- Transparent in funding spending
- Organization to accept funding
- What can we expect from donations?
- Provide progress via reporting back to the company
- Pay projects to help sustain
- Companies benefit in refactoring and recruitment
Chris DiBona said “Money is easy to find, if you can say how money converts to code”
Companies often want to help but are not sure where to pay. It’s hard to find the organization to make the payment to.
Ask for time from the company. Frame it in a way that benefits the company.
- Help govern projects that service charitable or public good
- Example: Selenium. SFC handles the funding, legal, conflict of interest policy.
- Ideology is part of conservancy
- They have problems with scalability
- Open Collective only takes 5% and the other 5% goes to _____?
- The recipient must be community (not single developer)
- FileZilla looked for SaaS
- Users get cut out with crypto
- Ethical Advertising - abide by RTD advertising guidelines. This is not easy. It’s hard to convince people that ethical advertising works. This requires meaningful ads to get revenue (Rachel from Drupal).
- People might not like ads to show when they aren’t paying.
Enable people to pay for an ad-free experience for others
Use the label “ethical ads” when displaying ads that are ethical. It demonstrates the values and builds trust with the audience.
- Being decentralized means code of conduct issues [Richard Littauer]
- We should make tools/processes/best practices
- Mozilla has open source archetypes
- Chaoss - metrics for open source projects
- Blog posts - context/goals, how to use, what actions taken + results
- Translations are an issue
- Open source guides at GitHub - something like that for sustain
- Interactive questionnaire to determine paths of sustainability based on location, personal preference and type/size of project
- “Outdated happens”
- Podcast - consume different based on learning styles
- “Sustain” brand is open
- Podcast is “low touch”
- Meetup is “high touch”
We are going to start a “sustain” podcast that discusses all things OSS sustainability. Initial panelists include Pia Mancini, Richard Littauer, and Eric Berry
Richard Stallman left things to be desired b/c sustainability wasn’t an issue back then.
A lot of people do not work on open source for their day job.
3 predominant models of funding:
If you have a piece of software available and someone comes to you and asks fuse in a different context they can pay.
Potential Downsides: extra energy for dual license, lawyers, time, market penetration is required. Project must be in super star open source mode before licensing can work. This takes a long time. 3-5 years of no income. This isn’t sustainable.
Provide a point of contact where users can get direct help.
Data is available freely. Drug dealer business model. First one is free, but when a company requires more, they can pay for it. “If you use this data in a commercial context, support the project via license”. The reason this works is because companies are averse to negative press. If someone was to decide not so support, twitter can be a great way to incentive them. Public shaming.
Open source project will provide consulting services to provide features / education / etc.
Potential Downsides: This violates business best practices b/c it’s diverting attention to other items instead of core product. Consultancy can end up taking all the work and time from the main product.
Grants are challenging due to: 1. Lots of work in getting a grant 2. Hard to get 3. Money comes in for a certain amount of time, then it goes away 4. Grants are good with mingling with other sources of income.
Good example is QGIS - many different companies are doing the work. This feature was funded by “x” company. End user pays for specific features. Money is also added for refactoring. Different end users are interested in adding value, but do not have the tech skills to do it. They pay others with the skills to do the work. Sponsored feature building or developer to represent interest of funder. The core team is now several companies. Sponsored development was the most exciting for the team b/c it’s being paid to make the project better.
Question: How do you divvy up funds to multiple people working on the same project?
Question: The end users are the bread and butter for the product. Do not charge them.
When we look at open source, we often only consider the tech and not the business model around it. In open source, we think of “users” and not “customers”.
4th model: Product - dangerous model to go down? People can mix project with product, and then when it comes time to sell, it gets confusing in what is being sold and expectations.
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How do we fund the dependencies of libraries along with the libraries themselves?
The mechanics around taking money for support - how do we take that and distribute it?
Is there a benefit of putting projects together in a coop or organization. Once you get 20-30 together with diversified revenue streams.
What didn’t work? The idea of the marketplace sounds cool in theory but I haven’t seen anything work.
One thing that we are taking about is after they become mature. We can forget those projects that are being bootstrapped.
1. “Sugar mama” business model. Get funding from someone else.
2. Be open and promiscuous with license, perhaps not the best idea. MySQL started with an open license. They eventually moved to license.
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Open Core model. Free software and paid portion. This works well as a business model, but maybe not as an open source project. There are exception to this that are respectable and not a trap for users. Eclipse is a good example of this.
“Only work on one thing” isn’t realistic when bills need to be paid. Consider “What is a suite of adjacent project that can have oss projects as part of it…” Maybe put limits on ‘arms’ of the core (reassures, etc). Maybe small team should have a singular focus, but don’t be afraid to put a couple together loosen load.
What is failure? Failure to scale? Failure in impact?
Perhaps aggregate similar type groups for projects that can help step in and take over pull requests. Current problem is that there are a bunch of forks. There can be 100 different versions of the same fix on npm or something like that.
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The view of some is that it’s a gift and I don’t care if you don’t like it.
Advertising is a proven way to support free software.
How do you maintain and pay your people without deciding which way your project goes. The big mess right now is ad driven.
If open source works, it’s because it’s driven by intrinsic motivations heavily.
The mechanism to eat in and out of an open source project is hard. Why open source is sustainable is because people decide to do it and are not told to do it.
People are not fungible but the economy is run on fungible resources.
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- Gifting mentality.
- Ethics and profit
- Clustering
How do you spread labor, revenue models.
New open source project to stamp out conservancies.
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Many different methods to create a more sustainable project. To create an overall solution for sustainability we do not have.