I want to start a discussion about something I don’t see talked about enough. how are independent FOSS developers supposed to sustainably continue developing their projects?
The community is supportive, but in practice only a small percentage of users financially support developers, and $5–$10 donations aren’t enough to make development sustainable.
Many developers eventually need to take a full-time job, and their projects become abandoned or receive much less attention.
So what are the practical ways for developers to earn a sustainable income from FOSS apps, apart from donations?
Are there successful models such as paid features, sponsorships, grants other approaches that actually work for independent developers?
What can developers realistically do to make FOSS development financially sustainable?
there is no prior art, it’s all pretty much sustained on breadcrumbs from proprietary software industry, that’s why despite all the rhetoric, when it comes down to it, no developer actually wants the status quo to change. the whole idea of making money on your project through some clever schemes or just because it’s so damn awesome and you are so damn awesome is just a brainworm inherited from the same industry. how many engineers in any other indsutry make money on their own projects? they work on their projects in their sheds and never even show them to anyone. as a developer you have a skill, that’s all, and you have to find a way to make money on that, which usually means providing a service. if you just idly put yourself out there, naturally in the current climate your are going to be picked up by some more or less established company. otherwise you have to yourself start a business serving the general public at a price they can afford, and foss provide many theoretical avenues for that, that nobody explored yet, cause all devs are scaredy-cat introverts who hate dealing with actual people:
nobody stopping you from selling copies of any foss project (not just your precious ones), you just need to come up with a way to market them
GPL explicity states that you can provide warranty on binaries you ship for a fee
you can provide software installation, maintanance, toubleshooting and on occasion (like machinist making a specialized part) development services
all of this means that you’ll have to get to know your neighbors, figure out what they need and do what you can to fulfill those needs. your salary would be much lower and your work much harder and more competitive, akin to an avarage plumber or electrician + the uphill battle against the established industry and all the barriers they put in place to prevent such businesses from getting off the ground
these businesses should be local btw, the idea that you should serve the whole globe from your shed is also a brainworm
@Licaon_Kter F-Droid is a platform/organization and is big enough to receive donations, grants, and other forms of support, but I’m talking about individual developers. donations are good, but they aren’t reliable. Apps can’t just rely on donations because they aren’t enough. We need ways to make apps independent so they can sustain themselves.
How can developers make apps on F-Droid “libre, not free”? Is there a guide or examples of apps doing this?
How can developers use ads without tracking or profiling users? Are there any FOSS ad networks, and what types of ads are supported?
How can developers use billing/payments without relying on proprietary software? Are there any FOSS billing systems?
How can developers offer paid features or subscriptions while keeping the app libre?
What other ways can a consumer FOSS app generate sustainable income besides donations?
How is F-Droid helping individual developers become financially sustainable?
F-Droid receives funding and grants—is that mainly for maintaining F-Droid itself, or is there also funding/support for the wider FOSS ecosystem?
For example, if an app on F-Droid has over 100k+ users and even 500 or 1,000 of them pay the developer $1 a month, that would be very useful. It’s one of the best ways to support a developer: they’re basically hiring a developer to maintain the app for just $12 a year, which is a very cheap deal.
Making it clear in app and on website how developers can be sustained, links to their donation platforms and etc. Now we’re working on integrating Taler
I thought of publishing the sequel of Breakout 71 on the play store (paid), but google has been so painful to work with recently, I think I’ll put it exclusively here. For monetization, I’m thinking that the thing that really annoys me is free users asking for features and bug fixes, or complaining to me about changes. So I’d like a way to only talk to people that donated at least once. I can do that with a stripe page + discord invite link in the confirmation message, but it feels wrong to center everything on discord, so for now i’m still exploring options.
Also, I’m sure some people will ignore the demand to only contact me via paid channels and try to find workaround, so I need to make it harder to find my email address.
Utterly relevant here: If the most crucial software of the entire Internet struggles w/ this, your standard startup dev has less hope. (Btw, I’m not a pessimist by nature!)
I often would like to donate to an app creator but the relatively small amount of the donation means, I expect, that quite a bit of the donation would go in fees.
Would it not be possible for F-Droid to take the donations and then split them amongst the creators, maybe even take a small cut. As I would be donating to multiple apps each year it would mean proportionately lower charges and even more so when F-Droid collates all the amounts and then pays out to the creators.
I don’t see why. Users could indicate which app they want to get part of their donation and then simple to work out which gets how much. I definitely did not mean that all apps on F-droid get a share. Bit like how Substack could let you either subscribe direct to a Feed or mark it as a Share Subscription and then collect your sub and divy it up amongst those. Would reduce FX/bank fees and allow users to support lots of apps whereas at the moment I can’t afford/don’t want to donate £10 to each app I use. But would be up for a £50 donation to be divided amongst X number of apps.
idk what that platform actually does, but to do what you suggest - aggregate and divvy up funds with minimal fees, you gotta get a legal status as a payment processor, and for that you gotta be filthy rich by law
liberapay is best effort to minimize fees without having to go through that ordeal