How will you ensure the financial sustainability of Nix without compromising its values?

[nyabinary]

Question

How would you ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the Nix project while preserving its open-source ethos and avoiding dependency on corporate sponsorships that may conflict with community values? What alternative funding models would you explore, and how would you engage the community in these decisions?

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[mschwaig]

I think it's OK to rely on corporate sponsorships, and to limit which sponsored are accepted based on community values as discussed in https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2024/issues/17.

The biggest financial risk by far should be the cache, and there I would see the issue as our dependence on a specific singular sponsor and the difficulty and cost associated with moving.

As mentioned in https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2024/issues/19#issuecomment-2379775428 I think we could invest in a peer-to-peer system to distribute traffic and storage, which we could do to reduce how much traffic hits the sponsor, or spread the load across a variety of sponsors.

[tomberek]

We need additional adoption by institutions that have the incentive and means to help with our financial stability. This means additional grants, sponsorships, and partnerships. It means expressly approaching and asking our users for support that is for agreed upon terms (eg: a year) and renewed. This means we have regular check-ins and an ongoing relationship with them; often that relationship is more important the funds themselves. We mitigate the risk of corporate capture by ensuring we have broader adoption so that no one interest dominates.

An example: engage with the largest organizations that rely on the cache to help make it sustainable. Same with Nixpkgs/NixOS. Convince them that in-house efforts would be made easier by supporting upstream.

I am specifically interested in pursuing additional grants. These need skill-sets for grant writing, project management, and consistency over years to really bear fruit, thus likely dedicated personnel to manage. Our relationship with NLnet is an example of a relationship that should continue to grow. Other mechanisms are to consider non-financial support; services and dedication of people's time.

[getchoo]

How would you ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the Nix project while preserving its open-source ethos and avoiding dependency on corporate sponsorships that may conflict with community values?

As I said in #17, sponsorships are a necessity for projects of our size. However, we must ensure they fall within our stated community values and that we are open to not just recognize, but readily take action on community feedback towards them

What alternative funding models would you explore

I believe encouraging more community donations would be a great way to ensure more sustainability in some areas -- such as smaller scale, local events that may have trouble finding a sponsor. As said by tomberek above, continuing and expanding partnerships we have with organizations like NLNet will also be a key factor in securing safe, uncompromised funding. Lastly, joining organizations like Software in the Public Interest, Inc would give us a path to both secure our own funding, and encourage the growth of projects similar to ours

how would you engage the community in these decisions?

Echoing what I said before: we must recognize and quickly act on feedback from our community regarding financial decisions. Without this, sponsorships, grants, etc. would be doing the exact opposite of helping to grow our community and making sure People come first. Financial decisions under consideration should also be made public and open to comment

[nyabinary]

To ensure the long-term financial sustainability of Nix while preserving its open-source ethos, I would explore a range of community-centric funding models, such as crowdfunding and donations from the community. Additionally, I would advocate for grants from organizations aligned with open-source principles (like the Sovereign Tech Fund).

Corporate sponsorships would be carefully vetted to avoid conflicts with community values. Transparency is key here, so I would push for the community to be actively engaged in these decisions through open forums and discussions, ensuring that we stay true to the foundational ethics of Nix.

[proofconstruction]

The need to dramatically improve financing in the Nix ecosystem has never been more clear to me. In service of this and other goals, I would work on the following:

• improving collaboration with other aligned organizations (e.g. the Haskell Foundation) to pursue mutually-beneficial projects which may receive larger volumes of funding from public sources like NLNet and the STF.
• devoting resources to outreach and establishing partnerships with commercial entities to achieve things like better job placements for Nix community members (get a Nix job!), dedicated corporate-sponsored developer time to work on Nix ecosystem projects (work on Nix at work!), and financial sponsorship of Nix events (bring work to Nix!)
• establishing a US-based counterpart to the existing NixOS Foundation, which would better allow organizations in the Americas to make financial contributions without the European VAT.

As answered in #17, I would work to strengthen the sponsorship policy in accordance with the community's ethics.

One alternative funding model I'm interested in pursuing is for the Foundation or a subsidiary organization to offer paid support and development services to other organizations. This would let organizations seeking to adopt Nix technologies hire members of the community to build that capacity internally, while also financially benefiting the organization, and providing a central place for this work to be procured.

Finally, as noted in #16, improving the reproducibility story would allow us to drop a large recurring caching expense and focus these funds towards other goals.