Open Collective Blog

I happen to believe in subsidised/affordable housing (I assume a UBI is what cybrox meant by not paying rent; also cracking down on housing-as-investments[1] sounds good to me, a layman, though apparently it wouldn't be enough[2] in our case, supply just needs to increase)—but I'm sure that other, less drastic societal changes would also be sufficient. For example, medium to large businesses could fund any open-source projects they make direct use of[3]. With the likes of OpenCollective[4][5] and GitHub Sponsors[6], the only roadblocks to adopting such a policy are corporate red tape and corporate greed. (And if it leads to smaller SBOMs, well, that's just a bonus as far as I'm concerned.)

All that said, I was actually referring to individuals (who aren't necessarily developers) choosing which software to use. Over the last 20 years, we've all taken free downloads and sign-ups for granted, ignorant to that whole "if you're not paying, you're the product" thing, and a lot of us now have a $500+ supercomputer in our pockets which is to some extent owned by a tech giant and not its nominal owner. It's apparent that such centralised platforms have some intrinsic problems with regards to users' freedom. That's what I'm cautioning against—not the idea of selling your programming labour to a business, which is fine.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_property_bubble#Foreign_investment_in_residential_property (This article is outdated. From a quick web search, it seems…

Hi all, I'm Lauren Gardner, the Executive Director of Open Source Collective (OSC). I wanted to share my gratitude for all of the conversation and help supporting the projects in flux after the announcement that OCF is dissolving.

To clarify: only OCF is closing down. This does not impact all the FOSS and OSS projects hosted in the Open Source Collective. While OCF hosts several projects that need c3 status, the bulk of the projects are hosted on the c6 OSC and are supported and can receive contributions as usual. The maintainers of the projects employed by OSC have not been impacted.

Because OSC is a c6, projects currently hosted by OCF (a c3) can not transfer their funds to us, so I'd like to re-share a message from Pia, the co-founder and CEO of Open Collective.

--- Ask: We have built a matching tool to connect collectives in OCF to potential fiscal hosts (on AND off the open collective platform) and a CRM to track their status and support. We are asking all fiscal hosts who can take on some of these groups to reach out so we can add them to the matching tool. We are tagging collectives based on locale, mission, and size at the moment, but we can expand to language (python, javascript, etc) for example or other tags.

Please reach out to support@opencollective.com directly with resources or questions

Open Collective's statement can be found here: https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-dissolution/ —

And if you have any questions for…

OpenCollective used to be much more transparent about how this was handled, but I don't think the math has actually changed much over the years:

Open Source Collective has a 10% fee. To my understanding, 5% of that used to go to OSC itself and 5% of it used to go to OpenCollective. OSC is stable, and still around, so I assume this math continues to work fine, but they simplified the view of it to just say "10% Host Fee" now, which includes both OSC and OC's portions.

However, you'll notice Open Collective Foundation is only charging 5%! That means, even assuming OCF was getting better pricing than OSC (another arguably internal fiscal host), there's almost no margin for OCF to operate.

It looks like OCF wasn't billing enough to cover what is otherwise probably a pretty reasonable platform cost.

EDIT: Actually, even crazier, it looks like OCF became 5% because OpenCollective gave OCF free service starting in 2020: https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-platform-is-moving-on-to-0-fees-for-charitable-collectives/

I think https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-dissolution/ is a better link.

It also seems “Open Collective Foundation” is shutting down, and “Open Collective” is a super-organization which contains a lot of sibling organizations (“Open Source Collective”, “Open Collective Europe”). And most of the entities getting donations through OCF can simply move to other organizations (hopefully automatically keeping existing sponsors), although others have to find a non-OC organization because they have extra requirements? The whole situation seems strange and technical.