I subscribed to some type of MySQL Support 15 years ago. It was about $150 a month and I figured I would never need it. One day I had a really difficult problem, so I emailed support. We went back and forth a few times and then they informed me that their "support" plan meant I was supporting their project, not that they would support me. I guess I got fired as a customer. This was the first time I had heard of this. Calling it "support" made it easy for the company to justify and buy.

Darn that English language !

But that's a great little trick - the accounts department sees "annual support plan" and thinks they are buying support from the project - but really ... :-)

I've been in a similar place raising funds for a makerspace. Sponsorship is a marketing expense for a company and can be accounted for as a cost of doing business. A private donation is hit by income tax and, where I live, depending on the structure VAT.

I used to be 100% against tax deductible contributions to not-for-profits. I've turned 180 on this. Citizens are much better at allocating funds to worthy causes than a central government.

In the case of our Makerspace, we couldn't get any public funding because we didn't fit into a predefined category such as a "sports team", and operating a garage full of tools could be seen as competing with private industry. Somehow there was money available for the lawyers who delivered that opinion to the local government though.

> Citizens are much better at allocating funds to worthy causes than a central government.

You kind of threw this out there. What makes you think this, is it something different about a charitable cause versus say health care? Both are distributing the same resources.

I might agree that decentralized decision making about resources is superior, but even that is full of caveats. I’m not sure why you think independently unorganized citizens are better than a group of citizens whose official capacity is to allocate (ie why call out government as something different? The important piece is centralized/decentralized, not govt vs citizen.)

At least it is supported in the literature - the lag and loss of resolution in reporting back centrally makes decisions a worse fit for actual conditions on the ground.

In the UK, a company can deduct a charitable donation from its profits before calculating income tax.

For an individual, the charity can claim the basic rate tax the individual paid (Gift Aid) and higher rate tax payers can claim the higher rate taxes using their self assessment, so in round numbers, it doesn't really matter who makes the donation.

That being said, it relies on there being a UK charity, which a lot of software foundations are not.

(Aside: I work for a US company that does support US foundations, as well as employ a few CPython core devs)

Individual still has to pay NI on their charitable contributions though.

How would you feel something like Help Jar (https://helpjar.org) fits into this space.

It's a platform I've created where you can allocate anywhere from 0.1 - 5% of revenue to causes you believe in. Right now it's geared towards charities but I'd love to include open source sponsorship in there too.

I like the idea, and kudos for keeping your costs at 1%.

Putting on my company hat, and I'm no expert, I believe for this to work in Denmark (where I live), you would need to be able to put some form of goodwill on the balance sheet. Companies still need to pay tax on donations (at a reduced rate up to ~2300€/year for recognized charities).

Unfortunately, 0.5% of the Danish workforce is directly employed by the tax office. It's a serious threat over here.

I'm trying to turn around a bleeding hackerspace.

Did you end up coming up with company sponsorship plans for your makerspace? What kind of perks did you offer your sponsors?

Facebook actually came in with a generous contribution. We also had a couple local people make private donations.

I was a corporate sponsor of PyConUK [1] and PyData London and this mirrors my experience.

At the time, JPMorgan had around 4500 Python devs globally and many of the FX/Commodities/Credit/Rates trading systems were Python-based (Google for Athena or watch [2]).

I felt the bank had gained hugely from the Python community so it was only appropriate to give something back. Fortunately I had lots of support from my MD internally. Ultimately the budgets were controlled from New York and it took time for the approval discussion between London and New York to conclude.

We took sponsorship packages that included logo on banners, an intro during the opening keynote, a recruiting booth, and entry passes for 10 of our devs. The money paid to PyConUK was small in corporate terms, and certainly less than the cost of the time I and the recruiting lead invested in getting it going.

The net result was a good amount of exposure, lots of people saying "I didn't know JPMorgan used Python", two direct hires I think, and useful support for Python in the UK.

I'm no longer at JPMorgan but as long as my future employers benefit from my Python experience, I'll look for ways for them to give back to the community. If you are in the same position, please encourage your employer to do it too. (I'm happy to be quoted on the benefits; my email is in my profile here).

[1] https://pyvideo.org/pycon-uk-2017/pycon-uk-2017-jp-morgan-sp...

[2] https://pyvideo.org/pydata-london-2018/python-at-massive-sca...

The recruitment angle has always been pretty successful, and now with JP's extensive open source work exposure to collaborators and emerging projects has become valuable for participants at these conferences.

With the pandemic, I moved us from being just a pycon sponsor to sponsoring the psf directly (https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/), though without a senior MD championing these types of initiatives it's always up to lower level employees being vocal and committed enough to push.

I remember JP Morgan putting on a very good show that year in Cardiff, and if memory serves you signed off a meaningful sponsorship sum (#) over coffee in Canary Wharf.

My takeaway from that surprisingly short deal was that with FOSS the real hard part (demonstrating value) is done and dusted long before any money conversations come up.

Most people I have had this conversation with in companies large and small are like Steve above - see the value of FoSS to their business and want to both give something back and more importantly support the producers of an important input to their business.

FOSS does not have and probably cannot have the "money for licenses" business model, but that's not to say there are not decent lines of funding that cannot be tapped.

It's a frustration, yes but both sides are aligned in this.

(#) For various definitions of meaningful I guess.

> and if memory serves you signed off a meaningful sponsorship sum (#) over coffee in Canary Wharf.

Ha, Paul, I do indeed remember that coffee! I didn't have the authority to approve anything on the spot, but I did promise to do my best to make it happen.

And that is why I don't run a sales department :-)

I like the idea, and "actionable paid insights into the future of this tool we depend on" might be a good sell. But maybe don't make it a subscription, one off payments can be easier to get approval for even if they occur every year.

Another thought: Often devs have a yearly budget that can be spent relatively freely on training/conferences/courses/books/etc. Conferences and travel are expensive, but with everything going on it's not being used as much. I'm sure people would pay to get on a Zoom call or Q&A with a few core devs if it comes out of that budget. Price it pretty high, perhaps a few hundred $ per participant, maybe add country-dependent pricing or make exceptions for OSS projects/etc. Basically a fundraiser with a training/conference talk component.

Probably add a 'Pay what you want' option in download pages as well.

From my own experience, I got just one donation in about a year of giving away free learning material. I then tried out ebooks (which was initially paid option only, but later switched to free online version and paid pdf/epub). This set up now pays my living expenses and recently started saving a bit as well.

I don’t make much money on eBooks (compared to writing ten books for publishers like McGraw-Hill, J. Riley, Springer Verlag, etc.) but I so much prefer self published eBooks - so easy to push updates and new editions! I have one eBook that sells very few copies (on the super niche Lisp Hy language) and I decided to make the minimum price free last month. The sales actually increased.

Anyway, probably the best model at least for me is to make eBooks freely available, but with an optional ability to pay for a book.

I'm currently trying, and failing, at the paid only ebook option. Maybe I'll give this a go. What is your book?

My marketing strategy is basically give away ebooks for free at launch and promote on social media. A few readers still pay for them (which is what I wanted from donation model). I write short books (about 100 pages), so I end up doing 2-4 a year (but losing interest now). Then bundle related books. And so on. You can find book links from my profile.

Kudos for a creative approach.

It is 100% correct that bigcorps find it much easier to make purchases than donations. One-off charges are also much easier to sell than subscriptions as they get treated as depreciable capex and are less vulnerable to being optimized away by future cost-saving initiatives.

I agree with it being easier, but I din’t think that a contribution of this form would be accounted for as a capital expense. It would a one-time operating expense if not a donation.

I always proposed that the way forward is training, consulting, and speciality services. I’ve seen this model work so much better than most, and for languages seems more obvious (I’m less sure how to handle the problem for packages in an ecosystem that also deserve funding)

I always wondered why that wasn’t the PSF model (having a business arm that provides these things to fund development and other initiatives like putting together conferences)

With Python in particular I’ve heard first hand from people who I have no reason to believe wouldn’t pay for what they’re saying: specific language features or enhancements. It’s impossible to donate directly to the PSF or otherwise for it be a line item for that specific purpose though, and I think in Pythons case it has hurt their ability to raise funds, maybe

Complex topic for sure!

> "charity" was a tough sell internally

I've been saying this for decades:

For-profit companies are expected to generate profit for the shareholders. As such, donations are hard to justify.

- Most technical teams have pre-approved budgets for licenses, SaaS, consultancy services.

- Most teams do not have pre-approved budgets for donations. Managers need to go through bureaucracy and justify it.

- Donating to organizations that are not famous charities can look suspicious (think bribery & so on). Donating to an informal group more so. Donating to some person on GitHub even more so. Imagine lawyers and accountants having to explain it to some tax agency.

- Many countries don't have the tax relief and loopholes that encourage donations

I like your idea. Lots of people are willing to contribute something but it needs to be easier and (even superficially) give something in return. Core team interviews, roadmaps etc. It's more work but it could pay off.

Not really related but a barrier for me in contributing to something new has been I'm already on recurring donations for a few things and it's easy to lose track. It would be nice if there were a solution to that.

I like privacy.com for things like this and you might also. You link your bank account and then you can set up on-the-fly credit cards with any name/address and arbitrary limits. You can set a maximum credit limit, or monthly recurring limits, or other configurations. It's also great for one time payments for shopping online.

I think they even have a rewards program now.

I highly recommend it if you can get over the uncomfortableness of linking a bank account to it. I just created a separate online account for this purpose.

In this case, I'd just create a separate card for each project you want to support with a monthly limit equal to your desired amount. They have an app and browser plugins and the like. It's really easy.

> but "charity" was a tough sell internally

Do not try to sell charity. Sell it as the investment is is.

That was the point I was trying to make - "we" (society) see FOSS as a commons good, so it suffers from the tragedy. But to try and get some of the value following to the creators, we could make the path of companies easier to hand over cash - buying relatively small amounts of "access" ( it that has its own downsides)

Basically this is a hard problem and without a market solution it's unlikely to ever get within spitting distance of fair. But I cannot see the market solution.

> FOSS as a commons good, so it suffers from the tragedy

If only there was a way to get a bit of money from everybody to pay for common goods...