
Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue - newtang
https://blog.geteventbot.com/2019/01/06/how-we-support-open-source-software.html
======
walterbell
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/](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 hardware developers to
distribute documentation that will allow device drivers to be written for
their product ... all donations made to SPI and its supported projects are tax
deductible for donors in the United States._

~~~
dantiberian
I'll make a plug for [https://sfconservancy.org](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.

~~~
robbyoconnor
Going to plus 1 on this one. The Software Freedom Conservancy is doing great
work. They are the fiscal sponsor for the project I run infra for
(LibreHealth).

------
nwhatt
Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS
gives everyone more bang for the buck right?

It's a wonderful gesture, I don't want to take away from that. Just wondering
how straight up donating compares to contributing.

~~~
joewadcan
> 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.

Joe (Eventbot co-founder)

~~~
piamancini
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.

~~~
joewadcan
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.

~~~
piamancini
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.

------
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.

------
claudiulodro
This is similar to WordPress's Five for the Future[1], which is one of my
favorite open-source-support initiatives.

It intuitively makes a lot of sense if you are building on top of a platform
to dedicate some resources towards the continued well-being of the platform.
With SAAS, the resources are the money you pay each month, but with open
source you can donate either money or time!

[1] [https://ma.tt/2014/09/five-for-the-future/](https://ma.tt/2014/09/five-
for-the-future/)

------
mistrial9
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 restrictive settlements)

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

In what way? Any sources?

~~~
xchaotic
A related example is Zuckeberg charity - they simply moved some of their
wealth to a charity but retain full control on how it's spent, it's just tax
free now. [http://fortune.com/2015/12/02/zuckerberg-
charity/](http://fortune.com/2015/12/02/zuckerberg-charity/)

~~~
bb611
It's not a charity, his donations to it aren't tax deductible or tax free. If
the business makes tax deductible donations those will pass back to him.

------
forsaken
Neat. I wrote about a similar idea a while back, which might add some other
arguments if people want to pitch it to their own company:
[https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/mar/9/one-percent-
for...](https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/mar/9/one-percent-for-open-
source/)

------
kiwijamo
This idea has made me think of donating a certain percentage of my income each
year to open source projects. Does anyone have a system for donating their
personal funds to open source projects?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I am an open source developer who accepts donations. Whatever you do, I would
recommend making a recurring donation. I like to say that one-time donations
buy beer, while recurring donations buy sustainable open source development.

I would also suggest contributing to individuals directly. Seek out
maintainers of the projects you want to support and see if they have a patreon
or liberapay page.

~~~
joewadcan
I very much agree - we put most of our donations on a recurring basis. Oddly,
a few projects specifically asked for a one-off donation because they felt
like a recurring donation would make them feel like they "owed us" something.
Of course, we don't have any conditions for our donation, but it was an
interesting sentiment I hadn't expected to find.

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rixrax
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.

~~~
desdiv
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".

------
zoobab
FFII.org will need your donations this year to file another legal commplaint
against Unitary Software Patents:

[http://www.nounitarysoftwarepatents.uk/](http://www.nounitarysoftwarepatents.uk/)

------
stuaxo
It's the small projects that need the help (or... the big projects that are
absolutely overwhelmed with requests).

We definitely need a way to make inroads on this, good work.

------
travisoliphant
Thank you for doing this. This is a great idea. If every company that used
open source committed to supporting the projects they depend on with this kind
of approach, it would solve a lot of the current sustainability problems. I
look forward to several initiatives over the next few years to encourage this
kind of behavior from all companies.

------
garysahota93
This is very similar to what Citus Data and the like have been doing in recent
months. Great job guys!

------
ArthurBrussee
I wonder what percentage the FAANG like companies donate. On the one hand,
it's probably quite low, on the other hand, they do run a lot of projects
themselves & donate labours to others. Still that's hardly sustainable for the
rest of OSS

------
pleerock
good job! wish you to grow your business and scale your company to support
more oss projects!

------
Wintamute
Donating to GulpJS? 2014 is calling, they want their streaming build tool
back.

~~~
onion2k
Gulp is still a great tool for straightforward workflows. It's still being
developed and maintained. It has more than 30,000 GitHub stars. There's no
need to change you have a working process.

There are valid reasons to look at other build tools, but "because your
current tool is 4 years old" isn't one.

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xte
Nice but no. We need to push Free Software and to push it at political level,
with the target of _forbid_ closed source products.

We do not need subsistence economy, we already won technically, open code is
everywhere now. The big loss is the miss of political support. The big loss is
the mass ignorance of how private companies trap open code in closed "boxes"
from Android to WSL/DeX/Crostini to our PND/NAS/router/*.

That's the real point to get and IMO apart FSF we need to take action at
school/universities level, workplaces etc. Putting money like that is a way to
loose money without return.

~~~
jsmeaton
I’m struggling to see how your comment relates to the article, which is
showing financial support to open source projects. Funding is a serious issue
with OSS.

Suggesting all code should be OSS is orthogonal.

~~~
xte
IMO no, it isn't. FOSS project need participation, so not money but resources.
FOSS idea is that software is knowledge, something that must be public and
grow through interaction (sharing). So if I have a need or a desire and I
start implementing it others may or may not join because they share the same
or similar need or desire. That's the FOSS way.

I start a new project, for instance to autoclassify documents. Ok users of my
code will contributed in code, hosting, documentation simply because they
share my similar need/desire. If there is interest there is no need for money,
software is not a product nor a thing we can live on. It's shared knowledge.
There are no "producer" nor "consumers", only participants.

If we have a single-man-show that say "hey, found me so I can keep the project
up" it means that:

\- we completely lost FOSS model, transformed to a sort of neopatronage, the
erotic dream of proprietary vendors that dream a world of products to be sold
and bought;

\- the project is already dead not because of lack of founds but because of
lack of participants, knowledge, interest.

~~~
schoen
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 programmers won't automatically understand how to improve them
substantially without a considerable amount of study. It's likely that many
people will need to be paid for that investment, not because they
ideologically believe that software should be property, but because it takes
up a huge amount of their time and effort that they won't be able to apply
elsewhere.

And indeed, when people have empirically looked into some of the larger FOSS
projects they've found that a majority of the contributions were made by
people who were being paid to make them—again, not because of any ideological
aspect, but because being paid for it allowed them to invest a huge amount of
time and focus and helped them to be more sophisticated and productive
contributors.

(Edit: Just to be clear, I don't think that trying to convince people to use,
develop, or procure FOSS instead of proprietary software is _bad_ , or that,
if successful, it won't also lead to more resources being applied to FOSS
development. However, a lot of those resources will probably be mediated by
money.)

~~~
xte
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 software from
ERP to CRM to DMS etc) and those are not contributed to FOSS. Even if they
both pay someone to develop FOSS code and publish it.

I hope to have being able to clarify that point in my limited English...

On complex codebase: FreeBSD codebase is not exactly simple and little, but it
live on it own foot since decades, for instance? Emacs, Debian, ... the same.
I do not intent that a project must run on casual contribution but simply that
contributors must be subjects that need/desire such code so they contribute to
it for their own sake like the Intel example above.

~~~
jsmeaton
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?

~~~
xte
Because it's not "founding" but alms. With some intermediary subjects that
gain and reign as they want. Not much different than Ottoman's empire "islamic
alms" that was in fact a form of imposition on citizen for the sake of few in
the upper pyramid.

If project like Django need maintenance the answer is: universities.
Universities train students and can easily maintain projects providing not
only people but also resources.

FOSS is knowledge, so a thing that need to be entirely public and entirely
relay on public. It is ok if a company need a certain software and so develop
it, it is not ok to be "founded" like Patreon, LibrePay, PayPal donation etc.
We need freedom and participation not charity.

~~~
jsmeaton
But charity does not preclude freedom. Unless you're suggesting that if
charity was absent we'd be seeing more participation?

------
pierotofy
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 others to organize such an
initiative. FOSS is just like public infrastructure. Maintenance costs need to
be shared. Innovation will accelerate immensely when this happens. Go ahead
and downvote now.

~~~
davnicwil
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 tweaks through regulations, no
matter how smart or well-intentioned you think you're being.

One observation is that when there's money involved, some things which
otherwise are extremely simple become extremely complicated. Like, for
example: ownership, collaboration, contributions, credit, etc - the
implications of these all change drastically when there is money on the table
and it changes the entire dynamic of _everything_ in the system top to bottom.
What comes out of those changes may not be what you want or expect.

~~~
schoen
I'm pretty sure that one of Richard Stallman's ideas for free software funding
in the 1980s was government grants, paid for with taxes—except I don't think
he suggested that the taxes would be collected only from users of particular
software, but rather from everybody.

(This does happen on a small scale because some government grants _do_ go to
academic researchers who are developing FOSS, and because U.S. government
agencies can't hold copyright in their original work, so there are some
codebases that have been released. But it's not like a large-scale software
development government agency or grantmaking entity.)

~~~
beatgammit
That's a different thing entirely though. If you force companies to donate to
a project, they'll want to have some ownership of it. If you do it indirectly
through taxes, you're forcing _everyone_ to fund it so it becomes a democratic
process.

I personally don't agree with either approach, but I think Stallman's idea
would have a much better result than forcing companies to donate.

