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FOSS donations which reach the roots

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Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#31

Post by rndhouse »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #23

I was thinking about FOSS funding earlier, and it's actually quite a complex problem. Depending on the application and the users, it may have a different audience with more or less money, more or less users, and different types of users and use cases. And regardless of all that, what is the money going towards in each case? Does the developer (or developers) need a full-time salary, or part time, or just coffee money…

I agree with your view.

I imagine the distribution curve of funding. If it shifts one way, more developers become full time open source maintainers. Those who previously received nothing might start receiving coffee money.

If we can normalize a low friction mechanism for receiving funds for developers then the curve might be shiftable.

Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#32

Post by rndhouse »

alangibson wrote: post #30
tpoacher wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the two seem orthogonal issues. a foss collective could act as the enforcer of the openfare license, sure.

I see the issue as 'how do we get resources to OSS contributors'. Micropayments will never be more than a pittance as long as it has to compete with "free"

For a user of the software, free might have downsides that micropayment-funded-at-scale might not have.

If all users chip in $1/month, perhaps it adds up to something significant.

I think the challenge is to minimize the overhead costs of that process.

Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#33

Post by cromulent »

rndhouse wrote: post #20
mcherm wrote: post #16

This seems to be solving the wrong problem. As far as I can tell, the problem is not that we lack good mechanisms for making payments to open source developers and deciding how to allocate such funds. The problem is that cash donations are rare and small. A small handful of developers are supported very richly by being paid full-time tech employee salaries to work on open source; a handful of groups like the Python S…

I don't believe enough public software developers ask for or expect to receive donations. The macro goal of OpenFare is to put in place a mechanism that developers can use to receive funds for developing public software. If there is a demand for donations, it needs to be brought to the surface. I don't think we're adequately over that hurdle. Many content creators (youtubers, gamers, ...) get paid a lot. I think that…

Thanks for moving the needle.

Millions of companies use open source without contributing anything. I have a theory/daydream that:

a) a new foundation could be created with a new licence, whose only purpose is to accept payments and distribute them, with max x% overhead

b) that licence would stipulate that by paying a nominal yearly fee (e.g. 10 hours average developer cost in your country) you would get all-you-can-eat commercial use of such licensed software

would lead to software adopting that licence, companies paying that fee as a no-brainer, and in time would mean that those millions of companies would at least give some money, without warranty etc, that would be distributed somewhat fairly.

Which would no doubt be massively imperfect, but better than now.

Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#34

Post by rndhouse »

cromulent wrote: post #33
rndhouse wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe enough public software developers ask for or expect to receive donations. The macro goal of OpenFare is to put in place a mechanism that developers can use to receive funds for developing public software. If there is a demand for donations, it needs to be brought to the surface. I don't think we're adequately over that hurdle. Many content creators (youtubers, gamers, ...) get paid a lot. I think that…

Thanks for moving the needle. Millions of companies use open source without contributing anything. I have a theory/daydream that: a) a new foundation could be created with a new licence, whose only purpose is to accept payments and distribute them, with max x% overhead b) that licence would stipulate that by paying a nominal yearly fee (e.g. 10 hours average developer cost in your country) you would get all-you-can-e…

Umm, I could be wrong, and you might be referring to what I have in mind. But your dream sounds an awful lot like the OpenFare Commercial License (non-FOSS) idea:

https://github.com/openfare/openfare#micropriced-commercial-...

Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#35

Post by watwut »

alangibson wrote: post #29
watwut wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would turn open source into trick and bait fraud. What about ... slapping license you are actually ok with. It is 100% fine to sell software for money, closed source, open source, free software and completely restricted.

> That would turn open source into trick and bait fraud. That's not possible. It would all have to be clearly stated in the license. > What about ... slapping license you are actually ok with. You would have to slap on a licence saying the trade org represents you, etc.

The whole debate is about open source with licenses that do in fact allow corporations to legally use it for free. And open source advocates of the past spent a lot of effort ensuring them it is so.

There are licenses that don't allow such thing. And afaik, corporations avoid those libraries or pay for alternative license. The people however don't complain about these.

Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#36

Post by remram »

I don't understand why you would want this to be in the code. That is just not compatible with how source code versioning works.

If you, a contributor, want to change your funding preferences, you have to file a PR with the project? If you update your preferences, other branches of the same project can still have different preferences? If you fork a project, you have to put a meaningless commit in there to change funding to your fork project, a commit that will have to be reverted if you ever merge upstream or you subvert upstream funding?

Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#37

Post by jka »

remram wrote: post #36

I don't understand why you would want this to be in the code. That is just not compatible with how source code versioning works. If you, a contributor, want to change your funding preferences, you have to file a PR with the project? If you update your preferences, other branches of the same project can still have different preferences? If you fork a project, you have to put a meaningless commit in there to change fun…

I'm not sure it's the perfect solution, for reasons that relate mostly to the (necessary, useful) ability to modify and adjust rewards on a long-term and after-the-fact timescale, but I'll offer one reason why this could be a good idea:

It codifies the social side of enterprise ownership.

Not just for the participants in the enterprise itself, but for potential investors, users of the service, collaborators and business partners as well.

I've spent a bit of time wondering how to effectively measure and assign share value to FOSS project contributors, and have always looked to technical solutions. Things like metrics and weightings and machine learning models built in aggregate based on customer success, company growth, and revenue metrics across a wide range of projects, with the resulting models then used to evaluate individual market entrants.

It has never felt like that is a workable approach: every enterprise is different, and some would be unfairly overvalued as a result, and some would be unfairly devalued. It also might not generalize well to non-profit and community-interest companies.

And so the technical approach might all be too complicated: perhaps a better solution, as offered here, is simply to commit the ownership structure into a repository and then allow that to be edited like any other code.

Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#38

Post by WJW »

cromulent wrote: post #33
rndhouse wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe enough public software developers ask for or expect to receive donations. The macro goal of OpenFare is to put in place a mechanism that developers can use to receive funds for developing public software. If there is a demand for donations, it needs to be brought to the surface. I don't think we're adequately over that hurdle. Many content creators (youtubers, gamers, ...) get paid a lot. I think that…

Thanks for moving the needle. Millions of companies use open source without contributing anything. I have a theory/daydream that: a) a new foundation could be created with a new licence, whose only purpose is to accept payments and distribute them, with max x% overhead b) that licence would stipulate that by paying a nominal yearly fee (e.g. 10 hours average developer cost in your country) you would get all-you-can-e…

I want to be optimistic about this, but I don't think the result would be that every company would sign up for this. Rather, every company would implement their own 10-liner library for adding ANSI color codes to terminal output. The whole system of smallish dependencies you add in on an as-needed basis only works when the cost of adding them (INCLUDING the transaction costs, the cost of dev hours spend on convincing the procurement dept, etc etc etc) is cheaper than the cost in dev hours of just writing it yourself.

In addition to this, if a company pays for software the devs they buy it from had better respond quickly to security vulnerabilities and feature requests. The standard FOSS "this software is provided as-is, without even some guarantee of fitness for purpose" is not really something that would fly in a commercial contract.

Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#39

Post by wizzwizz4 »

jka wrote: post #37
remram wrote: post #36

I don't understand why you would want this to be in the code. That is just not compatible with how source code versioning works. If you, a contributor, want to change your funding preferences, you have to file a PR with the project? If you update your preferences, other branches of the same project can still have different preferences? If you fork a project, you have to put a meaningless commit in there to change fun…

I'm not sure it's the perfect solution, for reasons that relate mostly to the (necessary, useful) ability to modify and adjust rewards on a long-term and after-the-fact timescale, but I'll offer one reason why this could be a good idea: It codifies the social side of enterprise ownership. Not just for the participants in the enterprise itself, but for potential investors, users of the service, collaborators and busin…

> It codifies the social side of

There's the problem. The reason the thing you're replacing is so complicated is because it tries to codify some aspect of human behaviour. If your solution for handling (e.g. money) is radically different to the existing (financial) system (which this is), it will probably blow up in a big way.

Re: FOSS donations which reach the roots

#40

Post by jka »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #39
jka wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's the perfect solution, for reasons that relate mostly to the (necessary, useful) ability to modify and adjust rewards on a long-term and after-the-fact timescale, but I'll offer one reason why this could be a good idea: It codifies the social side of enterprise ownership. Not just for the participants in the enterprise itself, but for potential investors, users of the service, collaborators and busin…

> It codifies the social side of There's the problem. The reason the thing you're replacing is so complicated is because it tries to codify some aspect of human behaviour. If your solution for handling (e.g. money) is radically different to the existing (financial) system (which this is), it will probably blow up in a big way.

In practice I think it's likely that most law firms and jurisdictions who configure and accept business ownership structures enforce their terms in a nearly-as-restrictive manner. No doubt there are exceptions; a file format can be adjusted over time to handle those equally.

The file format should -- and to some extent, is already -- separated from the mechanism(s) of payment.

Version-controlled software development is social and provides history, evidence, and allows code to evolve over time; I like that this approach leverages those properties.

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