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!
I like the idea of just one point to donate to lots of open source projects but I’m not sure if union is the right word for it? I immediately thought of worker’s unions and they dont collect and distribute money for their members, so they? (Or at least it’s not their primary function?)
Many unions collect fees, for operational costs, publications, transportation costs, etc.
Especially they collect funds to support those who have been unjustifiably laid-off, or during strikes to have emergency pay so they can refuse to return due to fin.pressure. Families of disabled or killed at work members…
The thing here is you have for profit corporations producing code as well as executives, and unemployed privateers. Who gets what?
@jlow @GroundPlane
Ah, I didn’t think of that, yeah, unions are even more amazing then I thought. So calling it a union would make sense (but I’m still unsure if it’s the right name if it’s primarily about getting money for people’s work?). OP also called it a co-op which I think is more fitting, personally.
Among distribution rules to be discussed, one of the first points would be who is eligible. I would not want corporations to be supported by these donations, but some companies actually focus on FOSS as a service and I could see them getting in on it. I would exclude devs employed at a company getting paid to contribute as well.
I think this would not drastically change the status quo. Today, corporations contribute to FOSS, but mostly to make sure their hardware or other software is well supported. They will still have that incentive if there is a central donation system that excludes them.