How Should Open Source Development Be Subsidized? (techcrunch.com)

"Open source maintainers are exhausted and rarely paid," writes TechCrunch's editorial manager. "A new generation wants to change the economics."

An anonymous reader quotes their report: [Patreon] is increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect with fans and sustain their work... For those who hit it big, the revenues can be outsized. Evan You, who created the popular JavaScript frontend library Vue.js, has reached $15,206 in monthly earnings ($182,472 a year) from 231 patrons... While Patreon is one direct approach for generating revenues from users, another one is to offer dual licenses, one free and one commercial... Companies care about proper licensing, and that becomes the leverage to gain revenue while still maintaining the openness and spirit of open source software...

Tidelift is designed to offer assurances "around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software," CEO Donald Fischer explained... In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues... Open Collective wants to open source the monetization of open source itself. Open Collective is a non-profit platform that provides tools to "collectives" to receive money while also offering mechanisms to allow the members of those collectives to spend their money in a democratic and transparent way.
TechCrunch warns that "It's not just that people are free riding, it's often that they don't even realize it. Software engineers can easily forget just how much craftsmanship has gone into the open source code that powers the most basic of applications...

"If you work at a for-profit company, take the lead in finding a way to support the code that allows you to do your job so efficiently. The decentralization and volunteer spirit of the open source community needs exactly the same kind of decentralized spirit in every financial contributor. Sustainability is each of our jobs, every day."

Comments

Make it easy for companies to contribute. Sell it

[raymorris]

I've spent several years being paid to do open-source development full-time. The Moodle project made it easy for my organization to contribute. In fact, that's mostly what the maintainers did - maintain the community and developer documentation, not write the code.

First, the software is modular. One can write a Moodle module without touching the rest of the code, or even understanding it. The Apache web server and Linux kernel are similarly modular, and I've been paid to write modules for both.

There are example modules of various types, and how to showing how to develop for Moodle.

There is a well-maintained forum, both user forum and developer forum.

Unit tests are included and easy to run.

Utility functions are included, so you don't have to know *how* Moodle does things, the internal functions, you just call "add block" and Moodle adds your block to page.

All of the messaging welcomes participation and contributions.

All of these things encourage business, government, and non-profit organizations to contribute - meaning paying their employees to contribute.

What Moodle didn't do was offer the ability to BUY Moodle directly from the people who run the project. You CAN sell GPL software. You just can't prevent other people from selling it under a different name. The government agency I worked for probably would have purchased it if they could have. Competing proprietary software sells for thousands of dollars per year, so $500/year, or $200/year, would have been seen as super cheap. Even though we could get the same product for free, I would have encouraged them to buy a copy, and I think they would have done so.

  Moodle allows you to DONATE, but as a government agency we weren't allowed to just give away tax money. We WERE allowed to purchase software, and there was no law that we couldn't buy software if similar software is available for free.

I like prestige, and need groceries

[raymorris]

Myself, I enjoy prestige. I like that my name is in the kernel changelog.

I NEED money. I HAVE to eat, and my kid has to eat.

Prestige is nice, money is required. Given the choice between no money and lots of prestige, or the opposite, I'd take the money, so my kid can eat.

I was fortunate to be able to get paid to work on open-source for several years. I'd like to do that again, but due to changes related to globalization I don't think that's very likely to happen. Not for me at this point in my career.

Very early in my career, it occurred to me that if I wanted power, fame, and money, I should start with fame. Being very well known carries with it a degree of power - even Instagram models and other "social influencers" have the ability to influence others by being well-known. If you well-known for being very good at something, being an expert, that's more power - Stephen Hawking influenced a lot of people, and his opinions could sway others. Heck, even being really good at basketball set Dennis Rodman on a path to influencing international relations. Not deciding them, but influencing them. Once you have game and influence, it's not that hard to leverage those to get money. Especially if you're well known for being very good at something, people will pay you to do that thing - or write books about it. So fortunately you don't have to choose between prestige and money, long-term.

For people early in their careers, or stagnating, making significant contributions to open source can add some prestige to their resume, which can definitely lead to more money. Once or twice in interviews I've had the good fortune to be asked of I was familiar with certain software and been able to say I've helped write that software, I've contributed to it. Someone asked if I know LVM (a major part of the Linux storage stack), I mentioned that I'm the maintainer of the Linux::LVM Perl module. (Which needs a new maintainer, btw, and probably a rewrite to the API).

Idealy you shouldn't need that

[Casandro]

If your code is so complex that you need significant amounts of work just to maintain it, you have done something wrong.
Free Software means that your users are able to use and change that software, if it's to complex you're robbing your users of that possibility as maintaining a fork would be to expensive for them. This makes your software just "Open Source", but not truly "Free" (as in speech).

Taking money is of course OK, but as with every software project, it should have a fairly well defined "end" after which the rate of changes drops rapidly as no new features are being added and the only changes are bug-fixes.

Re:Free is free.

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're talking about subsidizing software, why does it even have to be FOSS? If there's a more self sustaining way of producing software that helps people in a non-profit or even for profit manner, why not look to that instead?

We need the FOSS software because we have seen the risk of having things that we can't look into. Software companies put in spy systems like Microsoft Telemetry or the Android spyware Chinese manufacturers add to their phones. Governments insist on ways to break the cryptography and we can never see them without the source code.

Unfortunately, Microsoft, together collaborators like ESR, have convinced us that we don't need strong copyleft any more. It was copyleft which sustained Linux as a single cooperating project as the BSDs kept splitting every time someone found a commercial niche. FOSS developers who are doing it for altruistic reasons should always release under the strongest copyleft license they can and then only come down from that if they get enough money to more than compensate for the value of their software. It doesn't even matter if you keep the money (in which case others will see the idea and do more FOSS) or you give it to create more software. What matters is insisting that we always have an increasing pool of guaranteed available FOSS software.

Freeloaders - as in users - are fine. Freeloaders - as in developers - will always be a problem because they will suck away value from your project, often without even getting benefit themselves, just transferring money to VC bloodsuckers.

Re:How about freeing up some of that $7.5B?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

How about freeing up some of that $7.5B?

That's what Microsoft paid for GitHub.

. . . but why did Microsoft buy GitHub . . . ?

The Economist has an interesting opinion on this:

https://www.economist.com/the-...

Microsoft assures users the service is safe under its stewardship, but many are wary. When Mr Ballmer spoke of developers, he had a specific sort in mind: those using Microsoft’s tools to build projects for Microsoft products. He once called open-source Linux a “cancer”, which would spread uncontrollably. In a sense, his words proved prophetic: today, open-source software is everywhere, from websites to financial markets to self-driving cars. Under Mr Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft has embraced open-source development. In buying GitHub it hopes to gain the trust of developers it once spurned. But some wonder if the change is complete, or if Microsoft will use its newly bought dominance of open-source hosting to push its own products. Alternatives to GitHub—some themselves open-source—wait in the wings. If it is not careful, Microsoft may find the developers it just paid so much to reach slipping from its grasp.