate is no strings attached, meaning the project creators and maintainers stay in the driver's seat when it comes to prioritisation. Some projects opt to make other commitments to funders but that's totally up to the project.

I would love to see their pitch deck with the TAM and that sweet x10000 ROI with their 10% fee! :)

Although they may add value to OSS in the short term by bringing in the $$$ we wouldn't otherwise get, their ultimate purpose as a business is to maximize the return to the shareholders, who are not you or me.

What we really need is more competition in this space to drive the fees down.

...or use services that are run by non profits? there's a lot of funding platforms out there https://www.oss.fund

this type of service should be a public common good imho

The ultimate purpose is to fulfill the will of the shareholders. While this is usually dominated by profit concerns, other factors can come into play as well. Especially social good and community impact.

Who are the shareholders? Are they opensource developers?

There is one basic thing about open source and market economy:

1. People open source for free. They already do that. So, there is no real need to pay them as they are willing to do so for free. Greatest minds work for open-sourced projects.

2. If you want to pay/fund/support open source. Great, but these numbers we're talking about (like $1k/mo) are nowhere near what devs make at corporations.

I think Funds for Open Source is a great initiative! I just do not think it can be a real alternative to a career path.

I think the best open source support is done by big companies who open source their work. For example, Airflow by AirBnb.

The problem is that projects by big companies are often encumbered by their business decisions. Companies rarely find privacy profitable, so it's usually the first feature to get rid of, but if they use or need an open source tool that respects privacy, they may pay for it.

Funds from tech companies won't alone make open source development sustainable, but it'll help.

All projects are encumbered by business decisions.

I think open source improves on this problem because now I can fork and extend because a company open sourced something. This is not perfect, but it’s better than when I can’t.

I think a better approach is trying to encourage more of a gift economy with people working on stuff for free and sharing it.

It’s funny how I’m willing to accept some hair and do work myself as part of a community, but if I have to pay for it, I lose that community motivation.

For example, I’m willing to spend time writing up an issue for an OSS project with a test script, etc. but I won’t do that for a commercial company.

I would rather make 1k a month and work on something I like on my terms than to have a stressful/meaningless job around the clock with unpaid working hours all around. There only so much shit you really need. And you need time for your friends/loved one. You'll live poorer but longer.

Edit : This is not a fantasy about poverty being more genuine. Poverty makes you die sooner. My point is a life spent running after money and positions is a meaningless life.

Edit 2: I may have a bias here since I live with under 1k a month, under my country's minimum wage that is .

Appreciate that's the case for you, but under 1k in either the UK or US or many European countries is completely untenable for independent living.

I live in Paris so it's quite expensive. Not making a case about my lifestyle which is quite spartan I admit but I am tired of reading people complaining they can't make a living with only 3k a month, like my father, which feels kind of obscene to me. The reason my father is complaining about his financial situation all the time is because is always trying to buy shit to compensate the time he lost doing the job he doesn't like. It all ends up in the basement and when the basement will be full, it'll finally end up burnt in a land fill next to a village in Malaysia or something. Don't be my father.

I'm more surprised you can even pay rent in Paris & eat for <1k a month.

You have to remember peoples circumstances too - many people have families or live in very expensive areas, they can't just suddenly stop everything to live on a lower amount like an individual can.

I think I live in an expensive area. Rent is 500 euros a month (which is cheap, but I get what I pay for). Phone is five euros/month. So is internet (shared). I don't pay transportation because I think it should be free since I am not polluting common air with a car. Else I have a bike. Then I have 400 euros that need to be shared among food (which is swiftly shoplifted if expensive ;), clothing (which I already have plenty so I am fine) and nights out (which at the moment is rather quiet you know why). I cut my own hair or ask a friend. Short period of more intense work paid for all the *ware. Rather fine I must say.

As I said my point is not to say that everyone should be like me although I like to show off how not-wealthy I am for the high of moral superiority. My point is that thinking you need more money is often intricated with irrational emotions. It has happened to me various times to have someone I know is doing fine complaining about being "tight". When a person that's poor say "I have no money", it's means the account balance is dangerously close to 0,when a well off person says so, it means "I wish I did not have to cut down expenses so I can maintain my standard of living".

I think my co-founder (CTO of NewsCatcher) is in a very common situation. He's in a 500 euro flat in 13th district.

It's literally everything in one room. Everything.

You make that sound like it is a problem, when "having a room for yourself" was considered a luxury only 100 short years ago, when you would have shared that very same room with four family members.

Living in a small flat (essentially everything in one room) even though I would not have to economically, it taught me about sufficiency and the cost of buying things. Empty spaces tend to fill up with stuff you buy. If you do not have empty space, you buy less, which is good for your mental well-being and the planet.

True. But you also need empty space not to feel trapped in a cage or else you'll catch that cabin fever.

You can always go the park provided you got into that discipline, that you there is a park less than ten minutes away or that it's not too cold/raining/snowing: Not ideal. And it might a shitty square surrounded by cars.

Mentally, it is also very helpful to have separate spaces for different aspects of your life. When your room is also your office and your kitchen, it doesn't make for good sleep, good work or good cooking.

Relevant videos : https://youtu.be/LO1mTELoj6o https://youtu.be/snAhsXyO3Ck

> it means "I wish I did not have to cut down expenses so I can maintain my standard of living"

Well, we did move on from living in caves for a reason, you know.

Yeah that's exactly the reaction I get from those people when you tell them that maybe they don't need that new expensive sofa to replace "that one that is already four year old": "Why u want me to live in a cave? " So I guess there are only two ways of living : Either live in a cave, or have two big SUV because you know why moving 1500 kg of plastic and metal anywhere I go when I can move 2500 kg? I wish I could insert a Louie Ck video snippet saying "I deserve a golden watch"

I want to be able to buy stuff I'm interested in or buy equipment to learn new skills.

I don't think there's any shame in wanting > than the lowest possible money to achieve that.

You have a point! The goal though is not for one FUND to support they entire ecosystem but for many funds supporting it. 1k from one fund and 3k from another for example + recurring subscriptions from individuals, end up adding up. (disclosure, I am OC co-founder)

I don't think the $1k/month would fully cover a full time engineer. A few similar contributions would. Or an engineer doing this work as a side project.

I think it is likely an alternative career path for a handful of FOSS unicorns whose work is so instrumental that private corporations desperately need their work to continue.

Among us, some "entrepreneurs" will produce 100 little projects and try to get them all funded and then Show HN how they make a living off of dozens of lightly funded projects.

Funds for Open Source will globalize some work inasmuch as some developers will get paid some money in places where no development career paths exist now. Look at the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness report and you can find at least 20 countries where tech companies do not hire.

To your point, the reason people open source for free is that they cannot produce free software and get paid. There is no way for them to be compensated for working in alignment with their own values. Funds for Open Source attacks that problem.

I don't know that Funds is a good organization, or that they are fair in their pricing, or whether they are the best equipped private, for-profit company to wedge themselves between free-thinking developers and the corporate entities that consume their work for free, but I think the business model for Funds makes a lot of sense.

Open-source is just the noise floor. If a problem is so trivial that it's not worth selling as a product, open-source will step in and make it. The idea that companies benefit from open source is laughable. The cost of switching from Linux servers to a closed-source Unix would be very small. Linux is just used because it shaves a few beans off the bean count in the bean-counters spreadsheets. Likewise, recreating Preact or Angular from scratch is a few weeks of a developer's time. So yeah, this whole premise is flawed.

What’s the take for coordinating this Fund API? If I donate $1, what percent gets to projects and what percent is overhead?

I want more open source software and more great open source software. But I think the best projects (Apache, Linux, etc) aren’t in need of funds and function more as common goods with multiple companies paying for work and contributing back.

So I think their heart is in the right place, but the implementation won’t lead to better software.

Unsure whether they're using a different fee model for the "Fund" payments. But they're open about the fees for payments from individuals (each transaction on a collective's page shows the fee breakdown).

> Open Collective takes 10% + credit card fees (usually 3% + $0.30/transaction) [0]

A few concrete examples (dependent upon payment processor chosen)

For $1, a collective got ~$0.56

For $100, a collective got ~$86.60

I was getting very close to the inter-bank exchange rate for payouts.

[0] https://medium.com/open-collective/what-is-open-collective-h....

Hi! Pia here from Open Collective - In the FUNDS case the fees are taken when the Fund is created. Donations from the Fund are free of fees afterwards. Since the Funds are generally bank payments, there's no Stripe fees in this case.

So for bank payments, what kind of fees are we talking about?

It's 10% which gets shared 5% & 5% between the platform and the non for profit that is the custodian of the funds (and provides compliance, tax filing, 1099s,etc)

Isn't there a new pricing structure [1] that's a 15% revenue share with the fiscal host?

That works out to Open Collective taking 1.5% overall, if the fiscal host takes 10% gross.

[1] https://opencollective.com/pricing

> Open Collective takes 10%

That's honestly a lot.

Open Collective takes 5% and the other 5% goes to the non profit that provides fiscal sponsorship for the projects.

That’s still a lot, I think. Compared to other charities using a site like charitynavigator.org you can see that is a high price for a charity.

It’s also an odd legal structure to separate the platform from a non-profit to do admin tasks, since non-profits are not really that good at doing admin and compliance.

10% is a lot of overhead for just being an index fund. Imagine if vanguard took 10% overhead for their management.

I’d rather go through things like GitHub sponsorships that take 0%. Or I’d rather see a community oriented process that is OSS and just tries to connect donors to projects so I can donate directly to projects and just pay credit card processing fees.

> 10% is a lot of overhead for just being an index fund. Imagine if vanguard took 10% overhead for their management.

I think Open Collective has a new pricing scheme [1] where they don't take anything if the fiscal host doesn't either, but I think more people should consider the work that fiscal hosts have to do.

Unlike Vanguard, Open Collective and the fiscal hosts might not have enough diversified income sources to pay for all the dev work and other manual labour that comes with handling money.

Bookkeeping/accounting work and annual compliance filings are both tedious and expensive. :(

> I’d rather go through things like GitHub sponsorships that take 0%.

GitHub/Microsoft is absorbing the Stripe fee for GitHub sponsorships, which amounts to something like ~2.9% – 4%.

[1] https://opencollective.com/pricing

These corporate funds work for new, shiny OSS products - they generally stay clear from the bedrock, the core technologies that keep the world running, like, for instance, NTP.

For that, there's Loadsharers, a true community-run distribution network, which I invite everyone to go and have a look: https://esr.gitlab.io/loadsharers/

These funders are more like advertisers - paying for their logo on a web page.

Love the idea!

we should be able to do better with http://www.associate.com at some point.

Come help us build it.

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