Love FOSS and want to donate? Here's how we can do it

GroundPlane@iusearchlinux.fyi to Linux@lemmy.ml – 110 points –

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:

  1. You take some time to list the software you use and want to donate to
  2. You donate whatever amount you want for the whole

Server-side:

  1. Devs register their projects to the union while listing their dependencies
  2. A repartition table is defined by the relevant stakeholders. Models discussed below.
  3. 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!

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Maybe I'm missing the point, but if you want to have union of maintainers/contributors, please go ahead, just be careful with assuming it can actually address the problem. You will never have any substantial percentage of maintainers. That's kind of the main point of FLOSS: people do what they want to do, where they want to do.

If you want to collect data about what is used -- with the goal of "not forgetting the little project with the library", that's also great but that's going to be a lot of work and might be impossible to reflect. I can't think about solution that would not be platform-specific.

Don't get me wrong, uniting FLOSS developers along common goals, technology domains or philosophy, building communities and providing support systems is an absolute wonderful thing to do, even if you end up having what might feel like just a few projects.

You are not missing the point and bring up something my jaded views keep reminding me about. It is important to not believe too much in your efforts so as to stay grounded and not be too enthusiastic and get disappointed when downturns inevitably appear.

I'm battling between two approaches about data collection: the tedious manual entry on behalf of devs or the fully automated scrapping a la other existing efforts in the field

I would not say "not believe too much in your efforts", I think the tendency to simply scale down enthusiasm can be toxic in its own way.

I like to remind myself of how Václav Havel said it:

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Yes, being enthusiastic about false goals can lead to devastating results. Being hopeful by realizing that your work does make sense even if you won't necessarily see results of it, that's much more sustainable source of motivation.

Also, remember that no matter how it turns out you will learn something on the path. If anything, this is one of the "certain" parts.

A balance definitely needs to be struck and I'm hopeful that I am on the right side of it. Thank you for your support, it means a lot