Launch OSS Pledge #245
Comments
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Here are the things a company can do to support Open Source:
What is in-scope for Pledge? Cash only or all or some or ... ? 🤔 |
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What's the outcome we're trying to drive? Healthy Open Source (who didn't like "healthy"? I forget). Balance user freedom and developer sustainability. |
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The Salesforce 1% model is time, product, and equity (financial resources). |
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Sigh. PDFs were gated. 😭 
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Staff:
Charity Navigator - "Not currently rated" shrug |
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I propose that we need to reframe this initiative in order to drive the outcomes we want. OutcomesLet's talk outcomes. We want to change the status quo. Right now the status quo is some companies give some amounts, we don't really have great visibility, but we know it's not enough to really move the needle. What needle? Here's the needle: anyone who makes widely used OSS can get paid fairly without jumping through hoops. What we want is lots of high-quality Open Source software, year after year, without chewing people up. What we need is better economic incentives. What happens now is we get idealistic flare-ups that wither and die. We have a sputtering engine, with spark and oxygen but not enough fuel. We need more fuel. There's three parties:
The point of the Pledge is to unlock flow from (1) to (3) likely via (2). PossibilitiesHere's an outcome: a dozen companies Sentry's size also giving $500k/year 18 months from now. Here's an outcome: $1 billion flowing through FOSS foundations 10 years from now. Here's an outcome: 5,000 devs employed full-time through FOSS foundations 10 years from now. Here's an outcome: 5 years from now there is a real pathway for any JS, Python, or Rust dev to produce widely used software and get paid fairly without jumping through hoops.
Pledge is the Wrong FramingThe more I look at Pledge 1% as an example, the more I think it's the wrong benchmark for comparison, and that "pledge" in general is the wrong framing. Here are four reasons why it is so weak. 1. No ImpactI can't tell anything from Pledge 1%'s homepage about their real impact. It's all social validation signals with no substance—basically what we have today with FOSS Funders but 10 years further along (~10 staff and ~1000s of logos vs. side quest and 15 logos plus two names without logos). 
I find this buried in a FAQ:
$500,000,000 / 18,000 members = $28,000 per member, and the org has been around for a decade, so that's $2,800 annually per company. Maybe they have a better story but if so I would expect them to tell it. 2. No FocusThere are four ways to participate and they are not equal or even really comparable: equity, time, product, profit. From what I can tell, any company with a volunteer allowance can say they have "Pledged 1%." Weak sauce. 
3. No AccountabilityFrom the FAQ:
This is in the nature of a "pledge"—a promise to follow through in the future. Also in the FAQ: "Taking the pledge is setting your intent to give, even if that’s at a later date." Does anyone follow through? Does anyone care? With Sentry's FOSS funding program I've been very intentional about promoting it in the past tense, "We just gave":
4. No MeaningPledge 1% has a wall of 1000s of logos—eight walls. The logos link to corporate homepages, not to any sort of detail page. I have no idea what it means that, e.g., Adobe is part of Pledge 1%. Are they giving 1% of their equity to charity? One percent of their revenue? Or—more likely—do they have a corporate volunteering allowance that allows them to say they are donating 1% of time whether or not any employees even use the program? Sentry has the same, and I wouldn't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member. Or, since, "[t]aking the pledge is setting your intent to give," does Adobe simply intend to set up a volunteer allowance, "at a later date"? Or maybe they intend to give not just 1% of their profits, but 10%! Maybe they intend to give 100%! 🙄 
Bonus Reason: This Ain't CharityOpen Source is a restaurant, not a soup kitchen. Pledge 1% is philanthropy. We need voluntary taxation.
Frontier Climate is a Much Better ModelMike Fix is an engineer on Stripe Climate and also Stripe's Head of Open Source. I've been talking with him about how parallel the problem domains and therefore solutions are, between Climate and Open Source. Essentially what Stripe Climate is banking on for long-term, truly transformative success, is that governments will eventually enforce carbon offsets. Through Frontier Climate they are seeding a market now in order to be ready then. They are skating ahead of the puck. The way they are seeding the market is with companies who essentially voluntarily tax themselves for brand marketing purposes on the one side, in order to grow an ecosystem of providers on the other side. The providers need time to mature before they are ready to handle the volume of demand that regulation would bring. Sound familiar? Frontier's portfolio of carbon-removal companies in the Climate case is akin to FOSS foundations in the Open Source context. Expected (and, presumably, lobbied for) government carbon offset regulation has a parallel in the CRA and related legislation. Today's FOSS foundations are not up to the task of properly managing 100x their current budget in order to efficiently provision Open Source into the future. It will take time to get there. Companies like Sentry are the innovators and early adopters who are willing to pay out of enlightened self-interest, recognizing the brand benefits of being a leading player. To truly succeed we will need to see early and late majority follow suit, for more mundane reasons, up to and including government intervention.
Here are things that Frontier Climate has going for them that we should learn from. 1. ImpactLook how Frontier clearly communicates impact directly on the Portfolio page and on a dedicated Progress page (the main stat to notice is that the portfolio delivered its first 1,716 tons of carbon this past year). 
2. FocusFrontier does one thing: carbon removal. It does it through multiple "pathways," but they all roll up to the single unit of measurement. 
3. AccountabilityFrontier is creating a market. In the long run, market dynamics will provide accountability. Companies that deliver on carbon removal will win, and those that don't will lose. The seeds of this are planted on their Portfolio page, where companies are compared in terms of a single unit, tons of carbon, both contracted and delivered. 
4. MeaningMembership in Frontier is elite. There are nine logos, not thousands. "Members make large, multi-year purchase commitments directly with Frontier," but, at the same time, participation includes "tens of thousands of businesses using Stripe Climate." 
My PointMy main point right now is that we will achieve better outcomes if we drop Pledge as our framing and adopt Frontier Climate as our model instead. I've sketched out some of what this would look like above. Do I have buy-in to push further? |
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Had an internal call, agreements:
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We want to gather together companies that consistently give to Open Source year over year, according to some rational plan. This is kinda like FOSS Funders but with more weight behind it.
Google Doc
Inspo
Definition of Pledge
We the undersigned pledge to financially support Open Source regularly every year according to a published plan that relates our funding to some objective metric (profit, revenue, headcount, etc.).
To Do
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