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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

#31

Post by OJFord »

eximius wrote: post #16
gowld wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% cor…

That would be fantastic.

Sometimes I've thought about donating, only to realise that its the website/readme/whatever that's making me think about it, and wondered how many projects I owe more to that don't have as good donation-grabbing copy that aren't getting as much.

And does it even make sense to support the project most valuable to you, or perhaps rather the most endangered that has any non-trivial value?

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#32

Post by pierotofy »

davnicwil wrote: post #26
pierotofy wrote: post #21

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…

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 agree with you on being cautious. I don't think it's a simple matter and yes there could be negative, unintended side effects. I think it would at least worthy of consideration and study, as lots of FOSS has many of the characteristics of public infrastructure and suffers from the free rider problem. Make the legislation narrow in scope as to limit potential downsides, evaluate results after a few years, go back if results were not as intended, or change it based on results.

Make the tax voluntary, give incentives to companies for paying it and keep the definition of FOSS.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#34

Post by nerdponx »

davnicwil wrote: post #26
pierotofy wrote: post #21

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…

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…

If you force anyone to pay for it, it's no longer FOSS.

If you force anyone who owns a copy of the software to pay for the source code, it's no longer FOSS. You absolutely can charge for said software.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#35

Post by xte »

schoen wrote: post #30
xte wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 programm…

Of course there are FOSS paid developers, for instance Intel pay few devs to work on Linux in order to have the hw they sell work properly. That's good. That's not someone that live on FOSS, that's a company that participate to a FOSS project because it need or desire it.

On contrary there are other companies that pretend to sell "open" product that are open like a bunker (to name a few try looking for business software from ERP to CRM to DMS etc) and those are not contributed to FOSS. Even if they both pay someone to develop FOSS code and publish it.

I hope to have being able to clarify that point in my limited English...

On complex codebase: FreeBSD codebase is not exactly simple and little, but it live on it own foot since decades, for instance? Emacs, Debian, ... the same. I do not intent that a project must run on casual contribution but simply that contributors must be subjects that need/desire such code so they contribute to it for their own sake like the Intel example above.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#36

Post by mistrial9 »

I support FOSS - please add some adult supervision here.. some developer teams have gotten angry and upset when someone gets paid (yes you read that), and on the other side, non-profit tax status is sometimes abused in the US by professionals who make management/fundraising a lifetime occupation with little emphasis on programs served. (sources on conviction of fraud are not always available on the net due to restrictive settlements)

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#37

Post by pierotofy »

nerdponx wrote: post #34
davnicwil wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you force anyone to pay for it, it's no longer FOSS. If you force anyone who owns a copy of the software to pay for the source code, it's no longer FOSS. You absolutely can charge for said software.

I think the point was not about whether you can or cannot charge for it, but on forcing somebody to pay for it (you can charge for FOSS, but nobody is obliged to pay you for it if they get a copy).

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#38

Post by chaostheory »

walterbell wrote: post #27

You 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 hardwar…

There's also Open Collective

https://opencollective.com/

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#39

Post by phkahler »

jacobobryant wrote: post #3
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.

Agreed, the funds will probably only make a difference if each OSS project gets at least enough to sustain a developer full-time. Otherwise the authors still have to maintain their day jobs. This was a great read: https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-stu...

I've been thinking about that analogy a lot lately. Eventually (or soon) software will be much like infrastructure. People might be paid to make specific improvements to public projects. This is already starting to happen in some places.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#40

Post by pizza234 »

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.

It really depends on the project and the contribution(s).

I have experience with many open source projects, and the large ones are generally closed to small new contributions (the ones that can be studied and written in a few hours). Most of the time, they will rot, even if they're useful (as in "solves an open issue" useful) and competently written.

Some time ago, there was discussion (commotion) about the years-old Python bug fix that was never mainstreamed. In the real open source world, that's routine. Even Torvalds once acknowledged this phenomenon; I stress that I'm talking about competently written code.

Once, the maintainers of a certain project, which is structured around donations, essentially ignored my company's development contribution offer, even if it was significantly more valuable than the donation(s) they typically get.

To summarize, for small projects, or those who desire traction, contributing by all means, but for large ones... money, or just shift the attention to smaller ones :-)

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