91–100 of 176 posts
The need to create this is the failure of tax based revenue model of the govt
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You can click my handle to see I've been a part of the HN community longer than yourself, I'm fully aware of the many associations I have /rant'd on YC and the dilution of help to their startups after they stopped heeding their own advice to "do things that don't scale"
> I've been a part of the HN community longer than Dang, got me beat, too. :) gg
Something I’ve been curious about for a while is why more universities don’t get involved in sponsoring critical projects. In theory it could provide an interesting non-academic path for students and professors and, as you’ve pointed out, the funding model of the U would make sense here. I’m curious… would you consider having a “faculty” of “tenured” maintainers who receive livable funding and support based on a hist…
Well, speaking in the case of the US, this would constitute product development which is well outside the scope of what a 501(c)(3) organization should be doing, which could thereby jeopardize their tax status? Or, in the case of a state-run university, this raises all kinds of issues regarding how tax money is being given away to random schmoes instead of benefitting the public at large. So, yeah, there's plenty of…
I see this more as a way to answer the question of things like the maintainers of OpenSSL or sudo. One approach is to fund the "project" and let it deal with all of these questions. Another approach would be to fund the people themselves. So, have a faculty of expert software maintainers, vetted by the governance structure of the OSE. Within that faculty, you could have "adjuncts" and "residents" who have a time-bound grant and set of obligations. If they are successful and their work continues to be relevant, they could eventually apply for one of a defined set of "tenured" positions. Those positions would guarantee them independence and a stable source of income in order to continue their role as a maintainer.
The goal of this "faculty" would be sustainable OSS maintenance (which involves both leadership and contribution), rather than publishing research and teaching classes. So, similar overall structure and approach, but differing goals.
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SV is not a geographical location in the sense I'm using it Taking capital, using it, taking fees, and then distributing leftovers... sounds like Trumponomics
We all - the OSE donors - are donating personal savings to make this work, and are directly interested to make this org as efficient as possible. Having skin in the game is best way to keep such nonprofits accountable. There is no leftovers or fees - all investment income from donations goes to open source, except for minimized operating expenses (e.g. accounting). It is run by the team of volunteers without salaries…
The README has a 2-3% gap between expected returns and outlays, surely that is not all going to accounting?
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The README on github "pay operating costs" is one place non-profits often find fraud. Getting the money into the market between donors and builders, now you have to pay professional investors. You don't get to 7-8% returns without equities, what happens if the market tanks? Why not build something super minimal that requires less management and operating costs? That doesn't have the market risk at the center of it al…
> "pay operating costs" is one place non-profits often find fraud. If you find it here please let us know.
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Not the person you replied to, but I imagine less gameable signals than stars would make sense. Download count, default installs in multiple distros, industrial use cases in the cloud all come to mind. Maybe giving money to the endowment gives you a vote? (Kills two birds with one stone.)
The details of how we're thinking about this are in: https://github.com/osendowment/model Happy to have you join us there to iterate on the model. We do prioritize input from paid-up members ofc. ;^)
Pay-to-play, this reinforces the SV mindset underpinning all of this.
Strongly recommend you revise this if you are trying to present yourself as egalitarian. Feedback and suggestions for improvement ought to be considered on the merits, not who it came from, especially if money is the differentiator. (setting aside the natural reputation based weighting)
Do I get this right that you can only nominate projects on Github? It should be known by now that a centralized platform like Github is the complete antithesis to open source.
We discussed this prior to launch, and obviously decided to launch as you see it. :) Our reasoning was that a) standardizing on GitHub URLs makes it easier to do automated analysis as part of the funding model, and b) any project important enough to matter will have at least a GitHub mirror. If you have counter-examples to (b), please comment them on GitHub (see what I did there?) or here and I will copy/paste for yo…
Out of ethical disagreement they switched completely to codeberg. And they are certainly not the only ones, given signaling on the fediverse by other EU citizens.
Over the last few years I've talked with hundreds of people in the dev community, and almost everyone shared the same concern: there's no sustainable funding for critical OSS maintenance, and without it the modern world runs on an increasingly fragile foundation. I have personal experience with university endowments, and at some point noticed that the open source world is remarkably similar to a top research universi…
In a different world we would incentivize tech giants to sponsor critical open source projects by turning their donations into more serious tax write offs, up to a certain amount, and reviewed by experts within the industry, affiliated and unaffiliated with the companies doing the funding.