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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

#41

Post by joewadcan »

piamancini wrote: post #25
joewadcan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Hi Pia, we love Open Collective and are using it to donate to one of our sponsored projects. The platform is a great way to relieve a good deal of pain that OSS devs would have to endure in running a funded project.

One of the hardest things we've found is helping small projects (1 or 2 people) that don't have/need the structure of Open Collective but still could use the funds. PayPal is surprising bad since you can't even accept a recurring payment without going through hoops to set up a page/button.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#42

Post by cheriot »

I've always wished I could use the Professional Development budget employers give me to donate to open source projects. Not that I feel entitled to it, but I think some employers could get enough employee engagement and outside attention to justify it.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#43

Post by humanrebar »

mistrial9 wrote: post #36

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 restric…

> ...non-profit tax status is widely abused in the US by professionals who make management a lifetime occupation.

In what way? Any sources?

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#44

Post by jsmeaton »

xte wrote: post #35
schoen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softw…

And there are other projects (such as Django Rest Framework or even Django itself) where many people and companies derive significant value but either don’t have the time, knowledge, or resources to contribute directly. These projects advance by having people dedicated to maintainence. Often the only way to provide dedicated resources is through donations.

If these donations dried up then the projects would suffer. That’s not an outcome anybody really wants.

You seem to acknowledge that companies paying staff to contribute to OSS is ok. Why then is it not ok for companies to provide funding for a specialist to do the same thing?

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#45

Post by piamancini »

joewadcan wrote: post #41
piamancini wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hi Pia, we love Open Collective and are using it to donate to one of our sponsored projects. The platform is a great way to relieve a good deal of pain that OSS devs would have to endure in running a funded project. One of the hardest things we've found is helping small projects (1 or 2 people) that don't have/need the structure of Open Collective but still could use the funds. PayPal is surprising bad since you can'…

For those projects in countries with stripe, they can use open collective with their own stripe account. Fees are half since we don’t do fiscal sponsorship (they would self host) and the benefits is that we have the whole subscription / tiers / badges system set up. If you think some of this projects might be able to use it, feel free to send them my way. I’m happy to help them.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#46

Post by KindOne »

humanrebar wrote: post #43
mistrial9 wrote: post #36

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 restric…

> ...non-profit tax status is widely abused in the US by professionals who make management a lifetime occupation. In what way? Any sources?

Maybe something like this?

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/24/business/la-fi-bbb-2...

https://money.cnn.com/2013/10/10/news/nonprofit-ceo-pay/

https://www.charitywatch.org/top-charity-salaries

Some people abuse the position (like management) they are in and get get paid way too much money for the position.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#48

Post by dantiberian »

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…

I'll make a plug for https://sfconservancy.org who sponsor many open source projects including Clojars (which I'm a maintainer of), and Clojurists Together. They do great work and deserve your support.

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#49

Post by desdiv »

rixrax wrote: post #28

Depending what their margins are, this is great. But wouldn’t it generally be a more sustainable to give x% from your profits to Y.

My guess is that they want to preemptively dispel cynical low-brow dismissals such as: "that's effectively $0 because startups burning VC cash won't show a profit for years, if ever".

Re: Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue

#50

Post by samatman »

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 downvoted you, even though you make some very good points.

But fundamentally, you are wrong. Grandparent’s proposal doesn’t violate the Four Freedoms and would still be open source software.

In point of fact, DARPA funds the development of FOSS and isn’t the only organization which transfers taxpayer money to developers for FOSS.

Regardless of the other shortcomings of the proposal, making the software ‘no longer FOSS’ is not among them.

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