On 27/03/2019 01:46, Greg Landrum wrote:
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.
I looked at the cost structure in here:
https://opencollective.com/pricing
I understand they would take 13.6% in total (the scenario in which they
manage the money + accounting, etc.).
That's something, for sure, but not crazy.
- 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.
As an open-source project, I feel rdkit is quite successful.
So, the user community is not so small.
Some people who cannot contribute time could contribute money to the
project
(especially if it is tax-deductible, I guess).
Regards,
F.
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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