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!
The big stumbling block I see with this approach is that it’s not just the maintainers who do the work, as others also contribute code fixes, documentation and help in the community.
I can see the very real need to support the core maintainers on the projects we use, but I can also see that causing friction if the others who contribute to a project being successful and useful are overlooked. I know that some projects’ communities put bounties on bugs they want dealt with, which helps to a degree, but still leaved many contributors effectively donating their time whilst a core group get paid. For instance, I’ve submitted and had accepted several patches across several projects that I use. They’ve usually been tobadd functionality that I wanted and saw others wanted too. I don’t think I’d want paying for them, but I’d probably feel different if I knew the person accepting the pull request was being paid, either commercially or via a scheme like this. Maybe that will work out in practice, but I’d be worried about the change in dynamic.
I don’t have a good solution to this, but I thought i’d offer it as a different viewpoint.
Thank you for the input. I guess it would be hard to track community engagement. Also, whatever is done with the donation is up to the project maintainers, in any case. Accepting the pull request in your case is also a great deal of work given the amount of spam they can create, so it is still fair in some way. No one will get rich off of donations anyway