Leonard Ritter

I keep bouncing an idea in my head, thinking about how to strengthen the bonding between open source software developers and software users.

How is a beginning open source project funded, usually? Most of the time not at all. The site features a donation button, and users are encouraged to donate.

As an user, if you like an application very much, and would like to support its development, you might want to donate. However a donation has neither a direct connection to advancement of development, nor does it give you a right to influence the priorities of new features and bug fixes. It gives you no certainty that the application is still going to be developed - what if the developer is being hired for a more lucrative job? There is simply no contract, just a requirement of trust.

As an open source developer, how are you going to sustain and finance ongoing development? You can not rely on ongoing donations. You also need to care for fund raising. You have only a small understanding of how many users deem your application to be important. There is no dependency between you and your users, meaning that the choices you make might not necessarily be choices embraced by the community. Again, there is no contract, just a requirement of trust.

How to ensure a long-time interdependency between users and developers?

Since a long time, the IT world knows multiple answers to this question, of which one is: service contracts. A company using an open source product commercially would buy a service contract, which includes a warranty for the program and allows the company to prioritize bug fixes and addition of new features. In exchange, the company funds development.

Of course, these contracts are of high volume, with a lot more money involved than what an average user would be able to spend. However an industrially used program has also less companies interested in it.

My suggestion is to move this to the private software user / open source developer level. Users would be able to subscribe to a sponsoring contract, being able to choose the amount of money they want to pay per month or per year, starting at e.g. EUR 1/month or EUR 12/year. In exchange, each user has a right to get his bugs fixed within a period of 14 days, and also earns a right to influence the priority of new features suggested by the community.

The low pricing will make sponsoring attractive and thus increase the number of sponsors. The more importance the project gains, the more developers will get out of this deal, the more dependent they get on subscriptions, the more bugs will be fixed, and the project will not be abandoned. Since most users will have the same problems, the amount of work required will not necessarily increase. Payment could be handled by Paypal, which also supports subscriptions.

What do you think?