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klaro-org / klaro-js

Klaro Privacy Manager. An open-source, privacy-friendly & compliant consent manager for your website.
https://klaro.org
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The future of Klaro: Open discussion #380

Open adewes opened 3 years ago

adewes commented 3 years ago

Hi everyone! Klaro has been in development for almost three years now and its community has grown considerably. Today Klaro is successfully used on thousands of websites and manages millions of consent decisions every day (these are just estimates since we do not track self-hosted deployments).

To fund the development we started offering a hosted solution last fall, which is already generating a small but growing income stream for us. At the same time, many organizations still use the self-hosted open-source version of Klaro, which misses our backend features (statistics, scanning, cookie database, graphical IDE) but is otherwise fully functional.

Currently we're thinking about how to continue along this path. We'd very much like to keep Klaro's core functionality free and open-source. At the same, we'd like to be able to generate more consistent and larger funding to build more features for our community.

To enable this, we're thinking about developing some upcoming features as non-free software. Since we don't like forcing contributors to sign CLAs and since we'd like to keep the codebase clean we're thinking about following the approach that Wordpress takes: First, we plan to add a plugin interface to Klaro that defines ways to extend its functionality. Plugins could then be written as open-source by the community our ouselves. Some plugins might be offered as non-free software under a commercial license. This plugin approach is also interesting as it allows us to split out less commonly needed functionality from the core software, which reduces its size (e.g. not everyone needs support for 20 different languages or support for the IAB TCF-2.0 framework).

Our goa with thisl is to raise more funds for the sustained development of Klaro, which will hopefully benefit everyone in the community. I've opened this issue to invite you all to discuss this idea! Klaro is a community-driven project and we'd appreciate your input on this. Thanks!

webberian commented 3 years ago

Hi! New user here. I'm still in the process of evaluating and implementing Klaro, but I very appreciate the work that you and your team have put into it so far. I understand your reasoning in terms of (financially) future-proofing your solution, and I agree that premium functions sounds like a good way to. Perhaps a good source of inspiration could be Matomo, who use both premium plugins and consulting/support as a revenue stream.

Using a modular approach in order to reduce size/complexity of the core software definitely also sounds like a good idea.

ja-sk commented 3 years ago

+1 to webberian

JoshuaCrewe commented 2 years ago

:wave:

I found this issue and seen that there is not a lot of response. While I don't have anything super exciting to say, I did want to be more "vocal" about this project. I like it!

In terms of consent solutions out there we are inundated with proprietary systems which implement a consent system which (imho) is horrible for the user. Things like completely blocking access to a site without consenting to cookies, confusing UI designed to guide users to consenting to tracking. Klaro provides an important alternative to these systems which gives us developers the option of not doing that (... or doing that if we want). The existence of an open source self hostable solution is a valuable resource.

I have always taken comfort that a hostable solution exists. We are told that this is a sustainable business model to support open source projects going forwards. I have no first hand experience of maintaining a project like this, so it is interesting to hear how this model is working out practically. Is it sustainable? It sounds like it is isn't if we are talking about other revenue streams (which I think is absolutely fine btw, more strings to the bow and all that).

We do advertise the hosted option to clients and given the way google consent is going it is increasingly becoming a good option, paying for support is a valuable resource as well. I think that support is not a given for an open source project so charging for that is not a bad route to take. theoretically as the creators of the project there is no one better to give support. Do you have a paid for support model in place?

Finally, going forwards I am more interested in stability and performance rather than features. If there is a choice between them(!). Consistently having klaro work with Google consent mode, reducing the size of the script as much as possible (it gets flagged by Page Speed Insights) are two areas that would benefit everybody the most (users get a smoother experience, developers get fewer head scratchers, maintainers get fewer repeated issues on github.)

I have written a lot for not saying very much. I am happy to contribute to ongoing discussions. I can code not very well but am willing to contribute that way if helpful.

Thanks for the work so far, I recognise that we are not entitled to any more and am grateful for what we have.

mrmauriziorusso commented 2 years ago

@adewes maybe this news might be interesting for you. TCF was claimed as illegal by the EU data protection authorities.

https://www.iccl.ie/news/gdpr-enforcer-rules-that-iab-europes-consent-popups-are-unlawful/

saschafoerster commented 2 years ago

How about developing Klaro under the Business Source license: https://github.com/venueless/venueless/blob/dev/LICENSE That would be mean, everyone could host Klaro for their own projects as free software, but hosting for third parties is only allowed when they buy a license. It fit's well for Venueless, but it's also not a really FOSS license (so I guess Venueless mixed it with the Apache-license).