I just started watching videos from this year's PyCon Australia [0]. Russell Keith-Magee, a core Django developer, gave an interesting talk called "Money, Money, Money - Writing software in a rich (wo)man's world" [1].

I love open source software, and I want to see more high-quality open source. I want to see established projects like Django continue to thrive. If you're curious about how funding impacts the quality of open source projects, you might want to check out Russell's talk.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs4CJRBY5F1KMMpoEWMuB...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY8B2lXIu6g&list=PLs4CJRBY5F...

Good call, this is very important!

It's baffling that such a huge project, used by thousands of companies including at least one billion dollar unicorn, have such a hard time finding money to fund only one single developer. As a solo owner and happy Django user, I've donated what I could and encouraged others to do so but would love to find a solution to entice larger businesses to donate regularly.

The Django Software Foundation has just hired a part time person to organise fundraising [0]. There is also discussion happening around the community about trying to find a sustainable way of funding open source projects and Django in particular.

Part of the problem is that it's hard to get companies to "donate" money. If they can purchase something like "support" or something else tangible, or "sponsorship" out of their advertising budgets, there may be more opportunities of gaining funding.

Thank you for donating though! Django gets a lot of their money from regular developers' pockets. I, personally, feel that bigger companies using Django to generate lots of revenue should be contributing a greater portion to support the stack that supports them.

[0] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/nov/23/introducing...

Their need to "buy" something is the crucial point; donations fall in a totally different "account" with distinct rules. Sponsorships may be the ticket but you need to actively reach then as they won't come spontaneously (I think specifically of "that" unicorn :))

Not sure about support, maybe better to leave that to the myriad of contractors that form Django's ecosystem.

Maybe I do not know some important details, but why DSF (Django Software Foundation), does not do Django consulting in the first place. They very highly likely can do the best Django consulting in the world.

Secondly, maybe DSF could bake some great products for/from Django? The first ideas I have is Django specific, and user friendly:

- PaaS;

- analytics (as in 'new relic');

- crash and performance logging (as in 'sentry' and/or 'opbeat')

- CI;

DSF can just simply make business, by making great infrastructure stack around Django.

It's important to remember that the DSF is a non-profit foundation registered under US laws, which restrict what it can do. Many types of "just act like a business and sell things" ideas are automatically illegal for a non-profit foundation.

Can they open/own a for profit consulting company, which is taxed as a normal company but gives all profit/dividend back to foundation?

Yes they may. The proceeds of that company would be paid to the foundation.

Shame tbh. If they invest they could see their businesses doing even better.

We need to be communicating this to them, quantifying how their business could potentially be doing better, and offering products that they can spend money on. It's that last part that I think most OSS projects are having difficulty with.

Yeah I understand it's not as easy as i'm suggesting and I have no idea how you guys manage to do as you do even :).

I'm wondering (and of course I know little about this) if it would work doing things like: - community voting on the direction of the project or new features to be added and the top 5 get selected if there hits say 50k votes. - costs say 2-3 dollars to cast a vote. But if it's enough cash it means it won't dictate the direction of django by money or businesses and some of the cash can be spent elsewhere not just on those top 5.

So a feature could be something like "seamless upgrading from 1.8 to 1.9" which businesses might want or be willing to pay for.

What do you envision the solution looking like? A list of projects, with their updated runway, yearly budget, technology category and subcategory? Maybe create a watch list too and send notifications when the combination of their runway, yearly budget, and rate of donations reaches a critical point of becoming unsustainable. You can also have people give a range of what they'd be comfortable donating. When the project comes to a critical point, the first line of defense is to send notifications to larger businesses and as a project becomes more in danger the notifications get sent down the line to the people whom have smaller budgets.