About funding and all that

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yorik
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by yorik »

Done! Feel free to edit further
jidoeuf
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by jidoeuf »

Among 106 contributors on Github, there are only @yorik and @jriegel to whom we can make a donation?

Bountysource FreeCAD: only one team member?
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kkremitzki
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by kkremitzki »

@vejmarie brought up the possibility of joining the Software Freedom Conservancy recently so I thought I'd mention it in this thread. The member services seem like they could give a lot of benefit to the project. Also, take a look at the current member projects for reference; we'd be in pretty good company.

Here's a little about the board of the Conservancy.
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Joel_graff
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by Joel_graff »

Just thought I'd weigh in. I read the entire thread, and saw a few good ideas put forward and I certainly appreciate the difficult position the project is in when it comes to generating funding.

Anyway, the limited liability company (LLC in the US - no idea what it's called in Europe) really makes sense to me. Not only would it allow for a corporate vehicle to manage funds, but would, as previously stated, provide a ready structure to hire developers, should that ever occur. That said, it seems to me that maybe the best way to handle funding at the moment would be to reserve funds until enough has been saved to, say, hire a single developer for a 1-year contract (or two developers for six months) to work on specific projects - maybe voted on by the community?

This would provide a viable outlet for the funding that comes in as well as encouraging additional sponsorship. After all, if the funds are used to improve FreeCAD in targeted, valuable ways, it should attract increased sponsorship. Ultimately, isn't the idea to generate enough monthly income to be able to hire full-time staff? In my mind, it seems like getting Yorik and Jurgen, for example, to quit their day jobs and go full time on FreeCAD would be a great goal. :)

I have no idea how much funding FreeCAD is attracting, and I assume it's not enough to hire a contract developer for an extended period of time, but if the project makes that a stated sponsorship goal, it provides sponsors a metric - a way to guage the success of the project - and sponsors like that sort of stuff. Whatever the goal, though, it seems to me that if people are asking to donate, the project would do well to accommodate that as fully as possible in a way that makes responsible, efficient use of the funds and positions FreeCAD for real growth.
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yorik
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by yorik »

kkremitzki wrote: Tue Jun 13, 2017 1:18 am@vejmarie brought up the possibility of joining the Software Freedom Conservancy recently
We had that talk before... That is indeed an option (to "host" freecad under an umbrella association). Before doing such thing, one should review the options carefully I think, and analyze well what's involved. Even the apparently most "for the greater good" associations can have nasty implications, for example the Free Software Foundation requires you to hand over all your copyright to them. We might not have money right now, but we're free.

Besides, there have been talks, for ex. from brl cad people, to, one day, start such an umbrella organization, a bit like in the mold of what's happening now for GSOC. From my point of view, it would be much better for freecad to be in such a smaller, CAD-oriented umbrella org, than in a big, generic structure. And if brl cad would receive a share of what's freecad is earning, to cover the expenses, that would be a good thing, much better than if it went to a big thing out there I think. It would make our local ecosystem stronger.
Joel_graff wrote: Tue Jun 13, 2017 3:54 amThis would provide a viable outlet for the funding that comes in as well as encouraging additional sponsorship
Agree with all that you said, but we always get back to this, who is gonna make all this happen, set everything up, take care of the campaign, make annoucements, etc... For free :)
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Joel_graff
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by Joel_graff »

yorik wrote: Tue Jun 13, 2017 3:25 pm Agree with all that you said, but we always get back to this, who is gonna make all this happen, set everything up, take care of the campaign, make annoucements, etc... For free :)
Hmmm. I would think that certain aspects of the process could be managed as a community effort. :)

It's a good question, but without a clear idea of exactly what administrative tasks are required, I don't think it can be answered well. Certainly, some elements of the umbrella will need to be managed by one or two people, like the business technical details, but I would think the PR tasks could be distributed among willing community members, maybe?

I don't presume this is easy to do, but it seems clear to everyone that while we don't need the administrative-heavy foundation structure, we need more than just a guy with a paypal account...
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kkremitzki
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by kkremitzki »

yorik wrote: Tue Jun 13, 2017 3:25 pm
kkremitzki wrote: Tue Jun 13, 2017 1:18 am@vejmarie brought up the possibility of joining the Software Freedom Conservancy recently
We had that talk before... That is indeed an option (to "host" freecad under an umbrella association). Before doing such thing, one should review the options carefully I think, and analyze well what's involved. Even the apparently most "for the greater good" associations can have nasty implications, for example the Free Software Foundation requires you to hand over all your copyright to them. We might not have money right now, but we're free.
A lot of that is covered on the Applying page. To summarize,
  • criteria:
    (i) must be a software/documentation project
    (ii) dedicated to FLOSS
    (iii) with a license recognized by Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative
    (iv) with an existing, vibrant community. FreeCAD meets all these.
  • not required to accept membership if offered (i.e. interest can be expressed but then declined if minds have changed in the meantime)
  • if FreeCAD joined, there'd have to be some formalization of its structure, e.g. saying Jürgen Riegel, Werner Mayer, Yorik van Havre are "official" project representatives who are points of contact for the Conservancy
  • in order to stay in the Conservancy FreeCAD would have to keep being a FLOSS project... (duh)
  • the conservancy takes 10% of the money/donations for its services
  • FreeCAD can leave at any time, involves 60 day written notice and you need to have a similar (non-profit) organization to take the money the Conservancy is holding for FreeCAD
So, it seems fairly permissive.
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shiftee
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by shiftee »

As someone who has not joined Patreon due to closed source and high fees I would like to point out an alternative which I discovered recently.
It's called Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/about/faq), and is Free Software.
They do not take a cut of the payments so there's only the cost of the transaction fees,
I added €30.34 by wire-transfer and paid €0.18 in transaction fees

I appreciate there is not a large userbase yet but I would ask people with/considering FreeCAD Patreon accounts to consider setting up an account on this service also.

Thanks
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yorik
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by yorik »

I just had a look at our bountysource page at https://www.bountysource.com/teams/freecad
Several people donated already, and last month someone started a recurrent donation of US$ 200/month (that's US$ 400 donated already)... So I think it would be good to start doing something about that.

The most annoying issue is that I couldn't find a way to link our mantis tracker to the bountysource freecad account. As a result, it only takes the issues hosted on github, which doesn't reflects the reality. I posed on https://github.com/bountysource/core/issues/944 let's see what happens.

Also, I'm unable to see the total amount of money already earned by freecad, only the last month earnings. But that should now be above US$ 500...

I'm really not sure how far this platform is trustable... Shouldn't we, like, request the money already? Would someone be interested in fixing a bug for money, so we can test a real case?
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Kunda1
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Re: About funding and all that

Post by Kunda1 »

yorik wrote: Mon Aug 07, 2017 2:47 pm The most annoying issue is that I couldn't find a way to link our mantis tracker to the bountysource freecad account. As a result, it only takes the issues hosted on github, which doesn't reflects the reality. I posed on https://github.com/bountysource/core/issues/944 let's see what happens.
I think we should make some noise on that that issue page to show there is interest in getting it working. I remember this was an issue for the Scribus folks and at the time bountysource didn't have a way to parse mantisbt.
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