Financing

[brillout]

Hi :wave:,

I'm Romuald from the Lsos, an organization that develops financial solutions for open source projects, and we are currently doing outreach to projects we like.

One of our solutions is the Lsos Commons which I believe could fit; is that something LazyLoad would be interested in?

If not I'm sorry for having opened this ticket and I'll close it :).

[ameerthehacker]

@twobin @jasonslyvia what do you think about this? I was thinking of also opening sponsorship which might help us financially

[marcfielding1]

That's an interesting model - I've just come across this because I'm looking at using this for a startup, so here's a question - we're a startup going through funding, what's a large company, how is licensing calculated?

Lets say we're outside the charge zone how do we know we're in?

What happens if I'm already a large company that's been using this for years?

[brillout]

That's an interesting model

Thanks!

what's a large company

We define whether a company is "large" by its number of employees (which is a common practice in Software licensing). After our first estimations setting the threshold to 70 employees should be enough to remunerate the maintainers of Lsos Commons projects.

Also note that the fee is low enough to be insignificant for large companies; if you have 70 employees on your payroll then paying a small amount to open source developers is not only financially insignificant but actually a good thing for you as you'll get higher quality tools at the end of the day.

Lets say we're outside the charge zone how do we know we're in?

We'll reach out to you.

What happens if I'm already a large company that's been using this for years?

You'll be able to use the latest version before the Lsos Commons license clause was added. For any version after that you'll have to pay the fee.

Also note that we designed the license clause to be removable; LazyLoad would be able to leave the Lsos Commons at any time.

[brillout]

We developed a new solution: the Lsos Donation Fund. Unlike the Lsos Commons, the Lsos Donation Fund doesn't alter your license and everything stays free; the donation fund collects donations on your behalf and uses a "donation-reminder".

We estimate the donation-reminder to substantially increase donations. Sublime Text, for example, achieves impressive results using a similar technique.

We are just starting (we are finishing up the implementation of the donation-reminder) and we are looking for a handful of early adopters to try out the donation-reminder.

Would that be something you'd be up to? The only thing you have to do is to add our @lsos/donation-fund npm module to your dependencies which implements the donation-reminder. We take care of everything but we'll let you know exactly about our plans and what the npm module does. You'll be more than welcome to object to anything and give feedback.

For example, we plan to show the donation-reminder only to large companies and make it removable. But if you want to further increase donations we can change things.

While in the long term the goal is to distribute company donations among all open source projects used by the company, at the beginning we expect that most donations will go to our early adopters.

We care a lot about transparency; each company will see to what open source projects its donations goes to, and each open source project will see from what companies its donations came from.

Let me know if you are interested, we are eager to give this experiment a shot!