How to fund free
Jonni Bidwell delves into the thorny issues surrounding funding open source projects and urges you to support your favourite free software.
Jonni Bidwell delves into the thorny issues surrounding funding open source projects and urges you to support your favourite free software, before it’s too late!
For many of us, the price tag was a key part of what got us into free software. But giving everything away for free does not a viable business plan make, and many successful free software projects got that way by discovering sustainable funding streams. These might be in the form of donations, subscriptions, sponsorship or merchandise (there’s no better way to support your favourite project than owning a mug with their logo emblazoned on it). Or it might be in the form of a paid-for, premium version, which may include extra support or extra features.
We regularly run features telling you to ditch proprietary services and join the selfhosted revolution. But those services, be they Gmail, Dropbox or Zoom, are all free, and running your own will cost you in time (email is still hard, by the way) and infrastructure demands. Of course, numerous alternative services have popped up that, for a small fee, will provide these kind of services using open source tooling and without dubious data slurping practices. So in many ways the tables have turned. And there’s no doubt that there’s value in free software.
Covid-19 has understandably made this landscape yet more difficult to navigate, so we’ll take a look at some initiatives that have been set up to help projects that are struggling as a result. And of course, we’ve got plenty of advice on how you can help.
You’ll have read in our news section about the Covid-related layoffs at Mozilla. The fight for a free and open internet is tough and we hope the streamlined Mozilla Foundation can continue its dedication to it. We’re perhaps a long way from the enthusiasm that saw a two-page ad in the New York Times announcing the release of Firefox
1.0, but let’s hope our favourite browser continues to innovate and impress. Most of Mozilla’s income is generated by search revenue deals. Right now Google is Firefox’s default search engine in the US and UK,
Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China.
If you think of Google as a rival browser maker (or if you see them as enemies of privacy and freedom), then they and Mozilla seem like odd bedfellows. But all’s fair in love and war, and it’s a deal that benefits both parties and has been extended for another three years. From 2015 to 2017 Yahoo!, in the US, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and for the princely sum of $375 million a year, enjoyed the default spot. It’s understood that the arrangement with Google involves it handing over somewhere slightly north of this figure. For what it’s worth, Google also pays the open source Adblock Plus to not block its ads. Mozilla’s new revenue centric focus will hopefully see it continue to thrive, starting with its VPN offerings and ongoing partnership with Pocket magazines.
The cost of Libreoffice
Last month we saw how Libreoffice is funded by the Document Foundation, and how that model may change in the future. Libreoffice is a huge project (thousands of contributors, millions of lines of code and hundreds of millions of users) and it’s not something that can be sustained without considerable resources.
The Linux Foundation attracts membership fees from partner companies and events to support kernel development (they pay the salaries of Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-hartman) and the growing number of other open source projects under its umbrella. Its mission is to cultivate further industry adoption of FOSS, so many member projects are in rapidly developing areas, such as cloud, automotive, security and machine learning.
Under the Linux Foundation, considerable efforts have been made to secure the low-level projects that essentially run the world. In particular, the Civil Infrastructure Project (CIP) aims to provide Super Long Term Support (SLTS) for designated kernel releases. The eventual goal is for this is to support hardware that may be in service upwards of 50 years, much longer than the decade offered by the most supportive of enterprise distros today. The first release to receive the SLTS treatment is 4.4, which since its release back in 2016 has seen 235 (and counting) point releases and will be supported until at least 2026. This kind of initiative will encourage forward-looking managers in the transport, infrastructure and energy sectors to embrace Linux.
As Greg admitted in our interview in LXF259, there will always be projects that slip through the cracks. So the Foundation welcomes applications from new projects that fit with its mission. Yet there are dozens of other foundations that steward key open source projects. For example the non-profit X.org Foundation oversees all things relating to open source graphics stacks, from direct rendering code in the kernel to Mesa, Wayland and the venerable X.org server itself. Krita has since 2012 had its own foundation too, which solicits donations and organises crowdfunding to fund its four full-time employees. The Krita Foundation also receives
between 2,000 and 4,000 Euros in donations per month, according to the edifying charts at https://krita. org/en/donation-analytics.
However, what if your project doesn’t (yet) have a foundation to support it? Some sort of funding model is required, and different models will work for different projects. It’s worth remembering that the original definition of free software doesn’t insist that it be given away. Instead, it encourages people to sell it and services based on it. It sees nothing wrong with paying for software. In this spirit many projects offer paid-for editions of free software. This may provide extra features, or some sort of support arrangement.
Collabora Office does both, offering enterprises an on-premises office suite, and at least three years of support. There’s a reasonably priced tier ($18 per user per year) for small businesses, or you can use the free (but in Collabora’s own words unstable) development edition, which impressed us in our home office feature.
Lots of heavy-hitting open source projects offer similar premium services. In fact, everything we used in the last two pages of that feature – Docker, Nextcloud,
Collabora Online and Portainer – all have paid-for offerings. Well, almost. Portainer Business is on the way, based on the just-released Portainer 2.0 and which, like other enterprise solutions, will have enhanced management functions and a support arrangement.
In further good news the Auckland-based company has secured $1.2 million in funding to, amongst other things, “accelerate its commercialisation strategy” according to investor Black Nova Group. Not bad for a company that started out three years ago. The team says that it has no intention of letting go its open source roots. It’s pledged to continue to offer a free (under a Zlib license) Community Edition alongside the Business Edition and have said it won’t take features from the former and make them only available in the latter. Even though we barely scratched the surface of what
Portainer is capable of, we were amazed at its ability to tame our container overload. Fingers crossed the latest release will offer at least a ray of hope for us in our attempts to navigate the Kubernetes jungle.
It’s okay to charge a fee
Deploying open source (or indeed any) software on a large scale without any kind of support plan is a terrible idea. Yet, spying the opportunity to save on license fees, many businesses choose to do exactly this. This tends to backfire, specifically when updates need to be applied, or when they break things, or when a decision is made to revert to proprietary software. The notion of paying for software, even free software, shouldn’t be seen as alien.
For a long time, Linux Mint was funded solely by donations. These still contribute the majority of the projects coffers, with the distro receiving around $50,000 between May and July of this year. Mint also has a number of corporate sponsors who pay between $20 and $1,000 per month. Many of the sponsors at the $20 “community” tier are regular users who care enough about the distro to fork out the equivalent of two Windows 10 licenses a year for it. Besides donations and sponsorships, Linux Mint also has strategic partners (Compulab, makers of the Mint box, and Think Penguin). The default search engine in Mint is Yahoo!, which shares revenue generated by Mint users with the project. Oh, and T-shirts are also available through Hellotux.
Elementary OS is quite particular about classing itself as a pay-what-you-like, rather than a free, distro. Besides the nudge to make a donation when you download its ISO, elementary also accepts monthly donations through Patreon, which at the time of writing raises just over $1,000 of its stated $6,200 of monthly costs, which include funding its three full-time employees and not inconsiderable server costs. See the box (page 41) to find out how elementary OS is further diversifying its revenues.
Canonical, since 2012, is not above asking you to pay for your Linux either. If you donate, you can choose how your contribution is distributed. Zorin also offers a 39 Euro Ultimate edition of its fine distro, which features stylish desktop layouts, applications, games and (appealing no doubt to beginners) support with installation. Fedora is one of the few distros that doesn’t accept financial contributions. Instead, it encourages users to contribute by becoming active members of the community, writing content or providing hardware and bandwidth. Debian also doesn’t directly accept fiscal
contributions, but advises these be sent instead to Software in the Public Interest (SPI) or the Free Software Foundation (its erstwhile sponsor). Other Spiassociated projects include Arch Linux, Ffmpeg and (perhaps relevant in the current climate) the Open Voting Foundation.
Sharing the workload
Many open source projects (included Linux itself) started with a hobbyist coder working on their own and in their spare time. And many still start this way. There’s no proscribed formula for growing this into a sustainable enterprise, and there’s no shortage of pitfalls at every stage of that evolution. Thankfully, there are organisations that can help.
Maintainer.io was set up in 2017 by Richard Littauer and offers auditing and retainer services to projects and organisations to help keep their repositories in order. Having navigable documentation and guidelines for contributing are key to attracting new developers and sharing the workload. Nola Lawson said, on the subject of open source maintenance, “The more work you do, the more work gets asked of you”, and we asked Richard what he thought about this and how maintainer.io can help. His response: “Nolan Lawson is right. Most developers start coding because they (unsurprisingly) like to code. However, as soon as you open source your work, you also open up the possibility that people will ask favours of you – please close this issue, fix this bug, or listen to me when I natter on about why X is worse than Y. Coding fast becomes maintenance and community management, and developers don’t usually enjoy that sort of work.
“At Maintainer Mountaineer, I basically help developers figure out ways to scale themselves, and how to offload their community management onto someone else. I’ve worked with solo maintainers and Fortune 500 companies. It’s a niche job.”
Richard is also an organiser for Sustain, which holds events aimed at finding out what makes open source sustainable. In his own words, “Sustain is a community of people who are interested in how what we think of as ‘Open Source’ can be made sustainable in the long haul. We’re trying to answer questions around how to fund developers and help them do their work, how to ensure that corporations are good citizens of the community, and how to build better software collaboratively and in the open. We hold conferences, run a podcast, and host working groups who tackle these issues head on.”
A fine example of the community tackling events head on came when Indeed, the Open Source Collective and others united to host the Uplift! – the first virtual FOSS Responders funding event in May. Volunteers rallied across nine countries to help projects suffering from the economic fallout of the pandemic, as conferences were cancelled, redundancies made and purse strings were tightened. Support was provided by corporate backers, including Digitalocean, Github, Google Open Source and the Ethereum Foundation. And 10 open source organisations (including the Gnome Foundation, Drupal, the EFF and the Tor Project) were awarded $105,000 to keep fighting the good fight. Read more at https://fossresponders.com/blog/post/upliftan-event-of-open-source-resiliency.