Is there a list of the 600 "collectives" that need to migrate to continue accepting donations? Do any of them already have alternative donation methods?
Yes you can see the list on the opencollective page here https://opencollective.com/foundation
Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
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Re: Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
#12[flagged]
Re: Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
#13I think https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-sta... is a better link. It also seems “Open Collective Foundation” is shutting down, and “Open Collective” is a super-organization which contains a lot of sibling organizations (“Open Source Collective”, “Open Collective Europe”). And most of the entities getting donations through OCF can simply move to other organizations (hopefully automatically keep…
Seems to me pretty simple - the "for profit" company behind the foundation (read: the for profit entity that charges the foundation as much as it can) charged too much so the foundation dissolved. >Unfortunately, over the past year, we have learned that Open Collective Foundation's business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tec…
The foundation paid a lot more for their own employees than for the platform https://opencollective.com/foundation#category-BUDGET so I don't think you can pin it solely on the company, the "complex services" performed by the foundation itself also cost money.
What confuses me about the budget breakdown is that the all-time expenses and contributions don't add up to the top-line disbursed and income amounts. Especially the income seems to be almost entirely opaque; maybe that was a large one-time grant that is now running out.
Re: Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
#14Is there a list of the 600 "collectives" that need to migrate to continue accepting donations? Do any of them already have alternative donation methods?
I think this is the list:
https://opencollective.com/foundation#category-CONTRIBUTIONS
That's a LOT of groups! This page here indicates they were raising $13m a year back when they had 300, so it could be double that now: https://opencollective.foundation/
Re: Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
#15[flagged]
Open-source is the one place where I actually don't mind the "spam" or self-advertisement.
Pretty much all software projects today use some open-source libraries. These open-source libraries need funding to sustain and thrive, and also remain supported for the long haul and make feature improvements and bug fixes.
But precisely because they are open-source, they get very little funding since people get it for free. What to do then? The only way is to ask for donations.
OpenCollective is just one of the options open-source projects use for fund collection - there are others, but not surprised to see OpenCollective so visible in this aspect of open source funding and outreach.
Re: Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
#16This is going to be a huge pain for the 600 groups that this affects (few of which are open source projects - this is NOT the part of Open Collective that handles open source).
The key thing to understand here is what a "fiscal sponsor" is in the US charitable world.
If you want to accept charitable donations from people in the US you really need special tax status with the IRS. This involves a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork.
Or... you can find an existing 501(c)(3) that is willing to be your "fiscal sponsor". They handle the IRS paperwork and do things like provide a bank account for the donations to go into and make sure you are behaving correctly and legally.
They will generally do this for you because your cause matches with their mission - plus they usually get a small portion of your donations to help cover their costs (lots of accounting and legal work).
Once you've set that relationship up everything becomes massively easier for you... unless your fiscal sponsor dissolves itself, at which point you have to unwind that relationship and kick up a new one with someone else!
I learned about this because the Python Software Foundation occasionally acts as a fiscal sponsor.
Re: Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
#17Given this news, it's interesting to read the "Investor Update" published by Open Collective earlier this month: https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-inc-investor...
Open Collective will (presumably) experience a further drop in revenue as they lose the "platform fee" they collected from OCF
Re: Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
#18This is going to be a huge pain for the 600 groups that this affects (few of which are open source projects - this is NOT the part of Open Collective that handles open source). The key thing to understand here is what a "fiscal sponsor" is in the US charitable world. If you want to accept charitable donations from people in the US you really need special tax status with the IRS. This involves a lot of bureaucracy and…
I have a general explainer about the OCF shutdown (not the OC, or OSC, or OSE, or OSNV!) over here, where I include more links to software foundations that might also act as fiscal hosts, like Conservancy, SPI, or NumFocus.
https://communityovercode.com/2024/02/open-collective-founda...
What we really need is a lawyer/accountant/tax person to write a focused guide for collectives and how to move their money. US tax law means that generally, 501(c)(3) public charity organizations can't just transfer the money anywhere - it'll most likely need to be another 501(c)(3) or equivalent. That's going to trip a lot of people up who want to go to OC (for-profit) or OSC (a 501(c)(6) business leage), because neither will qualify for accepting fund transfers (I think).
Also, if you have any offinity for Europe, look at the OCE - they are a charity, and they sound like they're seeing if they could accept fund transfers from OCF for projects that fit their model. https://opencollective.com/europe/updates/regarding-the-anno...
Re: Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
#19Too bad, I always saw Open Collective as one of the few options open-source developers (who are not supported by Big Tech) had to self-fund their work. Curious what people think are the best alternatives now? I can think of GitHub Sponsors as well as creator-friendly tools like Patreon, Locals etc.
Naming things is hard, as software engineers know. It's only OCF that's shutting down, not OC, or OCE, or OSC, or even OCNZ (I just found out about that one today).
In any case, there are plenty of other funding models/sites out there, the trick is finding one that really fits how your FOSS project works:
https://fossfunding.com/#how-are-individual-projects-or-main...
Re: Open Collective Official Statement – OCF Dissolution
#20I think https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-sta... is a better link. It also seems “Open Collective Foundation” is shutting down, and “Open Collective” is a super-organization which contains a lot of sibling organizations (“Open Source Collective”, “Open Collective Europe”). And most of the entities getting donations through OCF can simply move to other organizations (hopefully automatically keep…
Seems to me pretty simple - the "for profit" company behind the foundation (read: the for profit entity that charges the foundation as much as it can) charged too much so the foundation dissolved. >Unfortunately, over the past year, we have learned that Open Collective Foundation's business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tec…
I don't know what happened, but this def is not the full story. Surely if the company had known it was squeezing the foundation to death it would have been in its best interest to offer a better deal no? I mean it's not like the company has hundreds of customers, and keeping the foundation alive even with reduced to maintain some income and avoid repetitional damage seems like a no-brainer.