Introducing: Funds for Open Source.

We are on a mission to make working for an open source project a legitimate alternative to a career working for a for-profit corporation. To achieve our goal, we must remove friction between projects, the communities who support them, and the corporations who depend on their work (and can fund them)

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Open source projects are a motley crew of often unincorporated communities, likely with members distributed around the globe, some tied to a company, others under a foundation. This makes it difficult for companies to invest money in them. So we are solving this at scale.

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We are set up for exactly this: as a combination of an open funding management platform + an umbrella non-profit we are serving 2500+ projects. We have a new feature on the platform to make the experience even better, and more scalable: Funds.

Check out Chrome. They are investing in 17 open source projects via their Web Framework & Tools Performance Fund. Imagine asking Google’s finance department to make 17 individual contributions to a mix of groups and individuals around the world, each with its own separate procurement process. Not going to happen. Instead, they have one payment to one non-profit who then redistributes it to projects.

Open Collective's funds for open source

Open Collective has put out an announcement describing its "Funds for Open Source" initiative, which is aimed at making it easy for corporations to fund the work of individual developers. "Big companies call the process for paying for stuff 'procurement'. It’s often pretty involved, with contracts, invoices, purchasing order numbers, and bureaucracy—a painful thing to go through repeatedly for small amounts. It's practically a blocker. It is so much simpler and more practical to ask corporations to make one large payment, to one vendor. Make it easy and companies will invest more."

Roy Marples’ family and friends sharing dhcpcd

But I am not here to criticize dhcpcd, Roy Marples would have wanted me to, I am here to display a difference between one dedicated “person” to the cause of open code and “freely shared” software, against a multinational corporation writing without a human name and face. Roy has a partner and school aged children, and his partner contributes to the support of this family by working in a job that in the modern western world is not enough to support a 3-4 member family adequately. Very basic things will be missed without the contributions to Roy’s budget.

We, the open-free-foss…. whatever, community should provide a safety net for our own, not for the IBMs or the Oracles, Googles, and faCIAbooks, NoSuchAgencies, or the HPs, or the AT&Ts Bells and whistles, but to a real human being and his family. We should be the insurance that this can work, do not succumb to the pressures of becoming a faceless employee of a multinational, it is worth being one that shares among those who respect sharing. Unfortunately not all “users” of open free software deserve to consume “FREE” for “free”. This call is for the rest of us, who share, don’t consume, don’t exchange.

I hope the new maintainer of dhcpcd adds a link to the support channel to Roy’s family for as long as dhcpcd exists. A tiny little bit each can contribute, can collectively make a difference. Some more bread, rice, vegetables, milk, some roofing tiles, some oil for the heater, some lights for reading (essential to freedom), maybe even the high cost of ISP ethernet connection for having more to read than you can handle in a lifetime, or two.

Software platforms for open-source projects and foundations

Operational issues with project-backing FOSS foundations are not unheard of. The X.Org Foundation, for example, briefly lost its charity status in 2013 due to paperwork that was not filed. In 2016, the organization joined Software in the Public Interest (SPI), in part due to the paperwork headaches; in 2017, it dissolved its legal entity. When X.Org was considering joining SPI, LWN observed that organizations which enjoy tax-exempt status and are eligible to receive tax-deductible donations in the US need to "adhere to some strict paperwork and filing requirements at the IRS [Internal Revenue Service]". Those requirements turned out to be "a bit of a burden over the course of the past few years" for X.Org.

X.Org is not the only organization that has struggled with paperwork. The Gentoo Foundation, which lost its charter briefly in 2007, is currently mulling its future: should it continue to exist as a legal entity, join an umbrella organization (such as the Software Freedom Conservancy or SPI), use a platform like Open Collective, or simply dissolve?

One interesting thing about the X.Org Foundation change is that it kept its governance structure, including its board, intact when it joined SPI. The Open Bioinformatics Foundation, which is also part of SPI, similarly operates as a virtual foundation. Essentially, they are operating as a foundation within a foundation. This is possible because SPI's relationship with its associated projects is fairly loose; there are few restrictions imposed on the governance structure. Increasingly, projects and whole organizations join umbrella organizations in order to benefit from services without taking on too much of an administrative burden.

AOMedia libaom AV1 3.0 Encoder Released With Better Compression Efficiency - Phoronix

AOMedia libaom 3.0.0 was released on Tuesday by Google engineers as this reference AV1 video encoder.

The 3.0 release delivers on compression efficiency improvements, speed improvements for the real-time mode, new APIs, scaling optimizations, multi-threading performance boosts under the real-time mode, and other improvements. There are also a number of bug fixes.

Elevating open leaders by getting out of their way

Today, we're seeing the rapid rise of agile organizations capable of quickly and effectively adapting to market new ideas with large-scale impacts. These companies tend to have something in common: they have a clear core direction and young, energetic leaders—leaders who encourage their talented employees to develop their potential.

The way these organizations apply open principles to developing their internal talent—that is, how they facilitate and encourage talented employees to develop and advance in all layers of the organization—is a critical component of their sustainability and success. The organizations have achieved an important kind of "flow," through which talented employees can easily shift to the places in the organization where they can add the most value based on their talents, skills, and intrinsic motivators. Flow ensures fresh ideas and new impulses. After all, the best idea can originate anywhere in the organization—no matter where a particular employee may be located.

10 Best Open-source cashier and PoS (Point-of-Sale) software 2021 [Ed: Paywall]

The Dos and Don'ts of Writer Templates - LibreOffice Design Team

As we have seen in the previous posts (1st and 2nd) there are many advantages of using templates. And you should use them whenever is possible, they will help you with consistency across documents and will make your workflow more efficient. So where should you start when creating a template?

Built-in "Xray" like UNO object inspector – Part 3

DevTools implementation has been completed and this is the third and final part of the mini-series. The focus of this part is on the object inspector, but I have also improved or changed other DevTools parts, so first I will briefly mention those.

40% of the web uses WordPress

When we announced five years ago that WordPress usage had reached 25%, its creator Matt Mullenweg famously answered by writing "Seventy-Five to go". I found that a quite venturous statement. After all, we currently monitor 737 other content management systems. It's not like there is a lack of choice for webmasters. There is even no shortage of other impressive success stories, where Shopify and Squarespace are just two obvious examples, but there are plenty more.

Yet, WordPress plays in a league of its own. It's not only the usage numbers, also the ecosystem around WordPress is absolutely remarkable. There are more than 58,000 plugins, more than 8,000 themes, and any number of companies and individuals that make a living from creating WordPress sites. There are also a fair number of web hosting providers specialized in WordPress hosting. One of them, of course, is Automattic, the company behind WordPress, and they are not even the biggest one. That honor goes to WP Engine.