Sustainable Open Source: Current Efforts

The recent appearance of Clojurists Together, friends working on OpenBounty, as well as recently finding a lot of energy to work on a documentation platform for the Clojure ecosystem stirred some thoughts about sustainable OpenSource.

Let's say one thing right out of the gate: sustainable OpenSource isn't really a goal on it's own. What the community (users as well as maintainers) strives for is reliability and well-maintained ecosystem components. Businesses and individuals alike depend on those properties — not the fact that work done to achieve them is sustainable. That said I don't see any ways to achieve those without sustainability.

Current Efforts

There are various platforms trying to improve sustainability of open source efforts that have continued momentum. Many of them with their own ideas how the situation can be improved.

• OpenCollective collects payments fromindividuals and companies and stores funds for organizations. People may then"invoice" the organization. This can be for stickers and labor time alike.
• OpenBounty is a bounty platform usedwith cryptocurrencies. Contributors may work on specific issues and get paida bounty which has been defined in advance.
• Clojurists Together collectsmoney from companies and community members to fund open sourceprojects benefitting the overall Clojure ecosystem. People may applywith a project they want to work on and get funding (depending onoverall availability) for a duration of three months.

All platforms take care of collecting money and have mechanisms for redistributing it. With OpenCollective a community will need to agree on processes to request and distribute funds. Clojurists Together collects money in similar ways to OpenCollective but has a predefined process for how funds are allocated.

Projects like webpack have embraced OpenCollective with people getting reimbursed for expenses but also regular labor invoices for time worked on the project.

OpenBounty also provides some of these processes by assigning bounties to specific tasks. OpenBounty is used in Status.im's development process and while I don't believe bounties are the answer to everything I'm excited to watch this space in the future.

Sustainable Incentives

Contributing to OpenSource is about incentives. As far as I can judge these often are

• fun & community,
• fixing a problem one encountered,
• recognition & better job opportunities.

Nothing is wrong with this list but they are not sustainable on their own. Just working for the fuzzy feeling of giving back to a community doesn't pay your bills. As soon as you can no longer afford to work for the fun of it the stability and momentum of projects you contributed to will suffer.

I believe there are two kinds of participants required to achieve reliability, stability and so on:

• There need to be some people contributing on a regular basis. They provideoverall direction, deal with reported issues and incoming contributions.Often projects refer to this as "core". In my experience stability of an opensource project suffers with fluctuations in the set of "core" people working on it.
• There need to be occasional/new contributors. Life will happen(kids, work, etc.) to regular contributors causing a naturaldecline. New contributors discovering they enjoy working on theproject can fill up those gaps.

In my opinion the incentives listed above are not sufficient — especially for long-term regular contributors. If work is unpaid it will eventually become stressful to juggle with other responsibilities and people will be forced to step back. New contributors are just as important and I believe there are improvements to be done there as well but ultimately nothing works without a "core" set of people.

I have some further thoughts on how such incentives could be structured which I will explore in a later blog post.