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Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

endowment.dev

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Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#141

Post by pabs3 »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #61
kvinogradov wrote: post #2

Over the last few years I've talked with hundreds of people in the dev community, and almost everyone shared the same concern: there's no sustainable funding for critical OSS maintenance, and without it the modern world runs on an increasingly fragile foundation. I have personal experience with university endowments, and at some point noticed that the open source world is remarkably similar to a top research universi…

> Government support won't work for OSS at scale — it's too globally decentralized... We recently received US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity status. If this is successful in the first iteration, I'd love to see a UK and EU based charities too. That would allow european donors to support on a gross pay basis, and may simplify grants to european nationals too. (I'm sure similar things apply in other jurisdictions too.)

There is already NLNet and other charities in the EU for funding FOSS.

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#142

Post by pabs3 »

whit537 wrote: post #117
nwellnhof wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concrete examples: GNU software, musl C library, everything from x.org and freedesktop.org. Just have a look at the top 1,000 projects from the Debian popularity contest and you'll find many projects outside the Github bubble. Why not use the Debian package name in your nomination form instead of a Github URL? Any project important enough to matter will have a Debian package, right? If you're trying to come up with s…

Thanks, captured here: https://github.com/osendowment/endowment.dev/issues/34#issue...

I'd encourage you to look at the Software Heritage archive as an example of the broader diversity in software sources outside of GitHub. Even that doesn't cover everything, because many repos aren't yet archived there, and there are repo formats not yet supported, and code not in repos, and people that refuse/block archiving of their code.

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#145

Post by galaxyLogic »

I think the "organizatton" should have membership fees. The members would get a somehow less restrictive license to the software maintained by the organization.

The organization needs a way to make something valuable it can charge a (membership) fee for, not just collect donations. Then it can share some of those fees with its developer-contributors, byt distributing a dividend that goes on to prepetuity instead of individual one-time grants.

So, two types of members, contributor-developers, and code-using organizations which get a less restrictive license.

This seems like a chicken-and-egg problem, but once it starts going it could be sustainable.

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#146

Post by pjmlp »

EarlKing wrote: post #68
numbsafari wrote: post #44

Something I’ve been curious about for a while is why more universities don’t get involved in sponsoring critical projects. In theory it could provide an interesting non-academic path for students and professors and, as you’ve pointed out, the funding model of the U would make sense here. I’m curious… would you consider having a “faculty” of “tenured” maintainers who receive livable funding and support based on a hist…

Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status? Or, in the case of a state-run university, this raises all kinds of issues regarding how tax money is being given away to random schmoes instead of benefitting the public at large. So, yeah, there's plenty of…

Which is why app stores and SaaS products thrive, they provide the mechanisms to actually pay for the software one uses.

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#147

Post by toastal »

armchairhacker wrote: post #35
briffle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is your proposed solution?

Nominate any public git repo (or at least Codeberg, SourceHut, etc.)

Why does it need to be Git? What’s wrong with Darcs, Pijul, Mercurial, Fossil, & so on?

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#148

Post by psychoslave »

kvinogradov wrote: post #134
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on the same libre project for more than 25 years, and making a living from it for about 15, so I have my own perspective on this. The biggest issue that I see is that even for things that are in some respects "finished", grants on the order of $5k do not change the maintainance picture very much at all. If there's a sudden crisis with critical infrastructure, people will step. But that's precisely w…

Now the Open Source Endowment is a very small organization that starts with ~$5k microgrants. It is not enough for a living but still should help maintainers not only financially but also by allocating attention. As it grows bigger, the grant size will also grow. One can help with this by donating and bringing in new donors!

$5000 is enough to make a living in several countries.

On a global scale, likely less than 10% of the world's population has ever been able to save $5,000 at any point in their life, with the vast majority concentrated in high-income countries. In low- and middle-income countries, this is a rare achievement limited to a small, affluent minority.

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#149

Post by randoramax »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #122

This is an interesting idea. Why hasn't an established foundation like the Apache Foundation attempted something like this?

Possible answers: Maybe because the Apache Software Foundation spent over two years debating a feather versus a leaf? see https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/native_american_apach... Or because the Open Source Initiative wasted over a year debating election rules? https://lwn.net/Articles/1056376/ Or because the Document Foundation has been locked into a fight with its own members? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157999 Looks like a pattern, doesn't it?

Re: Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers

#150

Post by jononor »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #130
kvinogradov wrote: post #2

Over the last few years I've talked with hundreds of people in the dev community, and almost everyone shared the same concern: there's no sustainable funding for critical OSS maintenance, and without it the modern world runs on an increasingly fragile foundation. I have personal experience with university endowments, and at some point noticed that the open source world is remarkably similar to a top research universi…

I've been working on the same libre project for more than 25 years, and making a living from it for about 15, so I have my own perspective on this. The biggest issue that I see is that even for things that are in some respects "finished", grants on the order of $5k do not change the maintainance picture very much at all. If there's a sudden crisis with critical infrastructure, people will step. But that's precisely w…

A stable/predictable base of maybe 50k USD/year is probably more in the range where it could influence someone to be FOSS maintainer full-time.
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