I’ve been thinking a lot about how we as a community and industry can make sure open-source projects keep getting the love they deserve. It’s no secret that the traditional funding model of donations and sponsorships is more than a little shaky. Coder Radio listeners have heard Chris and I bemoan the plight of some of our favorite projects and their founders and contributors who often find it hard to make ends meet while services like Amazon Web Services make a mint by leveraging their work; for a concrete example of this, take a look at Docker and AWS.
Direct Employment: Increasingly,companies are realizing how valuable open-source contributions are. So, why not hire developers to work on these projects full-time? This would give developers financial stability and help companies innovate faster. Win-win! Unfortunately, this has seen mixed results with many firms cutting the man-hours they allocate to the actual open-source projects in favor of proprietary ones overtime.
Consulting: Open-source developers have a ton of specialized knowledge that businesses need. By offering consulting services, developers can make money and help companies implement, customize, and troubleshoot open-source software. It’s a great way to create a win-win situation for everyone involved and it has worked in the past! It’s also failed miserably many many times. We can look at such fallen stars as Cygnus for cautionary examples. Hell, even the venerable Red Hat ended up being acquired by IBM.
Bug Bounties: Security is a big deal in the digital age, and open-source software is no exception. Bug bounty programs pay people to find and report vulnerabilities in software. This is a great way for developers to make some extra cash and help improve the security of open-source software. This strategy has the added benefit of playing to most business types’ (love you all 🙂) deep-seated fear of hackers and the like; to be fair in the shadow of the XZ Utils exploit these fears seem pretty legitimate.
The open-source movement is at a crossroads, facing the challenge of sustainability head-on. By adopting models like direct employment, consulting, and bug bounties, we can open up new avenues for funding that ensure developers are compensated for their invaluable contributions, but it’s not going to be enough. The industry is evolving and so must our funding models. Yes, these three methods make sense if used in tandem, but we’re going to need something more community based to make sure that all project contributors are fairly and equitably compensated for their efforts instead of just letting the few large tech firms treat the community as a pool of free labor; perhaps something akin to podcast boosts would make sense to distribute rewards within individual teams. Please let me know what you think on LinkedIn and Mastodon and X. Also, please checkout Alice for your automation and ERP-related development needs.
