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rndhouse | 4 years ago

I don't believe enough public software developers ask for or expect to receive donations.

The macro goal of OpenFare is to put in place a mechanism that developers can use to receive funds for developing public software. If there is a demand for donations, it needs to be brought to the surface. I don't think we're adequately over that hurdle.

Many content creators (youtubers, gamers, ...) get paid a lot. I think that there is room for public software engineers to ask for their share.

discuss

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cromulent|4 years ago

Thanks for moving the needle.

Millions of companies use open source without contributing anything. I have a theory/daydream that:

a) a new foundation could be created with a new licence, whose only purpose is to accept payments and distribute them, with max x% overhead

b) that licence would stipulate that by paying a nominal yearly fee (e.g. 10 hours average developer cost in your country) you would get all-you-can-eat commercial use of such licensed software

would lead to software adopting that licence, companies paying that fee as a no-brainer, and in time would mean that those millions of companies would at least give some money, without warranty etc, that would be distributed somewhat fairly.

Which would no doubt be massively imperfect, but better than now.

WJW|4 years ago

I want to be optimistic about this, but I don't think the result would be that every company would sign up for this. Rather, every company would implement their own 10-liner library for adding ANSI color codes to terminal output. The whole system of smallish dependencies you add in on an as-needed basis only works when the cost of adding them (INCLUDING the transaction costs, the cost of dev hours spend on convincing the procurement dept, etc etc etc) is cheaper than the cost in dev hours of just writing it yourself.

In addition to this, if a company pays for software the devs they buy it from had better respond quickly to security vulnerabilities and feature requests. The standard FOSS "this software is provided as-is, without even some guarantee of fitness for purpose" is not really something that would fly in a commercial contract.