The Open Collective Foundation is shutting down [LWN.net]

The Open Collective Foundation is an organization created to provide legal and financial services for non-profit projects, many of which are associated with free software. Projects hosted there are now beginning to report that the Open Collective Foundation will be shutting down at the end of the year, with an unwinding process over that time.

Unfortunately, over the past year, we have learned that Open Collective Foundation's business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tech platform.
In late 2023, we made the decision to pause accepting new collectives in order to create space for us to address the issues. Unfortunately, it became clear that it would not be financially feasible to make the necessary corrections, and we determined that OCF is not viable.

Some more information can be found in the Dissolution FAQ. Note that the Open Collective Foundation is distinct from Open Source Collective, which has hastened to point out that it remains in operation as before, and both are distinct from the Open Collective platform.

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The Open Collective Foundation is shutting down

Posted Feb 28, 2024 20:57 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (1 responses)

This is unfortunate.. I hope projects will be able to find another home.

The Open Collective Foundation is shutting down

Posted Feb 29, 2024 3:56 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

An explainer about this:

https://communityovercode.com/2024/02/open-collective-fou...

The Open Collective Foundation is shutting down

Posted Feb 29, 2024 19:56 UTC (Thu) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (2 responses)

The explanation of why they are shutting down lacks any meaningful details which would make it make sense to someone on the outside. I click around and their docs page says their budget is transparent, https://opencollective.foundation/#docs, but it doesn't actually seem to be, half of their expenses in 2023 are listed as "untagged" and their revenue is not documented. But I note this expense: https://opencollective.com/foundation/expenses/188729, which indicates they had to hire a temporary chief executive because the last one failed or left and they couldn't find a new one, and that is an indication of trouble. Their values talk about being open and transparent, but it doesn't look like they really were going into the end.

The Open Collective Foundation is shutting down

Posted Mar 1, 2024 11:18 UTC (Fri) by zumbi (subscriber, #62446) [Link] (1 responses)

I am very shocked and sad to read this news entry. Running such kind of foundations require lots of effort, energy and big dose of patience. While getting the data out into public is one goal, soon becomes impractical as other urgent matters need to be resolved, soon you are drowning in paperwork, payments and hardly keeping up with accounting books, as doing the split per project is not trivial, burnout might kick in... at the end the story can end like this one.

I would like to thank OCF all the past work and hopefully they learn the lesson and after some rest they can come back with better offering, since their role in open communities was huge.

Respect and love!

The Open Collective Foundation is shutting down

Posted Mar 1, 2024 23:38 UTC (Fri) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link]

zumbi, I appreciate the sentiment. Do you speak from experience? Perhaps share your name?