Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
I want to publicly announce a change in my thinking. For many years I have promoted non-profits, especially foundations as a good way to keep FOSS (Free and Open Source) projects protected and effective.
Not any more. I am now leaning towards coops as the better vehicle. The cooperative approach allows for better distribution of power to those that do the work where foundations typically concentrate power on those with the money. This might become a long thread that'll take some time.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@fahrni Yep, it will land there too. In my experience starting a thread here helps me to gather comments, criticisms and replies that make the final blog post better :)
Rob Fahrni
@jwildeboer You do have a blog! This would be a great spot for that! 👍🏼
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@engravecavedave Sure.
CaveDave
@jwildeboer is it possible to have both? A non-profit which is a co-op?
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@MartyFouts Thank you for jumping to conclusions before I was able to even start laying out my arguments.
Marty Fouts
@jwildeboer As a retired member of the NetBSD foundation I strongly suggest that you are being far too simplistic in comparing foundations to coops. There’s nothing inherently superior in the structure of either and either can be well used or equally abused.
As always, it comes down to the individual people involved.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
A bit of background. I live in Germany and thus under EU regulations.In the EU we have the construct of an European Cooperative Society under Regulation 1435/2003. See https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/european-cooperative-society.html for an introduction and links to more details. We also have a coop (Genossenschaft) under German laws.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
Let's focus on teh working definition from the EU [1]:
"A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united to meet common economic, social, and cultural goals. They achieve their objectives through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise."
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
When it comes to foundations, the picture becomes very chaotic. Again, I live in Germany, where the common definition of a foundation is something like
"A foundation should not have commercial activities as its main purpose, but they are permitted if they serve the main purpose of the foundation. There is no minimum starting capital, although in practice at least €50,000 is considered necessary."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(nonprofit)#Germany
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
With that out of the way, lt me explain some uncomfortable axioms I use since many years.
#1: FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) needs stable funding. Making money with FOSS is not only perfectly fine, it is needed IMHO to keep FOSS alive and kicking. I don't want FOSS to be a hobby of the privileged that can spare time and energy to work on it. I want it to be sustainable and a source of income for those that do teh work.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
#2: Thus we need a structure that allows for offering paid services and fostering an environment that attracts and rewards developers and users in transparent and accessible ways. A commercial vehicle that isn't at risk of being controlled and abused by egoism and heroism.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
#3 This, IMHO, means that he construct must work in a way that is close to how FOSS is created. A community approach, where users and developers define the way forward. In democratic ways but also with money involved as that is needed to fulfil axiom #1. This is why I think coops are the better choice.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
Now to why I am not a foundation person anymore. From my direct and indirect experience, managing a foundation needs a very specific set of knowledge and experience that is not necessarily compatible with how FOSS communities work. It typically results in the foundation acting in ways that are good for foundations, but not really aligned with the needs of a FOSS community.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
(I'll leave it here for the moment as it is late in the evening and I am tired and need some sleep. Please do discuss and add to the thread! I'll be back tomorrow :)
Alexandre Oliva
GNU Too
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@tofticles Nailed it ;) That is one of my biggest problems with foundations. The disconnect due to the structural demands.
Tofticles
@jwildeboer Background: I was part of the crew that made Coding Pirates in Denmark - a non-profit teaching kids IT, broadly.
Which structure you should choose very much depends on what you want to achieve imo - for us, creating a foundation created a disconnect between the foundation and the volunteers - since much of the work in the foundation was fund-raising.. to pay their own salary.
I think, I see where you are going, but very interested in hearing your thoughts on coops.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@icaria36 Absolutely. That is the interesting part, IMHO. Coops allow a much broader scale from non-profit to for-profit implementations with various levels of member participation and influence compared to the foundation approach.
icaria36 🎶
@jwildeboer Interesting. Still the question is how the money arrives to finance the development. There are workers cooperatives, where workers must provide a service and/or apply for grants, crowdfunding, donations... There are consumers cooperatives where members must arrive to a critical mass to make the activity sustainable. And many hybrids. You can have a cooperative essentially running the same not-for-profit business model than a foundation, internally organized as a cooperative.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@mpotter Please feel free to add a link to that thread here!
Michael Potter
@jwildeboer I recently had a thread where I talked about spinning up worker co-ops with all the laid-off tech labor out there, and it was an interesting thread, but I'm finding myself a bit overwhelmed at the logistics of it all.
Many problems must be solved, and you touched on the biggest, that non-profits are often more enmeshed with the dysfunctional status quo than the solutions the future needs. Another is the dissipating or deflective energy that threads like this often encounter.
翠星石
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@tomjennings And when Cygnus was successful, the CEO proposed to take 10% f the total equity and buy a small company in the research triangle that tried to also make money with Open Source. He failed to convince his board. A few years later that company in teh research triangle took 10% of their equity and bought Cygnus. That company was Red Hat ;)
tom jennings
There's the model Cygnus Support used. They'd port a package to some platform, eg gcc or whatever, the client pays Cygnus to fix bugs that affect them, those bugs go into the source for everyone's benefit but the client gets to set priority and other bennies.
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@stk The correct choice is a complex, not a binary decision. My decision to use an eG might be wrong your your requirements and the other way round.
Stefan Kremer
@jwildeboer so why not chose the eG?
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@mpotter Do notice that I live in Europe and not the US, so our definitions of coops and non-profits are not the same and we don't have to deal with Trump directly ;)
Michael Potter
@jwildeboer I know it sounds like I'm really down on nonprofits, but some of the coolest organizations I know of are nonprofits, and even worker co-ops themselves will sometimes opt to incorporate as 501c3 .
There's also the incoming administrations' intent to demonize nonprofits, which means some of them must be effective, although I suspect at least 90% of the nonprofits hate is about Greenpeace and other climate-advocacy organizations.
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