Hello all, On Mon, Oct 14, 2024 at 05:16:31PM +0200, Sasha Romijn wrote:

On 14 Oct 2024, at 16:26, Vesna Manojlovic @ RIPE.net wrote:

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What are your thought about this approach?

Thanks for bringing this to the list! I like their approach, it really addresses some of the pain points of open source funding: some organisations generate large revenues building on open source without contributing, the funding problems are harder especially for smaller projects, and funding should not just be a one time effort, but an ongoing thing.

I’d be curious to hear from people who work at organisations this is aimed at, whether they think they can get their employer to join, and what the obstacles are.

The main obstacle from our customers I have ever heard is the internal auditing department where they demand to have some direct services to be provided to the specific company. No service? No payment. This is why BIRD is slowly but surely moving from "your payment is supporting the development" to actually "BIRD Team supports your deployment".

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And do you have other examples of funding FLOSS ? (in addition to the grants from NLNET, NGI, RIPE NCC Sovern Tech Fund (mentioned in the blog)... ).

Some other ones I am aware of are: * [Open technology fund](https://www.opentech.fund/) * [SIDN Fund](https://www.sidnfonds.nl/excerpt) * [GÉANT Innovation Programme](https://community.geant.org/innovationprogramme/) (currently closed) * TCU keeps a [wiki with many fundraising opportunities](https://wiki.digitalrights.community/index.php?title=Fundraising_Opportuniti...)

Heard 2 days ago about <https://maintenance-as-a-service.de>. I would very much appreciate having an opportunity to discus these affairs more properly and deeply during the upcoming RIPE meeting. Sadly, I haven't had time and energy to prepare anything, and I don't think that I'm the right person to open/facilitate a discussion on these topics, as I feel some conflict of interests there. I can do a (lightning) talk on how our support model works, though, if there is nothing better to open this topic. Maria -- Maria Matejka (she/her) | BIRD Team Leader | CZ.NIC, z.s.p.o.

Hi, On 14 Oct 2024, at 20:24, Vesna Manojlovic @ RIPE.net wrote:

If the chairs want to facilitate this, I would be interested to contribute in any way I can - as a moderator, bringing more speakers/panelists (external to the RIPE community), sharing  more of the documentation I collected over years etc.

However, it takes a bit longer to prepare than 2 weeks that we have before RIPE89 -- so we can do it as "interim session" online, or at RIPE90.

Doing something like this has been on my mind, thank you both for offering to contribute in some way. RIPE89 is indeed quite soon already, so a larger plan would need to be further out. I’ll discuss it with my co-chairs :) Sasha

I would also love to have a discussion about how to better fund and sustain open source in the wg. I am aware of the Sentry effort, and I like the way they have tried to exclude funding open source that is only for the benefit of your own company or ecosystem. Alistair Woodman proposed something similar about a year ago - I am not sure how much of this is his idea and how much I have added, but he was thinking about this like a ‘Fair Trade’ initiative, like people buy ethically-sourced coffee, for example, where a company could claim a marketing benefit if they were adequately supporting the open source they benefited from. A first step is to just get companies to disclose how much they contribute to funding external open source, perhaps in their annual financial reporting. The Sentry thing though, asking for $2K per developer is also good, because by emphasizing the ‘per developer’ part, it is apparent that you haven’t actually bought all of someone’s time, so hopefully there are fewer expectations that you will then direct the project with your priorities. Similar to Maria, I could explain how ISC is funded, although it is very simple - paid professional tech support. This requires some minimum scale however, and there is a bunch of overhead to create a support business, so it isn’t workable for everyone. We ended up with this model after trying others: including soliciting donations. We found that in a lot of companies, the people who might make charitable donations and the people who can buy products and services are just not the same people, and the ones who are consuming software can only buy products and services. I would love to see a donor fund succeed though, and maybe somethings are changing... I have some experience with applying for grants for open source development, and there are downsides to that as well. The main ones are: the grants are almost all for developing new features, which of course just increases on-going maintenance costs, which almost nobody will fund, and, the grants all require that you commit today (or whenever you write the application) to what you will do in a year (or however long it takes for them to assess and award the grants) and often your priorities change in that timeframe, but you are still committed to doing whatever you proposed in your original grant application. The biggest problem however is that it isn’t steady, dependable funding, and humans need some security and not to be constantly worrying about where their next grant is coming from. Also, in the US at least, there is a fair amount of reporting overhead required to accept donations, which makes them unfeasible unless you get enough to justify all the reporting. Anyway, we could have a BOF or something. I think a good focus might be to try to determine what will motivate companies to make a voluntary contribution to help sustain open source, because there will need to be some benefit to the donor for this to really work. This could be a tax benefit, or a marketing benefit, or maybe we can come up with other ideas. Vicky

On 14 Oct 2024, at 16:26, Vesna Manojlovic @ RIPE.net <http://ripe.net/> wrot

What are your thought about this approach?

Thanks for bringing this to the list! I like their approach, it really addresses some of the pain points of open source funding: some organisations generate large revenues building on open source without contributing, the funding problems are harder especially for smaller projects, and funding should not just be a one time effort, but an ongoing thing.

I’d be curious to hear from people who work at organisations this is aimed at, whether they think they can get their employer to join, and what the obstacles are.