@jacob BlueOak is recently OSI-approved, in case you were unaware; i don't think it changes anything about your post ofc other than the slight implication that BlueOak is somehow more restrictive
@ljharb oh, I actually think that was a typo from a draft. I'd confused Blue Oak and PolyForm in my mind, and maybe missed fixing it everywhere. Thanks!
@boris
> I’ve been trying out “fair licenses” but it’s not big tent enough
You mean Shared Source? It's better in some ways than pure proprietary but worse in others (eg creates confusion). It didn't take off when BorgSoft were pushing it in the early noughties;
@boris
> I got told recently that OSI approved™️ is not good enough. We live in fallen times, and the Golden Age GPL would lead us back to salvation
AFAICT the OSI remain good gatekeepers of what is and isn't a freedom-respecting license. Despite a lot of attempts to bully them into watering down the definition of "Open Source" to merely 'source available'. But if a license is approved as "Open Source" by the OSI, but filed as proprietary by the FSF/ GNU Project, I go with the latter.
@jacob yea and the GitHub sponsors are always empty, people think the donation or nonprofit model is better but don’t really think about the costs involved in governance and administrative tasks. Tbh they just don’t want capitalism but don’t want to go that far either.
@glyph@jacob yea that’s what I mean, the GitHub sponsors are empty. I know I don’t donate to every open source project I use or even the ones I depend on.
@cam@jacob it's a weird sort of circular thing. I actually kind of have a policy of not donating to open source, because I have given a LOT of my life to the "community", and I feel like a personal boundary for me is that I am not going to make my personal donations to what are, let's be honest, corporate development teams be a cost center in my personal life. and I've mostly succeeded, please do not look at my domain name registration bills.
@cam@jacob but also, I am not entirely certain my moral calculus is correct here. I've given a lot but I've gotten a lot too. Am I net negative or net positive on my community contributions? Hard to say. But I have more or less given up on getting corporate sponsors, individuals are the only ones who can recognize the aesthetic merits of open source approaches.
@glyph
my take on this, from a denominational funder who changed my perspective re: paying for what pays me- if you don't sustain the things closest to your heart, no one else is going to do it for you, and the more niche the thing is, the more it has to be you, if it's YOUR niche. Tons of people will give to NPR. Only Unitarian Universalists will support UU and its institutions. Different field, obviously, and YMMV.
@jordinn
This is exactly my take as well, I fund Julialang, Keepass2Android, Signal, OpenWrt and a few others with small monthly donations because they're super important to me and I don't want a world where they stopped existing because there wasn't enough money coming in.
I'd like a foundation that takes one payment in and then makes proportional payments out to as many projects as I set up. I suspect more people would do this if it were easy. @glyph
@dantleech
This seems to be about sponsoring things your code depends on? But I'm talking about for users. Let's say someone has a home network with Nextcloud, PiHole, an OpenWrt based router, a Debian server, they message via Signal, they use some back up solution, etc etc... they don't write a line of code. Right now you could set up recurring payments to each but it's an organization nightmare... @jordinn@glyph
@dlakelan@jordinn@glyph true, concept is about the same though, except you'd manually list the "dependencies" for the application called "life" (i like the concept btw)
@nemeciii
I don't believe this is true. It may be that "donation" is a protected term which must go to a certain kind of legal entity (usually a non-profit organization), but if you avoid that term, you should be good to go. I'm not aware of any jurisdiction where money gifts are illegal, and I'm also not aware of any jurisdiction in which the sale of digital goods and services requires you to also provide a physical good.
@LWinterberg@nemeciii@cam@jacob In the UK, I could not send somebody a sticker as reward for a donation, as then I need to charge VAT (and if it's an EU user, register for VAT filing in an EU country). Which is a pain with GH sponsors, as they keep pushing to offer rewards. It's not a problem with Patreon, as they charge VAT themselves.
Nothing wrong with that as long as the commercial features do not take away the user's freedom by turning these so called features more into restrictions.
Maintainer: works for a large tech co
Usually not good. At most large tech companies you're only contributing to things that make the world a worse place, but there are some exceptions.
Maintainer: takes investment
That's usually not a bad thing, especially if it is investment from governments or well trusted NGOs. Investments are really only a bad thing if the investors want something that ruins things for everyone in return.
@mischievoustomato It is one way, but I think it is more rare than the others. I vaguely know a guy who works at Oracle and all he got hired to do there is improve GCC.
Adding commercial features to your free software, such as providing support, hosting, selling hardware that run the software, etc. is a far more common way for people to make money with free software.
Getting investments is also very common. Your beloved NixOS for example is mostly being funded by the NLnet Foundation.
i now know, thanks. It's just that I often hear that making money with foss is near impossible, that I more or less am blackpilled about this and wished that donations were more common
true true. I'm not gonna say I'm too big on ethics atm because I've been poor all of my life, so I'd have no qualms working to write propietary or foss code
@mischievoustomato I mean I can't fault anyone working on proprietary software as long as you realize it is just a means of survival. I would still urge you to work on free software instead of that opportunity arises.
@offby1 yeah exactly. The only "acceptable" way appear to be asking for donations -- offering nothing in return -- and doing so incredibly politely and absolutely not in any way that looks like advertising. Which doesn't actually work, shocker. If we're serious about open source sustainability, the community needs to grow the fuck up about money.
@mjgardner@jacob I'm not sure what kind of dunk you're aiming for here.
I run an instance. I take donations, but if we had to find sponsors we would definitely consider it, in order to sustain the community. In fact, we are always looking for ways to do exactly that while maintaining the community values we have.
@mjgardner@jacob I do not think that you made the point you were trying to make, and neither of the people you tagged are the people you seem to be trying to make it to.
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