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FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

floss.fund

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Re: FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

#101

Post by kelnos »

myprotegeai wrote: post #37

I've maintained a fairly popular open source project for over 13 years[1]. The software is basically "complete." How does funding work for someone like me? I have no initiatives with it that require funding. Occasionally, I need to fix a bizarre obscure bug, or support a new python version/feature (async/await being the last big one). But otherwise, I just field questions a few times a month. Truth be told, I'd rathe…

You can always just stop working on it. You aren't obligated to do anything further if it doesn't bring you joy. Update the README to say you've stopped maintaining it, and to add a bit about searching for a new maintainer.

If you believe you still get an ongoing benefit (reputational or whatever) by being its maintainer and continuing to support it, and if you still want that benefit, then you have to keep up the work. Very little in life is truly free, unfortunately.

You could also see if there's a way to monetize your work on it. If people want support or need bugs fixed, they can pay you to do so, for example. Might even look into GitHub Sponsors, if you haven't already. I do get that it's harder to solicit donations for something that's "finished", though.

Re: FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

#103

Post by ozim »

chaosprint wrote: post #53

I have been developing and maintaining https://glicol.org for 4 years. I have donation page on github but only got it from 2 people. It seems all the donation service providers requirs login. I don't know why we cannot have a guest mode like regular shopping website.

Mostly we cannot have nice things because bad guys will come over and exploit it for some nefarious reasons.

Re: FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

#104

Post by account42 »

traceroute66 wrote: post #12
ignoramous wrote: post #5

To apply, the project must place a funding.json in their public code repository or at a well-known uri location on their domain: https://dir.floss.fund/submit That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you Llama Impact Grants, OpenAI Cybersecurity Grants, NLNet, & OpenTechFund. --- Disclaimer: A project I co-develop was granted £3.75k in 2023 back when…

> That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you I guess somebody has to point out the obvious .... First, the process is probably simpler because the donation amounts are going to be smaller. If there's only $1M per year in the bank, I somehow don't see them giving out the sorts of large sums the others you mentioned do, e.g. OpenTechFund says it will…

> Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.

Does it though or does it sort out the projects who would rather focus on developing while selecting those better at marketing themselves than at building useful things aka the professional bullshitter class.

Re: FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

#105

Post by account42 »

kelnos wrote: post #101
myprotegeai wrote: post #37

I've maintained a fairly popular open source project for over 13 years[1]. The software is basically "complete." How does funding work for someone like me? I have no initiatives with it that require funding. Occasionally, I need to fix a bizarre obscure bug, or support a new python version/feature (async/await being the last big one). But otherwise, I just field questions a few times a month. Truth be told, I'd rathe…

You can always just stop working on it. You aren't obligated to do anything further if it doesn't bring you joy. Update the README to say you've stopped maintaining it, and to add a bit about searching for a new maintainer. If you believe you still get an ongoing benefit (reputational or whatever) by being its maintainer and continuing to support it, and if you still want that benefit, then you have to keep up the wo…

> and to add a bit about searching for a new maintainer.

Don't. Unless you already know someone you can trust it's better to just let someone fork it and build reputation for their fork on their own.

Re: FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

#106

Post by account42 »

cxr wrote: post #49
myprotegeai wrote: post #37

I've maintained a fairly popular open source project for over 13 years[1]. The software is basically "complete." How does funding work for someone like me? I have no initiatives with it that require funding. Occasionally, I need to fix a bizarre obscure bug, or support a new python version/feature (async/await being the last big one). But otherwise, I just field questions a few times a month. Truth be told, I'd rathe…

When someone no longer enjoys the food in a restaurant, they tend to stop going. Why not do the same: just not do the thing that you wish not to do?

Some people do feel responsible for things besides themselves. That's generally a good thing for society.

Re: FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

#107

Post by account42 »

rwmj wrote: post #56
theragra wrote: post #2

Interesting that these kind of things are done by less known companies, not the big names. At least that's my (uninformed) impression.

Red Hat funds FOSS developers to work on open source projects to probably 100x - 500x this amount every year.

And many of those Red Hat developers end up creating orders of magnitude more work for other developers and users.

Re: FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

#108

Post by cxr »

account42 wrote: post #106
cxr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone no longer enjoys the food in a restaurant, they tend to stop going. Why not do the same: just not do the thing that you wish not to do?

Some people do feel responsible for things besides themselves. That's generally a good thing for society.

Oh, cool, another HN-forged strawman!

Re: FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

#109

Post by ipaddr »

mr-karan wrote: post #73
jph wrote: post #25

Great idea! I'm trying it now by adding the file `funding.json` to two of my FOSS projects. Feedback welcome. Donations welcome. :-) 1. Assertables is a Rust crate that provides assert macros for smarter testing: https://github.com/SixArm/assertables-rust-crate/blob/main/f... 2. BoldContacts is a mobile app that helps people who have disabilities: https://github.com/BoldContacts/boldcontacts-mobile-app-for-... Result…

Hey, I'm from Zerodha team. 1. Regarding the validation, this error seems to be related to the provenance check mechanism in the spec. This is to prove ownership of that project/domain. The wellKnown field is designed to handle cases where the webpageUrl doesn't match the manifest URL. 2. Will definitely be passing the feedback to our team and evaluate this further!

I'll confirm doesn't work.

Re: FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

#110

Post by andris9 »

MITSardine wrote: post #94
andris9 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I started with Nodemailer, my goal was to build a cool product—not to become an unpaid helpdesk employee for life. But here we are. So, I’ve been trying to monetize the project in various ways for the past ten years. I’ve tried everything (license restrictions, freelancing and consulting, paid extensions, etc.), and each approach failed for different reasons. The only strategy that actually took off was using No…

Could you expand on the strategies you tried, and how they failed?

For example, I once switched the license of Nodemailer from MIT to EUPL, with the option of still getting a MIT version if you paid for it. I had some paying customers, but it turned out they were all spammers using stolen credit cards (I guess they misunderstood what the paid offering was). So, when the chargebacks came in, my account actually went into the negative.
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