Sponsoring open source project, what do you think?

ROS ROS General
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Hi,

I just saw this and I was thinking about the ROS community.

We have a large and amazing ecosystem of free software, free as in beer and speech!

That accelerated robotic development and we are all very grateful for it.

But I thin that it is also interesting to discuss how to support financially mantainers, keeping the software free for small companies (pre-revenue), students and individuals.

Thoughts’

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I worry about the equivalent of “GPL contamination” in this context.

In other words, if I decide I want to make something truly free but have been depending on a package that adopts an Open Source Maintenance Fee, then I either need to transitively require that my (revenue-generating) users pay the fee to the dependency… or migrate to another dependency.

But at the same time, it’s true that relying purely on corporations sponsoring the OSS repos they use purely on good faith hasn’t really been shown to work. Companies that sponsor OSS are more an exception than a norm.

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I’ve heard of this method before, rather than paying for the software, you’re paying for the packaged binaries which can be distributed under other terms. This seems like this project throws in use of the issue tracker and discussions as additional terms, but if you read the EULA its all about packaged binaries. I can’t say I like the strategy of tying payment to responses (or even comments?) to issues, since that in effect becomes a poor-man’s support contract without any promise of an outcome or even a response. It also effectively drops general Q&A, ticket support from the project, which is a key element of what the Fee is supposed to itself fund.

In case someone reading is interested in more info, the terms are here. I checked as of July 24th and there are 56 sponsors of this project. I’m interested to check in on this in some time to see how that grows. I also found a website for the Open Source Maintenance Fee. It seems like its from the same group of people, but not 100% certain about that.

I fundamentally believe that a carrot is a better motivator and creates more sustainability long-term than a stick, which this implementation seems to be. My opinion is that orgs that feel forced to pay are much more likely to stop sponsoring the moment they can (and perhaps move on faster than not), versus those that are asked and get value are likely to keep on using the software and be long-term customers. Especially when considering this project is asking for a small amount of money, sometimes that can be worse by frustrating the Finance / Legal departments.

I have some ideas about how to fund FOSS projects, but all boil down to requiring that software companies after a certain size allocate a budget to open-source support. I don’t think this is impossible, but seems to need some kind of trade group or other central organization to lobby and justify this need to make it a staple of company budgets. Once a budget is established for supporting their critical dependencies, I expect the process is much more straight forward to identify and fund the open-source capabilities. Each one would not need to navigate the corporate process alone, which still only works if there’s an internal champion to fight on their behalf.

Anyone want to start the lobbying arm of OSRF? :laughing:

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My two cents: I think this is a reasonable idea, but not without difficulties.

From my experience, a successful OSS project usually involves corporate sponsorship (e.g., PyTorch). Large companies can dedicate resources and have full-time teams to work on these projects for the benefit of themselves and the community.

However, the robotics industry—which I still consider a cottage industry compared to the broader software industry—has only a few large players, concentrated in self-driving, defense, and recently, humanoid robots.

To make things worse, teams at those companies almost always hand-roll their internal tooling instead of adopting open-source solutions. Rarely do these projects become successful open-source projects. Of the projects that did come out, some of them went back to being private. I’m thinking about Foxglove.

I don’t know why we have such a culture in the robotics space regarding tooling. I suspect that robotics engineers always have a DIY culture from the get-go.

Therefore, if the corporate sponsorship route is unrealistic, we have to rely on grassroots support. I’m also building an OSS project, but truth be told, I can’t count on individual donations. To my understanding, there isn’t a culture of financial support for open-source contributors yet.

This could change if we collectively decide to embrace open-source tooling instead of hand-rolling internal tools, convince companies to put resources into OSS projects, and build a culture that supports OSS project creators.

Let me know if your experience is vastly different from mine. Looking forward to hearing another perspective!