LinuxCon: funding development

At LinuxCon 2012, Bradley Kuhn, executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), presented a session on funding free software development. SFC's primary mission is to provide organizational and legal support to free software projects, but it has also been successful at raising funds to support development time — a task that many projects find difficult.

Ancient history

Kuhn started the discussion with an account of his introduction to free software, which began when he accidentally hit a key sequence in Emacs that brought up the text of Richard Stallman's GNU Manifesto. Reading the Manifesto was inspirational, said Kuhn, who has subsequently pursued a career in free software — even serving as director of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

But on this occasion, he told the story not just as an introduction, but also to point out an oft-overlooked section of the document. Toward the end of the Manifesto, Stallman discusses several possible alternatives to the proprietary software funding model. Stallman argues that (contrary to the common objection that "no one will code for free") free software will always have developers, they will just earn smaller salaries than they would writing proprietary software. He cites examples of people who take jobs writing software in not-for-profit situations like MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, and says that free software is no different. Developers do tend to move to higher-paying jobs when they can work on the same projects, he said, but there are many who write free software out of commitment to the ideals.

Stallman suggests several alternative funding models under which developers could make money working on free software. One is a "Software Tax" in which software users each pay a small amount into a general National Science Foundation (NSF)-like fund that makes grants to developers. Another is that hardware manufacturers will underwrite porting efforts; a third is that user groups will form and collect money through dues, then pay developers with it.

Few people remember it, Kuhn said, but in the early days FSF itself functioned much like one of the user groups Stallman describes in the Manifesto. It accepted donations and directly paid developers to work on GNU software. A long list of core projects, including GNU Make, glibc, and GDB, were originally written by paid FSF employees. It was only later, as these original developers took jobs working on free software at companies like Red Hat and Google, that FSF turned its primary attention to advocacy issues.

The non-profits

Today, Kuhn said, the majority of free software is written by for-profit companies. Although that situation is a boon for free software, the resulting code bases tend to drift in the direction of the company's needs. He then quoted Samba's Jeremy Allison (a Google employee) as saying "It's the duty of all Free Software developers to steal as much time as they can from their employers for software freedom." Since not everyone is in a position to "be a Jeremy", Kuhn said, some developers need to be funded by non-profit organizations in order to mitigate the risks of for-profit control.

But proliferation of free software non-profits can be detrimental: it confuses users, and each organization has administrative overhead (boards, officers, and legal filings) that can steal time from development. There are several "umbrella" non-profits that attempt to offload the administrative overhead from the developers, including the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Software in the Public Interest (SPI), and the SFC.

In addition to the administrative and legal functions of these organizations, each has some mechanism for funding or underwriting software development for its members. Donations to the ASF go into a general fund, from which individual member projects can apply for disbursement for specific work. SFC and SPI use a different model, in which each member project has separate earmarked funds.

Most of SFC's disbursement goes toward funding developer travel to conferences and workshops, Kuhn said. It also handles financial arrangements for conference organizing, Google Summer of Code, and other contracts, but the most interesting thing it does is manage paid contracts for software developers. Typically these contracts are fixed-length affairs that raised targeted funds for the contract through donation drives — as opposed to, for example, earmarking funds that accumulate through an ongoing donation button on the project's web site.

Fundraising successes

Kuhn recounted several recent success stories from different SFC member projects. The first was the Twisted engine for Python. Back in 2008, the project was confronted with a familiar scenario: it was successful enough that many core developers got high-paying jobs working on Twisted consulting, which in turn led to bit-rot of core functionality. The project decided to hold a fundraising drive, and collected enough donations to pay founder Jean-Paul Calderone to work for two years on bug-squashing, integration, and maintenance of the core — work that was vital to the project, but not exciting enough to attract a full-time position from the typical corporate Twisted user.

In 2010, SFC did a similar fundraising drive to pay Matt Mackall to maintain the Mercurial source code management system. Mackall said he was able to support himself full-time on Linux kernel-space development, but that it was hard to repeatedly "context switch" to Python userspace and work on Mercurial. The SFC fundraising drive funded Mackall full time from April 2010 through June 2012.

The PyPy Python interpreter project launched three successful fundraising initiatives in one year to support specific development projects. The initiatives for PyPy's Py3k implementation of Python 3 and its port of the Numpy scientific computing package each raised $42,000 in drives held a month apart in late 2011. The project has also raised more than $21,000 and counting this year to fund development of software transactional memory support. Kuhn related that he had been concerned at one point that the frequency of the fundraising drives would wear out the potential donor pool, but the project forged ahead, and SFC is now funding four PyPy developers.

Fundraising challenges

A member of the audience asked what SFC thought about using Kickstarter for fundraising, to which Kuhn replied "who is going to Kickstarter for Python stuff who isn't also reading your blog?" PyPy's recent success, he explained, probably owes more to the fact that PyPy is a hot commodity in Python circles right now. It has little trouble finding donors as a result, but by raising the funds through drives hosted at its own site, it avoids having to pay Kickstarter or another broker a potentially hefty cut of the donations.

The tough part, he continued, is what to do when you are no longer on top of the popularity bubble. Free software has a big "I gave at the office" problem, he said. Many of free software's most passionate users (and thus potential donors) already spend their own time working on free software. Consequently, they react to fundraising efforts with questions like "I code all day long, now you want me to give money, too?"

Kuhn did not offer any simple solutions to the ongoing fundraising issue, but clearly there are none. Like Yorba, SFC is interested in exploring the possibility of funding free software projects, which makes Kuhn's report on SFC's successes an interesting counterpart to Yorba director Adam Dingle's examination of other funding methods.

It is clear that SFC's success stories differ from generic Kickstarter or bounty-style drives in a few key respects. First, they are tied to funding work by well-known contributors with good standing in the projects — often key maintainers. Second, they are tied to a development contract of specific length. But they still differ in other important details: although the PyPy initiatives were also tied to a specific feature set, the Twisted and Mercurial drives were done to fund the harder-to-price tasks of bug fixing and routine maintenance. Free software development is not a homogeneous process, so there is certainly no one-size-fits-all answer to the fundraising question. But it is reassuring to know that organizations like SFC (with its commitment to software freedom) can still find success where money is involved.