Comment by scellus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scellus | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't know. iNaturalist contributes a valuable identification service in their free apps. I'm a relatively experienced naturalist, but greatly helped by the iOS app, simply because remembering hundreds of species names is hard, even when the species are familiar. And the identification abilities of their models outside of my own domain are just stupendous, and freely available.

If they feel like keeping the models to themselves, I think it's a fair game. I give them observations, they gave me the id service for free. Maybe they even sell the models to fund their development efforts? I wouldn't mind... they need to fund their functions somehow anyway.

And remember, their observation databases are open. In fact my observations are automatically copied to the databases of a national biodiversity institution (which is open as well, except for some critical species).

Institutions need to maintain themselves and be able to pay their employees for them being able to feed their kids, etc.

This comment makes no sense as iNaturalist are a non-profit and they run on donations. Data is hosted for free by AWS under the Amazon Open Data Sponsorship Program, which covers infrastructure and bandwidth costs. The community already pays staff salaries. "For 2024, reported revenue was $4.71M, with over 94% coming from contributions and philanthropic sources". See https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/financials ~20 full time employees.

They get almost all of their money from Gordon and Betty Foundation, NSF, Nat Geo Society and the like. The "community" are almost entirely free-riders. I have donated a bit I think (maybe $20 or so), but their statistics say 0.24% of users donate.

That's probably not a sustainable situation.

Not sure where to start here. The community include much of the actual scientific community. As such they have dedicated their lives to accruing specialist and leading knowledge often not held by any other individual - now or ever. Accusing them of free riding is simply ignorant.

IMHO funds received by well-run non-profits will be banked, not spent, therefore they yield ongoing returns which are used to meet costs and sustain the organization. The fund origin is immaterial.

Yeah, just wanted to point out in my reply that the community is not paying the salaries their employees, the community in the sense of me and you, those who send observations and ids. The money mostly comes from big donors. To me that sounds a bit like bootstrapping the system, a startup if you wish. Moore giving them $10M per year from here to eternity is not a plausible future.

sounds like you're arguing that it should be open given that two non-profits and the US government are the primary funders of it. Given how non-profits tend to get a high degree of public subsidy as well (indirect tax subsidies to non-profits and the people that donate to them are essentially paid by the US taxpayer), we can reasonably conclude that the US taxpayer is footing the bill here.

I'm not here to say it _should_ be open. Instead, I'm saying they offer a valuable, international (global) service and I want their economics to be sustainable, and have personally no objections to them keeping their AI models private if they wish so.

Meanwhile, the whole idea of iNaturalist has evolved around voluntary reporting, community involvement, and open data, and I think some of that needs to stay. They can't turn fully commercial.

I think the problem for me here is that previous you mentioned yourself that the primary funders are nonprofits and government organizations (NSF, Nat Geo Society, Gordon & Betty), so it doesn't seem like even you believe the private commercial piece of the puzzle is very large. I doubt allowing the models to be open would sabotage the work they do with any of the aforementioned organizations, or hurt their ability to target future government/non-profits.

If in fact what you said is true about the sources of funding, it would then seem that the US taxpayers (the relevant party here) are footing a large part of the bill from direct and indirect subsidies. I feel that it can be reasonably argued that a non-profit organization that is benefiting from significant public subsidy should make their model available for public use.

I use iNaturalist. I do not make monetary donations. I use their tools to make observations and contribute them to the open data set. How am I a free-rider? Without the data contributions from the community, all that money buys you is a bunch of empty servers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com