A great voluntary step in the right direction. But we know companies like EventBot are rare outliers. Congress could pass a law mandating all large companies that utilize FOSS to pay a tax deductible % of their net revenues to projects of their choice, for which they have no active maintainers. Even something as small as 0.1% would have a huge impact. I've been thinking about this for a while, would love to talk with others to organize such an initiative. FOSS is just like public infrastructure. Maintenance costs need to be shared. Innovation will accelerate immensely when this happens. Go ahead and downvote now.
Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
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Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#22Nice 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.
IMO no, it isn't. FOSS project need participation, so not money but resources. FOSS idea is that software is knowledge, something that must be public and grow through interaction (sharing). So if I have a need or a desire and I start implementing it others may or may not join because they share the same or similar need or desire. That's the FOSS way.
I start a new project, for instance to autoclassify documents. Ok users of my code will contributed in code, hosting, documentation simply because they share my similar need/desire. If there is interest there is no need for money, software is not a product nor a thing we can live on. It's shared knowledge. There are no "producer" nor "consumers", only participants.
If we have a single-man-show that say "hey, found me so I can keep the project up" it means that:
- we completely lost FOSS model, transformed to a sort of neopatronage, the erotic dream of proprietary vendors that dream a world of products to be sold and bought;
- the project is already dead not because of lack of founds but because of lack of participants, knowledge, interest.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#23Neat. I wrote about a similar idea a while back, which might add some other arguments if people want to pitch it to their own company: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/mar/9/one-percent-for...
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#24This 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.
I very much agree - we put most of our donations on a recurring basis. Oddly, a few projects specifically asked for a one-off donation because they felt like a recurring donation would make them feel like they "owed us" something. Of course, we don't have any conditions for our donation, but it was an interesting sentiment I hadn't expected to find.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#25Taking 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…
Hey Joe, I'm one of the founders of Open Collective (opencollective.com) Happy to help if you have any questions on how to implement or if we can help out somehow.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#26A great voluntary step in the right direction. But we know companies like EventBot are rare outliers. Congress could pass a law mandating all large companies that utilize FOSS to pay a tax deductible % of their net revenues to projects of their choice, for which they have no active maintainers. Even something as small as 0.1% would have a huge impact. I've been thinking about this for a while, would love to talk with…
If you force anyone to pay for it, it's no longer FOSS.
This isn't just a technicality, either, it will literally become something different with a whole different set of incentives involved for everyone in the ecosystem.
I am making no comment on whether this would be a positive or negative thing. Rather saying that you have to be careful about messing with established, organic systems with top down planning and tweaks through regulations, no matter how smart or well-intentioned you think you're being.
One observation is that when there's money involved, some things which otherwise are extremely simple become extremely complicated. Like, for example: ownership, collaboration, contributions, credit, etc - the implications of these all change drastically when there is money on the table and it changes the entire dynamic of everything in the system top to bottom. What comes out of those changes may not be what you want or expect.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#27You can donate to several projects via Software for the Public Interest, including PostgreSQL, Debian, ArchLinux, OpenEmbedded, LibreOffice, Jenkins, FFmpeg and OpenWrt.
https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/
> SPI acts as a fiscal sponsor to many free and open source projects ... we encourage programmers to use the GNU General Public License or other licenses that allow free redistribution and use of software and hardware developers to distribute documentation that will allow device drivers to be written for their product ... all donations made to SPI and its supported projects are tax deductible for donors in the United States.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#28Depending what their margins are, this is great. But wouldn’t it generally be a more sustainable to give x% from your profits to Y.
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#29A great voluntary step in the right direction. But we know companies like EventBot are rare outliers. Congress could pass a law mandating all large companies that utilize FOSS to pay a tax deductible % of their net revenues to projects of their choice, for which they have no active maintainers. Even something as small as 0.1% would have a huge impact. I've been thinking about this for a while, would love to talk with…
If you force anyone to pay for it, it's no longer FOSS. This isn't just a technicality, either, it will literally become something different with a whole different set of incentives involved for everyone in the ecosystem. I am making no comment on whether this would be a positive or negative thing. Rather saying that you have to be careful about messing with established, organic systems with top down planning and twe…
I'm pretty sure that one of Richard Stallman's ideas for free software funding in the 1980s was government grants, paid for with taxes—except I don't think he suggested that the taxes would be collected only from users of particular software, but rather from everybody.
(This does happen on a small scale because some government grants do go to academic researchers who are developing FOSS, and because U.S. government agencies can't hold copyright in their original work, so there are some codebases that have been released. But it's not like a large-scale software development government agency or grantmaking entity.)
Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IMO no, it isn't. FOSS project need participation, so not money but resources. FOSS idea is that software is knowledge, something that must be public and grow through interaction (sharing). So if I have a need or a desire and I start implementing it others may or may not join because they share the same or similar need or desire. That's the FOSS way. I start a new project, for instance to autoclassify documents. Ok u…
I support the FOSS idea that software is knowledge and should be public, but I think that a substantial amount of FOSS development has always been done professionally, on a paid basis. Ad-hoc bazaar-style contributions where someone happened to notice a way to improve something is probably the exception rather than the rule.
One reason for that is that many codebases are large and complex, and so even expert programmers won't automatically understand how to improve them substantially without a considerable amount of study. It's likely that many people will need to be paid for that investment, not because they ideologically believe that software should be property, but because it takes up a huge amount of their time and effort that they won't be able to apply elsewhere.
And indeed, when people have empirically looked into some of the larger FOSS projects they've found that a majority of the contributions were made by people who were being paid to make them—again, not because of any ideological aspect, but because being paid for it allowed them to invest a huge amount of time and focus and helped them to be more sophisticated and productive contributors.
(Edit: Just to be clear, I don't think that trying to convince people to use, develop, or procure FOSS instead of proprietary software is bad, or that, if successful, it won't also lead to more resources being applied to FOSS development. However, a lot of those resources will probably be mediated by money.)