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Latest comments (22)
Are there currently any attempts at a spotify model?
Great post Erik. I agree with a lot of the problems you describe here.
Just a few days ago, I posted an article about funding in open source here on dev.to as well. I wanted to know how the open source community feels about the current situation and started a survey on the topic of open source funding. Maybe you want to check out the survey: opensourcefunding.github.io/
The big problem I see in the (important, no matter how pessimistic I sound) conversation around Open Source Sustainability is the "build it and they will come" mentality, the idea that, if we write useful code and make it available under licenses that allow big companies to yank it behind a paywall, they're going to finally realize their obligation to the community and Open Source developers around the world will be sitting on fortunes for their altruism.
The reality is that the big companies might hire a couple of developers to get what they want without training someone on their team. But after thirty years of explaining to lawyers that the BSD/MIT-type licenses mean that they can pretend their programmers wrote the code and not need to issue a purchase order, they're not going to spend money on software everybody can get for free.
That's one of the reasons I've become a copyleft hard-liner, even though I'm not producing anything important: If you want to pretend the code is yours or if you want to make changes that don't get pushed back to me, you need to negotiate with me for your own license. Otherwise, you're constrained by the AGPL, because I'm not interested in working for Apple without a salary...and probably not with a salary, either.
I keep wondering, though, if the flaw in "sustainability" is in assuming that it needs to focus on money. Don't get me wrong. Money is important to things like not starving. But in insisting that a sustainable system is a well-funded system where people quit their jobs, it seems like people are just creating companies that require design, marketing, sales, support, and accounting, leading the founders to burn out from the strain of trying to get money from other Open Source projects (the most likely entities to appreciate the work) to, in part, pay other Open Source projects.
I don't know. It often feels like we confuse hobbyist Open Source with "follow your dreams (and live off your savings)" Open Source and (worse) commodify your complements Open Source, and the result is a twisted mess where people are trying to figure out what's stopping the Big Five (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) from showering us all with money, since they all love Open Source.
Unfortunately, I don't have any legitimate solutions, beyond the deeply unsatisfying, "get a job, Hippie" accidentally implied by my rambling...
I wrote about this last year: aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-...
At the end of the day, I think there is a difference between an open source project and a product. Most developers are currently building projects that are widely used, these aren't the things businesses traditionally want to buy. There's also the cruel reality that the market may be telling you something about the monetary value of your work :/
I'm a marketer, so I'm planning to use GitHub Sponsors differently than intended. My team wants to award hackathon winners; give larger, 1x sponsorships to devs and projects we use or want to support; and generally use GitHub Sponsors to encourage engagement in open source work we care about.
This isn't directly related to open source sustainability, but I wanted to get opinions on this. Is this type of approach a net positive for open source?
great post, some points and a prompt:
100% this will not work, but I disagree with your 'libraries devs appreciate the most' idea. I think what we're already seeing is that a small number of libraries with more exposure are starting to attract even greater support. People tend to pick the winners.
We could go down the line and say that there might be an algorithm that takes into account the cyclomatic complexity, usage and a dampening factor for current level of support. I would love to get there, and I have tried and failed in the past.
More and more I am thinking in terms of sustainability as a community of projects, rather than treating each project in isolation. Given the current programmes we have some projects will 'win' and others will lose. But what if we use that fact that some projects have that exposure and are able to generate 'revenues' (whether in paid for services, support or donations) to create a a sustainable future for themselves and those that they depend on? At what point should OS projects begin to support other OS projects?
The ongoing maintenance and growth of open source projects are clearly in the best interest of the software companies using them. And yet, raising money for an open-source project is difficult, and many developers struggle with finding the right sponsors for their open source projects. What is the best way to get the resources open source developers need to keep developing? here's an article I wrote about how to find the perfect sponsor for your opensource project:
blog.xscode.com/736/the-right-spon...
Check it out.
Nice summary. I've tried GitHub sponsors myself, and so far have one sponsor (which I'm thankful for!) for Open Source contributions that I know is used by hundreds of large companies.
After reading a blog post on that subject yesterday evening, I just wrote an article about the idea of integrating a Sponsorware approach into dev.to:
💡 GitHub Sponsors and dev.to posts
Raphaël Pinson ・ Jul 2 ・ 1 min read
Your post is very informative and good suggestions :)
Great write up, Erik! I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the Sponsorware approach. It doesn’t address the issues with big companies and open source, but I wonder if it could help with the funding.