Hi Roman, thanks for bringing this up here … I too want to help with exactly this. I tried starting a discussion on this on members@ but that sort of dried up and it felt a bit like a monologue or people simply telling me what didn’t work for them in the past and therefore I shouldn’t try on my own … but I keep on adding stuff in hope someone might be passively consuming.
For this, in 2021 I invested quite a bit of work, time and even money in scouting solutions. I knew most things I tried, would not be successful, but I wanted to do them to see in which way they didn’t perform. And I’m glad I tried it. Because I did learn things, that I haven’t thought about before. So let me share this with you all. Not all things I learned will apply to all projects and all industries. My experience is greatly dominated by automation industry and my work on PLC4X. So initially I tried offering paid consulting, training, and implementation work for PLC4X. This failed, mainly because the Automation industry is not used to this concept. At least the concept of individual contractors. Most companies use Perferred-Vendor approaches. This is the same in more classical IT-consulting consuming industries. The main difference however is that in the automation industry there are no proxy-companies as there are in the other parts of the industry, which individuals could use as proxies. In the past I have worked for numerous Banks by offering services through consulting companies that were listed as Preferred vendors. Usually even if a bank approached me directly, they then said: So, we’re going to take care of setting things up with company X, which is in our Preferred vendor-list, … This infrastructure is completely missing in the Automation sector. In order to make it easier for potential customers to find people willing to help, we added: https://plc4x.apache.org/users/commercial-support.html To the Apache PLC4X website. This was a bit tricky to get right, but I think in the end we got it into a form that is in-line with the ASF and what we are allowed to do as a non-profit charity. In parallel I took every chance to speak at conferences or publish in tech-magazines. However, our potential customers simply didn’t go to those conferences or read those magazines. The automation industry has industrial fairs instead of conferences and their magazines are all pay to play. So, you need to invest a lot of money to be noticed. This is 100% in conflict with the ASF’s mission, and I don’t really see any way how we can change this, unless companies are willing to sponsor Open-Source (and ASF) content or give us some space at industrial fairs. I definitely don’t see the ASF using it’s budget for that, unless it’s a targeted donation explicitly for this sort of thing. I tried platforms like Github Sponsors (Where I must continuously keep on searching for how to find the page every time) https://github.com/sponsors/ … however this didn’t work at all. I think I had one sponsor for 2 or 3 months, but that was a friend from the ASF. The problem is that the industry is used to buying products and not to consuming services. Also, a donation is not targeted and doesn’t work well with industrial book-keeping. I tried contacting companies like tidelift, but no matter what I did, I never got any response, but instead every time I got more spam wanting to tell me about how awesome open-source is (Yeah … tell me about it ;-) ) I tried setting up a crowd-funding platform. The problem with the existing ones was, that they are not made for sponsoring feature development for open-source projects. I didn’t want to invest more time in preparing marketing videos for a campaign that takes longer to prepare than to implement the feature. As I couldn’t find any, I decided to setup my own. As I’m lazy and my website was based on WordPress I used WP-Crowdfunding (https://www.themeum.com/product/wp-crowdfunding-plugin/) … but I knew I had to have this legally checked. So, I hired a lawyer to check what I was planning on doing (Which is quite tricky … not many lawyers seemed to be willing to do that, guess most are just concentrating on the usual stuff). Turns out (at least in Germany) a classical crowdfunding is not possible. The problem is that if a campaign is not successful, you must pay back the invested money. Above that you are required by law to pay interest on that. This is where things start getting interesting: As soon as you pay interest, you offer bank-like services. And this requires you to run your business through BAFIN. Which is a HUGE amount of paperwork and probably even expensive. The only option I had, was to run it as a donation without any repayments. Of course, this again brings up the problem that donations don’t go down well in corporate accounting. So, I wasn’t expecting much to happen on my new crowdfunding platform. But I thought: If this should happen to work, I would like to enable others to do the same, so I added a few bucks to the lawyer bill and had him prepare something that I was allowed to give to others to use (Sort of like “terms of service” with a permissive license). This: Having a lawyer check if crowdfunding is possible and if yes, in which way and having them prepare the “terms of service” cost quite a bit. Unfortunately, I was right with the acceptance of this platform: Not a single cent got paid into any of the campaigns I listed. The sums some of them list were simply test-data I intentionally left there when going online ;-). But one thing I didn’t expect, was that having campaigns listed and having a price-tag assigned to them, made companies approach me directly asking for a different form of sponsoring the campaigns. So right now, there are 2 campaigns that are being sponsored and they even got the companies to actively participate. So, I will not be doing all the work on my own but we’re splitting things up between me and the companies, making them become more involved in the project. This is good for me and for the Project. So, I think we need to do two things: * List individuals or companies willing to provide services around one of our projects * List possible features that could be implemented and assign some sort of measure to them (like developer-days needed to implement … I would strongly object adding prices, but having developer-days should be a dimension they can think in and sort of get an idea on what costs to expect) Also, would it be good, if we could establish some sort of standard for projects offering this sort of thing, so people get used to it. Similarly to “every project has a download page” we need awareness that there’s also a “commercial-support” (or whatever we call it) page and some sort of feature catalog. I do think there are ways how we can ensure income to solo developers or small companies and still stay in line with the ASF mission. And finding these paths is what I would like to do in the future. Chris From: Roman Shaposhnik <r...@apache.org> Sent: Sonntag, 27. Februar 2022 23:06 To: ComDev <dev@community.apache.org>; cd...@apache.org Subject: Effective ways of getting individuals funded to work on ASF projects Hi! over the past couple of years there has been a number of efforts trying to figure out effective ways of getting funded for working on ASF projects as individuals and not employees at companies building on top of these projects. Chris's recent experience is but one of them: https://lists.apache.org/thread/momxgzzyq03lz54knvzhxm16r8j40vog My personal frustration with all these threads is that we never seem to arrive at any actionable suggestions for how developers like Chris can *easily* create these additional income streams. Rightfully, we at ASF basically say that it must be a 3d party issue to solve. It very much is. The problem is that doing so one one-off just perpetuates the logistical pain of setting up contracts, etc. etc. This creates a pretty significant barrier and, as Chris's experience would suggest it typically becomes too insurmountable for individual developers. Sure, there have been interesting attempts to "hack the system" and use things like GitCoin, BugMark and a few others to solve for this "how do we get back to our open source roots when individuals, not corporations were the economic agents around open source". But I honestly don't know of any of them becoming viable either. At least not so far. At the risk of tilting at windmills once again, I'd like to see if there's enough interest to take a crack at this problem yet again. And in the spirit of "hacking the system" I'd like to suggest that we focus on a 3d party solving it for us. In fact, I suggest we pick a very particular 3d party -- TideLift https://support.tidelift.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406293106324-Quickstart-guide Now, before you exclaim "who the heck appointed TideLift to solve it for us?" I'd be the first one to admit that I picked them because I know them really well and I do think they are the closest to giving us some of the answers. But above all, I'm suggesting we look at TideLift because they seem to be very much willing to work with us on actually changing their engagement model to fit our needs. IOW, it is not like their rules are cast in stone -- we can assume they are malleable. If anyone knows of a similar 3d party -- let's discuss that too. If, however, there's a general consensus about seriously looking at them as that 3d party -- I'd like to start collecting names of ASF developers (and PMCs) who would be willing to participate in a trial program with them of sorts and report back. If you have comments on anything above -- please reply in-thread. If you'd be interested in this trial -- you can either do that or just reply to me personally. Thanks, Roman.
