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Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

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Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#11

Post by eximius »

nwhatt wrote: post #2

Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right? It's a wonderful gesture, I don't want to take away from that. Just wondering how straight up donating compares to contributing.

Specialization and competitive advantage are a thing.

Also, allocating 3% of my developers time is not super useful. That's less than 1 day a month per developer. Far better to allocate 1 developer for X time. By giving cash, you facilitate that for someone else. You could of course choose one person in your company to be that person and pay them directly, but thats hard for political reasons.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#12

Post by xte »

Nice but no. We need to push Free Software and to push it at political level, with the target of forbid closed source products.

We do not need subsistence economy, we already won technically, open code is everywhere now. The big loss is the miss of political support. The big loss is the mass ignorance of how private companies trap open code in closed "boxes" from Android to WSL/DeX/Crostini to our PND/NAS/router/*.

That's the real point to get and IMO apart FSF we need to take action at school/universities level, workplaces etc. Putting money like that is a way to loose money without return.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#13

Post by nwhatt »

joewadcan wrote: post #4
nwhatt wrote: post #2

Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right? It's a wonderful gesture, I don't want to take away from that. Just wondering how straight up donating compares to contributing.

> Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right? I see what you mean. However, as a two person company we think the impact from supporting those projects is a better use of funds. It's all a bit of an experiment, but we wanted to put a stake in the ground somewhere because of how important open source has been to our existence as a company. J…

Makes sense, exciting to hear how the experiment goes.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#14

Post by gowld »

kiwijamo wrote: post #8

This idea has made me think of donating a certain percentage of my income each year to open source projects. Does anyone have a system for donating their personal funds to open source projects?

https://fosspost.org/education/fund-open-source-software-wit...

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#15

Post by claudiulodro »

This is similar to WordPress's Five for the Future[1], which is one of my favorite open-source-support initiatives.

It intuitively makes a lot of sense if you are building on top of a platform to dedicate some resources towards the continued well-being of the platform. With SAAS, the resources are the money you pay each month, but with open source you can donate either money or time!

[1] https://ma.tt/2014/09/five-for-the-future/

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#16

Post by eximius »

gowld wrote: post #14
kiwijamo wrote: post #8

This idea has made me think of donating a certain percentage of my income each year to open source projects. Does anyone have a system for donating their personal funds to open source projects?

https://fosspost.org/education/fund-open-source-software-wit...

oss.fund is also apparently a thing.

I think it could be pretty cool to have a donation aggregator, though I'm not sure what it would do differently than what existing places I don't donate to do. Perhaps more transparency?

It'd be kind of neat to have 'OSS Index Funds' (misnomer to convey the idea) that a donation aggregator could provide. I could offer a fund for 'Rust' that might support 30% compiler team, 30% core team, 20% something else, 10% docs (I obviously don't know what the percentages should look like, just demonstrating). A different fund could be 'Programming Language Development' which might invest 20% in the Rust fund, 20% in Zig, and so on. A fund for Graphics like GIMP, Krita, Blender, etc.

Discovery of who to support is, maybe, one of the big problems preventing direct support. If you eliminate that problem without making people feel like they don't have a say and don't overwhelm them with information.... then maybe it could catch on?

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#17

Post by jsmeaton »

xte wrote: post #12

Nice but no. We need to push Free Software and to push it at political level, with the target of forbid closed source products. We do not need subsistence economy, we already won technically, open code is everywhere now. The big loss is the miss of political support. The big loss is the mass ignorance of how private companies trap open code in closed "boxes" from Android to WSL/DeX/Crostini to our PND/NAS/router/*. T…

I’m struggling to see how your comment relates to the article, which is showing financial support to open source projects. Funding is a serious issue with OSS.

Suggesting all code should be OSS is orthogonal.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#19

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

kiwijamo wrote: post #8

This idea has made me think of donating a certain percentage of my income each year to open source projects. Does anyone have a system for donating their personal funds to open source projects?

I am an open source developer who accepts donations. Whatever you do, I would recommend making a recurring donation. I like to say that one-time donations buy beer, while recurring donations buy sustainable open source development.

I would also suggest contributing to individuals directly. Seek out maintainers of the projects you want to support and see if they have a patreon or liberapay page.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#20

Post by gbear605 »

fastbeef wrote: post #10
kiwijamo wrote: post #8

This idea has made me think of donating a certain percentage of my income each year to open source projects. Does anyone have a system for donating their personal funds to open source projects?

You, uh, take a percentage of your paycheck and click “Donate” in the page for your software of choice?

I think the "of choice" is the hard part here. For instance, if you're a JS developer: do you donate to Mozilla? NPM? Your JS framework? Other libraries you use?
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