Hi all, now that the Aprils Fool Joke has worn off a bit, I think I can post this here. I at first suggested this in the board list before April 1st, as I wanted to make sure this hasn’t been wiped off the table as a silly idea before.
Turns out that I didn’t get a single “silly idea” response. As you all might know I have been working on finding ways to finance my work on open-source, but in an open-source way that others can also profit from what I might find out. There are some projects that managed to form or attract companies to grow around them. These usually don’t have problems finding funds to finance further development. However, we also have a large number of projects that are not as big, or a large number of people working on our projects, but don’t work for those companies. So, these people are generally relying on finding contracts themselves. This usually is problematic as many larger companies don’t do business with individuals. Also is it often tricky to get the legal documents and contracts right and then not even talking about how long payments usually take. Another thing is that the ASF is a non-profit organization and therefore it’s challenging to advertise commercial offerings around Apache projects. As an example: One of the things I found out with my crowd-funding experiment is that this doesn’t work. Admittedly I wasn’t expecting it to work. Companies just can’t donate large amounts of money without any assurances. But I did learn one thing: My crowd-funding experiment was in a way the most successful thing I did. The thing was, that I listed up things that could be on the roadmap and I added a price-tag to them. This is one thing an Apache project just couldn’t do. So even if I didn’t get a single cent in donations for my work, I was approached by multiple companies willing to finance individual campaigns, but with a normal consulting contract. Now there are also companies like Tidelift, that want to close this gap. However, we are still a bit unsure how to align the interest of that company with the values of the ASF. And there’s the fact that not everyone is able to profit from Tidelift. I for example tried reaching out to them several times for offering commercial PLC4X support, but the only responses I got, were people wanting to discuss how my business could profit from using more open-source ;-) So for me Tidelift is not an option as not everyone can use it. Now let me get to my idea: What If there was a separate legal entity closely related to the ASF (Let’s call it “Support Inc.” for now). I would even propose that the oversight entity for Support Inc. should be the ASF board. This would assure the company is perfectly in-line with the ASF and its values. Individuals could sign up on Support Inc’s website for providing commercial services around Apache projects. These services could be Consulting, Feature development, Training, Commercial Support. On this site a user could also add possible feature-development campaigns with a price-tag attached, just like I did on my website. If a company wants to finance a feature, get support, consulting, or training around an Apache project, this would be the well-known website somebody would go to first. Support Inc. would provide the contracts and therefore the individual wouldn’t have to (I usually spent 2000-4000€/year on legal advice for stuff like that). Also, would Support Inc. be a bigger company the customer would be doing business with, which would probably ease the problem of getting into the companies with Chris Inc. The contracts would be between the Support Inc. and the customer, and the customer would pay to Support Inc. The developer would have a contract with Support Inc. and be paid from this but give Support Inc. a certain percentage of the contact to cover its expenses (But in contrast to other pure for-profit companies, this cut would be a lot less than usual). Now a developer could probably choose from different models, where he gets paid instantly (but then give Support Inc. a bigger cut of the profits) or wait for the customer to pay. The services the new company would provide, would be taking care of the payments, the legal issues and provide the infrastructure for finding commercial support offerings. And if people know this is something integrated into the general open-source ecosystem, I assume people would probably try less to screw with as they know it might backfire PR-wise, just like dragging the ASF to court wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do. If the company earns money, it could become a sponsor of the ASF. What do you think? I hope you’re now not going to point at me laughing because I like the idea. Chris
