
Open-source Funding and Support Questionnaire - froztbyte
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfAa6-MDjt9Q5Oy0mhWw7J6U5Qsk0v_2O7T-V7AZWUrmErYzQ/viewform
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cimm
I am a freelance developer and added footnote to my invoices explaining I
donate 1% of the amount to an open-source project used for the assignment. I
ask them to propose the projects they prefer but almost no one does.

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williamdclt
Sounds like a very good idea. Companies should do that !

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brianwawok
They should. Although I guess in a perfect market with two identical
companies.. the one without the donations will have 1% more cashflow and be
able to underbid the nice competitor by 1%.

(1% is likely to small to make a difference, but a fun thought experiment).

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michaelt
I donate about $150 to Canonical any time I download Ubuntu - but I'm pretty
sure this is a flawed approach.

After all, if I install a package, which depends on something which depends on
something which depends on a library for left-padding strings, it's unlikely
the library author sees a cent. And each of those levels doesn't just have
developers - they have package maintainers, people doing bug triage, people
maintaining test infrastructure - and the tools those people use.

Unfortunately I think this would be very difficult to resolve - as the problem
of fairly distributing donations would have a very large political element.

~~~
zanny
Canonical themselves are only developing a tiny fraction of even their default
suite of software anyway.

If you want to contribute to open source software in general, Software in the
Public Interest is probably the best general fund to stick your money in,
since they provide financial support to several distributions, LibreOffice,
FFmpeg, Postgres, Xorg, etc.

Also, set your amazon smile donations to go to them, since they are a non-
profit!

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willnorris
There's no indication in the questionnaire of who is actually running it, what
is being done with the data, whether results will be published and where, etc.
Does anyone have more info? Right now, this just looks like a black hole.

~~~
kaspm
Agreed, without some context as to who is behind this survey I am reluctant to
fill it out.

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Joe8Bit
I really think there's an opportunity to make it easier for companies (large
and small) to pay for work on open source projects. The complexities I see (as
someone who has done it often):

* Knowing who (as an individual or an organization) you can give money to to reliably perform the work. So working out a way of managing this would be huge e.g. I want a feature added to Postgres, who the hell do I speak to? Are they reliable? Is their contribution likely to be accepted upstream?

* The tax/employment logistics can be painful, an intermediary could make that simpler. For large contributions you often have to support multiple people, and this becomes logistical complex VERY easily

* A lot of folks who make their living being supported to work on open source are scornful or outright malevolent towards the things that corps need (e.g. invoicing, statement of work, liability protection)

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whit537
It sounds like you've mostly tried to pay for new development on projects? As
opposed to remunerating for existing product? Does that sound right?

~~~
Joe8Bit
Yes. Not that I disagree with the other way of paying, but it needs to be
handled differently:

* The 'pay someone to do X, which has Y value for us in return' is a very simple value proposition for even the most luddite of finance/legal folks to grok. The details are different, but you're essentially hiring a contractor.

* On the other hand, it's much less clear to those people what the value proposition is for paying for 'past work' or some amphorphus future work that it's difficult to quantify will have any value to the organization.

* That's why the above is much better framed as 'sponsorship' and put under PR/dev relations/talent/HR. They're the ones who can best track value from concepts like community engagement and enhancement, improved standing of the company etc

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lathiat
I made a one-off donation of $150 and now Patreon $20/month to Ondrej
Sury(.org) (who does php/apache packaging for Debian & Ubuntu) which I use for
a web hosting business.

I also Patreon to Jon Oxer for superhouse.tv (mainly for his YouTube videos)
he's quite involved around various open hardware projects and open source in
Australia - maybe not quitenyour traditional definition.

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whit537
P.S. Gittip and Gratipay are the same thing. :-)

[https://gratipay.news/gratitude-gratipay-
ef24ad5e41f9](https://gratipay.news/gratitude-gratipay-ef24ad5e41f9)

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jjm
There is one thing I'm not sure anyone has talked about yet. When a corp
entity 'donates' or provides funding for a specific feature, they will usually
want a timeline for the completion of it. I personally feel there is a
distinction between being 'paid' for a feature, and 'funding' a feature. Where
the funding route is still in spirit of the project. Sadly it seems that a lot
of open source projects even if used widely are still powered by 'spirit'
rather than anything else.

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delegate
Apart from having a framework/service for funding open source projects, we
need about the people who develop the _dependencies_ used in those projects.

Project maintainers should have the ability to 'forward' part of the received
donation to other projects - without which the project wouldn't have been
possible.

Which contributors, which dependency and how much to share - these questions
are best answered by the project maintainer(s) - they can forward zero or all
the funds and make the process automatic, so when a donation is received, the
system automatically redistributes it to other accounts, as configured by the
maintainer.

I've worked on a design spec for such a system some time ago:
[https://github.com/boomhub/design](https://github.com/boomhub/design)

I'd gladly resume work on it if anyone else feels like this is the good way to
go. Just start by creating an Issue :).

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vmorgulis
I'm thinking of something automated.

For example, it's possible to gather some metrics of the usage of libraries
from a running process (with strace, google perftools, source maps in
javascript...).

It can be a process used by a real user or autotests from the project.

A software could monitor those probes and allow the user to reward the
dependencies that:

\- use less CPU or energy

\- use less memory

\- contains less bugs

\- ...

~~~
cabalamat
If it's automated it will probably be gamed.

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vmorgulis
Yes but as it is open source everybody will know who game what.

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Midiv0k
It would be really interesting to see some answers statistics!

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whit537
Yeah! Are you going to release this survey data, @froztbyte?

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froztbyte
First to get some more responses.

Later, if possible, I'll attempt to release the raw (albeit sanitised) data.

At minimum I'll post a follow-up with some statistics/analyses.

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brilliantcode
Would love to know the results of this, I'm currently trying to get
[http://letsopensource.com](http://letsopensource.com) up and running.

~~~
fundamental
What's the scope of letsopensource? It's not clear what the website intends to
do from the one page that's there.

If it's another crowdfunding website what makes it different and more likely
to succeed compared to others?

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brilliantcode
Good questions and I don't have answers for them as of now, will do a Show HN
thread in the coming weeks to get some initial feedbacks.

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lathiat
Weird the title changed from "ask hn: do you" to "open-source funding/suppor
questionnaire"? And didn't notice the link before but I guess it was there.

~~~
OJFord
It was, I think that's why the title changed - AskHNs presumably have to be
text questions hosted here?

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akavel
_Editorial notes:_

The questionnaire seems to be missing "desktop (GUI) apps" and probably
"mobile apps" in "What you'd pay for?" section.

Also, the "time/effort" was weird for me; I don't feel it matches "funding"
which sounds like money to me — or I didn't understand what it's intended to
mean.

 _Some general thoughts:_

On a related note, personally I don't like paying until I tried an app. But
then OSS apps often ask for payment only just before/after downloading. I
think a deferred approach is one of the reasons which helped me pay (donate)
for the single OSS app for which I've done so yet: Calibre ([https://calibre-
ebook.com/](https://calibre-ebook.com/)). While the main reason was that it
really struck me that it's an awesome, polished and easy to use app
(especially for non-technical users in my family) while I was downloading it
to _n_ -th computer one day, it also shows some non-obtrusive but visible
_encouragement_ in its GUI (a big heart icon — feels encouraging, not nagging)
reminding to consider donation.

From other somewhat interesting approaches, Aseprite
([https://www.aseprite.org/](https://www.aseprite.org/)) is actually GPL IIUC,
but it provides the binary only with payment — thus more convenient (esp. for
non-technical users, who I assume are majority of the targeted users group,
i.e. artists) — although you can still just download and compile the sources
_for free_. I'm very curious to what extent it's actually working for the
author!

Moreover, I felt quite nice about itch.io's
([http://itch.io/](http://itch.io/)) approach, where a publisher can pick a
"payment-optional" model. But as written above, I'd prefer to be _gently_
reminded in-game from time to time ( _@leafo?_ whaddya think? feature idea for
Refinery?). Also, I didn't really find a good enough game for me on itch yet,
for which I'd feel like paying, unfortunately.

Finally, I think it'd be easy for me to pay for OSS games (dunno about other
apps?) which would be parts of a bundle (ideally on gog.com; maybe Humble
Bundle too, but as much as it started the bundles trend in awesome way, I feel
it's fallen in quality and open-ness for me at some point in the past). I'm
already paying for bundles, so if an OSS game got in there, I probably
wouldn't even notice I can have it for free (nor I would complain later if I
noticed, I believe). Though if it'd be explicit, I think I'd pay anyway
(custom? convenience?).

 _P.S._ Now that I think of it, seems what I describe here is kinda variation
of "in-game/in-app purchases". Hm, maybe they could be also linked to some
specially tricky features of an app, e.g. using some feature would also
display non-obtrusive info "this feature was really tricky/took much love to
implement/and is unique on market — a donation as act of gratitude would be an
awesome gesture of appreciation!" obviously with an easy link.

Also, I think receiving a code enabling personalized label/annotation "Paid
for by $DONATING_USER" could be a really cool bonus touch.

~~~
fundamental
+1 to "desktop (GUI) apps". I've been maintaining one project since 2009 and
from what I've seen, it's pretty rare for desktop applications to receive
proper funding. They're generally not a great target for corporate funding and
they often end up being very incomplete as developers run out of
spare/interested time. It doesn't help that for the GUI side of desktop
applications there can be a _huge_ amount of time spent on trying to get the
UI/UX right.

I've even tried to fund some work on the open source application I maintain,
but I haven't been able to get anywhere close to minimum wage for it. Other
open source applications in the same space seem to have the same issues with
crowdfunding.

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mack1001
A while ago I did a concept study called
[http://opensourcebay.io](http://opensourcebay.io) to create a marketplace for
open source services. This approach in my mind provides the most viability for
maintainers/service providers and for people who inevitably need
services/training/features. Unfortunately I did not have the initial traction
nor the resources to continue on this path.

~~~
mack1001
FYI want to be clear that I am not plugging my site. I have pretty much
abandoned it due to lack of traction.

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whit537
Who are you, @froztbyte? Wanna be part of
[https://sustainoss.org/](https://sustainoss.org/)? :-)

~~~
froztbyte
Someone with an interest in the liveliness of open-source ecosystems.

I didn't find enough relevant data out there, so I decided to get some.

