That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document some of these other orgs have you fill. Looking at you Llama Impact Grants, OpenAI Cybersecurity Grants, NLNet, & OpenTechFund.
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Disclaimer: A project I co-develop was granted £3.75k in 2023 back when FOSS United grants were co-sponsored by Zerodha (the same company behind FLOSS/fund). The entire process was over in like 3 days from the date of application.
I guess somebody has to point out the obvious ....
First, the process is probably simpler because the donation amounts are going to be smaller. If there's only $1M per year in the bank, I somehow don't see them giving out the sorts of large sums the others you mentioned do, e.g. OpenTechFund says it will give up to $400,000 ... I don't see that happening with a fund that only has $1M a year to give out.
Second, building on the above, giving out large sums involves a greater amount of due diligence.
Finally, sadly, the most obvious point .... a longer form helps sort the wheat from the chaff. Both in terms of cutting down the volume of applications some poor soul has to trawl over, but also helping keep the quality of applications high.
I've applied to each of those funds for ~£5k. The process remains the same.
It's also not just about the initial (typically multi-stage) application, but then the reporting and compliance requirements, the random donor requests.
This sort of thing is often objectively worse for smaller funders, but also relatively worse with smaller amounts of money as it's harder to resource for people to deal with the crap. Grant money ain't free.
> Put money where the mouth is—a minimum of $10,000 and up to $100,000 for a single recipient, totaling $1 million per year, which we will increase once we understand the dynamics of running the fund.
I suspect that phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting and would not be surprised if the length of the required paperwork increases in good time.
It is also worth reading the FAQ, it very much sounds like it remains the case that you are not going to escape 20 pages of paperwork, just that they are kicking the can down the road:
"If your application is accepted, our team will reach out to you for the necessary paperwork (such as tax residency documents required by Indian laws) before processing the funds. This generally involves back-and-forth communication over email and can take up to 4 weeks"
"Just" does a lot of heavy lifting here, considering that you only need all that paperwork if you are accepted ;)
No, it does not.
Might I invite you to consider the context of what I am saying ?
The OP here was boasting about "all you need" is a funding.json and none of the 20 pages of forms of the other organisations the OP chose to name and shame.
What I am saying is you're not going to escape those 20 pages. Do it now or do it later, you're still going to have to put in more effort than "just" a funding.json.
That is why I took issue with the OP naming and shaming the other organisations. It is both misleading and unfair on the other funders.
Which makes a huge difference, because you do indeed escape those 20 pages if you are not accepted.
I don't think that's clear at all. The part you quoted mentions tax forms as an example of what will need to be filled out afterward. Of course you'll need to fill those sorts of things out, and that feels very distinct from some sort of multi-page application where you have to tell them why you believe you deserve the grant. And the start of the sentence you quoted is, "If your application is accepted", which to me implies that they're going to make a firm yes/no decision as to whether to give you money based solely on the funding.json thing.
Of course only time will tell how this will work out in practice, but their initial wording seems to suggest they will make a go/no-go decision based on a very simple "application".
Does it though or does it sort out the projects who would rather focus on developing while selecting those better at marketing themselves than at building useful things aka the professional bullshitter class.
Opposite effect, actually. Longer forms get you a lot of the top 10%, but you miss out on the top 0.0001% who don't want to waste their time with people who aren't smart enough to design a brief form.
Great question.
Some starting ideas to look for datasets: look at quality of innovation coming out of YC (short form that can be completed in < 10 minutes) versus many government agencies such as NIH (long, horrible application process that require attending training sessions).
That’s why you can’t say you are a musician and expense your $700 Fender pedals.
Zerodha is India's Robinhood.
In India, it's very difficult to get a deductible donation exemption because of how easy it would be to game.
Truth be told, I'd rather be done with the project completely. It's like a little monkey on my back that I can never be rid of, that I must always tend to. But at the same time, since I can never realistically receive funding for it, the only value I get is the fact that my name is on it. I wish a big, legit company would just buy it off of me somehow, but there's no incentive for them either. I don't know how this ends.
Just out of curiosity, do you think the separate documentation page has better conversion than if you were to, say, include the ad directly into the readme inside the repo?
It’s also a question of sovereignty. If your documentation is in the README, then GitHub owns the audience. If they, for some reason, close your project, you’re finished. With your own documentation page, the risk is much lower.
If you believe you still get an ongoing benefit (reputational or whatever) by being its maintainer and continuing to support it, and if you still want that benefit, then you have to keep up the work. Very little in life is truly free, unfortunately.
You could also see if there's a way to monetize your work on it. If people want support or need bugs fixed, they can pay you to do so, for example. Might even look into GitHub Sponsors, if you haven't already. I do get that it's harder to solicit donations for something that's "finished", though.
Don't. Unless you already know someone you can trust it's better to just let someone fork it and build reputation for their fork on their own.
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From their FAQ:
> Currently, our focus is on supporting existing, widely used, and impactful projects to specifically contribute to their sustainability. Very new projects or projects with minimal usage are not considered for the time being.
> A project can apply for funding of up to $100,000 in one year. To keep the logistics and operational overhead of the fund reasonable, we accept requests in denominations of a minimum of $10,000 and multiples of $25,000 thereafter.
A better title: Floss/fund: Up to $100K/year for popular open source projects
Still admirable though...
You should give a "why" with your statement.
It makes you wonder how many projects are out there which have tremendous potential but still lack a critical feature or two that a bit of funding would help bring to fruition.
From my experience, open source projects are either big and massively funded, able to pay their own developers a salary, or the projects end up in a void filled with burned-out maintainers whose only appreciation is an occasional $15 donation and issues filled with negativity and sometimes even hatred.
The biggest problem with occasional $15 donations is that they're occasional. Sustainability requires a somewhat stable ARR.
Depends on where you live too - $10k would take care of 5 years for me.
From my experience though, it is better to figure out a way to sell something in addition to the open stuff.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members https://openjsf.org/members https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/
It’s obviously not enough to give up the day job, but it dwarfs all other contributions I’ve had.
As a data point, my open source web app for a casual game received thousands of dollars of donations (not remotely covering the development cost if we go by hourly rate but that’s never the goal), while my open source developer tool with a couple thousand stars on GitHub received <$50 over several years. I don’t beg for donations in either case, just an inconspicuous link.
Disclosure: I donate a very modest amount to various projects every year.
In practice it can be an hidden freelancing or employment relationship.
Donators actually expect you to do things in return, for example with cURL they expect the developer to do security fixes.
Otherwise they will not get the “donation” the next month
It may not be written on a paper for legal reasons, but it is made for a good reason.
A true donation you do not expect for anything in return.
This could explain why they consider donation too low. A gift cannot be too small. But a gift where the giver has very high expectations in return may be too low.
Claw back this month’s “donation” if I don’t meet your expectations — sure, that’s an air quotes donation.
No donation next month if I don’t meet your expectations — that’s just a bona fide donation like any other.
It's pathetic, and just shows that most people haven't evolved spiritually beyond being freeloaders whenever they can.
No wonder millions would rather stand in line the whole day to get free bread than pay just a little for their food.
In the real world, if somebody invites you for dinner you eat for free. If you get invited a hundred times for dinner without inviting back or bringing a bottle of wine, then you're a freeloader. And the guy inviting you is being taken advantage of, he's not being generous. Especially if you start charging other people for eating dinner for free at his house.
Funnily, I've noted in tech circles, that they many times in the real world do not understand reciprocity. They get invited or treated to something and say "that was great, thanks!". Then they keep getting culled from the invitation lists, because they never invite back.
These companies instead should carve out a matching donation program for employees funding FOSS projects.
1. Assertables is a Rust crate that provides assert macros for smarter testing: https://github.com/SixArm/assertables-rust-crate/blob/main/f...
2. BoldContacts is a mobile app that helps people who have disabilities: https://github.com/BoldContacts/boldcontacts-mobile-app-for-...
Results so far:
1. The JSON spec validation seems to be problematic. For example, I get an error message and there's no obvious way to handle it: "entity.webpageUrl.url and manifest URL host and paths do not match. Expected entity.webpageUrl.wellKnown for provenance check at https://linktr.ee/joelparkerhenderson/*/.well-known/funding-..."
2. An opportunity for improvement is for the JSON spec to favor each project having all it's own information in the JSON file i.e. orient the file toward the project, rather than toward a specific developer, and definitely not toward the naming convention of "/.well-known" subdirectory (which doesn't exist in many projects and has a history of glitches because it's a hidden dot directory).
IMHO success looks like making the file spec simpler, even it means skipping some of the manifest capabilities.
1. Regarding the validation, this error seems to be related to the provenance check mechanism in the spec. This is to prove ownership of that project/domain. The wellKnown field is designed to handle cases where the webpageUrl doesn't match the manifest URL.
2. Will definitely be passing the feedback to our team and evaluate this further!
Some options that I use successfully with other donations services and funding services...
- A unique token per project published in a project file
- A unique token per domain published in a DNS TXT record
- A verification of the project's existing setup, such as using GitHub API access or OAuth
- A forwarding to the project's existing funding link, such as using a project's GitHub sponsors link
- A heuristic with the person's existing payment links, such as contact info being identical on GitHub and Venmo
- A challenge/response, such as verifying a small random payment
- A dedicated KYC process such as with a background checking service.
https://youtu.be/4BH8DRXwVRw?t=317
Feel free to connect via email if you want to chat more breck7@gmail.com
I think it would be better if funding for open source was more based on what it's worth to you then what the project needs, just like paying for a commercial product. That would more strongly encourage valuable open source projects, risks, creativity, efficiency.
> Instead of structuring this as a fund, why not a non-profit?
Thank you, this is an interesting suggestion. While a non-profit structure could potentially increase donations, implementing this globally would be extremely complex.
Particularly because tax laws vary by country, which would require us to be registered as a non-profit in most, if not all countries, and comply with their jurisdiction. The administrative overhead and legal complexities of managing a truly international non-profit outweighs the benefits for our current scale. We appreciate the idea and will keep it in mind as we grow, but for now, we're focusing on efficiently directing funds to FOSS projects through our current model.
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi...
I have 1 line in my .well-known lists
Here's my funding.json:
https://nativephp.com/funding.json
Can someone help me figure out what I'm doing wrong?
[1]: https://github.com/nativephp/laravel/blob/main/.well-known/f... [2]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nativephp/laravel/refs/hea...
I've updated it, but that also doesn't work AND fails validation because:
"projects[0].repositoryUrl.url and `projects[0].repositoryUrl.wellKnown` hostnames do not match"
In the meanwhile, if you would like to submit the project, you could use the following URL which redirects to the `raw.githubusercontent.com` page: https://github.com/nativephp/laravel/raw/main/.well-known/fu...
I hope this helps!
Looking forward to being listed and considered for funding :)
Hopefully they will fix their submission tool. I did see one project submitted successfully by having domain.com/github point to their project URL, which the submission accepted, but that causes certificate errors.
Add "passthrough" field with a float value, and the idea is that you are sub-awarding a percentage of your grant to projects that you rely upon or want to succeed.
Then, people who are not open source maintainers but do spend their time indexing high-quality open source can have a 1.0 pass through funding.json passthrough to repos they believe are worth supporting.
And people who do not spend their time indexing high-quality open source but trust other people that DO spend their time indexing high-quality open source can have an index fund of donation streams.
In which case we can welcome both people who want to endow but don't have time and the people who have time but can't endow as much.
If anyone is interested in talking to me about this problem, I'm down
> In addition, we have given out many sizeable grants to FOSS projects and organisations in India. While funding projects outside India involves significant paperwork and operational overhead, we have reached out to several small and large projects that we use at work and have managed to pay them. This highly ad hoc approach is something that has increasingly bugged me though.
I have a personal donation page but I'm struggling to get and retain funding, especially monthly donations, which would make it easier to spend time on the projects I contribute to (either my time highlighting the work of others on social media, or writing code).
I call it a "happy problem" - kind of problem you get in with lot of money.
All participating parties are having middle class above life style and looking for the way to balance each other.
Perhaps such move would spark others to also fund such a fork.
This XKCD[2] is perhaps becoming less relevant.
[1]: https://vishnukvmd.github.io/funding.json
[2]: https://xkcd.com/974
I think since you are starting this from scratch you can do something pretty revolutionary with your application (and far simpler, long term!). I demonstrate in the user test below.
Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.youtube.com/embed/4BH8DRXw...