Convener: David Abramson

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Jennifer Moore (@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io)
• Ryan Barrett (@snarfed.org@snarfed.org)
• Colin Devroe (@colin@cdevroe.com / @cdevroe@mastodon.social)
• Johannes Ernst (@j12t@j12t.social) (a little bit)
• Fred Hauschel (@naturzukunft@mastodon.social, https://rdfpub.org/)

Notes

• Fascinated by things that have been big projects & successful, e.g. Django.
• Probably one of few people working on fediverse full-time without associated with a major project; done through crowdfunding & contract work. Working with IFTAS and as an advisor. Other side is applying for grants. A few people here have done that. Not necessarily an easy one. If you partner up with Meta / Google, there may be social implications.
• Type of funding has different implications from a tax / book-keeping perspective, e.g. GitHub (payments from GitHub rather than a specific person) vs. other groups.
• Exploring options like having paid features / business friendly features, or meaningful sums of money.
• Universities / Bell Labs / AT&T had a few of their employees working on Open Source stuff, and people would self-fund on nights / weekends.
• Explicit corporate donations for services & even more recently organizations aimed at.
• History on each person’s involvement w/open source, how they’ve funded their own work, etc.
• Some people full time independent on open source, funded various ways, but not many!
• Easy to start open source projects, harder to scale and maintain responsibly over time.
• You can call it “business mode” or “funding plan” or anything else, but you need it, otherwise you’ll never scale or last.

Lots of past models!

• Universities, eg BSD from Berkeley.
• Corporate as a by-product, eg Bell Labs, AT&T, lots of modern big tech.
• Individual people self funding via full time jobs, doing open source on nights and weekends.

…and more recent models:

• Crowdfunded donations like GitHub Sponsors, Patreon.
• Aggregator services like https://tidelift.com/.
• Specialized corporate-led orgs like Google’s Alpha/Omega.
• Specialized, high end sponsorship agencies like https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/geomys/.
• Calls for “tech civil service” like OSQI, https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/04/01/OSQI.

Worker-owned coops! Like CoLab. Try for open source!

Also how can open source help circular economies, regenerative, coops, etc.

Software supply chain! Open source projects are interdependent, need to aggregate and spread support.

Corporate money usually comes with strings. Need plurality of support to limit those strings.

Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, NLNet.

Need help with admin work like governance, compliance, bookkeeping, logistics, etc!