To apply, the project must place a funding.json in their public code repository or at a well-known uri location on their domain: https://dir.floss.fund/submit
That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you Llama Impact Grants, OpenAI Cybersecurity Grants, NLNet, & OpenTechFund.
---
Disclaimer: A project I co-develop was granted £3.75k in 2023 back when FOSS United grants were co-sponsored by Zerodha (the same company behind FLOSS/fund). The entire process was over in like 3 days from the date of application.
> That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you
I guess somebody has to point out the obvious ....
First, the process is probably simpler because the donation amounts are going to be smaller. If there's only $1M per year in the bank, I somehow don't see them giving out the sorts of large sums the others you mentioned do, e.g. OpenTechFund says it will give up to $400,000 ... I don't see that happening with a fund that only has $1M a year to give out.
Second, building on the above, giving out large sums involves a greater amount of due diligence.
Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
I worked in non-profit funding for many a year, and in the more traditional charity space, there's zero -- even negative -- correlation between grant value and effort.
It's also not just about the initial (typically multi-stage) application, but then the reporting and compliance requirements, the random donor requests.
This sort of thing is often objectively worse for smaller funders, but also relatively worse with smaller amounts of money as it's harder to resource for people to deal with the crap. Grant money ain't free.
> Put money where the mouth is—a minimum of $10,000 and up to $100,000 for a single recipient, totaling $1 million per year, which we will increase once we understand the dynamics of running the fund.
> once we understand the dynamics of running the fund
I suspect that phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting and would not be surprised if the length of the required paperwork increases in good time.
It is also worth reading the FAQ, it very much sounds like it remains the case that you are not going to escape 20 pages of paperwork, just that they are kicking the can down the road:
"If your application is accepted, our team will reach out to you for the necessary paperwork (such as tax residency documents required by Indian laws) before processing the funds. This generally involves back-and-forth communication over email and can take up to 4 weeks"
Might I invite you to consider the context of what I am saying ?
The OP here was boasting about "all you need" is a funding.json and none of the 20 pages of forms of the other organisations the OP chose to name and shame.
What I am saying is you're not going to escape those 20 pages. Do it now or do it later, you're still going to have to put in more effort than "just" a funding.json.
That is why I took issue with the OP naming and shaming the other organisations. It is both misleading and unfair on the other funders.
> What I am saying is you're not going to escape those 20 pages.
I don't think that's clear at all. The part you quoted mentions tax forms as an example of what will need to be filled out afterward. Of course you'll need to fill those sorts of things out, and that feels very distinct from some sort of multi-page application where you have to tell them why you believe you deserve the grant. And the start of the sentence you quoted is, "If your application is accepted", which to me implies that they're going to make a firm yes/no decision as to whether to give you money based solely on the funding.json thing.
Of course only time will tell how this will work out in practice, but their initial wording seems to suggest they will make a go/no-go decision based on a very simple "application".
> Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
Does it though or does it sort out the projects who would rather focus on developing while selecting those better at marketing themselves than at building useful things aka the professional bullshitter class.
> Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
Opposite effect, actually. Longer forms get you a lot of the top 10%, but you miss out on the top 0.0001% who don't want to waste their time with people who aren't smart enough to design a brief form.
Some starting ideas to look for datasets: look at quality of innovation coming out of YC (short form that can be completed in < 10 minutes) versus many government agencies such as NIH (long, horrible application process that require attending training sessions).
Applying for an nlnet grant generously takes like an afternoon. Like the entire rationale for their organization is to prevent you from having to write 20 pages of fluff to appeal to EU bureaucrats, so you can be to the point and chat with technically minded people instead.
Are you saying that as a good or bad thing (an afternoon)? I have no clue if that’s good or bad, never done this kinda thing (more of a sysadmin than a SWE).
I am curious, out of ignorance, if business many expenses are deductible anyway, what would be the fundamental difference between calling it a Marketing/Advertising expense to buy community good will compared with a charitable deduction?
I don’t know the answer, but I think it depends on how the money gets appropriated. You can’t buy a TV spot and call it good will, but could you setup a food drive in a large target city and you setup a bunch of fun shit for families and kids, and during which you also promoted your business. Can a corp write that off? Seems like the answer would be yes, but maybe not.
I've maintained a fairly popular open source project for over 13 years[1]. The software is basically "complete." How does funding work for someone like me? I have no initiatives with it that require funding. Occasionally, I need to fix a bizarre obscure bug, or support a new python version/feature (async/await being the last big one). But otherwise, I just field questions a few times a month.
Truth be told, I'd rather be done with the project completely. It's like a little monkey on my back that I can never be rid of, that I must always tend to. But at the same time, since I can never realistically receive funding for it, the only value I get is the fact that my name is on it. I wish a big, legit company would just buy it off of me somehow, but there's no incentive for them either. I don't know how this ends.
I had the exact same experience with Nodemailer, a popular open-source project I started 14 years ago. My solution was to empty the README file and set up a dedicated documentation website. Since the project is popular, the documentation website receives around 70,000 visits per month. I initially tried paid ads, but they only netted about $200 per month—not great. So, I started a commercial project somewhat related to Nodemailer and added ads for my new project on Nodemailer’s documentation page. This brings in around 3,000 visits per month to my paid project through the ads on the documentation page. Even if the conversion rate is low, it’s essentially free traffic for my paid project, which is now approaching $10,000 MRR. Without the free visitor flow from my OSS project’s documentation page, I definitely wouldn’t have made it this far.
This is a really interesting approach, I hadn't thought of this!
Just out of curiosity, do you think the separate documentation page has better conversion than if you were to, say, include the ad directly into the readme inside the repo?
You have less control over formatting and ad placement in the README file, as rendered markdown offers only limited options. With a dedicated documentation website, it’s much easier.
It’s also a question of sovereignty. If your documentation is in the README, then GitHub owns the audience. If they, for some reason, close your project, you’re finished. With your own documentation page, the risk is much lower.
Thanks for sharing. It's an interesting idea, to try to trampoline it into another related commercial project. I just checked my RTD analytics, I get around 1k pageviews to `/` per month. Unfortunately I don't have a related commercial product either.
When I started with Nodemailer, my goal was to build a cool product—not to become an unpaid helpdesk employee for life. But here we are. So, I’ve been trying to monetize the project in various ways for the past ten years. I’ve tried everything (license restrictions, freelancing and consulting, paid extensions, etc.), and each approach failed for different reasons. The only strategy that actually took off was using Nodemailer’s documentation page as a referral source for another relevant paid project.
Very interesting! I wonder if, sadly, the rise of AI-assisted coding will chip away also at this potential revenue stream? As developers simply ask a local or cloud LLM how to use a piece a software instead of reading the documentation.
You can always just stop working on it. You aren't obligated to do anything further if it doesn't bring you joy. Update the README to say you've stopped maintaining it, and to add a bit about searching for a new maintainer.
If you believe you still get an ongoing benefit (reputational or whatever) by being its maintainer and continuing to support it, and if you still want that benefit, then you have to keep up the work. Very little in life is truly free, unfortunately.
You could also see if there's a way to monetize your work on it. If people want support or need bugs fixed, they can pay you to do so, for example. Might even look into GitHub Sponsors, if you haven't already. I do get that it's harder to solicit donations for something that's "finished", though.
It's always an option to just publicly announce that you will no longer maintain it anymore and that you are either looking for a successor, or encouraging the community to fork it.
* Fine print: For successful projects only, and up to $100K per year per project
——
From their FAQ:
> Currently, our focus is on supporting existing, widely used, and impactful projects to specifically contribute to their sustainability. Very new projects or projects with minimal usage are not considered for the time being.
> A project can apply for funding of up to $100,000 in one year. To keep the logistics and operational overhead of the fund reasonable, we accept requests in denominations of a minimum of $10,000 and multiples of $25,000 thereafter.
Agreed. Isn’t it better to donate to something that’s actually used than something that might have an audience of 1? It’d be nice to see donations to newer projects gaining momentum, but they get to choose how to hand out the cash. I just hope it’s not projects that are already exceptionally well funded (it’d be kinda ridicous if they gave $100k for Linux, for example).
I was curious how they might handle something that isn't ready yet, but in the process of being built. But that answers it, it's not eligible. Oh well :( Plenty of good open source out there deserving as well.
So while this effort is commendable, it will do nothing to help open source projects that are good, but just have not become popular yet.
It makes you wonder how many projects are out there which have tremendous potential but still lack a critical feature or two that a bit of funding would help bring to fruition.
I wonder what projects will end up receiving money from this fund. It's nice that more funds are available, but my best guess would be that these will go to projects which probably don't really need them anyway.
From my experience, open source projects are either big and massively funded, able to pay their own developers a salary, or the projects end up in a void filled with burned-out maintainers whose only appreciation is an occasional $15 donation and issues filled with negativity and sometimes even hatred.
What does a one-time donation between $10k and $100k do to help the second case? Perhaps it will allow the maintainer to take a few months off and work full-time on the project, or maybe hire someone to clear the backlog. But what happens afterward? Without a clear pathway to making the project self-sustaining, you've merely postponed maintainer burnout by a couple of years at best.
The biggest problem with occasional $15 donations is that they're occasional. Sustainability requires a somewhat stable ARR.
In my experience developers as a whole are very stingy, even though they complain about companies not donating to open source all the time, and complain when companies do donate but the amount is too little for their liking. (For instance, when I google “microsoft foss fund payout” the first result after the official landing page is https://lobste.rs/s/wyvnuu/microsoft_foss_fund_winner_curl complaining about the amount.)
As a data point, my open source web app for a casual game received thousands of dollars of donations (not remotely covering the development cost if we go by hourly rate but that’s never the goal), while my open source developer tool with a couple thousand stars on GitHub received <$50 over several years. I don’t beg for donations in either case, just an inconspicuous link.
Disclosure: I donate a very modest amount to various projects every year.
I have a theory for why developers complain it is too low. A large recurring “donation” can be a bit of a trap.
In practice it can be an hidden freelancing or employment relationship.
Donators actually expect you to do things in return, for example with cURL they expect the developer to do security fixes.
Otherwise they will not get the “donation” the next month
It may not be written on a paper for legal reasons, but it is made for a good reason.
A true donation you do not expect for anything in return.
This could explain why they consider donation too low. A gift cannot be too small. But a gift where the giver has very high expectations in return may be too low.
I hate open source and would consider myself the chief anti-open source crusader online. I always try to avoid FOSS and pay indie developers for their software. However, in a few cases I've been forced to use FOSS solutions when there's been no other alternative, and then I donate to the creator of it. And I always see the same thing. Thousands and thousands of downloads over the years and the creator has earned only a hundred dollars in donations.
It's pathetic, and just shows that most people haven't evolved spiritually beyond being freeloaders whenever they can.
No wonder millions would rather stand in line the whole day to get free bread than pay just a little for their food.
For every perceived freeloader is someone who selflessly donated their time and energy so that someone else could benefit from it and improve it if they wanted to.
I'm not quite sure how these are supposed to balance each other? User who benefits and contributes nothing is balanced by the hardworking contributor? And there is certainly not a contributor for every user.
Somebody who selflessly donated their time and effort to people who won't even make a symbolic donation as thanks. And the biggest freeloaders of them all are giant businesses and high salaried engineers working for them. Shareholders are laughing their ass off at open source developers helping them rake in millions and getting nothing in return.
In the real world, if somebody invites you for dinner you eat for free. If you get invited a hundred times for dinner without inviting back or bringing a bottle of wine, then you're a freeloader. And the guy inviting you is being taken advantage of, he's not being generous. Especially if you start charging other people for eating dinner for free at his house.
Funnily, I've noted in tech circles, that they many times in the real world do not understand reciprocity. They get invited or treated to something and say "that was great, thanks!". Then they keep getting culled from the invitation lists, because they never invite back.
I've had to use FOSS in cases when there's no paid option of equivalent features. When I do, I donate. When I donate I see how little other people have donated. People who certainly are richer than me, but are spiritually still stuck on freeloader mentality.
1. The JSON spec validation seems to be problematic. For example, I get an error message and there's no obvious way to handle it: "entity.webpageUrl.url and manifest URL host and paths do not match. Expected entity.webpageUrl.wellKnown for provenance check at https://linktr.ee/joelparkerhenderson/*/.well-known/funding-..."
2. An opportunity for improvement is for the JSON spec to favor each project having all it's own information in the JSON file i.e. orient the file toward the project, rather than toward a specific developer, and definitely not toward the naming convention of "/.well-known" subdirectory (which doesn't exist in many projects and has a history of glitches because it's a hidden dot directory).
IMHO success looks like making the file spec simpler, even it means skipping some of the manifest capabilities.
1. Regarding the validation, this error seems to be related to the provenance check mechanism in the spec. This is to prove ownership of that project/domain. The wellKnown field is designed to handle cases where the webpageUrl doesn't match the manifest URL.
2. Will definitely be passing the feedback to our team and evaluate this further!
Thanks for the reply. It turns out the current JSON file approach can't prove ownership of the project nor the domain, so perhaps there's a gap in my understanding or your team's understanding...? Feel free to contact me about this a because I believe in your mission: joel@joelparkerhenderson.com
Some options that I use successfully with other donations services and funding services...
- A unique token per project published in a project file
- A unique token per domain published in a DNS TXT record
- A verification of the project's existing setup, such as using GitHub API access or OAuth
- A forwarding to the project's existing funding link, such as using a project's GitHub sponsors link
- A heuristic with the person's existing payment links, such as contact info being identical on GitHub and Venmo
- A challenge/response, such as verifying a small random payment
- A dedicated KYC process such as with a background checking service.
Would be even more interesting to start an endowment type fund. Donate some of that fund directly save some of it and extract the interest over time. After a while the fund would be self sufficiently pumping out donations.
> Has the project received any funding in the past? Is it in dire need of support, or is it doing reasonably well?
I think it would be better if funding for open source was more based on what it's worth to you then what the project needs, just like paying for a commercial product. That would more strongly encourage valuable open source projects, risks, creativity, efficiency.
Instead of structuring this as a fund, why not a non-profit? Then you could solicit tax-deductible donations which get funneled to these FOSS projects as part of your mission. Seems like a possible way to scale this to something much larger than yourselves.
> Instead of structuring this as a fund, why not a non-profit?
Thank you, this is an interesting suggestion. While a non-profit structure could potentially increase donations, implementing this globally would be extremely complex.
Particularly because tax laws vary by country, which would require us to be registered as a non-profit in most, if not all countries, and comply with their jurisdiction. The administrative overhead and legal complexities of managing a truly international non-profit outweighs the benefits for our current scale. We appreciate the idea and will keep it in mind as we grow, but for now, we're focusing on efficiently directing funds to FOSS projects through our current model.
I am trying to submit my funding.json, it validates when I check the validator, but fails when I submit with the error: "too many lines in the .well-known list"
Hi, I'm from the team at Zerodha. It seems as if the well-known URL for the laravel repository points to the GitHub page[1] instead of the URL for the raw code[2]. Changing the well-known URL to the raw code path should fix this issue. Will pass this feedback on to the team to improve the experience, thanks!
Apologies for my previous misguiding comment. We have figured out the issue and a fix is being implemented right now to handle URLs for GitHub repositories and suffix them with `?raw=true` to automatically to fetch the raw file. The fix should be live soon.
So my best guess is that even though the validator succeeds, the actual submission is pulling the GitHub page for the well-known instead of its raw content. The problem is you also can't really fix this yourself: The raw file is hosted at raw.githubusercontent.com which wouldn't match your source URL.
Hopefully they will fix their submission tool. I did see one project submitted successfully by having domain.com/github point to their project URL, which the submission accepted, but that causes certificate errors.
I have been developing and maintaining https://glicol.org for 4 years. I have donation page on github but only got it from 2 people. It seems all the donation service providers requirs login. I don't know why we cannot have a guest mode like regular shopping website.
Add "passthrough" field with a float value, and the idea is that you are sub-awarding a percentage of your grant to projects that you rely upon or want to succeed.
Then, people who are not open source maintainers but do spend their time indexing high-quality open source can have a 1.0 pass through funding.json passthrough to repos they believe are worth supporting.
And people who do not spend their time indexing high-quality open source but trust other people that DO spend their time indexing high-quality open source can have an index fund of donation streams.
In which case we can welcome both people who want to endow but don't have time and the people who have time but can't endow as much.
If anyone is interested in talking to me about this problem, I'm down
This is great. However, I'd rather Zerodha just award the FOSS projects they use instead of having random projects apply. I hope many more companies do this especially the big companies. I'm guessing there are also tax incentives at play here.
> In addition, we have given out many sizeable grants to FOSS projects and organisations in India. While funding projects outside India involves significant paperwork and operational overhead, we have reached out to several small and large projects that we use at work and have managed to pay them. This highly ad hoc approach is something that has increasingly bugged me though.
This seems very "project focused" rather than developer focused, many people contribute to open source projects but don't necessarily represent their project or don't wish to take away funding from those projects, but could still desperately use funding for their work.
I have a personal donation page but I'm struggling to get and retain funding, especially monthly donations, which would make it easier to spend time on the projects I contribute to (either my time highlighting the work of others on social media, or writing code).
"The rise of the "open core" model and the unfortunate license changes in many good open projects recently, are clear signs of this growing turmoil. ... That said, Python libraries raising massive amounts of VC funding in quick time does not look like a healthy trend."
I call it a "happy problem" - kind of problem you get in with lot of money.
All participating parties are having middle class above life style and looking for the way to balance each other.
Love this! Love how you start with the BLUF (Apply now up top). Lots of great thinking here.
I think since you are starting this from scratch you can do something pretty revolutionary with your application (and far simpler, long term!). I demonstrate in the user test below.
To apply, the project must place a funding.json in their public code repository or at a well-known uri location on their domain: https://dir.floss.fund/submit
That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you Llama Impact Grants, OpenAI Cybersecurity Grants, NLNet, & OpenTechFund.
---
Disclaimer: A project I co-develop was granted £3.75k in 2023 back when FOSS United grants were co-sponsored by Zerodha (the same company behind FLOSS/fund). The entire process was over in like 3 days from the date of application.
> That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you
I guess somebody has to point out the obvious ....
First, the process is probably simpler because the donation amounts are going to be smaller. If there's only $1M per year in the bank, I somehow don't see them giving out the sorts of large sums the others you mentioned do, e.g. OpenTechFund says it will give up to $400,000 ... I don't see that happening with a fund that only has $1M a year to give out.
Second, building on the above, giving out large sums involves a greater amount of due diligence.
Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
> First, the process is probably simpler because the donation amounts are going to be smaller.
I've applied to each of those funds for ~£5k. The process remains the same.
I worked in non-profit funding for many a year, and in the more traditional charity space, there's zero -- even negative -- correlation between grant value and effort.
It's also not just about the initial (typically multi-stage) application, but then the reporting and compliance requirements, the random donor requests.
This sort of thing is often objectively worse for smaller funders, but also relatively worse with smaller amounts of money as it's harder to resource for people to deal with the crap. Grant money ain't free.
From the post:
> Put money where the mouth is—a minimum of $10,000 and up to $100,000 for a single recipient, totaling $1 million per year, which we will increase once we understand the dynamics of running the fund.
> once we understand the dynamics of running the fund
I suspect that phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting and would not be surprised if the length of the required paperwork increases in good time.
It is also worth reading the FAQ, it very much sounds like it remains the case that you are not going to escape 20 pages of paperwork, just that they are kicking the can down the road:
"If your application is accepted, our team will reach out to you for the necessary paperwork (such as tax residency documents required by Indian laws) before processing the funds. This generally involves back-and-forth communication over email and can take up to 4 weeks"
> just that they are kicking the can down the road:
"Just" does a lot of heavy lifting here, considering that you only need all that paperwork if you are accepted ;)
> "Just" does a lot of heavy lifting here
No, it does not.
Might I invite you to consider the context of what I am saying ?
The OP here was boasting about "all you need" is a funding.json and none of the 20 pages of forms of the other organisations the OP chose to name and shame.
What I am saying is you're not going to escape those 20 pages. Do it now or do it later, you're still going to have to put in more effort than "just" a funding.json.
That is why I took issue with the OP naming and shaming the other organisations. It is both misleading and unfair on the other funders.
I considered the context, and lo and behold, it says "To apply".
Which makes a huge difference, because you do indeed escape those 20 pages if you are not accepted.
> What I am saying is you're not going to escape those 20 pages.
I don't think that's clear at all. The part you quoted mentions tax forms as an example of what will need to be filled out afterward. Of course you'll need to fill those sorts of things out, and that feels very distinct from some sort of multi-page application where you have to tell them why you believe you deserve the grant. And the start of the sentence you quoted is, "If your application is accepted", which to me implies that they're going to make a firm yes/no decision as to whether to give you money based solely on the funding.json thing.
Of course only time will tell how this will work out in practice, but their initial wording seems to suggest they will make a go/no-go decision based on a very simple "application".
> Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
Does it though or does it sort out the projects who would rather focus on developing while selecting those better at marketing themselves than at building useful things aka the professional bullshitter class.
> Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
Opposite effect, actually. Longer forms get you a lot of the top 10%, but you miss out on the top 0.0001% who don't want to waste their time with people who aren't smart enough to design a brief form.
Is there any actual evidence of this? It seems to just be something lazy people who believe themselves to be smart would say.
> Is there any actual evidence of this?
Great question.
Some starting ideas to look for datasets: look at quality of innovation coming out of YC (short form that can be completed in < 10 minutes) versus many government agencies such as NIH (long, horrible application process that require attending training sessions).
Applying for an nlnet grant generously takes like an afternoon. Like the entire rationale for their organization is to prevent you from having to write 20 pages of fluff to appeal to EU bureaucrats, so you can be to the point and chat with technically minded people instead.
Are you saying that as a good or bad thing (an afternoon)? I have no clue if that’s good or bad, never done this kinda thing (more of a sysadmin than a SWE).
Comparatively very good. There are cases where it's weeks worth of paperwork and documetation.
They probably need more stuff for tax (tax deduction) reasons, after all it can be considered a (deductible) donation.
I am curious, out of ignorance, if business many expenses are deductible anyway, what would be the fundamental difference between calling it a Marketing/Advertising expense to buy community good will compared with a charitable deduction?
The IRS doesn’t like businesses that only lose money, also known as hobbies.
That’s why you can’t say you are a musician and expense your $700 Fender pedals.
huh I thought they were called startups ;)
I don’t know the answer, but I think it depends on how the money gets appropriated. You can’t buy a TV spot and call it good will, but could you setup a food drive in a large target city and you setup a bunch of fun shit for families and kids, and during which you also promoted your business. Can a corp write that off? Seems like the answer would be yes, but maybe not.
> They probably need more stuff for tax (tax deduction) reasons, after all it can be considered a (deductible) donation.
Zerodha is India's Robinhood.
In India, it's very difficult to get a deductible donation exemption because of how easy it would be to game.
I concur with the other reply -- in my experience, it's not difficult to apply for an NLnet grant, or receive funds from one
I've maintained a fairly popular open source project for over 13 years[1]. The software is basically "complete." How does funding work for someone like me? I have no initiatives with it that require funding. Occasionally, I need to fix a bizarre obscure bug, or support a new python version/feature (async/await being the last big one). But otherwise, I just field questions a few times a month.
Truth be told, I'd rather be done with the project completely. It's like a little monkey on my back that I can never be rid of, that I must always tend to. But at the same time, since I can never realistically receive funding for it, the only value I get is the fact that my name is on it. I wish a big, legit company would just buy it off of me somehow, but there's no incentive for them either. I don't know how this ends.
1. https://github.com/amoffat/sh
I had the exact same experience with Nodemailer, a popular open-source project I started 14 years ago. My solution was to empty the README file and set up a dedicated documentation website. Since the project is popular, the documentation website receives around 70,000 visits per month. I initially tried paid ads, but they only netted about $200 per month—not great. So, I started a commercial project somewhat related to Nodemailer and added ads for my new project on Nodemailer’s documentation page. This brings in around 3,000 visits per month to my paid project through the ads on the documentation page. Even if the conversion rate is low, it’s essentially free traffic for my paid project, which is now approaching $10,000 MRR. Without the free visitor flow from my OSS project’s documentation page, I definitely wouldn’t have made it this far.
This is a really interesting approach, I hadn't thought of this!
Just out of curiosity, do you think the separate documentation page has better conversion than if you were to, say, include the ad directly into the readme inside the repo?
You have less control over formatting and ad placement in the README file, as rendered markdown offers only limited options. With a dedicated documentation website, it’s much easier.
It’s also a question of sovereignty. If your documentation is in the README, then GitHub owns the audience. If they, for some reason, close your project, you’re finished. With your own documentation page, the risk is much lower.
Thanks for sharing. It's an interesting idea, to try to trampoline it into another related commercial project. I just checked my RTD analytics, I get around 1k pageviews to `/` per month. Unfortunately I don't have a related commercial product either.
When I started with Nodemailer, my goal was to build a cool product—not to become an unpaid helpdesk employee for life. But here we are. So, I’ve been trying to monetize the project in various ways for the past ten years. I’ve tried everything (license restrictions, freelancing and consulting, paid extensions, etc.), and each approach failed for different reasons. The only strategy that actually took off was using Nodemailer’s documentation page as a referral source for another relevant paid project.
Very interesting! I wonder if, sadly, the rise of AI-assisted coding will chip away also at this potential revenue stream? As developers simply ask a local or cloud LLM how to use a piece a software instead of reading the documentation.
You can always just stop working on it. You aren't obligated to do anything further if it doesn't bring you joy. Update the README to say you've stopped maintaining it, and to add a bit about searching for a new maintainer.
If you believe you still get an ongoing benefit (reputational or whatever) by being its maintainer and continuing to support it, and if you still want that benefit, then you have to keep up the work. Very little in life is truly free, unfortunately.
You could also see if there's a way to monetize your work on it. If people want support or need bugs fixed, they can pay you to do so, for example. Might even look into GitHub Sponsors, if you haven't already. I do get that it's harder to solicit donations for something that's "finished", though.
> and to add a bit about searching for a new maintainer.
Don't. Unless you already know someone you can trust it's better to just let someone fork it and build reputation for their fork on their own.
It's always an option to just publicly announce that you will no longer maintain it anymore and that you are either looking for a successor, or encouraging the community to fork it.
When someone no longer enjoys the food in a restaurant, they tend to stop going. Why not do the same: just not do the thing that you wish not to do?
Some people do feel responsible for things besides themselves. That's generally a good thing for society.
Oh, cool, another HN-forged strawman!
* Fine print: For successful projects only, and up to $100K per year per project
——
From their FAQ:
> Currently, our focus is on supporting existing, widely used, and impactful projects to specifically contribute to their sustainability. Very new projects or projects with minimal usage are not considered for the time being.
> A project can apply for funding of up to $100,000 in one year. To keep the logistics and operational overhead of the fund reasonable, we accept requests in denominations of a minimum of $10,000 and multiples of $25,000 thereafter.
https://floss.fund/faq/
A better title: Floss/fund: Up to $100K/year for popular open source projects
Still admirable though...
Charitable giving ought to have less conditions than an investment. Of course, the opposite is true.
> Charitable giving ought to have less conditions than an investment.
You should give a "why" with your statement.
Agreed. Isn’t it better to donate to something that’s actually used than something that might have an audience of 1? It’d be nice to see donations to newer projects gaining momentum, but they get to choose how to hand out the cash. I just hope it’s not projects that are already exceptionally well funded (it’d be kinda ridicous if they gave $100k for Linux, for example).
I was curious how they might handle something that isn't ready yet, but in the process of being built. But that answers it, it's not eligible. Oh well :( Plenty of good open source out there deserving as well.
So while this effort is commendable, it will do nothing to help open source projects that are good, but just have not become popular yet.
It makes you wonder how many projects are out there which have tremendous potential but still lack a critical feature or two that a bit of funding would help bring to fruition.
you're describing a startup with no business model.
Thanks—we've taken the dollars out of the title above.
I want to know what their criteria for “widely used” is.
I wonder what projects will end up receiving money from this fund. It's nice that more funds are available, but my best guess would be that these will go to projects which probably don't really need them anyway.
From my experience, open source projects are either big and massively funded, able to pay their own developers a salary, or the projects end up in a void filled with burned-out maintainers whose only appreciation is an occasional $15 donation and issues filled with negativity and sometimes even hatred.
Doesn't this target exactly your second case? Successful projects in terms of usage and impact that can't be maintained by volunteers alone?
What does a one-time donation between $10k and $100k do to help the second case? Perhaps it will allow the maintainer to take a few months off and work full-time on the project, or maybe hire someone to clear the backlog. But what happens afterward? Without a clear pathway to making the project self-sustaining, you've merely postponed maintainer burnout by a couple of years at best.
The biggest problem with occasional $15 donations is that they're occasional. Sustainability requires a somewhat stable ARR.
>Perhaps it will allow the maintainer to take a few months off
Depends on where you live too - $10k would take care of 5 years for me.
From my experience though, it is better to figure out a way to sell something in addition to the open stuff.
Interesting that these kind of things are done by less known companies, not the big names. At least that's my (uninformed) impression.
Actually many big name companies do contribute a lot to open source. Few Examples:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members https://openjsf.org/members https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/
FYI - Zerodha is the biggest platform for retail investors in the Indian markets.
To be fair Microsoft have been making contributions. I’ve received two $1000 contributions from them in the past couple of years.
It’s obviously not enough to give up the day job, but it dwarfs all other contributions I’ve had.
In my experience developers as a whole are very stingy, even though they complain about companies not donating to open source all the time, and complain when companies do donate but the amount is too little for their liking. (For instance, when I google “microsoft foss fund payout” the first result after the official landing page is https://lobste.rs/s/wyvnuu/microsoft_foss_fund_winner_curl complaining about the amount.)
As a data point, my open source web app for a casual game received thousands of dollars of donations (not remotely covering the development cost if we go by hourly rate but that’s never the goal), while my open source developer tool with a couple thousand stars on GitHub received <$50 over several years. I don’t beg for donations in either case, just an inconspicuous link.
Disclosure: I donate a very modest amount to various projects every year.
I have a theory for why developers complain it is too low. A large recurring “donation” can be a bit of a trap.
In practice it can be an hidden freelancing or employment relationship.
Donators actually expect you to do things in return, for example with cURL they expect the developer to do security fixes.
Otherwise they will not get the “donation” the next month
It may not be written on a paper for legal reasons, but it is made for a good reason.
A true donation you do not expect for anything in return.
This could explain why they consider donation too low. A gift cannot be too small. But a gift where the giver has very high expectations in return may be too low.
> Otherwise they will not get the “donation” the next month
Claw back this month’s “donation” if I don’t meet your expectations — sure, that’s an air quotes donation.
No donation next month if I don’t meet your expectations — that’s just a bona fide donation like any other.
I hate open source and would consider myself the chief anti-open source crusader online. I always try to avoid FOSS and pay indie developers for their software. However, in a few cases I've been forced to use FOSS solutions when there's been no other alternative, and then I donate to the creator of it. And I always see the same thing. Thousands and thousands of downloads over the years and the creator has earned only a hundred dollars in donations.
It's pathetic, and just shows that most people haven't evolved spiritually beyond being freeloaders whenever they can.
No wonder millions would rather stand in line the whole day to get free bread than pay just a little for their food.
For every perceived freeloader is someone who selflessly donated their time and energy so that someone else could benefit from it and improve it if they wanted to.
I'm not quite sure how these are supposed to balance each other? User who benefits and contributes nothing is balanced by the hardworking contributor? And there is certainly not a contributor for every user.
Somebody who selflessly donated their time and effort to people who won't even make a symbolic donation as thanks. And the biggest freeloaders of them all are giant businesses and high salaried engineers working for them. Shareholders are laughing their ass off at open source developers helping them rake in millions and getting nothing in return.
In the real world, if somebody invites you for dinner you eat for free. If you get invited a hundred times for dinner without inviting back or bringing a bottle of wine, then you're a freeloader. And the guy inviting you is being taken advantage of, he's not being generous. Especially if you start charging other people for eating dinner for free at his house.
Funnily, I've noted in tech circles, that they many times in the real world do not understand reciprocity. They get invited or treated to something and say "that was great, thanks!". Then they keep getting culled from the invitation lists, because they never invite back.
This is a really interesting perspective! When have you been forced to use FOSS? What OS do you use? Is big-company FOSS ok for you?
I've had to use FOSS in cases when there's no paid option of equivalent features. When I do, I donate. When I donate I see how little other people have donated. People who certainly are richer than me, but are spiritually still stuck on freeloader mentality.
I think any employee in tech should appeal to their employers to donate / contribute to the open source projects they use.
Appealing will only get so far in any bureaucratic mess, especially if those responsible for the decision are way above your pay grade.
These companies instead should carve out a matching donation program for employees funding FOSS projects.
Playing devil's advocate/CFO, what value does "the business" receive from this transaction?
Red Hat funds FOSS developers to work on open source projects to probably 100x - 500x this amount every year.
And many of those Red Hat developers end up creating orders of magnitude more work for other developers and users.
Great idea! I'm trying it now by adding the file `funding.json` to two of my FOSS projects. Feedback welcome. Donations welcome. :-)
1. Assertables is a Rust crate that provides assert macros for smarter testing: https://github.com/SixArm/assertables-rust-crate/blob/main/f...
2. BoldContacts is a mobile app that helps people who have disabilities: https://github.com/BoldContacts/boldcontacts-mobile-app-for-...
Results so far:
1. The JSON spec validation seems to be problematic. For example, I get an error message and there's no obvious way to handle it: "entity.webpageUrl.url and manifest URL host and paths do not match. Expected entity.webpageUrl.wellKnown for provenance check at https://linktr.ee/joelparkerhenderson/*/.well-known/funding-..."
2. An opportunity for improvement is for the JSON spec to favor each project having all it's own information in the JSON file i.e. orient the file toward the project, rather than toward a specific developer, and definitely not toward the naming convention of "/.well-known" subdirectory (which doesn't exist in many projects and has a history of glitches because it's a hidden dot directory).
IMHO success looks like making the file spec simpler, even it means skipping some of the manifest capabilities.
Hey, I'm from Zerodha team.
1. Regarding the validation, this error seems to be related to the provenance check mechanism in the spec. This is to prove ownership of that project/domain. The wellKnown field is designed to handle cases where the webpageUrl doesn't match the manifest URL.
2. Will definitely be passing the feedback to our team and evaluate this further!
Thanks for the reply. It turns out the current JSON file approach can't prove ownership of the project nor the domain, so perhaps there's a gap in my understanding or your team's understanding...? Feel free to contact me about this a because I believe in your mission: joel@joelparkerhenderson.com
Some options that I use successfully with other donations services and funding services...
- A unique token per project published in a project file
- A unique token per domain published in a DNS TXT record
- A verification of the project's existing setup, such as using GitHub API access or OAuth
- A forwarding to the project's existing funding link, such as using a project's GitHub sponsors link
- A heuristic with the person's existing payment links, such as contact info being identical on GitHub and Venmo
- A challenge/response, such as verifying a small random payment
- A dedicated KYC process such as with a background checking service.
I'll confirm doesn't work.
Aloha! I think there's something novel you could do here that would catch on like wildfire. Here is me coding up the basics:
https://youtu.be/4BH8DRXwVRw?t=317
Feel free to connect via email if you want to chat more breck7@gmail.com
Would be even more interesting to start an endowment type fund. Donate some of that fund directly save some of it and extract the interest over time. After a while the fund would be self sufficiently pumping out donations.
> Has the project received any funding in the past? Is it in dire need of support, or is it doing reasonably well?
I think it would be better if funding for open source was more based on what it's worth to you then what the project needs, just like paying for a commercial product. That would more strongly encourage valuable open source projects, risks, creativity, efficiency.
Instead of structuring this as a fund, why not a non-profit? Then you could solicit tax-deductible donations which get funneled to these FOSS projects as part of your mission. Seems like a possible way to scale this to something much larger than yourselves.
Hi, I'm from the team at Zerodha.
> Instead of structuring this as a fund, why not a non-profit?
Thank you, this is an interesting suggestion. While a non-profit structure could potentially increase donations, implementing this globally would be extremely complex.
Particularly because tax laws vary by country, which would require us to be registered as a non-profit in most, if not all countries, and comply with their jurisdiction. The administrative overhead and legal complexities of managing a truly international non-profit outweighs the benefits for our current scale. We appreciate the idea and will keep it in mind as we grow, but for now, we're focusing on efficiently directing funds to FOSS projects through our current model.
Interesting funding.json made no mention of FUNDING.yml:
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...
I am trying to submit my funding.json, it validates when I check the validator, but fails when I submit with the error: "too many lines in the .well-known list"
I have 1 line in my .well-known lists
Here's my funding.json:
https://nativephp.com/funding.json
Can someone help me figure out what I'm doing wrong?
Hi, I'm from the team at Zerodha. It seems as if the well-known URL for the laravel repository points to the GitHub page[1] instead of the URL for the raw code[2]. Changing the well-known URL to the raw code path should fix this issue. Will pass this feedback on to the team to improve the experience, thanks!
[1]: https://github.com/nativephp/laravel/blob/main/.well-known/f... [2]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nativephp/laravel/refs/hea...
Sure, but that's not how it's demonstrated in the docs...
I've updated it, but that also doesn't work AND fails validation because:
"projects[0].repositoryUrl.url and `projects[0].repositoryUrl.wellKnown` hostnames do not match"
Apologies for my previous misguiding comment. We have figured out the issue and a fix is being implemented right now to handle URLs for GitHub repositories and suffix them with `?raw=true` to automatically to fetch the raw file. The fix should be live soon.
In the meanwhile, if you would like to submit the project, you could use the following URL which redirects to the `raw.githubusercontent.com` page: https://github.com/nativephp/laravel/raw/main/.well-known/fu...
I hope this helps!
Awesome! It worked! Thanks so much.
Looking forward to being listed and considered for funding :)
Cheers! The issue has been fixed now and is live. Thanks a lot for your feedback :)
So my best guess is that even though the validator succeeds, the actual submission is pulling the GitHub page for the well-known instead of its raw content. The problem is you also can't really fix this yourself: The raw file is hosted at raw.githubusercontent.com which wouldn't match your source URL.
Hopefully they will fix their submission tool. I did see one project submitted successfully by having domain.com/github point to their project URL, which the submission accepted, but that causes certificate errors.
I have been developing and maintaining https://glicol.org for 4 years. I have donation page on github but only got it from 2 people. It seems all the donation service providers requirs login. I don't know why we cannot have a guest mode like regular shopping website.
Mostly we cannot have nice things because bad guys will come over and exploit it for some nefarious reasons.
Suggestion:
Add "passthrough" field with a float value, and the idea is that you are sub-awarding a percentage of your grant to projects that you rely upon or want to succeed.
Then, people who are not open source maintainers but do spend their time indexing high-quality open source can have a 1.0 pass through funding.json passthrough to repos they believe are worth supporting.
And people who do not spend their time indexing high-quality open source but trust other people that DO spend their time indexing high-quality open source can have an index fund of donation streams.
In which case we can welcome both people who want to endow but don't have time and the people who have time but can't endow as much.
If anyone is interested in talking to me about this problem, I'm down
This is great. However, I'd rather Zerodha just award the FOSS projects they use instead of having random projects apply. I hope many more companies do this especially the big companies. I'm guessing there are also tax incentives at play here.
From the blog post
> In addition, we have given out many sizeable grants to FOSS projects and organisations in India. While funding projects outside India involves significant paperwork and operational overhead, we have reached out to several small and large projects that we use at work and have managed to pay them. This highly ad hoc approach is something that has increasingly bugged me though.
This seems very "project focused" rather than developer focused, many people contribute to open source projects but don't necessarily represent their project or don't wish to take away funding from those projects, but could still desperately use funding for their work.
I have a personal donation page but I'm struggling to get and retain funding, especially monthly donations, which would make it easier to spend time on the projects I contribute to (either my time highlighting the work of others on social media, or writing code).
https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html
"The rise of the "open core" model and the unfortunate license changes in many good open projects recently, are clear signs of this growing turmoil. ... That said, Python libraries raising massive amounts of VC funding in quick time does not look like a healthy trend."
I call it a "happy problem" - kind of problem you get in with lot of money.
All participating parties are having middle class above life style and looking for the way to balance each other.
The owner of this website (floss.fund) has banned the country or region your IP address is in (TN) from accessing this website.
Hi, I'm from Zerodha. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. It was a misconfiguration on our end, which we've now patched.
Our regional view of your open fund :)
is your IP on any blacklists?
"projects" top-level key should be labeled "Required" at https://floss.fund/funding-manifest/
It seems that "plans" are required? Or is that just a quirk of the builder UI?
Yep, at least one plan is required. See https://floss.fund/funding-manifest/#schema
So, I should create a plan with amount=0, set the currency to USD anyway, and label it "any donation appreciated"? What is the workflow?
Built a GUI[1] to generate funding.json, with help from Claude.
This XKCD[2] is perhaps becoming less relevant.
[1]: https://vishnukvmd.github.io/funding.json
[2]: https://xkcd.com/974
Actually good idea
Love this! Love how you start with the BLUF (Apply now up top). Lots of great thinking here.
I think since you are starting this from scratch you can do something pretty revolutionary with your application (and far simpler, long term!). I demonstrate in the user test below.
Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.youtube.com/embed/4BH8DRXw...
I wonder if they would fund a fork of WordPress given the mess that's become as of late.
Perhaps such move would spark others to also fund such a fork.