Let's play a game?!?!!?

I got sweets!

As a private person …

Who of you is using Free Software?

Expectation: 100%

Who of you is contributing in any way to Free Software?

Coding, translations, documentation, user support, …

Expectation: 33%

Who of you is donating to Free Software?

Expectation: 20%

And now as your company/university/…

Whose of your company/university/* is using Free Software?

Expectation: 100%

Whose of your company/university/* contributing in any way to Free Software?

Coding, translations, documentation, user support, …

Expectation: 50%

Now without IBM and SUSE!

Expectation: 10%

Whose of your company/university/* donating to Free Software?

Expectation: 5%

How do you choose which projects to support in which way?

Think about it -- we will come back later to this.

About me

• Long time Free Software user and contributor
  You may know me from Geany
• Working in DevOps, full-managed hosting
  … with a lot of Free Software and upstream involvement (e. g. NixOS)
  … with a lot customers that don't contribute
• Board member of a German hacker coop »WTF eG«

Disclaimer: Of course I do have a bias!

One big problem

Actually there are way more than one.

Source https://www.xkcd.com/2347/

Visibility of projects and work done

• Most of the FLOSS-tools depend on a big amount of libraries, frameworks, …
• Critical dependencies are often hidden
• xz! Yepp. It needed to be mentioned

debtree geany --max-depth 2 | dot -Tpng > geany.png

Punctual contribution of developing studios

Often only contribute …

• … new features they don't plan to maintain/sell in future
• … bugfixes for critical bugs they cannot work around

Maintenance and "unfamous" bugfixing is often left out.

Speaking of time

Most projects (»Build me a webpage …«)are just planned without upstreaming/contributing.

Developers itself and its focuses

If there is no external motivation ("money"), there needs to be some internal ("joy").

Joyful things to contribute …

• New features
• Proof of concepts
• Fancy dashboard
• …

Unwanted work

Let's be honest: Too many of need-to-be-done tasks are not that joyful (for most of us).

• Optimizing database queries in your favorite PHP framework
• Proof read documentation and example API calls
• Ticket triage and reproducing bugs
• Translation
• …

Many programs and approaches

• Individual developers (github sponsors, buy me a coffe)e
• Visible projects (Document Foundation, Apache *, Mozilla)
• Institutional programs from e. g. European Union
• Programs for subsystems (like for maintaining »go«-environment)
• Grant/scholarship

I'm sure I'm not aware of each and every option.

Just a huge mess!

Imagine yourself providing support or giving some?!

Let's start a better, new initiative!

Idea

We need an approach, that …

• Focussing on task nobody wants to do (without payment)
• Taking care of the dependencies of the dependencies
• Easy to use for supporters
• Everyone is depending on a healthy ecosystem around their software products

Healthy ecosystem

For a good investment, you have to be sure, that your software is not end of life next year due to lag of maintainership.

Important paramters

• Companies (and other) need one partner for invoicing
• Supporter should have not too much on options to influence what in detail is done.
  That's a feature request other people are up to
• A fair share needs to be forward to the dependencies
• Regular is the key

User story: donator

Dear community: That's you

1. Picking an amount
2. Picking a set of projects/technologies
3. Paying the bill ;)
4. The system is distribute the money (time) fair to the projects and it's dependencies

User story: contributor

Dear community: That's also you

1. Registering for a project
2. Doing maintenance work
3. Getting paid for work

… and that's what I wanted to suggest you.