TL;DR https://youtu.be/IWmDZUtTzo8

Recently the Python Software Foundation denied a $1.5M grant from the U.S. government in order to keep their integrity. They turned down the biggest cash influx in their history. Cheers for that! It was kind of a wake up call for me, asking myself: How do I see open source working out for me and what can I do for the community?

Open source has got an obvious problem: lack of funding. And although donations exist, they are inefficient. With open source foundations such as the Mozilla Foundation or the Python Software Foundation being offered or actually taking investments from private companies or other bodies, often with strings attached, open source is running the risk of losing its independence and ultimately its openness. So what can we do?

Let me ask you another question: Why choose GitHub over Codeberg? Why choose Microsoft Office over OnlyOffice? Why choose proprietary over open source? Although there are many other reasons, private companies mostly get people hooked with convenience. This is often reflected by players like Microsoft or Google creating enormous software ecosystems inside which you as a user can traverse easily.

So convenience is a huge driver. Let's keep that in mind. People choose convenience, at least the mainstream, with priority and are willing to pay a price for it, fair enough. Private companies also provide closed ecosystems and support, which has got a value. I am not talking about that. All of that also means, that people generally have got and will spend money for software products.

So what is the proposition here? I am asking the entire open source community to endorse in a convenience of donation method which I call "downstream donations", for now. My point is, that donating to a single entity of the open source community is not an impact on the community as hole. Although almost every project in the community relies on other libraries and tools, those do usually not benefit from their forks. It is not a problem of funding, but a problem of liquidity in the system, partly due to a lack of convenience which developers, users and foundations can easily change with the method proposed here. It is an honor-based system that will distribute funding throughout the entire open source landscape and reward the most appreciated projects fairly and rightfully so.

To give you an example of this practice, let me show you the 'README.md' of my project 'morPy'. What I am doing is to provide a clear statement of my downstream donations, QR codes for convenient payment and provide summaries of donations and downstream payments on my homepage. I will also provide account statements, because transparency builds trust. This way, donations are just a qr-code scan away and will benefit other developers, in this case the ones morPy depends on. Nobody is obligated to pay and who can't will be covered by the community. This was always the spirit of open source. What we as developers have got to do is live this practice. Set up your 'readme'-file and homepage accordingly or miss out on being a receiver and a guarantor of the dependencies you choose. People can donate conveniently and know that their donation is in one way or another distributed throughout the community. They do not have to feel obligated for the next thing they make use of.

And finally, the icing on the cake. We urgently need a software license tailored for these downstream donations. One which explicitly allows for commercial use, but obligates to a fraction of the earnings in downstream donations. And I mean these really need to be a fraction, so companies can still benefit from open source as an inexpensive base, all the while open source stays independent and will be far better funded. The license also has to cover for the obligations of the developer: transparent downstream commitments and the correct implementation of the downstream donation method, which is still an individual setup. Developers also have to make sure, they actually can make a difference of donations received in case they are maintaining more than one project in order for the downstream to work in the way intended.

This will put big tech, and all private endeavours therefore, back in their place. Either locked outside the borders of open source or within compliance. Since developers are enticed to make use of the new license in order to receive and contribute, commercial products will be rewarded with license simplicity and license security. For every non-commercial contributor it is purely honor based, convenient and self-sufficient for open source. The base principle is freedom, so a developer may choose not to downstream at all, but may face the penalty of others turning down a donation opportunity to this particular project. It is a chaotic yet robust and stable principle. Bad actors will likely be detected early, since the license demands transparency.

Think of the possibilities! Companies with great talent but lack of projects may decide to have their talent work on open source projects for an additional revenue stream rather than laying off. Developers publishing via F-Droid could feed the system with liquidity. A person in a poor country may decide to become a developer rather than an employee in a scam call center due to newly found opportunities. And what if this kind of contribution is leveraged within Wikipedia? They would probably not have to raise as much money themselves and users would benefit from the convenience donations to articles/editors of their choice. Just a thought, though. We are talking about an engine of innovation and stability, generating taxes as a side effect. For me, it's got all the best principles of commerce baked in. An additional comment on entire teams: you will have to figure out the fair distribution of funding within the team yourself. But that's the idea of democracy: messy but self-sufficiently correcting.

I am calling out to the open source foundations to create a new license which will manifest this new, democratic and inclusive strategy of open source. Please consider this strategy seriously. If you like this idea, implement it and spread it. Have people know about it. It is inexpensive and can be hosted from a projects 'readme'-file alone, you do not need a homepage. It can - and I hope it will - change the world. This is the trickle down effect everybody deserves.

DISCLAIMER Do not be tempted to donate to my project. I am absolutely fine. This is about the open source landscape entirely!