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Open-source Funding and Support Questionnaire

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21–30 of 39 posts

Re: Open-source Funding and Support Questionnaire

#21

Post by brianwawok »

williamdclt wrote: post #6
cimm wrote: post #3

I am a freelance developer and added footnote to my invoices explaining I donate 1% of the amount to an open-source project used for the assignment. I ask them to propose the projects they prefer but almost no one does.

Sounds like a very good idea. Companies should do that !

They should. Although I guess in a perfect market with two identical companies.. the one without the donations will have 1% more cashflow and be able to underbid the nice competitor by 1%.

(1% is likely to small to make a difference, but a fun thought experiment).

Re: Open-source Funding and Support Questionnaire

#22

Post by Joe8Bit »

whit537 wrote: post #18
Joe8Bit wrote: post #16

I really think there's an opportunity to make it easier for companies (large and small) to pay for work on open source projects. The complexities I see (as someone who has done it often): * Knowing who (as an individual or an organization) you can give money to to reliably perform the work. So working out a way of managing this would be huge e.g. I want a feature added to Postgres, who the hell do I speak to? Are the…

It sounds like you've mostly tried to pay for new development on projects? As opposed to remunerating for existing product? Does that sound right?

Yes. Not that I disagree with the other way of paying, but it needs to be handled differently:

* The 'pay someone to do X, which has Y value for us in return' is a very simple value proposition for even the most luddite of finance/legal folks to grok. The details are different, but you're essentially hiring a contractor.

* On the other hand, it's much less clear to those people what the value proposition is for paying for 'past work' or some amphorphus future work that it's difficult to quantify will have any value to the organization.

* That's why the above is much better framed as 'sponsorship' and put under PR/dev relations/talent/HR. They're the ones who can best track value from concepts like community engagement and enhancement, improved standing of the company etc

Re: Open-source Funding and Support Questionnaire

#23

Post by zanny »

michaelt wrote: post #8

I donate about $150 to Canonical any time I download Ubuntu - but I'm pretty sure this is a flawed approach. After all, if I install a package, which depends on something which depends on something which depends on a library for left-padding strings, it's unlikely the library author sees a cent. And each of those levels doesn't just have developers - they have package maintainers, people doing bug triage, people main…

Canonical themselves are only developing a tiny fraction of even their default suite of software anyway.

If you want to contribute to open source software in general, Software in the Public Interest is probably the best general fund to stick your money in, since they provide financial support to several distributions, LibreOffice, FFmpeg, Postgres, Xorg, etc.

Also, set your amazon smile donations to go to them, since they are a non-profit!

Re: Open-source Funding and Support Questionnaire

#24

Post by froztbyte »

whit537 wrote: post #13
Midiv0k wrote: post #7

It would be really interesting to see some answers statistics!

Yeah! Are you going to release this survey data, @froztbyte?

First to get some more responses.

Later, if possible, I'll attempt to release the raw (albeit sanitised) data.

At minimum I'll post a follow-up with some statistics/analyses.

Re: Open-source Funding and Support Questionnaire

#25

Post by jjm »

There is one thing I'm not sure anyone has talked about yet. When a corp entity 'donates' or provides funding for a specific feature, they will usually want a timeline for the completion of it. I personally feel there is a distinction between being 'paid' for a feature, and 'funding' a feature. Where the funding route is still in spirit of the project. Sadly it seems that a lot of open source projects even if used widely are still powered by 'spirit' rather than anything else.

Re: Open-source Funding and Support Questionnaire

#28

Post by delegate »

Apart from having a framework/service for funding open source projects, we need about the people who develop the dependencies used in those projects.

Project maintainers should have the ability to 'forward' part of the received donation to other projects - without which the project wouldn't have been possible.

Which contributors, which dependency and how much to share - these questions are best answered by the project maintainer(s) - they can forward zero or all the funds and make the process automatic, so when a donation is received, the system automatically redistributes it to other accounts, as configured by the maintainer.

I've worked on a design spec for such a system some time ago: https://github.com/boomhub/design

I'd gladly resume work on it if anyone else feels like this is the good way to go. Just start by creating an Issue :).

Re: Open-source Funding and Support Questionnaire

#30

Post by jldugger »

michaelt wrote: post #8

I donate about $150 to Canonical any time I download Ubuntu - but I'm pretty sure this is a flawed approach. After all, if I install a package, which depends on something which depends on something which depends on a library for left-padding strings, it's unlikely the library author sees a cent. And each of those levels doesn't just have developers - they have package maintainers, people doing bug triage, people main…

I wasn't aware Canonical, a for-profit company, could accept donations.
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