About funding and all that

[yorik]

Small update: We now have a liberapay group account for the FreeCAD project at http://liberapay.com/FreeCAD
Any money received there will be shared in equal part between all members of the group. At the moment, that's @kkremitzki, @realthunder and me.

If you feel like entering the game, that is, you have a minimally proven record of working on FreeCAD and a coupe of bucks could help you work more on FreeCAD, create yourself a liberapay account and tell me! Beware that this account only receives a couple of dollars per month so far, so don't create big illusions! But I think if people see the money being put to good use by more people, that will be very good.

Also, I think that besides bountysource, that's the closest thing we have so far that more or less is a group account for the whole project...

[dimitar]

Small update: We now have a liberapay group account for the FreeCAD project at http://liberapay.com/FreeCAD
Any money received there will be shared in equal part between all members of the group. At the moment, that's @kkremitzki, @realthunder and me.

If you feel like entering the game, that is, you have a minimally proven record of working on FreeCAD and a coupe of bucks could help you work more on FreeCAD, create yourself a liberapay account and tell me! Beware that this account only receives a couple of dollars per month so far, so don't create big illusions! But I think if people see the money being put to good use by more people, that will be very good.

Also, I think that besides bountysource, that's the closest thing we have so far that more or less is a group account for the whole project...

I second the fact of having reports, which I guess in some shape or form we already do, at least for yorik's monthly updates. Not sure of similar updates exist from the other devs?

I was just searching on information about funding, structure organisation, etc. I've read up on the wiki and all the linked info the the funding wiki, and it's really made me realise what an impressive community effort freecad actually is!

I would like to introduce Freecad properly in my company, HOK. The global leads are techy guys and they understand open source (in fact some of the dev guys have been writing open source tools for revit - https://github.com/HOKGroup/HOK-Revit-Addins)

I have written on how just a fraction of the money that goes into licensing Autodesk software and then investing for developing for a closed-source platform could significantly boost open source projects.

So, I believe companies are willing to invest in good things, open source or elsewhere. Both, with funding, and with dev time. However, corporate organisations will most likely want to invest in a company fund instead of individuals, know pretty well what's happening with the money they are investing. I guess bountysource serves well for that. And then documentation, wiki, and support/bugs....yadda yadda yadda all the things that everyone knows

I am just wondering whether anyone's thought of or has tried to crowdsource similar to what blender has been doing - e.g this much money would enable us to get these and these features, better hosting, documentation, onboarding, etc (sorry if it has been mentioned before somewhere in this thread, I'm a bit limited on time for reading though all threads, as much as I would like to). They would help these industries in these ways. In other words set up goals and clearly state the investment that would be needed to achieve those goals. I feel like the minute blender put on fund.blender.org the desire to raise 25K euro/month (and then properly spread the news, made it easy for both individuals and corporate sponsors to join), a lot more people joined than if they hadn't shared those. goals/intentions. I guess Krita is doing the same through kickstarter, (which i know has been discussed

[triplus]

I guess it would be great if Werner would be added to Patreon as an individual and as a team member of liberapay group. And in the future if some more targeted and focused campaigns would be ongoing on one of the popular platforms for achieving such goals.

[vocx]

...

I am just wondering whether anyone's thought of or has tried to crowdsource similar to what blender has been doing - e.g this much money would enable us to get these and these features, better hosting, documentation, onboarding, etc (sorry if it has been mentioned before somewhere in this thread, I'm a bit limited on time for reading though all threads, as much as I would like to).

Read this post from Yorik.

...

2) I know most of us would like much FreeCAD development to go faster by receiving money, and ideally start that now, I also want that, but my opinion is that we are nowhere close to be able to do that. ... We could "hire developers" of course. Who? Who's going to go after developers? Assess if they're up to the task? What will we ask them to do? ... it requires several hours per week just to monitor ONE task. If we want FreeCAD to stay with the same level of quality, it's something we HAVE to do. I don't want to do it, all my time would go into that, which I don't want. I dare to think Werner has enough on his plate as well. So, who?
...

d) start thinking indeed of a smaller structure than the forum, that can take decisions related to money without having endless forum discussions.

Basically what FreeCAD needs is more organization. Currently we have two benevolent dictators, a few long standing developers and power users, and a few new enthusiastic developers, plus an ever increasing base of regular users.

We haven't consolidated into a "FreeCAD organization" that is able to make major decisions. We basically trust our leaders at the top, and that's it. In order to move FreeCAD forward in a coherent manner, we really need a core group of 15 or so people, who can make decisions and follow through those decisions. But this takes a lot of time. We basically need somebody, at least one or two people, who can dedicate 100% of their time to FreeCAD organizational matters (funding, scheduling, task planning, documentation planning, standards planning, etc.). So far, these people don't exist, as everybody is busy with their own jobs and lives. Dedicating 100% to FreeCAD won't make sense to those "organizers" unless they can receive a proper salary from FreeCAD. And also, those people should be respected members in the community already. If you or I want to become the community leaders, and dedicate entirely to FreeCAD, nobody would follow us if we haven't built the proper community trust, through our forums posts or code contributions. So, necessarily it'd have to be somebody with at least 5 years of FreeCAD developing experience.

A year ago, Kunda tried to revive the Organization chart of FreeCAD; see Reviving FreeCAD's Organization Chart. That didn't do much. What we need is people who are able to commit and say, "I will monitor this, and will make sure everything about it is up to date". So far people haven't committed long term officially, which is understandable given that this is free software, and people have the freedom of coming and going whenever they please.

I think we just need more time. The more FreeCAD matures, the more developers will join the project, and then we will have the sufficient mass to create an organization.

[thimmah]

Hello! I use FreeCAD with QCAD on my not very complex, but real job and that tools works great together. Thank you, everyone there. Recently I bought QCAD Pro version as a gratitude to devs and for a few non-free extensions. I think it's would be great if FreeCAD have the same way of donation as QCAD.
And I should say that seems all your current donation ways pass through paypal. It's difficult to use it from Russia. Paypal forces me to send my home address when I try to pay by Visa card. It's not feels ok. I think FreeCAD should have non-US way to earn money too. Sorry for my English.

[thimmah]

And a FreeCAD model store would be great too. With a free and non-free models.

[Cyril]

And I should say that seems all your current donation ways pass through paypal. It's difficult to use it from Russia. Paypal forces me to send my home address when I try to pay by Visa card. It's not feels ok. I think FreeCAD should have non-US way to earn money too. Sorry for my English.

There is non US ways with less fees but not sure if it works from Russia. Give it a try here using bank transfer (Stripe) : https://liberapay.com/FreeCAD/ and tell me.
Another way is to try to contact one of the developper directly.

Edit : Stripe was Irish but I see that it is now US. I meaned by non-US that they use non US mechanics like SEPA bank transfer (very low fees and often even 0 €).

[bernd]

Get in touch with Yorik. As written you could directly transfer the money to a bank account than.

[Zolko]

by surfing randomly on the forum, I found this very wise piece:

Basically what FreeCAD needs is more organization. Currently we have two benevolent dictators, a few long standing developers and power users, and a few new enthusiastic developers, plus an ever increasing base of regular users. We haven't consolidated into a "FreeCAD organization" that is able to make major decisions.

yes, I think it's fundamental to realize this: the FreeCAD developer community isn't organized in any way. It's not even organized in the traditional open-source (free-software) way, that has basically 2 modes:

• the BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) style: where Linux/Linus is the best example.
• the well organized organisation style: Debian is a good example.

The problem with the lack of organisation are multiple, the main being scalability: a single person doesn't scale for a large project. So either that person is actually paid for doing it, and can take time to organise things, or it needs to be split between several benevolent people but then some decision-making process is necessary. FreeCAD's specific problem is that there are 2 benevolent dictators : as long as they hang onto their power, they can't be removed without forking FreeCAD. And since they don't have the legitimacy of Linus Thorvalds, Theo de Raadt, Guido van Rossum ... who did create the software on which they rule, we have a power vacuum. There was a thread about uniting the assembly modules, a subject that is brought up by all users: none of these 2 ever participated.

I think we just need more time. The more FreeCAD matures, the more developers will join the project, and then we will have the sufficient mass to create an organization.

I disagree: with more people you'll increase momentum, but also noise, and it will not magically create organisation.

I'd actually take it in reverse: if, as we all hope, FreeCAD v0.19 makes it into the next Ubuntu LTS, a lot more people are going to use it. Think orders of magnitude. How would the development process be if suddenly 50 new developers with lots of ideas appear ? This is going to be a mess.

Code: Select all

FreeCAD 0.19, Libs: 0.19R19107 (Git)
© Juergen Riegel, Werner Mayer, Yorik van Havre 2001-2019

Jürgen is not around any-more and Yorik's code contributions are .... very specific shall I say. The amount of code brought by realthunder into FreeCAD core for v0.19 is going to be huge: will he make it into the © list ? Who decides these things ? How ? Where is it discussed and documented ?

[vocx]

...
yes, I think it's fundamental to realize this: the FreeCAD developer community isn't organized in any way. It's not even organized in the traditional open-source (free-software) way,

... And since they don't have the legitimacy of Linus Thorvalds, Theo de Raadt, Guido van Rossum ... who did create the software on which they rule, ...

We do have a traditional free software organization with two benevolent dictators. All decisions have to go through them. Werner is one of the creators of the software, absolutely. He's been there since the beginning. Yorik isn't a C++ developer but so what, he is one of the core people who started all this, and organized the project in some ways that you may not be aware of (wiki, SourceForge, GitHub, forum, documentation, etc.). They absolutely have legitimacy.

I disagree: with more people you'll increase momentum, but also noise, and it will not magically create organisation.

I'd actually take it in reverse: if, as we all hope, FreeCAD v0.19 makes it into the next Ubuntu LTS, a lot more people are going to use it. Think orders of magnitude. How would the development process be if suddenly 50 new developers with lots of ideas appear ? This is going to be a mess.

It's free software. Organization won't happen magically, obviously; it's growing pains, just like everything. If we have 50 new developers, that's great! More eyes to look at the code, and who can propose new things and work on features by themselves.

FreeCAD has been included in past LTS releases and it hasn't received a deluge of new developers creating a mess. Why are you so worried about this happening now? And if they do make a mess, and fork FreeCAD, then so what? It's free software. If somebody can come and improve the program and be successful while the older program dies down, then that's fine. It's the nature of free software after all.

You seem to come from a very combative and pessimistic point of view. You have to think in a different way. Most people, most humans, try to build things on top of what has already been built; very rarely do new developers want to destroy or corrupt something just because they have slight disagreements.

... The amount of code brought by realthunder into FreeCAD core for v0.19 is going to be huge: will he make it into the © list ? Who decides these things ? How ? Where is it discussed and documented ?

Werner and Yorik decide, of course. I don't have a problem if they would like to include him as one of the core authors of the software. I would expect a bit longer tenure though. This is the reason people like Werner and Yorik, because they have been around for long; they know their stuff, and also aren't afraid to take advice from the other senior programmers and users. I could see realthunder being one of the key guys in the future, if he'd keep participating in the development for 5 years or so. He's shown politeness and willingness to cooperate, and none of that disruptive behavior you seem to think other developers have.