Microblog Memes

you don’t contribute tens of thousands every year

Really depends on the business model. If it's business software, I very well might because it's cheaper to finance hours for improvements than to commission custom code from third parties. I've worked at a number of companies that operate this way - letting the lead spenders define future work while the small fries just take what's on offer.

Most 100% unmonetized FOSS projects just don’t have a stable revenue stream and to make it worse, the users can be real assholes, hounding the devs to work more or put someone else in charge to accept PRs quicker, etc.

Sure. It's far from a perfect system. But public financing of projects and official lines of communication can improve this significantly.

Universities are great at churning out FOSS applications for this reason. A lot of the mainline software has derivative applications. So you'll get a library that's great at file management/transfer used for purely academic work and financed by a public grant to that end. But then you've got people picking up the library updates on Git and applying them to all sorts of tangential projects without needing to go out of pocket to finance it.

They might contribute bug reports and the occasional feature improvement (or just fork and let the OG authors pick up improvements as they please). But they aren't on the hook for thousands of dollars to use something that is just a useful improvement to existing technology.

They make the majority (about 47% from largest corporate donors, another 10% from other corporate donors), but they make the remaining amounts from individuals:

• Individuals (17% or about 440k euros/year)
• Blender Market (6% or about 149k euros/yr)
• Misc. Large Donations (10% or about 250k euros/yr)
• Generic Small Donations (10% or about 260k euros/yr)

That's over 800k euros/yr not from corporations. They currently spend around 2.5m/yr on all costs, but some of that is for things like grants that they don't necessarily have to give out, but sure, it doesn't cover all of it, but I'm sure Blender could theoretically operate just at a smaller scale if all corporate donations entirely pulled out.

I'm not saying this funding model works for every project out there, but it does show that software that's free for the end user can still be funded without coercion.

On top of that, it's not necessarily bad for a project to have corporations funding it. Let's say Adobe goes the Blender route and runs entirely off donations. How many corporations that rely on them for creative work would donate? Probably enough to keep them afloat.

But would that be worse than when every smaller individual had to pay hundreds of dollars a year for the same software, while Adobe did everything they could to charge them more, and even make cancelling your subscription cost a fee? I doubt it.

It's not necessarily perfect, but it's still much better.

Found it, was making fun of him in that conversation actually rofl

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