I hope that there will be someone here who raises their hand, and they can come, I do
the talk instead of me because they know better, but unfortunately none of you.
I'm going to convince myself, I'm already convinced, convince yourself that we can
finance open source by small companies. We are giving one person of the income to
open source project, I'm going to convince you that all of the small companies in
open source can do that, and we can change, we can change much in the open
source world with that. Do you know what it can be, 23.1 million?
Huh? Hard question. That's the number of small companies in the European Union. Wow.
How many of them do the computing science? How many of them use open source
every day? How many use open source every day? I would say half probably, but how
many are contributing and are constant users of open source? Way harder to ask.
Are you the same that at least 5,000? Imagine now that 5,000 companies, which
is not that optimistic estimate, each of them giving 1,000 euros per year. The
total budget you get is 5 million. What we can do for 5 million in Europe, quite
much, and 1,000 euros per company, it's not high number, it's really a
pessimistic estimate, so we can do way better than that. Before we get to the
details of the product smart dictionary check, we are in Europe, all of us talking
about taxes, incomes, and financial things we are using our own languages, and we
need to have a dictionary check when we are switching to English. So, turnover,
income, gross revenue, same thing, it's all sales of a company over a period of
time, usually a year, and profit, it's earning minus all of the expenses that you
have. What I'm convincing you that you can give 1% of the income, so all sales
is really a year. Now, my personal point of view,
SysLineBit is a company running multiple economic activities under one roof, and
we are helping new activities and new people to be their activities. It's a
pretty specific type of a company under the French law called CEL. We are
concentrating on embedded and open source, so we are strong supporters of
open source. Currently, in our model, everyone is a consultant, but we welcome
production, system admins, and all other types of activities. Currently, every
consultant gives 1% of their income to open source project. As we hold multiple
independent activities, every person decides on their own to which project
they want to give, because we have different preferences, and I started that
when it was a one-person show, when I started a company two years ago. A small
reminder, 1% of income means 1,000 euros for every 100,000 of income. The
idea of one person is not a new one. You have probably seen about one person for
the planet. There have been a few initiatives of giving to open source,
but I think it's good to bring the idea back, because we are always, as always,
missing money in open source. Now, when the company gives a donation, what it
needs? In voice!
I was shouting too much, I think. When you're running company, you need an
invoice for every single expense you have, and if you pay first and then wait
for the invoice, you have a risk of not getting it at all, or getting after a
long time. Last year, I have given to one of the organizations in open source,
everyone here knows, and I'm not going to name because, and it took me like four
or five months of email exchanges with a person who was very sorry that they
cannot get to the person doing the invoices, they cannot give me an invoice,
they are going to send them a message yet again, and I was a month again, I was
sending the message again. Finally, got my voice like five months later. That is
risky, I was already thinking how to explain that to my accountant. A company
can go through a method used by big companies, purchase order that the
company gives, then the recipient of the money gives the invoice, and then you
pay. Problem, it's a burden, it's a burden organization you give, and it's a
burden for the company giving the money. But that's the solution I use for
bigger donations when I cannot risk of not getting the invoice. For individuals,
they are all their ways to donate. If a company wants to give money to an
individual, that's complicated. For the tax reasons, for the legal reasons, so we
avoiding giving money directly to individuals. For cryptocurrencies, some
projects accept cryptocurrencies. I leave you the question to ask your
accountant, and then you need to be sure you can run away from the place. The
reaction varies, but may be drastic when you talk to accountant about
cryptocurrencies. So no, if you do not want to run into trouble, you do not run,
you donate in cryptocurrencies when you are running a company. Now, typical
open-source organizations supporting projects, what they offer for companies.
Either yearly sponsoring, or even sponsoring. That is something that exists
for most organizations. Typically, a sponsoring is from 1,000 to 25,000
euros depending on the level. Even sponsoring is between 500 to around
10,000 euros. Now, we compare that with what a small company can give. In a small
company, I have an alternative. Either I give 1,000 euros to one project,
eventually two, or I give 100 euros to way more projects. For people who live in
open-source, we know that if I give to project X, someone will ask, but why you
are not giving to project Y and Z, and some more, right? Because if you are
going to one project, it's fair to give to all others. Opinions differ inside the
company who is using which project in the products. Exactly. At the end, what
happens is you want to give smaller amounts to more projects. And that is
exactly not in line with what the organization supporting open source
have as an offer. Our way of doing the donation is giving directly to
organizations. So we establish the way of how to do the payment. So either they
have an account that you can create and then donate, or you need to contact some
email address and figure out the details. Things vary. And then when we have the
methods set up, we have that organization now, a database, and every
transaction later, it goes the same way and it works. There are other ways using
aggregators, like GitHub Sponsors, Open Source Collective, or Linux Foundation
crowdfunding. And there has been a talk about the subject by Wolfgang at the
Open Source Summit Europe last year. He had a pretty different approach because
that was from the approach of a big company with more internal difficulties
of having the donations done than we have in small companies, but still his
analysis of the ways you can donate is pretty interesting. Now, is it hard to
donate to an open source project by a company? Financially, the amount of
money, one person, if you compare it to different expenses you have in a company,
accounting, rent, internet access, electricity of whatever you have, it will
be in the small things that you have on the company bill. So it's not really
that hard to do. What is a little bit more complicated is the organization. And
what I found out is most complex is actually deciding to which project you
want to give, even in a company when everyone agrees, we want to give. A lot
of discussions and a decision-making on how to do that. And then important thing,
collect and document the payment procedure if you're not going through an
aggregator. Important thing. Now, you would ask why? Project work as they can. And when
you are already doing open source, you can say that you are already contributing
and there's a kind of donation you are already doing, right? I would say that
this is an addition to the work you are doing because you cannot take
a maintenance in every single project you are using in your product. That is just
not possible. And this is the maintenance work, infrastructure, all those hard to
sell us new features that need financing the most. In my opinion, that works
easiest with the money because you can just pay someone spending their time on
doing those tasks. And then, a subject related to the presentation before.
Currently, quite many organizations I was involved with, they in reality
depend on donation from a small number of big companies with a part of
individual donations that they receive. So, if you can break that dependency and
make sure that those projects have more stable and more diversified way of
getting the income, that is going to improve the stability and at the end is
going to improve the quality of the code we all depend on. So, are you ready to
try it out with your company? Or do you have any questions, subjects for
discussions? In the meantime, we try to fix the microphone and so take a bit of
time to question them. Okay, there we go. What can open source projects do to make
this easier? Like for example, something that I run a scientific open source
project, we're looking at trying to incorporate as a non-profit because we
think that will be more attractive and we're trying to figure out where to do
that and deal with all of the international stuff and it's a whole thing.
So, I guess, what do you see from the small business perspective as to what
projects can do to make you're giving us money easier?
Yeah, so hold on. Maybe we collect some questions first and then in between we
can fix the mic issue. Would it be fine for you? So, that's why maybe we collect
some questions or is it okay? Okay, the question the question is how the
project how a project can make it easier. For me, it's very simple. Have a legal
entity that can create invoices or any legal proof of payment for the
amount and make this make it easy for a company to do that. So, make it easy in
such a way that when you get a message that we want to give you 500 euros, we
get a response rapidly that increase confidence that's going to work.
And then you can, if you are ready to send an invoice just at the moment of
payment, that helps. If you have a system that generates invoices, it's even
better. You can use online invoice generation systems that exist. If you can
use it, it's even easier for everyone. But it's a really, really simple fast
reaction time and getting the invoice easily. If I have those two, I will be
willing to donate again. Okay, so we have another question over here, two
ones. So, mainly the perspective on us was by a company's perspective. And this
topic has been discussed by the Node.js technical theory committee just
recently as I'm part of that. And Node.js is a part of the OpenJS foundation
and money is actually not an issue. That's not the main problem. What we need
is actually people donating their time and effort into projects. And that is way
more valuable as such. So, if a company, instead of investing money, because it's
really difficult, even like for an organization, you know, you have to
decide who's actually going to get that money. Do we pay someone? What is with the
others who contributed? It's a really tough question to answer. If it's not a
single contributor to this open source project, and therefore, just if you
pay someone from your company to work on that project, that is mostly really,
really valuable. Thank you. So, that was a pretty important subject when in a
situation when the money is not really an issue, people are an issue. And my answer
here will depend on the type of the development we are on. In my case, for
most of the projects, we donate small amounts like 100 euros per year, 200
euros per year. That amount of money doesn't allow you to hire anyone to work
on the project. What would be possible would be to donate to an organization
that will hire that person, and have multiple companies donate to that person
and then hire. Also, hiring someone for a small company, it's an important risk if
you do not have funding. Hiring someone for me is more of an approach. Either you
have a business model closely related with the project, if you are really doing
money with that specific project, then it makes sense. Or if you are a company of
like 50, then you can probably allow that. For small companies, I think it's a
little bit more complicated, unfortunately. Also try to...
We have another question over there. I'd like to highlight a service by a small
NGO from Berlin. It's called the Center for Cultivation of Technology, which is
like a back-end to open-source projects. They're registered non-profits in Berlin,
and if you are a small open-source project which doesn't have a company
somewhere or a legal name to it yourself, you can go there and say,
hey, I'm an open-source project, and they could act as a trustee. They
receive donations and they can hold that for your project, so companies can get
invoices or checks that the money has been sent there, and the software
devs don't have to care about all the financial stuff for that. There is
a back-end to support open-source projects and to make invoicing more
easier and at no cost. You want to respond to that? A small comment for that. Thank you
for doing this, and if you could send me the test of the foundation, I would be
interested in all initiatives that allow that aggregating payments for
different projects. My question is, well, I thank you for mentioning fiscal
sponsorship organizations, and I want to give a yes, software freedom
conservancy is a fiscal sponsor organization as well as there are many
others, and I know that several of us are very interested in making sure that the
projects we accept and therefore take donations for are have great governance,
and so there can be trust as far as making sure that funds they're donated
or used for the project and are used wisely. How do you evaluate governance for
these donations, or do you not because there's smaller donations? I think we
are trying to test. It's working. Okay, the question was how we evaluate that the
money is going to be well spent. I'm taking a shortcut. We are donating to the
projects we know very well. So that's easy. We know the governance. We know how
they work. So the check is easy. Donating to projects that we know less, I would
definitely agree that getting to a project that is in some aggregator that
has policies on the governments, that's an additional plus something point for
this project to actually donate it. Then to a project that we just absolutely
do not know how they work, what's going to happen, the answer to an email after a
month, and things like that. That's definitely a bonus point for that
project to getting a donation. Absolutely. Okay, so we have another question over
here. So coming back to what you said earlier, like at least when you're a
computer company, then you can definitely let someone work at least part
time on open source. That would be something really valuable again. I
encourage people in my company that are working to work on open source and we
have dedicated time that they may invest into that. Even as a small
company, I was able to work on open source because we used open source and we
ran into bugs, for example, while developing things. Then I discussed
that with the leadership at that point of time. Instead of having a workaround
built into the application that we are currently building as a closed source,
hey, why am I not going to fix that bug in that open source library that we are
currently using, and that's what I did.
You want to write? Yeah, very good. I think you have my mic. I have my mic.
Sure. I completely agree. The money part for me is an addition to all the
other open source work you do. We as an open source company, we propose to our
customers to upstream the code. We tell them we can upstream the patches
that you have, the fixes that you have. We can help you with working with
the open source work for your project. The money part is an addition to that.
If you are already open source citizen, that's already great. But what I
found out is that quite many projects I'm involved in Yocto. I have a
lot of experience in that. That's the maintenance part that requires time and
convincing customers to have people working and maintain us. It's even a
problem for the Linux kernel. Yeah, so it's a bigger problem and I think that
without financing people separately from that, I'm not really going to happen. It
already happened with different funding for different open source projects for
the maintenance part. If you can go forward with that, that's going to
help. Time's up. But we're happy to discuss with all of you in the corridors.