GUADEC: New funding models for open source software [LWN.net]

GUADEC: New funding models for open source software

Posted Aug 16, 2012 6:59 UTC (Thu) by danieldk (guest, #27876)
Parent article: GUADEC: New funding models for open source software

I've proposed this before: the distributions are in the best position to provide funding for upstream projects, since they provide the website and package manager that most of the users see.

What I'd love to have is the following: I give 10 Euros monthly to my favorite distribution (Ubuntu or Debian). They distribute my monthly donation uniformly among the projects associated with the packages that I use.

This has many advantages:

- I don't need to remind myself about donating (it's like a monthly subscription).
- I don't need to put time into finding out where to donate next, what the payment method is, etc.
- Projects that we'd rarely consider donating to, but are vital to every system, e.g. coreutils, would also receive regular donations.
- Although my donation is distributed uniformly, popular applications have more users, and thus get a larger share of the pie.

Say that you could convince one million Linux users to donate ten Euros monthly, the pie is 120 million Euros per year, this would imply that major projects suddenly have a budget to address boring development tasks (polishing, bugfixing), and even smaller projects may have the budget to hire a developer one or two months full-time per year.

Of course, the downside is that you'd need infrastructure for projects to register themselves, etc. But it is a whole lot easier, and probably fairer than the current methods for getting funding.

(Log in to post comments)

GUADEC: New funding models for open source software

Posted Aug 16, 2012 8:49 UTC (Thu) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

> How to you want to measure what packages are used?

Something akin to Debian's popcon.

> What about infrastructure packages, most users are not aware of?

Do you mean X.org, coreutils, libc et al.? They get a (big) share of the pie too, since in this setup, what counts is packages that are installed.

http://popcon.debian.org/ gives an impression of how donations are distributed in such a setup.

One potential problem is that some packages are small, but very popular. They might need less funding that larger, less frequently used packages (e.g. compare util-linux with Shotwell).

But I think the upside is that it guarantees a steady, predictable, income for the software projects that are the most fundamental to the free software ecosystem.

GUADEC: New funding models for open source software

Posted Aug 16, 2012 12:42 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Do you mean X.org, coreutils, libc et al.?

I think the question was referring to things like Koji or Bodhi (for Fedora). Every user needs those things, but they're rarely installed.

The stats would also have to be exposed so that RPMFusion could do something similar for its packages (I imagine Fedora would do this anyway (assuming something akin were implemented) in the spirit of transparency).

GUADEC: New funding models for open source software

Posted Aug 16, 2012 12:44 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> One potential problem is that some packages are small, but very popular. They might need less funding that larger, less frequently used packages (e.g. compare util-linux with Shotwell).

There could be a field for "After what point is money better spent elsewhere?" possibly due to few full-time volunteers versus $DAYJOB developers.

GUADEC: New funding models for open source software

Posted Aug 16, 2012 16:45 UTC (Thu) by tx (subscriber, #81224) [Link]

I think the other question is exactly who should be paid. The developer(s), obviously, but what about package maintainers, for example? They certainly do work and add value for users but it's unclear to me exactly how much of the pie that makes up.

GUADEC: New funding models for open source software

Posted Aug 16, 2012 11:24 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

I think there'd probably need to be some sort of bidding-for-grants type process mixed in to decide how the money is distributed - some projects just aren't going to be in a position to make use of donations, and I'm not sure I'm wild about the idea of sending donations to (e.g.) Apple and Oracle based simply on the ubiquity of Cups and Berkeley DB.

Other than that, I think I'd be on board with the general idea - it'd be a similar experience to buying a boxed set of Red Hat or Mandrake years ago rather than just downloading the ISOs.

Cups and Berkeley DB

Posted Aug 17, 2012 12:04 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Like it or not, the thing is that Apple and Oracle do some outstanding work for us GNU/Linux users, and it is Free software. Think about the developers there, not the megacorp that builds closed phones or databases. Sending a fraction of a dollar per donating user may not make a difference in their profits, but it might make a difference.

Then again these donations might convert a licensing issue into a cost/benefit decision ("Cups for Linux costs us xxx and we only get xx from them, so away they go"). Who knows. Anyway a grant evaluation process is nice.

GUADEC: New funding models for open source software

Posted Aug 16, 2012 12:41 UTC (Thu) by ssam (subscriber, #46587) [Link]

sounds good, but i think figuring how to divide it up would need to be smarter. popcon keeps track of what you have installed, and whether it has been used recently.

but:
i have plenty of things installed that I never use.
i have gnome-terminal(actually mate-terminal) open all the time, but i consider it feature complete, and not in any real need of funding.
some things are split into several packages, and some arn't

maybe there could be a set of sliders to adjust, with a suggestion based on your installed apps and usage. and system packages bundled together, eg
* Ubuntu infrestucture (hosting, servers)
* Linux kernel
* Core system software (compilers, libraries)
* Mozilla
* GNOME
* KDE
* gimp
* inkscape
...

GUADEC: New funding models for open source software

Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:02 UTC (Thu) by Tester (subscriber, #40675) [Link]

Big commercial distributors (like Red Hat) already fund a lot of upstream development by hiring people to work on them. Although this is annoying if you're an entrepreneur, it is much more efficient (more man-hour of software work per $) than giving money to countless small organisations (like Yorba) as you don't duplicate all of the overhead (HR, payroll, etc). And it has been highly successful for the projects that have benefited, like GNOME, KVM or the new fashionable cloud stuff.

vice versa approach

Posted Sep 3, 2012 17:18 UTC (Mon) by Tlb9 (guest, #86539) [Link]

It seems to me that this solution has a fundamental flaw - yes, there will be a 120M $(£ € whatever) budget, but there will also be a dictator in charge of this budget, and God help us if he will turn out to be not so benevolent. And with this big money any person, unless he's naturally saint - will become not benevolent, later or (more likely) sooner.

And lets think wider - it seems to me that outside of popular distros and their communities there is a dozen of other free and opensource software pieces that could benefit from regular donations, and it has enough fan users to provide good stream of donations if given a handy way to do this.

So, let's give all these people an option to choose what exactly they want to support, and option to select if they want to do a one time coin drop, or a regular check sending.

What do you think about such approach?

thanks,
Alex.