I just realised I have been thinking about OSS funding the wrong way around
It’s not “the world economy depends on this stuff why is it not properly funded” (which is true) it’s “never before has a coupe of guys or girls in a garage been able to reach so many people, and stand a chance of getting funding”
The troubles people have finding ways to make a living whilst providing value to people suggests something is wrong not with them but the economy
If you're making a product, I think Kickstarter is awesome.
If you're making entertainment, I think Patreon is awesome.
If you're making OSS... I'm not sure we have a good system. Buy Me A Coffee or a TipJar... Starring a repository... They're good... but they're not enough.
Upvoting on Hacker News whenever I see something promising is another thing I do that I hope might help...
I kind of wish I could subscribe to some monthly payment that tracked my usage of OSS, and sent each a fraction of the money, and that they appraised which systems they depended on, so it flowed down to them, too, and etc...
I've donated quite a bit through the Kofi and Tipjar payment systems for neat OSS apps I use. I agree that it's not enough, however we do have other systems in place via Github sponsorships, Patreon (consistent funding), etc.
It's up for the community to adopt those platforms for their project
I like where you're going. I'm intrigued! but what would it look like? For example, curl. I use curl it's awesome. I love it. It's not at a level where I'm going to go to community meet ups for it though, but I'm super happy it exists. I can buy stickers for my laptop and do free advertising?
It's all psychological. If curl had a micropayment system and every time you used it, it cost a 10th of a penny and there's a monthly subscription. Oh God, holy hell, no! But at the same time, I don't want Daniel Stenberg to go hungry.
I'm thinking more about a subscription to a monthly fee that you and I and other fans of OSS voluntarily pay.
Say, I pay $10 a month. It figures out I used curl 850 times. I used gunzip 1246 times. And etc.
It may turn out that I'm donating a 10th of a penny to curl every time I use it.
Do I want to commit to donating a 10th of a penny BEFORE I can use curl each time?
No.
But if I set a flat rate of donating to OSS - $10 a month - and there were a simple tool that figured out a semi-reasonable way to allocate that money... I think that'd be neat.
The tracking app would be pretty simple. A shim in the shell that tracks the first argument on the command line and increments a counter. Then usage stats are pushed to the service every 24 hours (or something like that).
app usage / all tracked app usage --> donation to app.
Handling the payments portion would be... nightmarish?
With crypto it would be really easy. I'd be tempted to take cash on the frontend, convert to crypto, split, then reconvert to cash and make payouts.
How do we handle registering apps that you use? What about upstream dependencies? Example: you just spun up a new React project, do we target all deps on that project? Is this only for command line? What about cron jobs, or systemd? Or that systemd service script you copied from a gist somewhere?
I wonder if some weird kind of aggregation could go on.
At the end of the month, I'm told to donate my entire $10 to some obscure tool I've never even heard of.
The system did all of the tracking, across all users, and then figured out how to assign users like me to projects, such that I'm only donating once or twice ($6 to this project, and $4 to that project.)
The system I propose does all of the counting, all of the aggregating, matching intended donations to the recipients, and then encourages me to do my actual gifting...
Seems possible, but weird. Or maybe we need to set up a non-profit to do all this money laundering^W^W donating.
or maybe that's a direction to go towards. Similar to Spotify wrapped, someone else made a thing to go through your bash history and say what your popular things were.
The problem is the arbitrary way the funding is allocated, find something interesting to companies du jour with a clear path to funding and you're golden.
If whatever OSS is too obscure to be noticed by non-techies but still fundamental (think OpenSSL, libxz,etc) it's more likely to lead to burnout far before anyone wants to put in any sane money (curl is one of few counter-examples but that hasn't had a straight journey).
Humans in their "free time" will make and create things of great value to society.
We should have a system whereby you don't die of pneumonia homeless on the street if you don't have a job. The things OSS developers do for free are of value completely incomparable with what almost all of us do in our day jobs.
People should be free to make art and music and anything else they want. People should be free to contribute to our culture and society.
Alas, someone wants to take 99% of the value of your work for themselves and give you only the barest minimum they can get away with. And if you don't comply, you don't deserve to live.
I just switched to EndeavourOS for 95% of my home computer needs last week (I left my Windows install on a separate drive for gaming and especially those that require super invasive anticheat, e.g. AAA multiplayer FPS) and it has been a wonderful experience so far.
We shouldn't be funding OSS developers. We should be funding everyone so that anyone can follow their passion without risk of starving to death.
If OSS developers can build and maintain essentially all of our digital infrastructure in the time between "work", then what would happen if we gave them all the time they want? What would happen if every developer had the freedom to build up and improve the things our entire society rest upon?
What does software look like when motivated exclusively by profit? You get Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Qualcomm.
What does software look like when it's developed out of passion purely for the improvement to the world? Curl, linux, git.
Funding OSS developers is entirely backwards. It's trying to insert a profit incentive where it should not exist.
The multiple meanings of many of the words in this sentence make it really poor at communicating what the site is about. "Endeavour" (with a capital 'E') is a proper name I associate with a space shuttle, and 'stellar' can mean 'having to do with stars'. So a first read for me leads to the conclusion that this site has something to do with space flight. And 'system' could mean almost anything. Maybe this site will let me personalize my own star system? All I can take away is that I'm not sure what this is, but clearly I'm not the target audience. Which I'm fine with.....
Rephrasing, Endeavour is something that is started with a terminal system based on Arch.
I know that's a cheesy way to say it's an Arch distro but I hope you notice how poor the phrasing is for someone trying to understand what they've been linked to.
I thought this too. But if there was a probe sent out to Ganymede wouldn't we have arrived at it? If Ganymede (the moon) is arriving at Earth we have a whole other set of problems.
after trying multiple distros 6 years ago to replace the enshittified Windows 8/10 [1], ended up at EndeavourOS + KDE. there is very little i miss about Windows. maybe Foobar2000.
amazing distro.
[1] after it messed up my linux dual boot config, continuously reset my registry tweaks with forced updates / restarts, insisted on re-enabling the io-destroying Defender, and started force-feeding me ads
Not a complete replacement for Foobar2000, but you might want to take a look at Quodlibet, which has many of the important niceties, and also is good at metainfo handling, where Foobar2000 shines especially.
>We still love what we do over here, but we all have chosen to let our lives and loved ones come first over the project
I think that's sensible but from a user perspective it's also why I think these nth degree derivatives are pointless. So much infrastructure and maintenance to effectively ship arch with a wallpaper.
Many of these projects eventually go the way of the dodo, I believe this is in itself a successor to Antergos. Just install Arch, Debian or Fedora and take 10 minutes to configure the desktop. The biggest issue with arch was the setup but they ship a TUI install script now that anyone can use. The OS on your computer shouldn't be a hobby project.
There's no context but from what I can tell this is a Linux distro release and the main line items for improvements are improved nvidia and broadcom driver handling. Not exactly the most thrilling release to hit the HN front page.
I just realised I have been thinking about OSS funding the wrong way around
It’s not “the world economy depends on this stuff why is it not properly funded” (which is true) it’s “never before has a coupe of guys or girls in a garage been able to reach so many people, and stand a chance of getting funding”
The troubles people have finding ways to make a living whilst providing value to people suggests something is wrong not with them but the economy
If you're making a product, I think Kickstarter is awesome.
If you're making entertainment, I think Patreon is awesome.
If you're making OSS... I'm not sure we have a good system. Buy Me A Coffee or a TipJar... Starring a repository... They're good... but they're not enough.
Upvoting on Hacker News whenever I see something promising is another thing I do that I hope might help...
I kind of wish I could subscribe to some monthly payment that tracked my usage of OSS, and sent each a fraction of the money, and that they appraised which systems they depended on, so it flowed down to them, too, and etc...
I've donated quite a bit through the Kofi and Tipjar payment systems for neat OSS apps I use. I agree that it's not enough, however we do have other systems in place via Github sponsorships, Patreon (consistent funding), etc.
It's up for the community to adopt those platforms for their project
I like where you're going. I'm intrigued! but what would it look like? For example, curl. I use curl it's awesome. I love it. It's not at a level where I'm going to go to community meet ups for it though, but I'm super happy it exists. I can buy stickers for my laptop and do free advertising?
It's all psychological. If curl had a micropayment system and every time you used it, it cost a 10th of a penny and there's a monthly subscription. Oh God, holy hell, no! But at the same time, I don't want Daniel Stenberg to go hungry.
I'm thinking more about a subscription to a monthly fee that you and I and other fans of OSS voluntarily pay.
Say, I pay $10 a month. It figures out I used curl 850 times. I used gunzip 1246 times. And etc.
It may turn out that I'm donating a 10th of a penny to curl every time I use it.
Do I want to commit to donating a 10th of a penny BEFORE I can use curl each time?
No.
But if I set a flat rate of donating to OSS - $10 a month - and there were a simple tool that figured out a semi-reasonable way to allocate that money... I think that'd be neat.
Like, "Steam for Donating to OSS."
The tracking app would be pretty simple. A shim in the shell that tracks the first argument on the command line and increments a counter. Then usage stats are pushed to the service every 24 hours (or something like that).
app usage / all tracked app usage --> donation to app.
Handling the payments portion would be... nightmarish?
With crypto it would be really easy. I'd be tempted to take cash on the frontend, convert to crypto, split, then reconvert to cash and make payouts.
How do we handle registering apps that you use? What about upstream dependencies? Example: you just spun up a new React project, do we target all deps on that project? Is this only for command line? What about cron jobs, or systemd? Or that systemd service script you copied from a gist somewhere?
I wonder if some weird kind of aggregation could go on.
At the end of the month, I'm told to donate my entire $10 to some obscure tool I've never even heard of.
The system did all of the tracking, across all users, and then figured out how to assign users like me to projects, such that I'm only donating once or twice ($6 to this project, and $4 to that project.)
The system I propose does all of the counting, all of the aggregating, matching intended donations to the recipients, and then encourages me to do my actual gifting...
Seems possible, but weird. Or maybe we need to set up a non-profit to do all this money laundering^W^W donating.
I think this thing's got legs. you don't have any contact info on your profile but you can email me at the one on mine if you'd like to dig further.
I used to work somewhere that owned everything I did in my spare time. Now, I don't. I've started trying to seed ideas, more, now.
or maybe that's a direction to go towards. Similar to Spotify wrapped, someone else made a thing to go through your bash history and say what your popular things were.
The problem is the arbitrary way the funding is allocated, find something interesting to companies du jour with a clear path to funding and you're golden.
If whatever OSS is too obscure to be noticed by non-techies but still fundamental (think OpenSSL, libxz,etc) it's more likely to lead to burnout far before anyone wants to put in any sane money (curl is one of few counter-examples but that hasn't had a straight journey).
Humans in their "free time" will make and create things of great value to society.
We should have a system whereby you don't die of pneumonia homeless on the street if you don't have a job. The things OSS developers do for free are of value completely incomparable with what almost all of us do in our day jobs.
People should be free to make art and music and anything else they want. People should be free to contribute to our culture and society.
Alas, someone wants to take 99% of the value of your work for themselves and give you only the barest minimum they can get away with. And if you don't comply, you don't deserve to live.
Bruce Perens (creator of The Open Source Definition) is attempting to remedy this at https://postopen.org/
I just switched to EndeavourOS for 95% of my home computer needs last week (I left my Windows install on a separate drive for gaming and especially those that require super invasive anticheat, e.g. AAA multiplayer FPS) and it has been a wonderful experience so far.
We shouldn't be funding OSS developers. We should be funding everyone so that anyone can follow their passion without risk of starving to death.
If OSS developers can build and maintain essentially all of our digital infrastructure in the time between "work", then what would happen if we gave them all the time they want? What would happen if every developer had the freedom to build up and improve the things our entire society rest upon?
What does software look like when motivated exclusively by profit? You get Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Qualcomm.
What does software look like when it's developed out of passion purely for the improvement to the world? Curl, linux, git.
Funding OSS developers is entirely backwards. It's trying to insert a profit incentive where it should not exist.
Posts like this would much benefit from a terse statement of context.
I've been waiting a long time for us to explore the moon.
I haven't been waiting for an Arch distro to release... whatever this is.
Agreed, I was wondering what an old Eclipse IDE version (Ganymede) was something people were waiting for?
I also clicked through a few times trying to get a clear description of what this is with no success.
"Start your Endeavour with a lightweight Arch-based, terminal centric system ready to personalise and a stellar community at your side"
- the front page of the site
The multiple meanings of many of the words in this sentence make it really poor at communicating what the site is about. "Endeavour" (with a capital 'E') is a proper name I associate with a space shuttle, and 'stellar' can mean 'having to do with stars'. So a first read for me leads to the conclusion that this site has something to do with space flight. And 'system' could mean almost anything. Maybe this site will let me personalize my own star system? All I can take away is that I'm not sure what this is, but clearly I'm not the target audience. Which I'm fine with.....
Rephrasing, Endeavour is something that is started with a terminal system based on Arch.
I know that's a cheesy way to say it's an Arch distro but I hope you notice how poor the phrasing is for someone trying to understand what they've been linked to.
I was confused myself, if only because when I saw Ganymede my first thought was the Eclipse release back in 2008.
I know I'm young enough to be too young to complain about getting old, but I still feel like I'm getting old every so often.
I thought this too. But if there was a probe sent out to Ganymede wouldn't we have arrived at it? If Ganymede (the moon) is arriving at Earth we have a whole other set of problems.
+1
after trying multiple distros 6 years ago to replace the enshittified Windows 8/10 [1], ended up at EndeavourOS + KDE. there is very little i miss about Windows. maybe Foobar2000.
amazing distro.
[1] after it messed up my linux dual boot config, continuously reset my registry tweaks with forced updates / restarts, insisted on re-enabling the io-destroying Defender, and started force-feeding me ads
Not a complete replacement for Foobar2000, but you might want to take a look at Quodlibet, which has many of the important niceties, and also is good at metainfo handling, where Foobar2000 shines especially.
foobar2000 runs great under Wine.
>We still love what we do over here, but we all have chosen to let our lives and loved ones come first over the project
I think that's sensible but from a user perspective it's also why I think these nth degree derivatives are pointless. So much infrastructure and maintenance to effectively ship arch with a wallpaper.
Many of these projects eventually go the way of the dodo, I believe this is in itself a successor to Antergos. Just install Arch, Debian or Fedora and take 10 minutes to configure the desktop. The biggest issue with arch was the setup but they ship a TUI install script now that anyone can use. The OS on your computer shouldn't be a hobby project.
I recently tried this distro on my raspberry pi and it was awesome.
I recently put Endeavour with KDE on an old laptop (c. 2013). It runs great. Much snappier than it ever did with windows. Great distro.
I put an m.2 SSD on my Pi and dropped in an Intel optane 16gb SSD for $10 on eBay. Its definitely snappy
There's no context but from what I can tell this is a Linux distro release and the main line items for improvements are improved nvidia and broadcom driver handling. Not exactly the most thrilling release to hit the HN front page.
its #5 on distrowatch, and #2 of arch variants.
hn should be a place where you can post niche things, and come to the comments or click through if you are out of the loop.
I did click through, you can see my findings in the comment you responded to.
I consider "Yes, we know it has been a long time since we released an ISO refresh" fairly adequate context.
This release may not be giant compared to the last release, but its the first ISO refresh in a while. So its two different "upgrades."