I'm in agreement with you. Like one or the other, not the switch over.
I rather the approach be that if it is an open source project, that they ask for donations. It is possible to succeed in that way, though it requires learning how to pull it off, where they also get corporate sponsors and donations.
Have you considered going the donations / sponsorship (e.g. patreon) route. This seems like it leads to much more sustainable open source projects than VC money which often leads to a project flaming out when the investors come to collect (or the company gets acquired).
I feel like the easiest way to fund open source is to offer dual licensing and somehow charge businesses. There have been many that have done this and it seems to work well, most notably IMO is mperham with Sidekiq, but there are many others. Open source developers are too timid of charging for their code.
Relying on donations seems like a bad move, business-wise, because I'd guess (no data to back this up, just gut feeling) that most donations will come from individuals and not busineses, yet the businesses are the ones making money off of your code.
It seems a good idea that can also be applied to open source projects who ask for donations. You could donate just to support the concept of open source.
One issue is that donations implicitly promote a cost-plus pricing model (I'd like to earn 10k a year doing open source, so that's how many donations I need to fund me working on this).
Whereas something like dual-licensing promotes a value-based pricing model (our fortune 500 doesn't need to pay 5 engineers for a year to build and maintain this distributed system; we would happily pay equivalent of an engineer per year for that.)
Let's consider I am a company and I want to donate 1000$ for Open Source projects and Open Source libraries as I am using them heavily. What can I do?
Option 1: Pick my favorite project and send them 1000$ -> simple but only one project benefits from my donation
Option 1: Find projects or libs I am using and accept donations, use their donation systems, distribute the 1000$ -> very time consuming and cumbersome, I have to use different systems, but can support multiple projects. Unfortunately, the donation for one project will be quite small as it is just a fraction of the donation of 1000$.
Do you know any platforms or good solutions to distribute the 1000$ or support Open Source so that the 1000$ is used as effectively as possible?
Actually giving something back is really hard in the open source space. If you don't create your own open source project you will have a hard time to integrate into another open source project.
I also generally feel like most of the really substantial open-source projects are able to get a good amount of donations and corporate sponsors. People DO pay, when the thing you're creating (an operating system, a programming language, a database) is complex and business-critical.
But nowadays it seems like everyone who creates a JavaScript package that concats two strings together, wants to be able to quit their day job and live on donations. It's just not realistic.
This is a bad idea. You have to have a plan if you have a for-profit open source product. You need to give contributors something so they don't feel like they're being taken advantage of. It's complicated. It isn't as easy as just open sourcing it and asking for contributions.
I do agree that most projects end up like this sadly. But the ones that do have some sort of sponsorship or donation or revenue stream. Have financial incentive to actively maintain and develop opensource projects. This of course has its own problems but overall better for the users i think.
I was thinking the same thing. It would be nice if there was some donations hub for open source projects with some sort of mixed Patreon/Humble-Bundle mechanic were you could donate N bucks to X open source software projects, one time or in a monthly basis.
The difficulties I see with this approach is 1) getting a trustworthy intermediate and 2) how to select the projects to allow the donations for. But 2) shouldn't be that hard because the users could, in the end, pick who they want to donate to.
Ask for donations (Babel, Webpack). Pro: this works for tools and libraries (not just apps) and you can keep your mission. Con: Companies feel these donations have ambiguous deliverables. There's a lot of mental overhead too (How many projects can one company fund per month?)
I don't write software, but I have run various small websites for something like 15+ years. I have always gotten more donation money than ad money off my projects. I switched to a tip jar (last year, iirc) and that further improved my take. (It isn't much, but it beats the figures I have seen quoted by most people when data has been asked for on HN. I also don't get much traffic. For the traffic involved, I think it is pretty good.)
I have also seen Patrick McKenzie talk about the fact that he won't donate money to open source, but if you are willing to write an invoice for him, he is happy to give you money. The reason is that he needs to justify his business expenses on his tax returns and a "donation" is charity that he can't justify to the government, but an invoice for a product he uses in his work is a legit tax deduction. He has talked about how he thinks open source should make invoicing business customers painless. I don't readily have a source at my fingertips, but I bet someone on HN can come up with a link.
I try to make my company to donate money to open source projects but it’s difficult. They would rather spend 100k on some BS enterprise thing that wraps open source software instead of spending 1k on giving directly to the devs.
Why? People want to donate. Would be silly not to take their money and use it to improve the project even more. I would argue that donations is a key part of this style of FOSS business model.
I like open source software projects and use them extensively on behalf of my employer. I care that they are healthy.
That said, there is a huge difference between getting authorization to spend company money on a subscription or support contract (easy), vs. getting authorization to donate company money to a person, informal group or nonprofit (extremely difficult).
A license or support contract is easy for the lawyers to understand, easy for procurement to understand, easy for finance to understand. That's how work gets done at a corporation, and they do those types of deals all day. Depending on the amount, I can sometimes turn around approval in hours.
A donation is not "how work gets done". It has no strings attached, which looks scary to lawyers and finance and PR folks. In my company at least, donations have a separate approval path that loops in the PR and corporate citizenship folks... and they want to see that money go to something fuzzy and feel good, like a charity. "Donations" is a line in the budget; it's not a big one and it's not mine.
So, I still think that the way forward for open source projects who want financial support from companies is to organize somehow (incorporate, nonprofit, etc) and sell support subscriptions. This aligns very well with how the corporation manages other dependencies, like office space, phone service, etc.
I rather the approach be that if it is an open source project, that they ask for donations. It is possible to succeed in that way, though it requires learning how to pull it off, where they also get corporate sponsors and donations.
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