Financial Support For Express #69
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I don't really have much weight around here.. but I know I hate the idea of this. |
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I would love to know why in more detail. Opinions matter for stuff like this. And I cannot speak for others, especially people who have put in much more effort than I, but I am not looking for income for this work. But sometimes having a little carrot can help incentivize people to spend more time. |
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It's the subscription part of it.. who is expected to pay for that? Doug? Why should he pay? If everyone chips in.. those are the likely people to do the work on the project.. so they get paid back their original money.. MINUS the fee... So tidelift gets their cut for doing nothing than be a stupid thing that someone has to pay into and then attempt to get money back out.. And I am sure there will be some hoops on both ends to do anything... |
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Oh, sorry maybe I was not clear. Users, companies or whoever wanted would pay the subscription to Tidelift, then they would distribute that to Express contributors. It is kindof like a support contract the supporters are paying for, but more to support the devs/maintainers, than as direct support. |
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Maybe the reason for tidelift to exist is not clear. |
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I think they provide a service which a company with significant resources would be more willing to pay for. I support a few things via direct support or over Open Collective, but I cannot imagine asking my employer to contribute directly to an Open Collective managed by individual contributors. A company like this provides more concrete things to the contributors, making large scale contributions for support more reasonable. |
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I think it seems cool, I like the idea of paying for open source projects that companies use to build their products. Seems like Babel, Chalk, and Standard is already on, so I think we should join too. |
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If we were to, I think we should have a concrete plan for how any proceeds should be distributed, and have a clearly documented and transparent process for doing so. I would like for it to be performance or contribution driven, but that has may issues with making it fair and not incentivizing "gaming" it. We should also probably reach out to the teams who are using it to get opinions and advice. I would also be interested in hearing about their experiences in general on adopting a "pay for OSS work" model in a pre-existing project. Was it hard to get everyone on board? What were the non-technical challenges & successes they have had? cc. @hzoo @feross @sindresorhus from those projects. |
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I've reached out to @piamancini from Open Collective to see if she wants to chime in here with her thoughts. I personally don't think that Tidelift is any different than Patreon or PayPal.me links, and I feel like Open Collective is way more transparent, open, and less gimmicky without slogans such as "You can win $10K for open-source!" that Tidelift has. |
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Yeah, I support Beaker Browser on Open Collective and like it and the experience well enough. I am not strongly opinionated on this space so would love to hear wide ranging input. The only reason I posted Tidelift was that the OP article was posted in a company internal Slack :) |
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thanks @niftylettuce for the ping. I'm happy to answer any questions on how Open Collective works! I'm not going to speak as to what Tidelift is doing since my experience with them is very limited. I think they want to work with individual maintainers instead of communities. That, at least, is my understanding from my few interactions with them.
@wesleytodd not sure I'm getting your point, many companies support projects on Open Collective facebook, Airbnb, trivago, just to pick three. |
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Thanks for the input @piamancini! I did not mean to imply that my employer would not use Open Collective. Just that some might, because traditionally non tech companies who do not have an understanding of how this all works might like the model where they get some "perceived value" out of the exchange. |
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Maybe I need a better pitch on Open Collective than I have previously gotten. My only interaction has been backing one project, but maybe OC would be a better fit here. I will look at it more from the project viewpoint, and would love any resources you could send my way for this @piamancini. |
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Sure! (I'm also happy to jump on a call anytime.) Open Collective is essentially a way for open source projects to get funding without needing their own legal entity / bank account. expressjs is a community of people in different countries and having a legal entity implies, incorporating somewhere and also having ownership - someone needs to be President or Director. This is crazy and most os projects won't do it. So the question is how do we sustain these communities, as communities (not individual maintainers or corporations). Open Collective's two cents to this is an open platform and a host (a non profit - the open source collective) that receives the money for the projects and manages their 1099s, processes expenses, makes reimbursements etc. Because bringing money into volunteer communities is tricky, we help manage this by making everything transparent. Everything that gets in / out of a collective is open (our fees included). This helps imho sustain the whole community behind a project, which at the end of the day it's what we want. On the sponsors side of things, the platform and the host provide companies, with invoices, reports, gift cards.... we go through their vendor onboarding madness, we receive bulk payments, etc... Finally, we also onboard to services on your behalf, so for example if you want to use carbon ads, threadless, creative-tim affiliate program, they'll make the payment to the open source collective and we'll add it to your collective's budget. I think that covers it :) I guess in a nutshell, we see sustainability as financial sustainability as well (and in equal standing) as the sustainability of the people and the community as a whole. sorry it went too long, didn't mean to through a pitch here! Feel free to reach out directly so we don't spam this thread. <3 |
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@wesleytodd can I ask what is stopping us from setting up financial support currently? I can't find anyone completely against it in this discussion and it's almost 1 year. opensource.guide has some notable ways. |
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Hey @devsumanmdn, I don't think there is anything clearly stopping us. I have some concrete ideas about this topic, but they are currently secondary to the work we have been talking about in the last few TC meetings. With so many topics to juggle I have not been able to follow up with this one. There are many ongoing conversations around support or sustainability in the OSS maintainer space. So my hope is that once these different groups can find a good path forward, Express can just adopt that. The problem is that an important project like Express has a lot at stake, so adopting the wrong funding model could have big consequences. Personally I just would want to make sure we choose the right model.
Thanks for this resource, I will check it out! |
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Sorry, I should have added references to the "many conversations": nodejs/package-maintenance#192 |
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The typical issues have been talked about here, and are even talked about (without a given solution) in the link @devsumanmdn posted, specifcially:
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Because Express is a project of several people (1) and (3) are relevant, which may not be as hard to answer if the project was just a single person (likely reported as a 1099-K from a payment processor of the donations if you are in the US, for example). But with more than one person, either one person will need to be the central point of collection (and uses their US tax information for the accounts / whatever) or another entity would need to be used to accept and manage the funds (like Tidelift) with the downside being that there is overhead there where they need to be paid for the service of the accounting, etc. and they may not be able to distribute to people in certain regions of the world. It's a lot to consider just from that point of view, and as opensource.guide even points out, it's probably better to come up with a clear goal on what the funds are needed for so it makes sense with what happens. |
@piamancini ping |
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So I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I have other plans for today, so I will just say this: There are many ways to solve the problems around accepting financial support, how it is distributed, and all the logistics questions. I raised this issue to start the discussion on if we might ever want to, and if so why. I think we should leave the "how would we do it" to a discussion after we decide we would want to, as it is pointless otherwise. As for why we might want to:
Anyway, clearly I think having some budget is a good thing for a project. If we others agree with me, then I think can start discussions of what specifically of these things would we plan to do, and how would we accept that financial support. But the first decision is yes/no on doing it at all. |
I can only speak for Open Collective. You have two ways with OC: a) you can either bring your own legal entity (and bank account), in which case your entity deals with taxed and they'll depend on the type of structure you have and the location. b) you can choose a host (fiscal sponsor), essentially an organization that provides you with the legal entity and bank account. The Open Source Collective (oscollective.org) is the fiscal sponsor 90% of projects on OC use. This is a non profit entity so there's no income tax from your donations.
Transparency is built into open collective, there's no way of receiving or withdrawing funds without a public record. This helps a lot. What you spend the money for it's mostly up to you as long as it's funding going towards your mission. In this case, you can expense flights/accommodation to conferences/meetups, operation costs, services (design, etc) and engineering time (invoices).
When you submit an invoice, that's accounted for as income for you, so you should include it in your filing. The host will need a W9 or W8 tax form and takes care of filing the relevant 1099s forms (US based). This is not the case for reimbursements (when you submit a receipt for an expense) |
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EDIT: Just saw that Pia from OpenCollective has already responded. That's what I get for leaving my GitHub tabs open for several days and not refreshing! @dougwilson Not sure if this has been suggested before, but OpenCollective provides a solution to some of the issues you've pointed out. Specifically, they can help by eliminating the need to set up a legal entity to collect the funds, as well as the need to file taxes. I believe that you can tell TideLift to send funds to the OpenCollective account where they will start to collect until there is a use for them. When someone wants to claim some of the funds, they submit a proposal which will be made transparent to the community. I think they take 10% of the funds as a fee for that service. I've never used it myself, so I can't recommend it from personal experience. I'm just sharing what I've heard. Anyway, hope this is helpful! |
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In no way do I want this to become self promotion, but today I was accepted into the GH Sponsors Beta. I wrote up my page over the weekend, and have committed to taking any support I get and funneling it directly into the projects I work on. Clearly Express is the largest and most in need of support :) So, I wanted to see how people feel about me starting to organize some community things if I can get some 💸 to work with? I was thinking of a bunch of ideas for the project, but feel a bit weird asking as an individual as opposed to people directly funding the project. Does anyone object to me doing this? Does anyone want to collaborate on this? There has not been much traction since I posted this a year ago, but maybe all the community enthusiasm around funding OSS (thanks @feross and the infamous expirement of 2019 😛) we can make some headway! Also, if anyone has feedback on my sponsor page I would love it. It is really hard to write something which is effectively asking money for things I already do for free, so helping me squash any impostor syndrome would be great! |
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I just had a quick pitch from Carbon Ads which sounds like a good way to bootstrap funding without requiring sponsors or subscriptions. The ads are fairly small and can be seen on http://getbootstrap.com and http://laravel.com/docs. We could look at doing something similar with http://expressjs.com, and I believe it'd be a non-insignificant source of funding. I think we'd be able to combine this income with something like Open Collective on the legal side to collect and distribute funds within the organization to pay for whatever is needed. |
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I am on the fence on ads. I agree these are unintrusive but I think the incentive is structure is not aligned with how OSS projects are managed IMO. I guess that if it raised enough money I might change my mind :P (see the perverse incentives at work!!) So how much money could these ads raise for us? |
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He mentioned $1-2 per 1000 impressions on the call, at a million impressions per month that would be $1000. Could you elaborate more on the incentive structure concerns? |
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It was brought to my attention that the project has some money waiting for us to claim in Open Collective. If there is no opposition, I can start the process of getting that setup so we can claim the money and figure out what to do with it. My preference would be to work with the Foundation to make sure this is done correctly, and preferably have the account somehow linked to the foundation. |
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Yes @wesleytodd , that would be awesome 👍 . The biggest hurdle I have encountered, I think, has been what to do with the funds, ultimately. It has always felt weird to turn it into any kind of "pay ourselves" for some reason (sorry, not sure how to articulate it just yet). But I have seen things like use for sending merch to groups who want to have local meetings (like stickers) or other small-scale things like that to show support, but I'm not sure what that does, ultimately (though I wouldn't oppose it). I would love to hear any thoughts you have on what the money can be used for, just as a general curiosity for myself. |
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IMO, a better decision can be taken based on the amount at hand, and the For the current instance, ($460) I suggest to devide the money among the express committers - bringing great motivation to the contriutors and triagers! In general, I believe one of the best way to feel proud of working in express is to utilize it, and probably talk about it! |
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Yea, I have seen at least one project use raised funds for something like that -- to help send someone from the general community (vs the main contributors) to talk about the project at a conference (even a local one) in order to both spread the word of the project and as a way to get people involved who may not be able to otherwise (due to the cost of travel, etc.). I know the current amount at hand may not be enough for something like that, but that doesn't mean it can't be in the future, of course. Usually the other reason I have seen the money distributed as merch and/or travel, etc. vs pay the committers, is because the reporting can be complicated for each person and the tax agencies in which they are under, as getting paid for being committers is considered earned income in many tax jurisdictions. |
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I agree on the tax related implications; but if the amount grows substantial and the inflow becomes steady, we may be looking at seriously considering it as an income source? And considering that way, IMO, is well aligned with the For that reason, I suggested to utilize it as |
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Right. I'm not familiar with all the jurisdictions, but in the US (where I reside) even $1 is required to be reported as income, carving off all the various taxes from that, and likely causing the people who receive it to file must more complicated tax forms. That is not a super concern for the project itself, but there is a threshold where if the amount goes above $600 for a tax year to any one person, the entity who is giving the money has to file documents with the US IRS as well, assuming the entity that is giving this money is based in the US. I'm not sure if each US committer in this case would also need to fill out a W-9 for it to be collected by whatever the entity who is distributing the money is. That is likely why hopefully, if the idea is to actually pay folks for their work here, the OpenJS foundation can provide the guidance on how to achieve doing this. |
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makes sense! /cc @jorydotcom @joesepi - can you pls advise or guide here? |
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@jorydotcom is who made me aware of this! Happy to have the conversation here, but I also asked in what way the foundation can assist in slack. As for how to spend it, this is a long thread, maybe once we go through the process of claiming it we can start that discussion in a new one. Also, there is no reason we have to decide right away, we can wait until there is more. Being setup to receive funds is the first step. |
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Hi! Jumping in with a quick clarification since the funds mentioned are pledged through the Open Collective Platform -- The funds pledged are quite old, and therefore some donors might not be able / willing to fulfill the donation. Open Collective can't legally hold money without it being earmarked for a project and since Express is not on the platform yet we are unable to execute on the payments until you claim it. Just wanted to make sure this was clear before you'all continue the conversation on how to spend it :) |
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Thanks for that information @piamancini , that is very helpful! Also @wesleytodd regardless of the specific amount of funds, etc. if we set up the OC account, we will then have the possibility of funds flowing in in the future. I'm not sure if you're planning on being at the TC meeting tonight, but was curious on if you wanted to have a discussion around what to use funds for in general. My thought is that even if we have none now, at least having an idea can help us write up what the funds would be for, helping folks who want to give understand what they would actually be giving to. |
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Yes I plan on being on the call tonight. I agree having a plan will be good. As for the funds not being “real” yet, that’s actually a good thing so we can state our plan more clearly so those folks can make an informed decision. |
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In this vein, here's a post from Babel about their "Funding Plans" from 2019 when they started soliciting financial support https://babeljs.io/blog/2019/11/08/babels-funding-plans |
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@wesleytodd @dougwilson @jonchurch I am not sure of what the state of the OpenCollective account is. I have a question though. If there were willing patrons that wanted to contribute today do we have the necessary alignment with @piamancini to be able to own and disperse those funds . If not we need to work on that first. |
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We will re-open the conversation in #228. Feel free to join the discussion there as I will close this issue |
I was wondering if anyone had any interest in something like this for Express?
https://tidelift.com/
https://www.wired.com/story/netflix-open-source-wants-developers-get-paid/
The idea is that the maintainers commit to certain things to the company (things which are most likely already being done), but in exchange get paid for it via a subscription fee paid to Tidelift. I am not personally looking to "quit my job and do open source", like the wired article talks about, but I can for sure say that if there was a small financial incentive I might put more effort into finishing up my open PRs :)
I think there are many challenges to a project like Express adopting a paid model, but I thought it would be worth at least bringing up.
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