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A new funding model for open source software

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131–140 of 184 posts

Re: A new funding model for open source software

#131
> The marginal cost — both psychological and financial — of supporting additional projects would drop to zero

Great idea for redistributing existing funds and preventing winner take all, but the bigger hurdle is increasing the overall funds (eg, getting more people to give a shit in the first place)

I have a lot of experience with non profits and independent projects, and funding success is partly based on merit, but more frequently on how clear, consistent and obvious calls to action for funding are.

At some point it stops being a problem you can fix with software. It's not like there's a mountain of funding that just needs to be unlocked. It's more about growing the funding in the first place, which when successfully done (in my experience) starts to look a lot like aggressive marketing, advertising, and tweaking of missions to appeal to whatever is hot/fundable at the time, similar to the VC industry. True story, and kind of an anecdote that money turns everything to shit eventually.

Re: A new funding model for open source software

#132

OK my project is open source. I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero users. How much do I get paid? Zero? But I wrote open source code that solves a real problem. It's open source. I should deserve to get paid. Because open source software. I don't think your funding model works.

> I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero users. > I should deserve to get paid.

Why?

I drew a picture of a giraffe. I should deserve to get paid because art.

Re: A new funding model for open source software

#133
post #127

I think that this essay is fundamentally brilliant, but doesn't come out and yell the self-evident truth: the ONLY way this ever takes off is if Github does it. And man, do I ever hope that they do. There's no other entity in the ecosystem that even approaches the role Github plays, with all due respect to Gitlab and the rest of the also-rans. It'd be wonderful if they did the same thing, but in the end, they are goi…

The only thing really keeping me on GitHub is stars. I have a fundamental objection to entrusting open source to Microsoft. If gitlab implemented this feature Id probably move tomorrow.

Gitea supports this, and https://codeberg.org is a good and fairly popular Gitea instance.

Re: A new funding model for open source software

#134
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ONLY way this ever takes off is if Github does it. Yes, let's encourage another walled-garden controlled by a dominant player which would be benefiting from FOSS donations (keeping % of it) while doing nothing to make GitHub a FOSS platform at the same time.

First, they don't even cover the cost of their credit card processing. They even used to match donations up to $5000. This is clearly not a profit center for them. What it is, actually, is excellent long-term business sense. They know that maintaining open source is draining, often thankless and demoralizing. Making sure that their best assets are provided for is just smart. But also, your attitude is wishful thinkin…

I just met a grandma that runs Linux. That surprised me. But it goes to show that sometimes wishful thinking can be achieved.

If we make something as a community that can replace GitHub in convenience and spread awareness of the problems with GitHub being our main code hosting platform, we may be able to convince the wider community to use a platform for FOSS that is itself FOSS (which is what I believe ekianjo was talking about).

Re: A new funding model for open source software

#135

I expected Youtube Red to work like this. Each person has its own pool. Channels should have been weighed by watch time with a minimum weight so that small channels get something as well. If I watch one channel then that channel should get the whole $10 (minus youtube cut). Instead we got a stupid global pool based on global popularity that primarily benefits PewDiePie even if I don't watch him. The compensation was…

Can you link to an article or something about how YouTube Red's payment model works? I've always been curious.

Re: A new funding model for open source software

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I be fair & frank? Your article does raise a few great points... about Github specifically. But not about funding sustainable OSS development in general. Open source also is not a business model. It's a principle that relates to intellectual rights and copyright: the author explicitly stating that they won't exercise their rights as to what others do with their work, provided then that others share any modificati…

I'm cognizant that I'm replying to someone named CaptArmchair. Based on your handle, I say: well-named. Look, I'm sure you remember the heartbleed scenario a few years back... the moment when we all realized that the human behind one of the most critical pieces of our infrastructure stack was a slave to his sense of responsibility, but he lacked charisma and hustle and social presence such that he wasn't able to keep…

Hm... that's not at all what I intended to convey. And I think you're putting things in quite extreme terms.

The field of software / digital engineering has grown an exploitative side. This is absolutely true. To be crystal clear, without diving into detail and derailing the thread: I find this evolution reprehensible and not how humans ought to be treated.

Is that dynamic then the result of Open Source as a princple of intellectual rights? Is it really, truly an inevitability that taking on Open Source projects and pushing code on Github now singularly serves as a resume of sorts for applying for a paid job? Is giving up your intellectual rights by default really the only way to ensure that you can make a living from writing code?

Because of it is, well, that should rather lead to bleak conclusions about the state of the value that developers are willing to attribute to the time and effort they pour into their craft, the labour market, labour protection, and societal values as a whole. Instead of concluding that Open Source itself is the problem (it is not) and people ought to donate a buck-and-a-half to anyone who has a repo with an arbitrary number of stars on Github.

You could draw parallels with other fields such as academics, film, music, games, books, fashion and so on. So, exploitation is not an entirely new dynamic either. Plenty of aspiring graduates, actors, writers, musicians, models, graphic designers,... are scrounging by, and get exploited in the process, while relatively few end up in a good place. Usually, their complaints are met with a short, unsympathetic "should have chosen a real career/job instead!" quip. If I'm allowed to play the devil's advocate: Should we add software developers to that list as well?

Of course not! In fact, nobody deserves to be outright reviled for the professional career they pursue.

The problems you describe are societal. They are the net result of larger economic dynamics in a rapidly globalized, free and unregulated marketplace. A markpetlace in which a few smart people understood how to leverage open source software in order to accumulate enough leverage to enter the financial market, moving on to accrue even far greater wealth. And what you describe is just another take on the Tragedy of the Commons.

Like I said, if the world is reconfiguring around software, it should be held to pay the true price of maintaining that infrastructure. Much as is pointed out exactly by Eghbal's study. After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Or as Mike Monteiro puts it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEa6PdOG2ts

Re: A new funding model for open source software

#138
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ONLY way this ever takes off is if Github does it. Yes, let's encourage another walled-garden controlled by a dominant player which would be benefiting from FOSS donations (keeping % of it) while doing nothing to make GitHub a FOSS platform at the same time.

First, they don't even cover the cost of their credit card processing. They even used to match donations up to $5000. This is clearly not a profit center for them. What it is, actually, is excellent long-term business sense. They know that maintaining open source is draining, often thankless and demoralizing. Making sure that their best assets are provided for is just smart. But also, your attitude is wishful thinkin…

My grandma runs Linux on her desktop (I set her up with Fedora).

GitHub hosts lots of FLOSS, of course. The platform itself is fully proprietary, although apparently they plan to liberate some amount of the core. That's why snowdrift.coop choose gitlab.com, although even that's a compromise (we used to use their githost.io offering so we could stay on gitlab CE, but that service closed down and we had to weigh staying on fully-FLO tools vs network effects).

Re: A new funding model for open source software

#139
This addresses the lack of convenience in existing tooling, but not the core of the problem of FOSS sustainability.

I believe to solve the problem two things must happen:

* Users evaluate how exactly much they benefit from particular software and services, and how much they'd lose in utility if their option of choice disappeared.

* Maintainers find out what matters to real users and offer them good bargains to fund their development roadmap and maintenance service level.

See https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/3735cd917...

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