Relying on volunteers to maintain every open source project isn't long term sustainable. Funding open source projects could keep development moving, but would that funding be raised and who would pay for it?
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to. | Seldo.com
Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.
Moving beyond the charity framework
A healthy ecosystem for supporting open source in the long term.
Scaling Open Source communities
Successful Open Source projects must transition from pure volunteerism to include paid contributions, mirroring how public goods like roads evolved historically.
Are donations effective for open source projects?
The other day I came across a new initiative for funding open source development called the Bitcoin Grant. While interesting at first sight, I was wondering: How is this better than the traditional donation button most open source projects have? The Bitcoin Grant then seems to limit who can donate and how you can use those donations (you can’t pay rent with bitcoins just yet).
Why Funding Open Source is Hard
tl;dr: Either developers need to change, or GitHub needs to change
Is This the End of Open-Source? | Built In
Open-source licensure empowers governments and moneyed interests over devs. A reckoning might be on the horizon.
Open Source is a cost-allocation system
Because the right to use the software is not tied to payment, the license does not connect the people who benefit, the people who decide, and the people who bear the costs. Projects have to build those connections deliberately through governance.
Fueling Open Source with Vibes & Money
Economists think Open Source is a business model. Devs know better, and fund it accordingly.
Home - Open Source Collective
Open Source Collective is a non-profit fiscal host for open source projects. Get Transparent fundraising, money management, and legal representation
The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
The open source movement runs on the heroic efforts of not enough people doing too much work. They need help.
Nominate OSS for Funding — Open Source Endowment
Nominate critical, underfunded open source projects for OSE grant funding through our open, community-developed model.
Is Open Source Broken?
The movement to develop software applications and all manner of IT services through the open source model is fundamentally rooted in the notion of community contribution, but things have shifted.
It’s time to rethink Open Source
Why developers give away valuable work for free — and what can be done to take that money back.
What does a sustainable open source project look like?
Over the past couple years, thanks in part to Nadia Eghbal’s Roads and Bridges report, the world is starting to see the need for long-term…
We just launched the Open Source Endowment, the first endowment dedicated to supporting Open Source maintainers, with $693,000 raised already. The world depends on Open Source, but making our ecosystem sustainable is a complex task. I hope that, with community consultation, the Endowment can help 🙏
A VC and some big-name programmers are trying to solve open source's funding problem, permanently | TechCrunch
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