Comment by CiPHPerCoder
1 day ago
From the article:
If libsodium is useful to you, please keep in mind that it is maintained by one person, for free, in time I could spend with my family or on other projects. The best way to help the project would be to consider sponsoring it, which helps me dedicate more time to improving it and making it great for everyone, for many more years to come.
The "sponsoring it" links to https://opencollective.com/libsodium/contribute
Hope that helps.
Frank does great work that is critical to many businesses, and should get funded to do it professionally.
However, donating money to an open collective is prohibitively hard for most big companies. Maybe the world should be different (or maybe not, since it would be easy for employees to embezzle money if they could direct donations easily), but that's how it works currently.
AFAICT, there is also no fiscal sponsor, so the donation matching suggested in a sister comment won't apply.
This is why Geomys (https://geomys.org) works the way it does, and why it has revenue (ignoring the FIPS and tlog sides of the business) which is 30-50x of some GitHub Sponsors "success stories": we bill in a way that's compatible with how companies do business, even if effectively we provide a similar service (which is 95% focused on upstream maintenance, not customer support).
I am not saying it's for everyone, or that Frank should necessarily adopt this model, or that it's the only way (e.g. the Zig foundation raises real amounts of money, too), but I find it frustrating to see over and over again the same conversation:
- "Alice does important maintenance work, she should get professionally funded for it!"
- "How does Alice accept/request funding?"
- "Monthly credit card transactions anchored at $100/mo that are labeled donations"
- no business can move professional amounts of money that way
- "Businesses are so short-sighted, it's a tragedy of the commons!"
Anyone who solicits donations should also sell overpriced books of some sort, because it’s often very easy to get even a $500 book approved as an expense where a $5 “donation” causes hell.
With the year prominently displayed, i.e. "20XX Edition", to reflect when it was current. To help people track how long it has been since they dona-bought their last copy. And so purchase documentation explains repeat purchases.
It's a great perspective.
> However, donating money to an open collective is prohibitively hard for most big companies.
You are absolutely correct. However, that's the mechanism that Frank has made available, and that's what the comment I was replying to was asking, so I was just connecting the dots between the question and answer.
Given the increasing obviousness that there's functionally no oversight of NGOs and government funding, perhaps we just need some NGOs and get government grants for these critical services.
While it might be frustrating to see non-viable options presented as ways to fund critical FOSS, it's even more frustrating to see blame effectively being placed on the maintainer; particularly because, if companies like Apple really wanted to fund this work, I'm pretty sure they could figure something out.
Anyway, looking at the model you propose, it seems like the main difference is that Frank just doesn't explicitly say "you can retain my services"? Is that all that's stopping Apple from contacting him and arranging a contract?
> if companies like Apple really wanted to fund this work, I'm pretty sure they could figure something out.
Having spent the last ~6 years in big tech consistently frustrated by the rigidity of the processes and finding clever ways to navigate (see: wade through the bullshit), this isn’t as easy as you’d hope. The problem is that someone has to spend a non-trivial amount of time advocating internally for something like this (a “non-standard process”) which generally means asking pinging random people across finance, procurement, and legal how to deal with it and 99% of people will just throw up their hands (especially in this case because they don’t understand the importance of it). If things don’t fit a mold in these big companies, they fall into the event horizon and are stretched out to infinity.
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Filippo is another maintainer, of extremely similar open source software with entirely the same customer base, offering (important) advice to a peer, so I don't think policing his tone is helpful here.
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> if companies like Apple really wanted to fund this work, I'm pretty sure they could figure something out
A reminder that companies are not a hive mind.
Many people at Apple surely would love to funnel piles of money to open source. Maybe some of them even work in the Finance or Procurement or Legal departments. But the overwhelming majority of Apple’s procurement flow is not donations, and so it is optimized for the shape of the work it encounters.
I bet there are plenty of people working at Chick-fil-A who wish it was open on Sundays. But it’s not ~“blaming the user” to suggest that as it stands, showing up on Sunday is an ineffective way to get chicken nuggets.
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If you donate via GitHub Sponsors to https://github.com/jedisct1 from an individual / personal account GitHub won't take a cut (or pays for it from their own purse) for any credit card processing fees.