Building a foundation/society/company

[bigfatbird]

PSA: This is just a draft

Just a quick idea, or some random thoughts and links how a project like this could be made sustainable and bring value long term to the community/world

One of the major problems with open source software is, that it's time consuming and everyone has to eat and pay rent.

While much software is running the it's free as in freedom and free as in free beer idea, people building that always have to pay with their (life)time.

Projects like e.g. Firefox, Godot, or Drupal most often are community based, but have a foundation or company in the background.

Sometimes these things don't work out, or companies turn evil, or do stupid or malicious stuff. There hasten to be some prevention mechanism for a foundation or open source company doing malicious intent.

1. Gosub should someday have a foundation or company or something in the background responsible for organizational work, like legal or public relations, money or putting people on a payroll and all things needed for software projects and products.

2. It also should have prevention mechanisms in place that prevent the company doing bad stuff ("Don't be evil!")

TODO: Find links and examples of successful open source projects, and how they organized their organization and made it sustainable

TODO: Clean up these thoughts

[jaytaph]

Personally i'm not a big open source enthusiast. Or at least, I like to use open source, I create open source, but it doesn't pay the bills. I find it strange that large companies can just "take" open source projects, and (ab)use it commercially. For instance, elastic, mongodb etc. I completely understand projects change their licensing to make sure that big companies don't run away and make a big profit from it, while the developers get nothing in return. Yes, that may be against the "open source spirit", but I think it's more than fair to protect your work from being abused that way. If you make money from my project, I make money from my project should be the default MO for every piece of software in my opinion. Again, if that's against the open source spirit, i'm totally fine with that. I think this would need to be a discussion when it comes to licensing.

I don't mind Gosub being an free (beer) project that people can download for free and use it. I think that is just the way people expect browsers to be (although there are no free browsers. Microsoft, apple and google are no charities. They have a browser because they make money out of it. If they didn't, they would kill those browsers instantly).

Basically: i'm fine with a free browser, and I think IF AND WHEN the project comes to something that is actually usable by people, there should be some kind of legal entity behind it. Al be it for the trademarks and such. Most often this can be a simple entity without too much costs.

If something would grow bigger, and you think about a foundation where people would be on a payroll, you need to think about revenue. For a browser, there isn't much available, so we have to think more about additional streams. The first that comes into mind is the way mozilla makes its money through search engines. I would not be a big fan of this: we directly become too dependent on a single vendor (google, microsoft/bing), AND one of the main idea's behind the browser is to allow choice. Preinstalling with search engines (and whatnot), would be just more of the same.

[bigfatbird]

Doesn't need to be for profit. Rumor has it Mozilla failed in a way, that they had management with salary increase, while laying off engineers at the same time.

elementary Inc (elementary OS) does pay what you want, yet are not successful enough to hire engineers.

Godot does interesting: donation based and hire an engineer after a funding stretch goal is reached. They also seem to have started a foundation.

Linux has a big foundation and is backed by big players like google microsoft and red hat.

Codenerg e.V. took over Gitea and now forked Gitea to Forgejo. They are a Open source "Verein" in Germany. Project seems vital and healthy.

Ecosia (not open source) is a company, that has a policy that protects the goal of the company from managers going greedy.

Obviously need to think about a good system. I'm on mobile, so need to find links and sources to back these statements.