greduan
commented
10 years ago Excellent idea @balupton! I also have an idea for open source and money so I'll be posting that soon. :)
Here's a question for something I don't get though.
Where does the money come from? I didn't get that from this explanation, you get paid for the amount of value your product offers, sure, however where does that money come from?
Idea originally posted as a private gist at 2013-06-10T07:53:26Z
Fair Funding
It's time that a fair and sustainable payment model was developed for the open-source world. Fair Funding is it.
Situation
Lets take a moment to talk about the current ways open-source developers receive their funding, as well as their problems.
You create something great, release it for free, thousands of people use it, but it may or may not be complex enough to be able to charge consulting for it, and you may also have an issue where those interested in the project are not in a position where they have the power to initialise funding or consulting for the project.
This then leaves us with an option of releasing a non-free portion of it, and charging for that, however that goes against the grain of being able to empower anybody to improve your entire offering, the foundations of the free culture and open-collaboration movements. Richard Stallman would even boycott you.
So then, that leaves donations. The issue here is that donations can be incedibly sporadic and do not provide a stable income. To counter this, donations are usually coupled with a crowd-source model of "I'll build this if we raise X amount of money", which then requires a constant time exchange of hot new features for money, which leaves the issues of:
It's time we rethought this trade for time for money, and created a sustainable funding model for open-source projects. Here it is.
Say hello to Fair Funding
Fair funding is built entirely on the premise of, the more value you add, the more value you receive, and we just make that transaction as rediciously easy and inituive as possible. Value is considered of two parts: Monentary and Time. So we use time to earn money, and we use money to the pay the bills. Now for an open-source project, that means we can receive value in two ways - time invested in the project in terms of contributions, and money invested in the project in terms of financial support/donations. So lets reward both ways!
When a commit is accepted into a project (say via pull request), or financial support provided, the Fair Funding script will detect this and automatically update the meta data in the README.md, BACKERS.md and package.json files. Providing exposure to those who've added value into back to the project.
The README.md file, will provide a listing of those who've added value back for the current month, as well as a link to the BACKERS.md file - an all time listing. The package.json project meta-data file will also serve as an all time listing of those who've added value back.
For adding financial value back, we've planned for the following tiers:
What is magical about this, is that Fair Funding will automate the complete process of keeping your contributors and backer listings up to date automaticaly on your project's README.md, BACKERS.md, and package.json files, as well as provide widgets and an API so that you easily automate the listing of backers and contributors on your website! AWESOME!
Now, what is game changing about this, is that it finally provides a funding model for open-source projects that isn't based on a time exchange (of "I'll do this task to get this money"), instead it is about an exchange of existing value. You've made something great, your users love it, and they want to see your project continue to thrive. As such, the more value your project adds, the more money you will consequently get! Even to a point, where if you add enough value, you will be able to work full time, or even, start hiring other people to join you! While keeping your offering entirely open-source and free. It's finally a fair funding model, one that provides open-source projects with the ability to run sustainably and scale exponentially. It's finally time.
So why are we posting this here?
Because we need your help to code the initial version of fair funding! We could slave away and try and do it ourself, and encounter the same problems that fair funding is trying to solve - limited time available to dedicate to it, as we must still devote our time to paying the bills, cannot hire people abundantly to help out, which takes a long time, and creates a crappy product. With your help, we can raise enough funding to get this off the ground as quickly as possible and with great quality. As well, with enough funding, we can even hire other great people to help us out on a full time basis! Allowing us to all benefit from Fair Funding quicker and with more quality that we all deserve and demand.
Now, it's also worth mentioning something. Fair Funding will be entirely open-source, the backend, the frontend, and everything in between. Everything about how our company operates, and as much as we can will be released under the incredibly permissive MIT license - an industry standard for free as in beer, and free as in freedom open-source projects! Now that is amazing, even you will be able to dedicate your efforts to helping us get even better. Don't have the money to support this project, but think it is an amazing idea! Then arm yourself with your code editor and fire off those pull requests with us! In fact, once fair funding is off the ground, we will use fair funding to fund fair funding! And we may even hire you! Awesome. Fair funding will bootstrap fair funding! We'll be our own biggest client! Thus, we will only earn our money, if you all continue to believe in us!
So who's behind this crazy idea?
The company is Bevry - an entirely open-source company setup by Benjamin Lupton in 2011 to cater for the bigger consulting clients he was obtaining. Benjamin is the 23rd most active open-source developer in the entire world and has created over 138 of his own open-source projects which together have been starred by over 8000 other developers - making his contribution to open-source already massive.
Together, Benjamin, Bevry and its 100 plus open-source contributors - http://bevry.me/about - have created such amazing open-source projects as History.js - a project to solve browser incompatibilities with the HTML5 History API and one of the most popular open-source javascript projects in the world, and DocPad - a project to solve web develop architecture and one of the most popular open-source coffeescript projects in the world, as well as Startup Hostel - a home for the doers of the world to solve developer loneliness!
Our big vision is to reach a world where open-collaboration has become the norm. We're the barriers of companies have fallen away, and all your left with is amazing people with amazing ideas helping each other out. We plan on accomplishing by solving the funding problem of open-collaboration with Fair Funding as well as providing homes for entreprenuers all over the world with Startup Hostel (an initiative starting in August in Bali! thanks to a partnership with Contenga's Startup Getaway initiative!).
No longer will there ever be an open-collaboration entreprenuer torn on the floor crying alone about how useless he is, despite his amazing contributions to the community, beacuse he doesn't have enough money to pay the simplest of bills or to even feed himself. Together, and with your help, we can belt the world with a new way of doing things. Where that situation will never occur. Where as you give value, you receive the value. Where entreprenuers can even travel the globe living with each other, in an abundance of opportunity. That is the world we're after. That's the world we're chasing. Let's do it together, and only together.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, sincerely,
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