FOSS: Investment not Charity
Today I got a message from an artist on DeviantArt, he wanted to thank me for the translation of the Managa I posted yesterday. Along with his thanks, he offered to donate $50 to any FOSS project that I wished to support.
My response was, that I’m very thankful for the pledge, but I’d like to see more users with an investment mindset, instead of a charitable one. So I offered a few ways this money could be invested, a couple of artists who do commissions who could draw some wonderful art in the name of FOSS, or people I know who do deb packaging or bug fixing. Perhaps it could go towards getting some very tiny feature implemented.
The reason I think it’s so important? You have to tie the service of software development to normal none technical users if you want them to be involved in any meaningful way in the direction of software. Since users are in the most need, serving those needs will be difficult so long as they are held at arms length by FOSS communities.
The one big way that none technical users can make a difference is with funding. They have the money and we have the skills. Obviously no single user has enough money to get major features developed, but they could aggregate their investment with others and raise the required funding.
The problem is that there are no tools to do this kind of thing and what is worse, there is a lack of acceptance within the community that funding of this kind is useful or even possible. It’s accepted that only the big industry level titans can hire developers to work on FOSS projects and without their enterprise level charging for their enterprise level services, there wouldn’t be enough money to develop common FOSS projects at any great speed.
So I’m making a stand, I want to see Investment not Charity from FOSS projects. I want to see Donate via PayPal buttons turned into “Invest in New Features by PayPal” buttons with a list of features being developed that users can choose. I want to see special logos used to show support for the common man’s interest in his software needs.
Pro-active funding isn’t as popular as Retro-active purchasing, our whole lives are driven by the ideas of buying products off shelves. The enterprise don’t want to be involved in the difficulties; so they focus on big money, simple, easy, teletuby funding.
But that doesn’t serve the man on the ground, it doesn’t give them a real say, the little guys who just want to get their homework done, or play a nice computer game. Nor does it help any of the programmers who aren’t employed by the IBMs and RedHats of the world. Users may not have any good ideas, but perhaps they do recognise the hard work in a project and would like to see it continue.
See my FOSS visual guide for a general idea of what I was thinking.
I agree with you that FOSS is an investment, however I think people might be more open to contributing if we emphasized the charitable nature of what they’re doing. Free Software is a public good in the economic sense – like pollution-free air or clean city streets it’s impossible to exclude someone just because they haven’t paid. People volunteer tons of money to these things (they even support their tax dollars being spent on them), but despite having millions of users FOSS projects fall short in donations.
So, instead of making it look like a quid pro quo, which does work to some extent, I think we might be able to encourage even more donations by emphasizing things like how free software is being used to further education in public schools that can’t afford new computers or windows licenses.
I agree with you, but maybe the language can ‘change’. Well when I was reading your post I was thinking in who keeps beign ‘man of the moment’: Barack Obama and specifically the method used to finance his campaing. I don’t know if it was a myth or not but the idea behind can be used to the FOSS movement. Is not invest (which is an idea that is so out of fashion these days
) but contribute, help. Not donate and forget, but ‘be part of it’.
You might be right that “investment” implies too much direct and exclusive benefit. Perhaps “contribute” is a better word. But I’d avoid charity, because this is about commons, this is about us helping each other, including ourselves. Not just helping others.
It is nice to feel like we’re doing something good, and we are, it’s just that there are important charities out there that can teach people how to read, give them clean water, food and treat bad third world disease. FOSS shouldn’t be a charity, it works technically, ideologically and economically; there is no reason to presume it’s in an sick position of requiring charity. Perhaps it’s just the difference between the way Americans and Europeans see charity. I don’t know.
If I were a company like Dell, I’d be investing in FOSS as fast as I fricking could to keep Apple from eating my lunch with caviar during a recession..
Were you aware of the existence of this website? http://cofundos.org/
They have a unique system for funding open-source projects.
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yokozar: I don’t think that developing open source software is charitable. Specifically, I think there’s a distinction to be made between selfless sacrifice and being paid to write software under an open license. No clue if my mental distinction matters in taxes or the minds of others.
I like your stance.
As pointed out, cofundos is a good place to start on that. Point the guy to spend his $50 on a project there.
Great post. Kudos for pointing out the facts and pointing people int he right direction.
I do not think developing open source is “charitable.” I really do think it’s an investment of time.
In this day and age time does equal money (in a service economy); however, these FOSS developers, QA engineers, or *anyone* (really) who is contributing is choosing to use their TIME on a FOSS initiative (such as Ubuntu) is choosing TIME = FREE over TIME = MONEY. And that is an investment.
[...] my travels recently, I happened across a rather thought provoking proposal from Martin Owens, an active contributor to the Ubuntu project. He suggested that people would be more likely to [...]
I agree. I think I’ve gotten a lot of benefit from others’ work over the years. I like the sound of the cofundos site- I don’t think I could ever pay enough alone for a feature I want, but with others…
A middle ground would be to take investments and acknowledge those contributions and maybe even how they were used. Like you said, most people have a mentality that they want what they’re buying now. Maybe with more acknowledgement for FOSS investors- my ideas at http://eazely.com/archives/apps/624- there would be enough goodwill to encourage more investments.
[...] talked at length before about how you can’t really offer services for excessive prices in order to re-focus money on [...]
This:
http://www.stefanoforenza.com/ubuntu-appstore-in-the-workings/
Reminded me of this post. It does provide a funding model to the developers — at least, I would hope.
Sorry for drudging it up
Cheers!