
A new funding model for open source software - colinmcd
https://vriad.com/essays/a-modest-proposal-for-oss-sustainability
======
imtringued
I expected Youtube Red to work like this. Each person has its own pool.
Channels should have been weighed by watch time with a minimum weight so that
small channels get something as well. If I watch one channel then that channel
should get the whole $10 (minus youtube cut).

Instead we got a stupid global pool based on global popularity that primarily
benefits PewDiePie even if I don't watch him. The compensation was barely
enough to cover the lost ad revenue so it failed to actually provide a viable
funding alternative for channels that aren't getting millions of views.

I hope the same thing doesn't happen with this model. If 100 people sign up at
$10/month to only support CatacylsmDDA and minetest then these two projects
should get $500 each (minus transaction fees). That money should not be
diverted to Angular, React, Vue, ... and then when its time for the two
mentioned projects they only get a pittance like $5 per month.

~~~
biztos
Doesn’t Patreon already solve this problem?

I might have selection bias because I support an OSS dev there but isn’t that
a pretty efficient way of directly supporting specific projects?

~~~
Ut_Pwnsim
Almost, except for the low end. It would be perfect if it grouped donations
and charges, and let you allocate any arbitrarily small amount to any creator.
As it is, it charges fees per creator you patronize, and limits donation to
being at least $1 per creator. I'd put $30/month there easily if I could
spread it over 100-200 creators with fees of $0.30 + 2.9% on the $30, but the
current $0.10 + 5% on each $1 donation means a lot less of my money is going
to the creator (who also gets charged those fees + 5-12% for Patreon services
when cashing out) than I think is useful, and that's even after downsizing the
pool of creators I'd like to donate to in order to meet the minimum $1/each.

To be fair, in looking this up, I did find it's a lot better than when I
cancelled my Patreon account, since at the time they were proposing $0.30 +
something% even for $1 donations. But the bundling of donations was my whole
point in using them, and when they clearly said they weren't going that way,
that was it for me. That's why I like the Brave/flattr/"sponsor pool" approach
so much more. It lets me support creators (especially web comics, bloggers,
and video creators) in a much more similar scale to the advertising model,
which many were on before, and for which I think we need a popular
replacement.

~~~
boogies
> As it is, it charges fees per creator you patronize, and limits donation to
> being at least $1 per creator. I'd put $30/month there easily if I could
> spread it over 100-200 creators with fees of $0.30 + 2.9% on the $30, but
> the current $0.10 + 5% on each $1 donation means a lot less of my money is
> going to the creator (who also gets charged those fees + 5-12% for Patreon
> services when cashing out)

Liberapay lets you donate a minimum of ¢1 ($0.01, and they also support 32
other currencies) a week [https://liberapay.com/about/faq#maximum-
amount](https://liberapay.com/about/faq#maximum-amount), and IIUC lets
creators choose the cut that goes to them

------
peteforde
I think that this essay is fundamentally brilliant, but doesn't come out and
yell the self-evident truth: the ONLY way this ever takes off is if Github
does it.

And man, do I ever hope that they do.

There's no other entity in the ecosystem that even approaches the role Github
plays, with all due respect to Gitlab and the rest of the also-rans. It'd be
wonderful if they did the same thing, but in the end, they are going to be the
contrarian 2%.

It's important to remember that GH sponsors isn't even out of beta, yet - you
still have to apply and make sure that all of your tax docs are in order.

One small proposal I'd make is that I suggest Sponsors and Pool could exist
happily in parallel. I believe that there's a meaningful difference between
being the patron of a developer and feeling like you're backing a creator with
feelings and a story and a family... and wanting to be a good citizen that has
an approved list of projects that I benefit from and want to support.

I can sponsor Matz, get his updates and feel good about knowing I am counted
as a supporter AND set aside $$$ per month to contribute to all of the tools I
use in my projects simply because it's the right thing to do and I want those
projects to exist for the long term. They are completely different
initiatives. Patreon vs Humble Bundle, if you will.

Perhaps most critically, Github could keep absorbing the cost of processing
payments to sponsored developers but also announce that they plan to hold back
3% of your monthly pool amount to cover CC processing fees. I think most
people would be more than fine with this.

But if Github isn't on board, this is all just speculative fiction. Please, if
you work at Github, make this happen.

~~~
jmiskovic
So we delegate complete control over open source financing channel to
Microsoft, because it's most conveniant option? Sounds a bit insane.

I do use both GitHub and its Sponsors feature, but I'm still hoping for open
source community to come to consensus to use a service from non-profit
organization like Mozilla or EFF.

~~~
ubercow13
This wouldn't prevent you sending cash to the developer in an envelope, just
like Github existing doesn't prevent you hosting your project elsewhere

~~~
jmiskovic
To send someone money I'd have to know their address (not viable). If they
only accept money through GitHub sponsorship, then I'm prevented from donating
in any other way.

Which option do we (content creators) endorse? We definitely need to
transition to better funding model. Seeking out donations and sponsorships is
frustrating and that time could be better spent. GitHub Sponsors managed to
solve most problems on technical level, but I'd like to see other options.

~~~
GordonS
> To send someone money I'd have to know their address

You could just ask them? I recently donated to an OSS project for which the
maintainer didn't publish any means of accepting donations - I simply asked
and he sent his PayPal address.

Another option would be for maintainers to publish a Bitcoin address in their
profile - but again, if not already present, just ask.

~~~
Kaze404
They're talking about physical address, as that's what the parent suggested.

~~~
GordonS
Yes, I got that; I was suggesting you can just ask the author for their
address or other means of payment, but in addition made a suggestion of
authors publishing Bitcoin address (in reality many would likely prefer fiat
currency though).

------
inputmice
Two issues here:

Models like these existed. Flattr and Liberapay. The latter had to switch away
from the pooling model because turns out when you do the pooling you
essentially become a bank and that’s difficult to do legally.

Those models only work if users actually visit your website or your Github.
I’m developing an app targeted at end users and I bet 90% of them have never
been on Github or even know what that is.

~~~
black_puppydog
I totally take your second point. But for the niche of apps that _is_
developed for tech folks (think sth like ripgrep) this seems pretty viable.

For user-facing apps, it should always be the platform(s) distributing it that
should have a pool mechanism. So google for android apps, Apple for iOS. Yeah,
I know, that'll be a cold day in hell...

PC software is a tough one there since there's no _one_ app store. Which is
the PC platform's strength, but yeah, that makes a pool difficult. As you
said, Liberapay tried something like this. Would be cool if something like
this could become big enough to justify the legal legwork necessary for this.

------
kumarvvr
I remember a company doing this some time ago.

You have an account, filled with a monthly recurring amount, what ever amount
that is. Then you click these "contribute" buttons, placed by the open source
project webmasters in their pages.

Each click of button registers that project to your account and the site
distributes your monthly amount among those registered projects.

Not able to recollect the name of the company though. Spreadrr, or Poolr or
something.

Edit: Another comment got it. It's Flattr

------
colinmcd
OP here. I'd love to see something like this exist. Let me know if it does
already, or if someone is trying, and I'll link it below.

EDIT: This model is used by Flattr [0]. Unfortunately Flattr isn't targeted at
open-source software; an OSS-specific approach (ideally implemented by a
highly visible, established player) is (probably) necessary for something like
this to reach its potential.

[0] [https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)

~~~
quadrangle
What you propose exists. It's [https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)

It hasn't made enough impact over its long history. That's not necessarily
because the model doesn't work. However, it does set up a zero-sum game. Each
click to another project takes away from the ones you already support. Thus,
it won't really change the overall economic situation much.

There are also foundations that sponsor multiple projects. E.g. Apache. There
are meta-level projects like Ubuntu. In _principle_ these larger downstream
projects should do what's necessary to support their upstream dependencies.
That doesn't always happen though.

Tidelift does funding that emphasizes awareness of upstream dependencies and
supporting them.

## On microdonations and fees

This is a payment-processor issue. I believe that Stripe and some others have
the _capacity_ to process aggregate charges without all separate. So, if in a
platform, you donate $10 to 15 different projects and so do many others, they
could charge you the _one_ charge of $10 and give the recipients their
_single_ payment from everyone. Each donor would get one processing fee, not
one for every project they support.

This is _key_. And it cannot be solved at the platform level because holding
funds in escrow is only feasible if you are a limited specific set of
incorporated projects (that's what Open Collective helps support, they can do
this approach with one donation fee for _each_ Collective you donate to, even
though the Collective could include a lot of projects. A specific Collective
there could _offer_ your system.

In other words: Open Collective could do what you're asking somewhat. You
donate to a Collective. They don't just have the money for _any_ of their
members, the Collective offers a tool for you to vote on which of the members
you want to support.

That's another way to see your proposal: An org that accepts donations and you
get to vote on which projects they give grants to.

## On downstream vs upstream funding

Anyway, the bigger problem in free/libre/open funding is that it relies too
much on _proprietary_ end-user products that have paywalls or ad-driven
business models. If a product is designed to reach all the way to downstream
users, everyone _can_ freeride. So, freerider problem, game-theory dilemmas.

You might be interested in the ideas at
[https://snowdrift.coop](https://snowdrift.coop) which is aiming to build
downstream patronage via _crowdmatching_.

The wiki there also has reviews of the issues:

[https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/existing-
mechanisms](https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/existing-mechanisms)
[https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics](https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics)

and this is a thorough review of all the existing funding platforms:
[https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-
crowdfundi...](https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding)

There's a long history of failed efforts, some mentioned at
[https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-
research/history/software](https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-
research/history/software)

Cheers

~~~
jacques_chester
One thing that Flattr and many others like them got wrong, in my view, was
collecting too little and levying too little from it. Too many schemes were
$5/month or $3/month, then collecting 10% or thereabouts. You cannot build a
sustainable business with high risk exposure for less than a fraction of cup
of coffee per customer per month. But people kept bloody trying.

------
jjcm
If anyone is interested, I have a simulator for pool-based funding as I'm
working on a side project that uses the same approach:
[http://syd.jjcm.org/soci/](http://syd.jjcm.org/soci/)

My project is essentially a reddit-esque site that hosts
images/blogs/video/audio content. Each vote on a piece of content gives it one
share of your funding pool for that month. The pool based approach is
definitely the best for simple usability, but there's another aspect to it as
well: it means you weigh your vote more. In the case of a social sharing/news
site, low-effort content will get upvoted less, as you have to consider that
every vote will dilute the pool.

I'm really bought in on this as an overall concept and I think it's something
that will be extremely healthy for the web overall. Previously this was a
model that was used by Flattr, but they had a major issue that not everyone
was on their platform, so often times creators wouldn't get money out of a
donation (because they didn't know the donation existed). I definitely agree
with the author here that if this were to be done, Github themselves would
have to implement it. As soon as a third party who isn't hosting the content
implements it, an enormous percentage of creators wont know they have funding
waiting for them and things fall apart.

------
musingsole
Everyone thinks they deserve a dollar and can never imagine that the relative
value of their code is effectively zero no matter how much it solves a
particular problem.

>Big projects — operating systems, frameworks, CMSs, or fully self-hostable
applications — are in a privileged position to extract more value from their
users, especially corporate ones

Big projects aren't privileged to extract more value. They're privileged to
solve enough of a problem for enough people that the scraps thrown their way
amount to a meaningful warchest. Corporate big projects are privileged to
extract wealth. That's the part that pays crazy SWE salaries.

~~~
colinmcd
You seem to be reacting against the term "privileged" in a way I didn't
intend. I don't mean to say that they have some unfair advantage. They just
have a more foundational role in the tech stack of the products built on top
of them, so companies have a bigger incentive to keep the wheels turning.

~~~
jart
I'd love to learn more specific details about your leveraging strategy. Keep
in mind even someone like Torvalds only serves at the pleasure of big
corporations. Let's keep gift economies in alignment with public interest
folks. It's difficult to imagine a competent developer needing to squeeze
people, for cash money to pay rent, considering how much coders get paid.

~~~
aspenmayer
Two-thirds of projects on GitHub have 1-2 maintainers, as of 2015.[1][2] I’m
sure many of those people are in other areas or occupations, or in other
countries, where these high-paying jobs may not exist. Some people simply
don’t wish to work at a company, and those folks still may produce value to
those other than themselves.

Let’s not appeal to productivity too hard; learners and those of lesser coding
capability also create value in the form of skills and knowledge.

It’s hard to identify and quantify those whose contributions helped most, but
I feel all contributions are worthwhile. Not all code may be tip-worthy, but I
don’t feel chagrin toward those collecting, however they do so.

> Only three projects—less than 3 percent of the study’s sample—had more than
> 50 contributors.[1]

[1] [https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-
maintainer...](https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer-
projects/)

[2]
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462)

~~~
musingsole
> those folks still may produce value to those other than themselves.

They may, but my point here is that the reason a corporate SWE's code is so
valuable isn't because of the code itself. It's because of the ecosystem that
the SWE and corp are a part of. That ecosystem serves to multiply a
meaningless block of code into a couple million dollars that can be split
nicely with all the non-coders who made it useful. Without that ecosystem, an
open source project can never hope to monetize to the same level. That big
open source projects have substantial funding is an effect of being so
imminently usable in those million dollar ecosystems that the forgotten scraps
of the corporations are enough to sustain them.

~~~
aspenmayer
I generally agree with your interpretation, but I don’t see what you’re
advocating for. What do you think are the flaws/benefits of big open source
projects receiving the lion’s share of open source donations? What funding
model makes sense for those smaller projects? For many groups doing
fundraising, the work of doing the fundraising itself is extremely labor and
time intensive compared to the actual work the group does. Fundraising costs
incentivize projects to become bigger and higher-profile to enhance their
fundraising ability, but this increase in size and reach may not be helpful to
all projects in all ways equally. More bugs may be squashed from more eyes;
more cooks in the kitchen may make for lower quality standards of releases.
It’s all a double-edged sword. I’m curious about your thoughts on this
conundrum.

------
dimitrios1
I like the idea but instead of pools going arbitrarily every which way or to
the discretion of the donator, it should be automatically applied across that
open source project's dependencies as well. If I am open source software A,
and I make ample use of open source software B within my project, your pool
donation should automatically apply some to B, relative to it's usage in the
project.

~~~
colinmcd
Agreed this would be nice, though this layer of complexity introduces a bigger
attack surface for bad actors. They could try to get their modules listed as
dependencies of popular projects to piggyback on their downloads. On the flip
side there are some low-level tools (say, the `stylis` CSS autoprefixer) that
are almost never used in their "raw form" but are the backbone of several
massively popular projects. It's a tricky balance.

~~~
JimDabell
Is this really a concern though? In this situation, adding a dependency to
your project means making a decision to divert some of your funding to them as
well. It gives an incentive to avoid adding unnecessary dependencies.

~~~
NameDoesntExist
Workaround: fork all your dependencies with minimal if any changes and add
them back to your main project.

This allows you to cut-off the trickle-down funds in bad faith.

~~~
OJFord
If you're willing to do the extra maintenance of keeping them up to date (or
else on the hook for their issues) ... maybe that's 'ok'?

I don't mean that it's a service worth paying for, just that maybe it doesn't
seem like it's worth the extra (presumably minor) cut of initial donation and
people wouldn't really do it (more than once / for long / on a big project
with significant donations) anyway.

------
anurag
It's worth looking at Tidelift ([https://tidelift.com](https://tidelift.com)):
they're making the model work with pooled corporate subscriptions that create
the right incentives.

~~~
dblock
That actually seems to be working. I maintain ruby grape, a mid sized project.
We get $144/month from Tidelift. As more companies signup for corporate
sponsorship the $ amount increases. It’s a pool.

------
twoleftfeets
I guess I'm old. GOML!

This doesn't sound like a way for open source projects to get money to me. It
sounds like a way to get thousands and thousands of bad developers to spam me
to support their tiny open source no effort project. For them to fork someone
else's project and ask for money for their fork. etc...

Note, a similar thing already happens on patreon where people ask for support
for their piracy activities. They run a blogspot blog with pirated
movies/anime/porn and expect you to sign up to support them on patreon for
helping you pirate stuff.

Basically the easier you make it collect money from random people the stronger
the incentive is for bad actors to try to get some of it. I don't have a
solution but in my defense I do sponsor 3 open source projects at $!00 a month
each. But I'm sure my money is going to people/teams who are really dedicated
to their project and not just one hoping for some coffee money for their tiny
thing.

------
boogies
> That's because there's currently no way to make a donation to the abstract
> concept of "open source software"

This isn't absolutely true, there are the FSF and the Software Freedom
Conservancy, who fund many medium-ish projects, including ones that include
some small utilities.

~~~
Galanwe
And also fund a lot of evangelists that don't code at all but spend their time
playing open source cops on mailing lists, forums and tech conventions.

~~~
boogies
(IOW, their idea of supporting the _abstract idea_ of open source software.
Although I'm not sure who you're talking about: Stallman I guess fits the
description now but wrote his fair share of code in his day.)

------
dnautics
What would be fantastic is if this service scaled contributions across
projects whose code _you are actually using_ in your repos.

Minor nitpick: I don't think a badge is really considered virtue signaling
because you've already put your wallet where your mouth is.

~~~
colinmcd
I like that idea too. Though it definitely may lead to some troubling
scenarios where bad actors try to get their modules listed as dependencies of
popular projects to piggyback on their downloads. You could alleviate this by
not funding dependencies of dependencies but there are some low-level tools
(say, CSS autoprefixers) that are rarely used in their "raw form". It's
tricky.

~~~
dnautics
I see this being a major issue in the NPM ecosystem, lol. One thing is you
could make transitive dependencies strictly opt-in, or have a decay function.

~~~
SCLeo
Or each package's maintainer can set a proportion for each of its
dependencies, so that every time a donation is received, a certain amount of
that donation is automatically transferred to those dependencies according to
the proportion set by the maintainer. The donation sent to those dependencies
is then propagated to their dependencies automatically according to ratios set
by the maintainers of those dependencies.

------
andrewstuart
The problem here is marketing.....

"sponsor pools" "sponsorships" and "donations" are all words that imply
optional, not required requests for money as a favor. i.e. begging.

The way to monetise open source is for payments to be required in some way.
i.e. provide a core feature set that is valuable on its own and monetise by
providing additional valuable features under a commercial license.

~~~
sqrt17
You're missing the point here. The point is not to find ways to sell/rent out
software (these already exist) but to monetize open source projects in a non-
forced, non-compulsory way.

So, instead of selling your songs on a CD for a fixed price, that approach
would be more like busking or having your music streamed on music services
(Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc.). It's unlike begging in that you
do provide valuable goods with the expectation that the community is paying,
and that providing better value (more catchy songs) will get you more revenue.

Non-required payments already work ok in a number of shapes for music and
video creators, and we've seen some success in terms of feature bounties and
direct sponsorship in software.

Given that enough people are willing to support the software they use, there
are two things missing in the equation

\- an entity collecting, pooling, and distributing money in a transparent
(enough) fashion - the prime candidate would be GitHub because it already has
sponsorships and the necessary bits of information

\- an attribution model; and this is a bit harder for software than for music
or videos where you can simply use watchtime as an attribution metric.
Software has a more complex dependency graph, and arguably open source
software is the silver bullet that allows us to stand on the shoulders of a
herd of giants instead of implementing our bloom filters, routers etc.
ourselves. This is a hard problem, and arguably one in danger of not being
solved "correctly" in that an entity collecting money could do something
intransparent and unfair and people might still sign up because it's the only
game in town and they want the warm fuzzy feels and the convenience of not
having to write 0.50$ checks to a gazillion small-project maintainers.

------
fermienrico
This is amazing and I have a gut feeling that it will revolutionize OSS.

I usually want to give say $30/month to OSS (personal use) and as a
professional, I would have the authority to donate $300/month.

This would be great to not worry about individual donations, and just based on
one-click or even just divide up the funds equally amongst all of my starred
projects.

------
andrekorol
I recommend taking a look at Gitcoin [0] and quadratic funding [1].

[0] [https://gitcoin.co/](https://gitcoin.co/)

[1]
[https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html](https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html)

------
ahnick
_The root of the problem is that open-source donations are made on a per-
project basis. To support a project via GitHub Sponsors or OpenCollective, you
must create hyet another auto-renewing monthly subscription for each project
you want to support._

I don't think the author's description of GitHub Sponsors is exactly correct.
Technically, the sponsorship is at the user/organization level, so if you make
a donation it goes to the organization/user, which may have MULTIPLE projects
going on. This is the way I have set it up for our company Plyint
([https://github.com/sponsors/plyint](https://github.com/sponsors/plyint)).

Although I would very much like GitHub to implement a pool of
organizations/users, which is maybe what the author meant?

~~~
colinmcd
Good point, that characterization isn't exactly accurate. Though the first-
order point is that you have to go through a separate "checkout process" each
time you want to sponsor a new thing.

I actually think it's important that the pools themselves contain _projects_
not _users /organizations_. There are definitely complications I hadn't
considered if multiple entities/organizations are listed as maintainers of a
particular project. Presumably the set of maintainers would have a way to
"split" the incoming donations among themselves as they see fit.

[edit] I added a footnote to address this.

------
z3t4
The problem with OSS funding is that it becomes a popularity contest. There
need to be a model that is not zero sum.

~~~
wyattpeak
I think this is probably inherent to donations, at least if you're targeting
individuals. My priorities can be shifted with respect to what I might donate
to, but I'm not likely to substantially increase the total amount I donate in
a given year.

------
katzgrau
> The marginal cost — both psychological and financial — of supporting
> additional projects would drop to zero

Great idea for redistributing existing funds and preventing winner take all,
but the bigger hurdle is increasing the overall funds (eg, getting more people
to give a shit in the first place)

I have a lot of experience with non profits and independent projects, and
funding success is partly based on merit, but more frequently on how clear,
consistent and obvious calls to action for funding are.

At some point it stops being a problem you can fix with software. It's not
like there's a mountain of funding that just needs to be unlocked. It's more
about growing the funding in the first place, which when successfully done (in
my experience) starts to look a lot like aggressive marketing, advertising,
and tweaking of missions to appeal to whatever is hot/fundable at the time,
similar to the VC industry. True story, and kind of an anecdote that money
turns everything to shit eventually.

------
jacques_chester
I termed this model "microsubscriptions" when I was pursuing it in the context
of website funding.

There are difficulties.

 _Gaming the system_

Folks will absolutely distort their software, buy fake github stars, spam out
bazillions of typosquatting packages etc. We know this because there is
already a weak financial incentive to subvert: supply chain attacks for
cryptominers. Direct cash will be a much stronger incentive for fuckery.

 _Banking_

In general, financial institutions don't like services that aggregate and
transmit funds. They attract extensive regulatory burden and more importantly,
they attract fraud and chargebacks.

Chargebacks and fraud are expensive to deal with, banks hate it, so they
generally tell you to just sod off entirely.

 _Regulation_

You are on the hook too. Anti money laundering laws are complex and can come
with criminal charges for failures. Taxes are complicated and you need to keep
correct books. Got it wrong? Too bad, you owe the taxman cash you don't have.

 _Credit card money laundering in general_

This is where someone with a stolen card uses your service to launder money
taken from it. They sign up with the card, patronise their own software, then
run off with the cash. Later a chargeback arrives which is levied against
_you_ , not the attacker.

The easiest defense is to limit the subscription amount, so that an attacker
with a stolen card can't benefit much. But they can still use you to test that
the card is active. A second defense is to hold the funds for a period of
time, so that you can pay chargebacks. Even so, you will be looked at poorly
by any banks or processor companies if your chargebacks pile up, regardless of
whether you could cover them or not.

 _Trusts_

This one is the biggest mistake I see, and I see it again and again.

If you receive money from person A so that you can pay it to person B on A's
behalf, you are a trustee. You generally don't need a document to become a
trustee and you don't even need to _intend_ to be a trustee. Trusteeship
arises from the facts.

What does trusteeship entail? Fiduciary duty. That is a high bar and you
almost certainly don't meet it.

Mingling funds from multiple donors without incredibly scrupulous accounting?
Problematic. Mingling donor funds with your own funds? You're in deep shit.

Further: trusts have purposes, which the trustee has to abide by. These again
can arise from the mere facts. If you said you would take funds from A to pay
to B, that's _all_ you can do with it. Can't find B? Stiff shit. B doesn't
want the funds? Stiff shit again. You now have money that is like radioactive
waste: it's dangerous, you are responsible for it and it won't go away.

\----

In _general_ I like microsubscriptions as a model for _some_ things. I spent a
lot of time, emotion and treasure on doing it myself. But it is harder than it
looks.

~~~
namibj
Yes, _if you take credit cards,_ you'll have loads of issues. But for example
supporting the eurozone (most of the EU) is both easier and better
accomplished by only taking SEPA push transfers. While there is fraud risk,
it's significantly less and shouldn't cost you as the processor. Worst case, I
think, it'd be the cents you have to pay to send the money back.

And regarding the issue with being a trust: sure that's a thing, but contract
terms should be able to fix the problem by making you send it back (minus
nominal fees?) if the designated recipient's registered IBAN refuses your
payout. And just don't offer to collect money for anyone who didn't register.

~~~
jacques_chester
My point on trusts is that very few people consider them and wind up in the
default arrangements. Which are less than ideal.

But setting up an explicit trust arrangement needs to be done with _great_
care as well, especially since trust laws vary from place to place.

------
maelito
Change "open source projet" with "online newspaper" and everything applies.

I want to be able to give 20€/month to whatever news article I read with just
one click. Instead of liking something, I want to be able to pay quality
writings.

The browser is the perfect way to do this. I don't understand why Mozilla did
not implement that.

Brave is close, but Brave wants us to view ads. I don't want to pay for a
newspaper article talking about climate change through watching their ad for
the latest diesel SUV. I want to pay them, but without filling my bank details
for a monthly payment.

In France, the largest national newspaper lemonde.fr lets you subscribe in 1
click for 1€, but then you have to send them an tracked postal letter costing
7€ to cancel your subscription.

------
TimJRobinson
I would love something like this + automatically adding all the NPM packages I
use to the pool (or similar for Cargo, PIP etc). So that I don't have to
manually find the packages, and can easily contribute to everyone who's code
I'm using.

~~~
GordonS
What about transitive packages? With NPM in particular, I have a feeling that
donations would be diluted to the point of being meaningless.

------
andrey_utkin
This addresses the lack of convenience in existing tooling, but not the core
of the problem of FOSS sustainability.

I believe to solve the problem two things must happen:

* Users evaluate how exactly much they benefit from particular software and services, and how much they'd lose in utility if their option of choice disappeared.

* Maintainers find out what matters to real users and offer them good bargains to fund their development roadmap and maintenance service level.

See [https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-
project/message/3735cd917...](https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-
project/message/3735cd91750a1214443a283546391b72)

------
noxer
Concept is very similar to Coil.com s "donation" for web content. But Coil
actually does "pay by usage" and should therefore be more fair at distributing
the money. Its hard to define usage for an open source project.

------
wolco
It could work for a select group. The reason why other donation models are
successful is because they offer something (insider access/game earlier) that
makes you feel special without the badge.

~~~
colinmcd
This is something else I've been thinking about! Caleb Porzio's post from last
month describes a Patreon-style "insider access" service built on top of
GitHub Sponsors. I think it's a phenomenal idea. Ideally GitHub would also
implement something like that "natively" as part of the Sponsors program.

------
unsungNovelty
I am glad people are thinking more about Open Source software and how to fund
them. I think among other problems, Open Source have 2 main root issues when
it comes to funding.

1\. Silver bullet is a myth. The OSS users are forced to use one medium for
funding the software. Maybe Patreon, Github Sponsors, Paypal, Librepay and
more not than one or all of them in most cases. Using more funding method have
their own challenges, but it depending on the prject should definitely be more
than one.

I take the inspiration from POSSE concept from Indieweb
([https://indieweb.org/POSSE](https://indieweb.org/POSSE)). It talks about
publishing your content (blogs etc) once and distributing through various
channels like FB, Twitter, HN etc instead of forcing people to your website
which is just one medium. We should give the same level or freedom and choices
to people who want to donate to your OSS project so that they will use a
method which they are already using. Reducing the friction. And Flattr or the
new proposed will only be one of the ways or should be one of the ways.

2\. A lot of people don't know the difference between FOSS/FLOSS and OSS.
Especially people after the Millennials (i think). To them, it is a FREE
material. It is not! We should make awareness about what free software
movement was.

Before you jump the gun here, please read the GNU page about selling free
software -
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html).

Open Source forever have been about "free as in freedom" not about "free as in
beer". The whole reason for it to start was because the software was not
allowed to be redistributed and modified among other things. There definitely
was freeware and other software models which were FREE even before Open Source
was coined. Stop using FOSS/FLOSS everywhere if you don't mean it and make
awareness about the differences about FOSS/FLOSS and OSS.

The effort and time of the maintainer should be rewarded with whatever
he/she/they want, either recognition or money. We should make it a new normal.
Making money from OSS should be OK. Being rich (if you can that is :D )from
OSS should be OK.

Hope funding in OSS gets more momentum!

------
bullen
I'm going to offer users something if they sponsor the project by looking in
the GraphQL data. Today there are no simple ways of just asking github: "for
how much $ does user X sponsor user Y" and much less per project!

I think that is the only way to get open source revenue! Unfortunately that
means you either need a service or some closed source part that guarantees
that revenue.

------
galaxyLogic
What happens when an open source-project gets funding? How is the money
distributed inside the project, among different contributors?

~~~
colinmcd
I added a footnote to address this. I admit I hadn't thought this bit out
fully.

Basically there needs to be a mechanism by which the set of maintainers divvy
up the money.

A pattern I expect will arise (actually it probably already exists): there can
be different "contribution tiers", a fixed percentage of the proceeds go to
each tier, for each tier the allocated percentage is be distributed evenly.

------
pabs3
Sponsor pools sounds a bit like snowdrift:

[https://snowdrift.coop/](https://snowdrift.coop/)

------
smashah
An odd side effect of trying to monetise an open source project is another
repo popping up just outright copying it with no attribution. Amazingly, some
people expect that if you make an open source project on GitHub therefore
every single feature related to that project should also be open sourced. It's
very disheartening.

------
C50VGicCxmHC
I think the open source model is fundamentally flawed and enables the big
corporations to profit at the cost of the little people. The large
corporations benefit disproportionately from open source as opposed to the
maintainers. I thing what would be useful would be a programmer's "guild".

* There is a yearly due - say $100/year

* When you write software, you assign a license to anyone in the programmer's guild to be able to use that software. The requirement is that you have to contribute back changes.

* Only people in the programmer's guild can use that code.

* Anyone can join the programmer's guild, as long as they pay.

* A guild member can allocate up to half their year due to support a guild open source project or projects.

* You use the annual dues, to support widely used infrastructure that a lot of programmers are using. A big example would be NNTP

This has number of very nice benefits. First of all, it ensures a massive pool
of money to support worthwhile open source projects, that everybody is using
(think NNTP, or projects like that). With that pool of money, we could add
benefits for guild members such as employment contract legal review,
immigration assistance, etc. If you increased the annual dues, you would be
able to do more, but at the cost of excluding more people.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Everything is fundamentally flawed so it doesn’t say much to state it.

But personally I think the open source model has been wildly successful.

Before open source you needed to get a job working for a company to see any
really cool code.

Now you can see and play with a world class version of almost anything: a
world class OS, a world class 3D rendering engine, a world class video
editor... it’s awesome.

------
muazzam
Yet another model that has probably been never used on high scale: letting
people sponsor tickets (GitHub issues). The donation would go to the
contributor who closes the ticket to the satisfaction of the main
contributors. The amount, of course, will be decided by how a ticket is
perceived as important.

~~~
OJFord
What about the satisfaction of the person who raised the issue?

~~~
muazzam
Of course, I should've added that but that's not the main point.

------
kseifried
The entities that most benefit monetarily from OpenSource are companies that
sell products and services based on them. Why would they contribute to this?
It's an added expense they don't have to pay. In fact a major tenant of
OpenSource is that you can choose to make money or give. it away for free, but
you generally have to release the source code, which is what the companies
want, so again, why would they pay for it? To make a more sustainable
ecosystem? Hahaha.

As for individuals funding this, Open Source developers are not cheap, to make
it worthwhile (e.g. comparable to a part time contracting gig) we're talking a
minimum of tens of thousands of dollars per year per developer. We're not
going to get anywhere near these numbers with individuals contributing.

I write this as the guy that tried to help the OpenSource world by assigning
CVEs for security issues (several thousand...), I'd have had to charge 1-200$
per CVE to make a living at this while I was doing it. That's not going to be
sustained by personal donations. And even though a CVE will easily save
companies a few tens to hundreds of dollars (time spent tracking all these
issues when they don't have CVEs...) there's no way I'm going to get companies
to pay me.

The good news is that this doesn't really matter. We've had many decades of
OpenSource, there's enough good people working on this because it's their
passion/hobby/day job that it's mostly sustainable on average, but specific
bits may be sickly, and that's ok.

Some related listening and reading:

Episode 205 – The State of Open Source Security with Alyssa Miller from Snyk
[https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/07/12/episode-205-the-
sta...](https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/07/12/episode-205-the-state-of-
open-source-security-with-alyssa-miller-from-snyk/)

Episode 185 – Is it even possible to fix open source security?
[https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/03/02/episode-185-is-
it-e...](https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/03/02/episode-185-is-it-even-
possible-to-fix-open-source-security/)

Episode 182 – Does open source owe us anything?
[https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/02/10/episode-182-does-
op...](https://opensourcesecurity.io/2020/02/10/episode-182-does-open-source-
owe-us-anything/)

------
ggurgone
I like this idea! I had a similar one a while back
[https://giuseppegurgone.com/github-sponsors-oss-
sustainabili...](https://giuseppegurgone.com/github-sponsors-oss-
sustainability/#paid-packages)

------
justjosias
Another good idea would be for projects to list other projects they depend on,
and set aside a certain amount of their GitHub sponsor income to go to those
projects. Thus Users -> Projects -> Dependencies flows naturally with the same
model.

------
EGreg
If I may, a totally different way of funding open source projects is possible
too, that doesn’t rely on charity mechanisms: I will submit it to HN now as a
link under the title “A Decentralized Model for Funding Open Source”. Look tor
it there.

------
transitivebs
Any approach to OSS funding based on donations fundamentally doesn't scale
because the economic incentives just aren't there.

Whether you're donating to one person, one project, or a pool of projects, the
business model just doesn't work out.

------
joelwass
Have you checked out flossbank, it feels like an automated version of what
you’re describing

------
ZinniaZirconium
OK my project is open source. I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero
users.

How much do I get paid?

Zero? But I wrote open source code that solves a real problem. It's open
source. I should deserve to get paid. Because open source software.

I don't think your funding model works.

~~~
colinmcd
You don't get paid unless someone adds you to their sponsor pool. If no one
knows about your thing, you don't get paid. Am I misunderstanding your
question?

~~~
rsa25519
> If no one knows about your thing

And if nobody knows that software exists, then it's not helping anybody. My
phrasing sounds cruel, but I can't think of a better way to express it

------
felixge
This sounds great!

That being said, I wonder how well this would work out for smaller projects.
Spotify uses a very similar model, and from what I hear, lesser known artists
make very little money on their platform.

~~~
RileyJames
The Spotify model is similar.

The key difference is that while users pay into the pool, they don’t determine
determine how the pool, or their portion of the pool, is distributed. Plays
determine distribution, but not a single users plays, all plays.

If all github users donations entered a single pool, and that pool was
distributed to projects based on the number of clones each repo received, that
would be similar to the spotify model.

But I don’t believe that’s being proposed.

Rather, a user sets up a donation amount, which is then distributed to the
projects they include in their “sponsor pool”.

------
andrekorol
If you're willing to move away from your proposed GitHub route, you could try
implementing it on something like Gitcoin. The "wallet" you mentioned in the
article could be a smart-contract that by the end of each month (or any
desired period) would automatically make the donations directly to the crypto
wallets of the projects that you chose to include in your sponsor pool.

That way, you jump over some of the implementational and regulatory hurdles.
There would be no intermediary, such as GitHub, paying for the transaction
fees. The transaction fees necessary for using the smart-contract on a given
blockchain would be paid directly by the person making the donations.

~~~
tzs
> There would be no intermediary, such as GitHub, paying for the transaction
> fees

It sounds like there would also be no intermediary handling taxes. Each person
receiving donations would be liable for dealing with taxes themselves, which
could involve having to deal with the tax systems in every country/state in
which one of their donors resides.

Unless your plan is to just ignore taxes and hope any tax authority that might
want to come after you won't be able to obtain jurisdiction, you really want
anything that involves accepting money from all over the world to go through
some intermediary that operates in such a way as that intermediary is the
merchant of record for the transaction.

There also might be issues with sanctions. If your country has sanctions
against country X and you accept donations from someone in country X that
might violate your country's laws. An intermediary can handle keeping track of
that, making sure you only get donations from places that your country allows.

This could be even worse than the tax issues--at least with the tax issues it
is _other_ countries that might be trying to sue and/or prosecute you. With
sanctions violations it is your own country, which is usually a lot harder to
successful blow off.

------
ex3ndr
Isn't that pay models already exists? And they all failed.

------
tnash
I love this idea as a rework of github sponsors.

------
Bloggerzune
This is amazing and I have a gut feeling that it will revolutionize OSS. I
usually want to give say $30/month to OSS (personal use) and as a
professional, I would have the authority to donate $300/month.

This would be great to not worry about individual donations, and just based on
one-click or even just divide up the funds equally amongst all of my starred
projects. I termed this model "microsubscriptions" when I was pursuing it in
the context of website funding. There are difficulties.

Gaming the system

Folks will absolutely distort their software, buy fake github stars, spam out
bazillions of typosquatting packages etc. We know this because there is
already a weak financial incentive to subvert: supply chain attacks for
cryptominers. Direct cash will be a much stronger incentive for fuckery.
[https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/How-to-improve-your-
blog...](https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/How-to-improve-your-blog.html)

------
dilandau
For fucks sake if you are trying to make money, why are you doing open source?

Or, to put it another way, if you are doing open source, why are you so hung
up on getting paid for it?

------
renewiltord
FYI I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to put a recurring amount of money
into open source software. It isn't that it's hard. I just don't want to do
it.

------
neatze
Seems like solution to a problem that does not exist, there are many
motivations for open source projects and not all of them have generating
income purpose. Furthermore, generating income via dual licensing is fairly
straight forward way, assuming you have solution that is in demand and works.

------
prepend
> Existing open source funding models don't work for small projects.

Is this true? It seems to me that open source small projects flourish and
continue to grow [0]. Although, oddly, I can’t find a simple chart of python
or npm packages added over time, I expect it is.

Since the article is based on a seemingly false premise, it’s hard to consider
the rest of the article.

[0] [https://octoverse.github.com/](https://octoverse.github.com/)

~~~
colinmcd
That page argues (convincingly!) that open source is growing faster and faster
in terms of contributors, projects, commits, etc. This is definitely the case,
despite the fact that the funding problem is unsolved. But who knows how much
faster OSS would be growing if it was solved?

~~~
wolco
Want a new idea?

Sell direction of the project. Offer roadmap milestones. Sell priority over
features maybe even bug features.

Sell hats/logos/branded hosting environments.

Sell access to internal conversation. Sell invites to internal product Zoom
meetings. Sell access to private jira boards/trello cards.

~~~
colinmcd
One of the projects I had in mind when writing this post is the "color" module
on npm. It's a fantastic utility for reading in colors in different formats
(hex, decimal, CMYK), applying transformations, and getting a modified color
back (in your format of choice).

For all intents and purposes this module is "done". It's extremely mature and
has already implemented everything it set out to do. It has 3.3k stars and 8M
monthly downloads.

When I look at your list of proposals, none of them really apply to "color".
The projects you have in your head are big, ambitious projects, not the
smaller utility projects I describe in the article.

~~~
wolco
But if there is no active development why would these projects need additional
funding?

Is it just a thank you gift?

~~~
merlinsbrain
At that point it’s just a license to use.

MIT isn’t going to fly anymore if the intention is to make money off of that.

------
iamleppert
If the kind of open source you mention were actually valuable, there would be
a market for it. You make a common mistake many people make when trying to
calculate value: it has nothing to do with how much something is used, it has
to do with the incentives for those creating it.

People do not casually write open source to make money (unless sponsored by a
company). They do it for the recognition and for vanity, and I’d argue that
popular open source software is not scarce as evidenced by how much there is
of it. People will in fact rush to fill the void of open source such that the
popular open source is more of a fluke than anything: if it wasn’t _the_
react-router it would be something other nearly identical, where there are
plenty of people waiting in line behind that.

~~~
imtringued
I have a very nice pet project with a user base in the single digits and I'd
like to keep it that way. I know all my users personally and I am even using
it for several hours per week myself. I couldn't care less about recognition
or vanity.

People create opensource software because they have an itch they need to
scratch, not because they want to get attention. Attention is expensive and
involves scratching other people's itches, not yours. It means nagging users
who demand things from you and drain your sanity all while making money off of
your work. It's only natural that you want something in return.

>If the kind of open source you mention were actually valuable, there would be
a market for it.

This argument makes no sense. If the software isn't valuable (as in worth a
lot) then nobody would use it. Opensource software cannot become popular
without providing value. Open source software is not valuable in the sense
that it cannot be valued. You can't put a price tag on a non exclusive good if
you're not selling it in the first place. Another flaw in your argument is
that you are assuming that because there is no market for something there will
never be one. Github sponorships, liberapay, patreon and lots of other
platforms are clearly in the process of creating a market for these things.
People are clearly willing to fund opensource software if it is possible. Just
take a look at neovim! [0]

[0]
[https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/neovim](https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/neovim)

