Hi Paul.
Thanks for the links!
I wasn't too lazy to web-search, but especially these days I believe
it's still better to ask /people who know and care/ to get reliable
information.
Thank you very much for your opinion and insights.
Hm. Seems harder than imagined "where to point people to" when it comes
to financially support FOSS in general (instead of hand-selecting
individual projects).
I honestly ask myself, which "distribution-entity" to pay (and how much)
to put in my share?
Which distributors are you using to contribute /payments/?
(personally and professionally)
Anyways, thanks!
Peter
On 30.08.25 23:48, Paul Boddie wrote:
On 2025-08-30 22:01, P.B. wrote:
Hi everyone! :)
Just found this: https://opensourcepledge.com/
Seems to be a good idea.
Just quickly skimmed their site, and didn't check any backgrounds or
if it's "legit".
No Wikipedia entry yet it seems.
The bar is fairly high to a Wikipedia article these days.
So I thought, this might be the right place to ask:
**DOES ANYONE KNOW MORE ABOUT THEM?**
Your favourite search engine probably does, even in this age of
low-quality search results. For example:
https://lwn.net/Articles/993073/
https://opensource.org/blog/the-open-source-initiative-supports-the-open-source-pledge
https://blog.opencollective.com/why-the-open-source-pledge-is-both-relevant-and-timely/
The LWN article is probably where I learned about this, and Chad
Whitacre, who appears to be the prime initiator, has a track record of
supporting community funding for Free Software projects. The Gratipay
service mentioned in the article was a nice attempt to support
collaborative ongoing funding, but it somewhat fell foul of financial
industry regulations, mostly with regard to processing, receiving,
retaining and forwarding payments, if I vaguely recall the details
correctly. The Liberapay service was founded in Europe to offer what
Gratipay had been attempting to do in the US. See the appropriate
article for more background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberapay
Unlike Gratipay and Liberapay, I think the idea behind this newer
initiative is that while individuals might be willing to pay small
amounts, the sums involved don't add up to much, as you can see if you
look at even the most lucrative projects on Liberapay and similar
crowdfunding platforms. And even if there are projects making enough
to pay a full-time developer or two, they aren't necessarily critical
infrastructure projects, perhaps being more visible and easily
marketable projects instead. Meanwhile, corporations with plenty of
money rely substantially on Free Software but often balk at donating
to projects. Indeed, they may argue that they cannot or should not
donate to anything when the acquisition cost is zero.
It should also be noted that Open Collective, referenced above and
supportive of this newer endeavour, tried to market crowdfunding and
sponsorship to corporations, but was itself a venture-capital-funded
enterprise that would have needed to generate substantial revenue
streams and margins in order to generate the kind of return on
investment that such funding entails. It seems that the whole effort
has become more decentralised, and I see that projects like F-Droid
are hosted at Open Collective Europe, which is a "fiscal host" within
the Open Collective ecosystem. It gets confusing to define what Open
Collective actually is now, but a common technological platform might
be the best description.
It must be said that some projects/organisations are attracting fairly
reasonable amounts of funding through Open Collective, such as the PHP
Foundation. However, comparable established projects - thinking of the
Python Software Foundation - often have their own channels for
attracting funding. The above observations about the more popular
projects might still be relevant if we exclude such established,
big-name endeavours.
I truly believe it's time to engage in pay-for-foss ideas and real
concepts.
I know there are already some.
However, if you know anything about this site/service in particular,
I'd be happy to hear from you!
Unfortunately, I don't know much more about this particular service,
but I thought it would be useful to provide some of the background
around its initiator and the emergence of related services. I imagine
that some in the FSFE community might be able to describe their
experiences with such platforms, given that F-Droid, for instance, has
featured in FSFE campaigns in recent years.
Paul
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