Add individual membership

[mishushakov]

I spoke with Kyle from GitHub and with David (Sentry) about this quite a bit and would love to join as an individual fund.

I'm already sponsoring some folks through GitHub Sponsors, but I feel what would be awesome is to also highlight how individuals can take part in Open Source Pledge.

[vladh]

Amazing, thank you! I think this is fine since we already have members who only have one developer.

The only question that I can think of is how/if companies and individuals should be differentiated (1) in the marketing materials and (2) on the website. Perhaps the best way to solve this cleanly is to say that we don't make a differentiation, but we just sort members by pledge amount, which I hope will incentivise further high-pledge members.

@chadwhitacre what do you think?

[mishushakov]

Open Collective for instance makes that distinction: https://opencollective.com/curl

[chadwhitacre]

First, I think it's admirable that you are such a strong supporter of Open Source @mishushakov. Well done! 😌🙏

Second, I think we should handle this as a special case of tiering if/when we get to it. We don't have a ticket for that yet but it's come up a couple times, the idea is that it might make sense to bucket companies by number of employees—less than 10, less than 100, 1000, 10000, and then up. It would seem natural to bring in an individual tier along with that.

Third, I think we should park this idea for now so we can focus on the October launch.

[chadwhitacre]

Relevant: https://ziglang.org/news/300k-from-mitchellh/

[vinogradovkonst]

Individual membership would be a great addition, especially if combined with some special tiers in the future. One of good examples is https://wikimediaendowment.org/#benefactors. I would be more than pleased to join as an individual!

[voxpelli]

Since the purpose of the Open Source Pledge is to Pay your share I think the focus should be kept to companies.

Non-businesses have no "share" to pay and while their donations are admirable, they are not the focus of the Open Source Pledge I think and would if anything distract from the purpose and risk enforcing that OSS-donations are primarily something that non-businesses do, and that's the very thing the Open Source Pledge tries to combat?

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If one were to pursue this though, then it should be considered whether encouraging private donations generally is advisable, see eg: https://dev.to/voxpelli/open-source-and-taxes-a-swedish-perspective-gkn

Donations from money that's been taxed as salary is generally not advisable I think – from private foundations or wealth accrued through non-salary means can make sense, but that's more similar to a company donation than an individual donation.

[sandstrom]

Since the purpose of the Open Source Pledge is to Pay your share I think the focus should be kept to companies.

Non-businesses have no "share" to pay and while their donations are admirable, they are not the focus of the Open Source Pledge I think and would if anything distract from the purpose and risk enforcing that OSS-donations are primarily something that non-businesses do, and that's the very thing the Open Source Pledge tries to combat?

I agree with this.

I don't think there will be a lot of money in individuals contributing either, and it's not like there is anything stopping anyone from contributing. Individuals that think that monetary contributions from individuals can be a useful source of funding (I don't think it can!) can always start another project, for example "The Open Source Support Squad" or any other name.

The focus of this pledge and project should be companies.

Also, there is some administrative overhead here too -- another reason for this project to focus on getting companies to donate.

[vinogradovkonst]

Since the purpose of the Open Source Pledge is to Pay your share I think the focus should be kept to companies.

Non-businesses have no "share" to pay and while their donations are admirable, they are not the focus of the Open Source Pledge I think and would if anything distract from the purpose and risk enforcing that OSS-donations are primarily something that non-businesses do, and that's the very thing the Open Source Pledge tries to combat?

Every person consuming modern software-enabled goods and services indirectly relies on open source as a public good. So, one always has a "share" to pay from a goodwill perspective. Individuals should be encouraged to donate together with companies, and several general-purpose pledges are doing this, for instance, founderspledge.com and givingpledge.org.

The issue is that because >95% of software uses OSS, in most cases, organizations behind OSS-enabled products are not tech-savvy and are unlikely to ever join the Open Source Pledge, unfortunately. They are airports, hospitals, retailers, energy providers, governments (Germany is an exception here), etc.

If the ultimate goal of the Pledge is to "pay maintainers" to enable sustainable OSS maintenance, it should probably accept everybody who can contribute to this cause.

[voxpelli]

Every person consuming modern software-enabled goods and services indirectly relies on open source as a public good. So, one always has a "share" to pay from a goodwill perspective.

It's much harder for the individual to Pay a share of that goodwill than it is for a company to Pay a share of the profit they are making on their OSS use.

A company that Pays their share are "investing" (see #173) in the OSS projects they profit from and will gain dividends on that investment by being able to continue to profit from that OSS.

An individual sharing goodwill or doing donations to a project they are not making any financial gains on, that's charity and puts the OSS projects in competition with other charitable causes rather than in competition with proprietary software projects.

If the ultimate goal of the Pledge is to "pay maintainers" to enable sustainable OSS maintenance, it should probably accept everybody who can contribute to this cause.

I think the goal of the Open Source Pledge is for those profiting from OSS to share that profit with OSS.

Individuals support OSS as they support any charity and that is a danger – because when OSS is seen as charity that means that sponsorships are donations, not an investments.

Companies should see OSS sponsorships as investments (see #173). Including individual charitable donations in the Open Source Pledge would be at odds with that.

[vladh]

Companies should see OSS sponsorships as investments (see #173). Including individual charitable donations in the Open Source Pledge would be at odds with that.

I see this worry, for sure.

A company that Pays their share are "investing" (...) An individual sharing goodwill or doing donations to a project they are not making any financial gains on, that's charity

I'm not 100% sold on this though. For example, I might use a library in a personal project, and see that it's not as well-maintained as I would like, so I pay to support the maintainer, so they have more time to work on it, which means the library my personal project relies on will be better, which benefits my personal project. That's a kind of investment.

Is the crux of the point you're making that there's a difference between investment for more-or-less direct financial gain, versus investment for some other kind of benefit? So, for example, supporting my favourite YouTuber on Patreon is not an investment, because while their content brings me much joy, and my payments give me more of the thing that brings me joy, I don't financially benefit from the investment.

I can see the above distinction. But even then, some individuals do also make an income from software they wrote that uses Open Source packages. Basically — what's the difference between an individual and a company-of-one?

And more generally, I don't know how the direct-financial-gain line squares with our general incentives for the Pledge, a lot of which have to do with things like preventing security issues, including in global supply chains, for a generally healthy ecosystem. That's not an investment for direct financial gain. But it's still an investment.

I think we need to narrow down what we mean by “investment” a bit more. Maybe that will address #173 too. And I think we need to get more specific about what we mean by “individual”.