Episode 12: Funding of open source communities with Benjamin Nickolls

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Sustain Our Software podcast, Benjamin
Nickolls talks with the panelists about the potential for an open
source community that is self-sustaining. Benjamin helped create
Octobox, a notification system for GitHub, which helps filter
messages that one receives through GitHub.


Benjamin and his partner created Octobox hoping it would be a
model of a sustainable open source project, and after 9 months of
working on it full time they have been able to step away from it
as it continues to pay for its own hosting and software
development. The money that they received from the community was
donated back into the community to be able to experiment with
paying for development in the open source crowd. There are still
times when they need to go back in and maintain it, but for the
most part it is a self sustaining software.


Benjamin explains that as they tried to increase the amount of
people paying for their services they noticed that there was
organic growth that was occurring so they decided to step back
and let it continue to grow on its own. Benjamin and his partner
are both interested in seeing how Octobox can lead the way in a
new way to create open source development and be an example for
effective sustainability and maintainability.


Before Octobox, Benjamin and his partner created Libraries.io
which helped people search open source software to find what is
being used the most by the community. This has stemmed research
about the ecosystem of open source software. Open source projects
are an extremely diverse thing coming from different builders,
maintainers, and funders. Donations, paid services, as well as
grants have been the best source for funding for his projects.
Diverse funding has created better stability.


They discussed the different ways of funding and its benefits
through different platforms. Codesponsor was created to help make
funding more acceptable on the open source marketplace although
there were many critics. GitHub sponsors has been created to
promote individual sponsorships for developers similar to how
Patreon works.


Benjamin is wary of sponsoring individuals because of possible
burnout or the individual could feel over committed to the
project and will not work on anything else. The lack of diversity
in sponsoring an individual compared to sponsoring groups and
teams of people is problematic because of this tendency to get
burned out before the project is complete.. He stresses
throughout the podcast the importance of diversity in every
aspect of developing to maximize sustainability.


Benjamin wants to start seeing a push of funding towards
developers who are creating products that aren’t as visible to
the community instead of all the funding going towards those who
are building off of the less seen projects and have a bigger name
in the open source community. If those who are able to receive
money through open source projects are able to put it back into
the community, there will be a more stable and self-sustaining
environment for developers.


The panelists discuss how open source communities have been
driven by hobbyists in the past, but the need for change is
coming because of the dependency that has been created on these
communities. Simply giving those developers what they have
received in the past may not be sufficient now that it is a core
part of almost every application.
Panel



Richard Littauer




Eric Berry




Joined by special guest: Benjamin Nickolls


Sponsors




Adventures in Devops




CacheFly


Links



Benjamin Nickolls - Twitter




Octobox.io




Libraries.io




SustainOur Software on Twitter




SustainOur Software on Facebook




Picks


Richard Littauer:




Scuttlebot: a peer to peer log store




Patchwork: a web-based patch tracking system




Norman MacGaig: a Scottish poet




The Overstory: by Richard Powers




Eric Berry:




Pipedrive: A CRM tool




CodeFund: Funding open source projects through ethical
advertising




Benjamin Nickolls:




YouAreListening.to: ambient noise with police radio




Under The Skin: by Michel Faber


Special Guest: Benjamin Nickolls.