We all love FOSS. Lately, many of us have expressed their disarray at hearing stories of maintainers quitting due to a variety of factors. One of these is financial.
While donating to your favorite app developer is something many of you already do, the process can be tedious. We’re running all sorts of software on our machines, and keeping an exhaustive list to divide donations to projects is somehow more effort than tinkering with arch btw™.
Furthermore, this tends to ignore library projects. Library maintainers have been all over FOSS-centered media rightly pointing out that their work is largely unnoticed and, you guessed it, undervalued.
What can we do about it? Under a recent Lemmy post, some have expressed support for the following idea:
Create a union of open source maintainers to collect donations and fairly redistribute them to members.
How would this work?
Client-side:
- You take some time to list the software you use and want to donate to
- You donate whatever amount you want for the whole
Server-side:
- Devs register their projects to the union while listing their dependencies
- A repartition table is defined by the relevant stakeholders. Models discussed below.
- When a user donates, the money is split according to the repartition table
How do we split the money? It could be:
- Money is split by project. A portion of donations go to maintainers of libraries used by the project.
- Money is split according to need. Some developers don’t need donations because they are on company payroll. Some projects are already well-funded. Some devs are struggling while maintaining widely used libraries (looking at you core-js). Devs log their working time and get paid per hour in proportion of all donations.
- Any other scheme, as long as it is democratically decided by registered maintainers.
Think of it like a worldwide FOSS worker co-op. You “buy” software from the co-op and it decided what to do with the money.
We “only” need to get maintainers to know about the initiative, get on board and find a way to split the money fairly. I’m sure it will be easy to agree on a split, since any split of existing money will be more satisfactory than splitting non-existent money.
What are your thoughts on this? Would you as a maintainer register? Would you donate as a user? Would you join a collective effort to build this project? Let’s discuss this proposition together and find a way to solve that problem so that FOSS can keep thriving!
TLDR: We should make a browser extension where you assign points in what percentage projects get your predefined monthly donations.
So this will be a long text…
I have thought about this problem a lot. If we can have means to build necessary momentum I am all for that and would like to contribute.
I thought about it in a broader way. As to how to monetize content on the internet without ads (open source projects, creators, journalists), in a way we maximize collective good. It may be worth noting I was thinking it in terms of the new internet - Web 4.0 together with tools like ipfs, veilid, and new wave of web browsers (web 1.0 - protocols, 2.0 - platforms, 3.0 - crypto scams, 4.0 - something better, p2p, private…)
I placed highest focus on how to fairly monetize this web 4.0, since I believe the right monetization is the crucial point. If we put only donate our free time (max 2h a day) to projects things move slowly. But imagine what can be done if I am allowed to work 8 hours a day on eg. foss.
I have concluded that few things must have hold true:
I can propose one solution i am the most confident with. It would be a browser extension (or even better to be integrated in browsers by default).
First you set how much you would like to donate. (I played in my mind also with option to make some minimal donation - eg 1% of minimal salary in your country - may even be necessary as a subscription to internet content)
By default the sites (maybe preapproved sites good for community) get percentage of your donation proportional to your views.
You can explicitly set some (or all) sites to have higher percentage directly in from address bar by single click. Eg. I visit Linux webpage and I can click a button and set it to 20% of my donations. All the other donations then move proportionally to remaining 80%.
System based on (maybe even forced) donations changes whole behavior of monetization.
You start paying for what you believe in, and not for what you need.
And I believe this is the one of most important goals we can have. So people will have the highest incentive to work on stuff that makes the most good.
Also another note on forced donations: In Slovenia you can decide to put 1% of our taxes to non profit organizations. And this works.
If you read through that. Thank you! I believe my ideas have many flaws. So please comment and we can debate them.
This is reminiscent of Flattr. As are other suggestions here.
The basic principle of Flattr still seems right to me. You pay a monthly sum for all your donations to a third party in escrow. Then the third party redistributes the money according to your instructions, either by means of a tipjar buttons on websites, or a browser add-on, or perhaps just a giant list of checkboxes and sliders.
The major advantage being that the third party deals with the plumbing of payments.
Think Flattr where devs have a say in who gets what. A whole lot of problems to solve, but potential to be a central platform that devs actually want to join and advertise because they trust it
Never heard of them. Should we contact them?
That would be a nice option for web-based stuff. I guess the whole difficulty is to get a list of projects and to publicize it widely. I also believe donations should be stupid simple or they will never take off.
The main difference between your idea and mine lies in who decides where the money goes. I do not think end users should decide 100%, because that ignores a lot of critical under-the-hood software. Users must however have a completely transparent report of who gets what. I guess at that point they should be able to adjust it to their whims, which circles back to your point 1.
I think you can still have users decide which projects get funding and have the system/organization/smart contract/etc automatically distribute funds to the libraries those projects depend on. 80% to the project, 20% to the libraries, etc.
If we let devs decide which projects get funding, they’re just going to always pick their own project. Since that doesn’t align with what users want, users won’t want to donate. If you want users to donate, you need to let them have some say in what their projects their donations go to.
Ideally you would let picky users override every setting and provide fair enough defaults. That includes library donation cascading etc. At the end of the day it seems the core part of the project should be providing fair enough defaults
It may not be only for web based stuff. The only things organization would need is the website and a bank account. Which is pretty standard these days.
We could have both systems. There should still be the default setting. I proposed the default distribution should be based on views. But the default setting could also be set by the community. This default distribution would also be used by the people who decide to favorize one project and give them 50% of their donation and leave the rest with the default distribution.
Also I believe it is crucial you can override the decision of this community. There will be bad decisions or decisions that you personally do not agree with. But because of that you should not give up on donations. You can simply pick your own, or blacklist one organization you do not agree with.
It is crucial indeed. That makes the project more of a central donation platform removed from the dev world, but it is simpler as such