11 ms·

I freely confess to being flabbergasted by these displays of less-than-rigorous thought processes. How would a free software project 'pay it forward'? They ar

by hf 12y ago

I freely confess to being flabbergasted by these displays of less-than-rigorous thought processes. How would a free software project 'pay it forward'? They are in a very similar position, aren't they? Edit: For some reason, I can't reply to child comments (probably a cool-off time-out at work?). Just a short note here, then: $1.25e6 for the FSF translates to 10 developers like Koch being paid (the donation page quotes "120000 EUR"). That's ten. For the whole FSF. As an example of a well-funded project. I'm not going to comment on that. HN would rightly give me months of cool-off time.

sophacles 12y ago
There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. They have no problem meeting their donation requests, and having a good budget year over year. These projects are usually end user facing, in a way that their dependencies aren't. It seems reasonable that these projects should consider adding items to their budget to redistribute funds to projects that they depend on. Some probably do this, however I think the GP was suggesting that something like this become more common.
- davidw 12y ago
  > There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. Which ones are those?
  - copsarebastards 12y ago
    Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSSH, Firefox, Apache, etc. In addition, some projects that are not well-funded as a project are "funded" in the sense that companies pay people to work on them, for example Microsoft paying Simon Peyton Jones to work on GHC.
    - davidw 12y ago
      It's a complex topic, so I think it's best to look at different funding models differently. Ubuntu is funded by Canonical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth in other words. So one big donor. Debian... seems to mostly get by on volunteer labor and be ok with it, or it did when I was involved with them. Has that changed? I suspect that in some ways Debian is underfunded given the amount of work they do. Perhaps money would make some things happen faster there. The Apache Software Foundation does a decent job at fundraising, and even employs a few people to do stuff like administration. Most of the projects get by with companies that pay people to work on them, which seems to work out pretty well. Firefox/Mozilla make most of their money with deals: Google and Yahoo, last I remember. I don't know about OpenSSH. It's possible, but mostly donations don't seem to work unless it's big chunks of money from companies.
      - ryanlol 12y ago
        AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation.
        davidw 12y ago
        I've never heard one way or the other whether it is or not; I'd be curious to see some data.
        Alupis 12y ago
        > AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation. Unfortunately, that is very far from true. Ubuntu was negative $21 million USD in 2013[1]. Canonical would literally make money by just not doing Ubuntu anymore.[2] (Every time Canonical is on the verge of bankruptcy, Shuttleworth re-seeds back into the company from his personal checkbook) [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical-Group-Limited-Annual-Accounts-2013 http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical-Group-Limited-... (the numbers are represented in thousands, so 21,343 is 21,343,000) [2] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/13/mark-shuttleworth-canonical-ubuntu http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/13/mark-shuttlew... The significant losses due to Ubuntu development and related expenses are why Canonical as-of-late has been turning focus away from Ubuntu towards other markets such as Mobile and especially Enterprise (a la Red Hat's turf).
        zanny 12y ago
        I wonder what happened behind the scenes that basically killed Ubuntu in its tracks. Circa 2008, before the Unity and Pulseaudio switches, it was considered by pretty much everyone the premiere Linux distro. I don't see why they could not get support contracts with Dell, HP, etc to sell Ubuntu computers and provide the tech support in exchange for positive cash flows. Even today Dell is still doing Sputnik and in European countries you can buy HP hardware with Linux. Why is Canonical not taking advantage of the fact that they could be making money off support for their desktop OS through all the hardware vendors?
        12y ago
    - morb 12y ago
      Firefox is kinda special because they get a lot money from whoever pays them to be the default search engine, doesn't matter if it's Google or Microsoft or Yahoo. There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't. All of the Debian developers are volunteers, am I wrong? Slackware can barely support one employee, the founder. OpenSSH falls under OpenBSD, which also supports just the founder, everyone else volunteers, and they DO volunteer some serious time and do important things. They also had problems raising funds, there were discussions on HN about that here, and I'm sure there will be more in a year or two. From: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html : * If $10 were given for every installation of OpenBSD in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If $2 were given for every download of the OpenSSH source code in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal. This is kinda depressing. Is there someone from the Debian project here? I'm wondering if they could afford to run their own mirrors around the world if they had to. Could they cover hardware, colo and bandwidth costs, if they had to? I'm just curious.
      - bigiain 12y ago
        Perhaps GPG should annually auction off which nation-state security service or online advertising company's public key gets automatically added to the recipients list for each encrypted message? </cynical>
      - mattlutze 12y ago
        > There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't. That's the point -- the ones that can should support the ones that can't, which are often foundational components of the reason the ones that can, can get money in the first place.
- Alupis 12y ago
  > There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. They have no problem meeting their donation requests, and having a good budget year over year. Too bad OpenSSL wasn't one of them until after the big "heartbleed" incident. The core infrastructure projects don't seem to get as much funding as they ought to, especially given almost everyone relies on them (even if they don't realize it). Prior to Heartbleed and the industry rallying to fund critical projects, OpenSSL only received an average of $2,000 USD a year[1]... that's pathetic. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-giants-chastened-by-heartbleed-finally-agree-to-fund-openssl/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-g...
  - notsony 12y ago
    Over the next three years, the Linux Foundation will receive a combined total of $3.9 million from Google, Intel, Amazon and others to fund core infrastructure projects such as OpenSSL. Sounds good until you take a step back... > Intel will invest "$300 million to help improve the pipeline for women and minorities, actively support the hiring and retention of diverse candidates, and fund programs that support the positive representation of women and minorities in technology and gaming industries." http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-diversity/ http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-diversity/ > "Google Gives $775,000 to Nonprofit for Tech Diversity CODE2040 said Monday it received $775,000 in grants from the tech giant to support the launch of free training programs for more than 5,000 black and Latino college engineering students over the next two years." http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/02/google-gives-775000-to-nonprofit-for-tech-diversity/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/02/google-gives-775000-t...
    - jchrisa 12y ago
      I bet they also spent crazy money on non-diversity related things like employee perks or lobbying.
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      It's interesting with the Outreach programme in GNOME (I think that's what it's called), because if you periodically look at planet.gnome.org, there are interesting things going on with developers within that outreach programme. But there are also justified backlashes to the programme, given that there is a perceived priority given to the programme in some areas instead of writing software. The argument is that not everyone and their dog needs to be involved with writing software, so why should we encourage them to? You don't see such pushes in dentistry, the car industry or anything like that; "Are you a WOMAN? Then join the car industry!". Strangely we do in IT though, where it is the belief that we should make EVERYONE code! The "I will fight you and I will win" response from Emmanuelle Bassi is a particularly horrible/strange/passionate reaction from one of the guys involved with the programme: see http://blogs.gnome.org/tvb/2014/09/12/im-looking-at-you/comment-page-1/ http://blogs.gnome.org/tvb/2014/09/12/im-looking-at-you/comm...
- fijal 12y ago
  Name a few. I know very very few and the funding goals are very very modest most of the time (they don't really convey the idea of full time devs)
ryanackley 12y ago
https://www.fsf.org/about/financial https://www.fsf.org/about/financial The FSF had revenue of 1.25 million in 2013. I'm not trying to comment on where it came from or where it went to. I'm only pointing out that they are not in a very similar position.
- nanofortnight 12y ago
  So… enough pay for about 20 developers?
  - eru 12y ago
    In India? Do you know how expensive developers are? (Especially fully loaded, ie with all the overhead that a company has to pay.)
  - timonovici 12y ago
    More like 8 or 10. There are costs beside that: hardware, hosting, office, internet, etc. etc. The math doesn't work that way ;)
- hf 12y ago
  Those are some rather interesting documents, thanks! In 2013 FSF paid $ 689,239 in salaries and, astoundingly!, $ 48,995 in credit card fees.
  - chkuendig 12y ago
    FIY: That's 3.8% assuming everybody donated by credit card. Anybody got an idea why they pay so much?
    - ceejayoz 12y ago
      2.9% is fairly standard with Stripe et. al., but fees from things like chargebacks could probably add up to another 1%.
    - anebg 12y ago
mason55 12y ago
> How would a free software project 'pay it forward'? As mentioned by the grandparent comment, GPG is in use by Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat package managers. Whether or not you count those three as free software they have plenty of money to pay forward to a piece of software that underpins their entire stacks.
- hf 12y ago
  The point isn't easily settled, it seems: I am having a hard time to find financial statements from Debian. Ubuntu, or rather Canonical, being a private company, doesn't seem to release financial information. The Ubuntu main page doesn't even provide a 'donate' link anymore. Which leaves RedHat, at last. A public company, of course[0]: Operating profit 2014: $ 1.3e9 Net total income 2014: $ 178.3e6 [0] http://investors.redhat.com/financials-statements.cfm http://investors.redhat.com/financials-statements.cfm
  - tokenizerrr 12y ago
    > The Ubuntu main page doesn't even provide a 'donate' link anymore Try to download it: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=14.04.1&architecture=amd64 http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=1...
  - dfc 12y ago
    Software in Public Interest handles debian's donations. The latest treasurer report from SPI can be found here: http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2014-November/003353.html http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2014-November... For some reason SPI has not put out an annual report since 2012: http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/annual-reports/2012.pdf http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/annual-reports/2012.pdf
  - vacri 12y ago
    This article claims that $222k was the budget for 2012 for Debian, down at the bottom. It also claims the budget should be $19B, if paid at market rates. http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/what-is-the-development-costs-of-debian-gnu-linux-how-much-costs-the-development-of-a-free-software-projects/ http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/what-is-the-development-costs-o...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
lotsofmangos 12y ago
The thing is, the underfunded dependencies that are the most vital are those that are widely used by many projects. If it was normal to chuck a small percentage of available funds to dependencies, the money would start to add up.
Xylakant 12y ago
You're off on your numbers. The 120k are for him plus one developer. By that estimate that's 20 people for the FSF. However, a lot of commercial entities use pgp as core of their business: all software packaged for the linux world is signed with gpg one way or another. All commercial distributions depend on it at their very core. I'm amazed that they don't fund gpg at least partially.
- reidrac 12y ago
  I'm not surprised. For the same reason OpenSSH should be very well founded, and if I recall correctly it's not the case. One of the points of open source is that software becomes a commodity, and that will always hurt OSS founding.

by hf 12y ago

sophacles 12y ago

There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. They have no problem meeting their donation requests, and having a good budget year over year. These projects are usually end user facing, in a way that their dependencies aren't. It seems reasonable that these projects should consider adding items to their budget to redistribute funds to projects that they depend on. Some probably do this, however I think the GP was suggesting that something like this become more common.

davidw 12y ago
> There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. Which ones are those?
- copsarebastards 12y ago
  Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSSH, Firefox, Apache, etc. In addition, some projects that are not well-funded as a project are "funded" in the sense that companies pay people to work on them, for example Microsoft paying Simon Peyton Jones to work on GHC.
  - davidw 12y ago
    It's a complex topic, so I think it's best to look at different funding models differently. Ubuntu is funded by Canonical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth in other words. So one big donor. Debian... seems to mostly get by on volunteer labor and be ok with it, or it did when I was involved with them. Has that changed? I suspect that in some ways Debian is underfunded given the amount of work they do. Perhaps money would make some things happen faster there. The Apache Software Foundation does a decent job at fundraising, and even employs a few people to do stuff like administration. Most of the projects get by with companies that pay people to work on them, which seems to work out pretty well. Firefox/Mozilla make most of their money with deals: Google and Yahoo, last I remember. I don't know about OpenSSH. It's possible, but mostly donations don't seem to work unless it's big chunks of money from companies.
    - ryanlol 12y ago
      AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation.
      - davidw 12y ago
        I've never heard one way or the other whether it is or not; I'd be curious to see some data.
      - Alupis 12y ago
        > AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation. Unfortunately, that is very far from true. Ubuntu was negative $21 million USD in 2013[1]. Canonical would literally make money by just not doing Ubuntu anymore.[2] (Every time Canonical is on the verge of bankruptcy, Shuttleworth re-seeds back into the company from his personal checkbook) [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical-Group-Limited-Annual-Accounts-2013 http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical-Group-Limited-... (the numbers are represented in thousands, so 21,343 is 21,343,000) [2] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/13/mark-shuttleworth-canonical-ubuntu http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/13/mark-shuttlew... The significant losses due to Ubuntu development and related expenses are why Canonical as-of-late has been turning focus away from Ubuntu towards other markets such as Mobile and especially Enterprise (a la Red Hat's turf).
        zanny 12y ago
        I wonder what happened behind the scenes that basically killed Ubuntu in its tracks. Circa 2008, before the Unity and Pulseaudio switches, it was considered by pretty much everyone the premiere Linux distro. I don't see why they could not get support contracts with Dell, HP, etc to sell Ubuntu computers and provide the tech support in exchange for positive cash flows. Even today Dell is still doing Sputnik and in European countries you can buy HP hardware with Linux. Why is Canonical not taking advantage of the fact that they could be making money off support for their desktop OS through all the hardware vendors?
        12y ago
  - morb 12y ago
    Firefox is kinda special because they get a lot money from whoever pays them to be the default search engine, doesn't matter if it's Google or Microsoft or Yahoo. There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't. All of the Debian developers are volunteers, am I wrong? Slackware can barely support one employee, the founder. OpenSSH falls under OpenBSD, which also supports just the founder, everyone else volunteers, and they DO volunteer some serious time and do important things. They also had problems raising funds, there were discussions on HN about that here, and I'm sure there will be more in a year or two. From: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html : * If $10 were given for every installation of OpenBSD in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If $2 were given for every download of the OpenSSH source code in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal. This is kinda depressing. Is there someone from the Debian project here? I'm wondering if they could afford to run their own mirrors around the world if they had to. Could they cover hardware, colo and bandwidth costs, if they had to? I'm just curious.
    - bigiain 12y ago
      Perhaps GPG should annually auction off which nation-state security service or online advertising company's public key gets automatically added to the recipients list for each encrypted message? </cynical>
    - mattlutze 12y ago
      > There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't. That's the point -- the ones that can should support the ones that can't, which are often foundational components of the reason the ones that can, can get money in the first place.
Alupis 12y ago
> There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. They have no problem meeting their donation requests, and having a good budget year over year. Too bad OpenSSL wasn't one of them until after the big "heartbleed" incident. The core infrastructure projects don't seem to get as much funding as they ought to, especially given almost everyone relies on them (even if they don't realize it). Prior to Heartbleed and the industry rallying to fund critical projects, OpenSSL only received an average of $2,000 USD a year[1]... that's pathetic. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-giants-chastened-by-heartbleed-finally-agree-to-fund-openssl/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-g...
- notsony 12y ago
  Over the next three years, the Linux Foundation will receive a combined total of $3.9 million from Google, Intel, Amazon and others to fund core infrastructure projects such as OpenSSL. Sounds good until you take a step back... > Intel will invest "$300 million to help improve the pipeline for women and minorities, actively support the hiring and retention of diverse candidates, and fund programs that support the positive representation of women and minorities in technology and gaming industries." http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-diversity/ http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-diversity/ > "Google Gives $775,000 to Nonprofit for Tech Diversity CODE2040 said Monday it received $775,000 in grants from the tech giant to support the launch of free training programs for more than 5,000 black and Latino college engineering students over the next two years." http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/02/google-gives-775000-to-nonprofit-for-tech-diversity/ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/02/google-gives-775000-t...
  - jchrisa 12y ago
    I bet they also spent crazy money on non-diversity related things like employee perks or lobbying.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    It's interesting with the Outreach programme in GNOME (I think that's what it's called), because if you periodically look at planet.gnome.org, there are interesting things going on with developers within that outreach programme. But there are also justified backlashes to the programme, given that there is a perceived priority given to the programme in some areas instead of writing software. The argument is that not everyone and their dog needs to be involved with writing software, so why should we encourage them to? You don't see such pushes in dentistry, the car industry or anything like that; "Are you a WOMAN? Then join the car industry!". Strangely we do in IT though, where it is the belief that we should make EVERYONE code! The "I will fight you and I will win" response from Emmanuelle Bassi is a particularly horrible/strange/passionate reaction from one of the guys involved with the programme: see http://blogs.gnome.org/tvb/2014/09/12/im-looking-at-you/comment-page-1/ http://blogs.gnome.org/tvb/2014/09/12/im-looking-at-you/comm...
fijal 12y ago
Name a few. I know very very few and the funding goals are very very modest most of the time (they don't really convey the idea of full time devs)

ryanackley 12y ago

https://www.fsf.org/about/financial https://www.fsf.org/about/financial The FSF had revenue of 1.25 million in 2013. I'm not trying to comment on where it came from or where it went to. I'm only pointing out that they are not in a very similar position.

nanofortnight 12y ago
So… enough pay for about 20 developers?
- eru 12y ago
  In India? Do you know how expensive developers are? (Especially fully loaded, ie with all the overhead that a company has to pay.)
- timonovici 12y ago
  More like 8 or 10. There are costs beside that: hardware, hosting, office, internet, etc. etc. The math doesn't work that way ;)
hf 12y ago
Those are some rather interesting documents, thanks! In 2013 FSF paid $ 689,239 in salaries and, astoundingly!, $ 48,995 in credit card fees.
- chkuendig 12y ago
  FIY: That's 3.8% assuming everybody donated by credit card. Anybody got an idea why they pay so much?
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    2.9% is fairly standard with Stripe et. al., but fees from things like chargebacks could probably add up to another 1%.
  - anebg 12y ago

mason55 12y ago

> How would a free software project 'pay it forward'? As mentioned by the grandparent comment, GPG is in use by Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat package managers. Whether or not you count those three as free software they have plenty of money to pay forward to a piece of software that underpins their entire stacks.

hf 12y ago
The point isn't easily settled, it seems: I am having a hard time to find financial statements from Debian. Ubuntu, or rather Canonical, being a private company, doesn't seem to release financial information. The Ubuntu main page doesn't even provide a 'donate' link anymore. Which leaves RedHat, at last. A public company, of course[0]: Operating profit 2014: $ 1.3e9 Net total income 2014: $ 178.3e6 [0] http://investors.redhat.com/financials-statements.cfm http://investors.redhat.com/financials-statements.cfm
- tokenizerrr 12y ago
  > The Ubuntu main page doesn't even provide a 'donate' link anymore Try to download it: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=14.04.1&architecture=amd64 http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=1...
- dfc 12y ago
  Software in Public Interest handles debian's donations. The latest treasurer report from SPI can be found here: http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2014-November/003353.html http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2014-November... For some reason SPI has not put out an annual report since 2012: http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/annual-reports/2012.pdf http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/annual-reports/2012.pdf
- vacri 12y ago
  This article claims that $222k was the budget for 2012 for Debian, down at the bottom. It also claims the budget should be $19B, if paid at market rates. http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/what-is-the-development-costs-of-debian-gnu-linux-how-much-costs-the-development-of-a-free-software-projects/ http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/what-is-the-development-costs-o...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

lotsofmangos 12y ago

The thing is, the underfunded dependencies that are the most vital are those that are widely used by many projects. If it was normal to chuck a small percentage of available funds to dependencies, the money would start to add up.

Xylakant 12y ago

You're off on your numbers. The 120k are for him plus one developer. By that estimate that's 20 people for the FSF. However, a lot of commercial entities use pgp as core of their business: all software packaged for the linux world is signed with gpg one way or another. All commercial distributions depend on it at their very core. I'm amazed that they don't fund gpg at least partially.

reidrac 12y ago
I'm not surprised. For the same reason OpenSSH should be very well founded, and if I recall correctly it's not the case. One of the points of open source is that software becomes a commodity, and that will always hurt OSS founding.