And now that I've included two other messages, here's (part of) my take on this.
The viability of open-source business models is something I'm deeply interested in (I pay rent these days thanks to income from two open-source companies) and, like Andrew, something I've put a fair amount of thought into. Capturing all of that here is probably impossible, so here are a few points that I think are important. - We need to be really careful about drawing conclusions from projects like Linux, Eclipse, etc. Andrew hit on this already, but the potential base of potential donors/contributors to these projects is several orders of magnitude larger than the potential base for something like the RDKit, OpenBabel, or Chemfp. - Geoff pointed out the possibility of setting up a not-for-profit organization that can take donations and then disburse them. I'm not going to do this; dealing with that kind of paperwork is something I dislike and am terrible at. Going via OpenCollective (which Geoff pointed to) is a possibility, but they would end up taking >10% of each donation for overhead, credit card fees, etc. That seems steep, but 80+% of something is still better than 100% of nothing. - It's worth pointing out that it is already possible for companies that want to directly support the RDKit to do so: getting an RDKit support contract from my company (T5 Informatics GmbH) very directly supports my work on the RDKit and the infrastructure needed to do that. Given that the support contract may seem too expensive for small orgs, I could also easily set something up for companies who want to show support (and perhaps be listed as sponsors) at a lower price point. I doubt there's any demand for that, but I'd be happy to be wrong there. - Another mechanism that's always available to companies is to just pay an open-source developer to work on their open-source project. This can take the form of funding development of a particular feature, creating documentation, etc. - That last bullet point likely works for academics too: think about adding some support for open-source development to your next grant proposal. I would assume that there are ways to engineer this. For individuals to financially contribute is trickier... there's a voice in the back of my head that's saying that it will never be financially worth it to set something like this up for communities as small as ours,[1] but I have to think about that one for a while. I'm sure there's more to come, but I want to go ahead and hit "send" -greg [1] one-time donations would feel great, but they don't help when making long-term plans unless you can assume that more will continuously come in...
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