WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:11.520 Hello everyone, we're starting with the next session, which is a panel discussion about 00:11.520 --> 00:14.960 experiences of being funded for your software. 00:14.960 --> 00:20.160 Paloma is going to moderate and she will introduce all the fundees. 00:20.160 --> 00:24.680 Hello, check in in how everyone doing it's lunchtime. 00:24.680 --> 00:26.680 I'm not, I'm good. 00:26.680 --> 00:27.680 Thank you. 00:27.680 --> 00:28.680 I'm good. 00:28.680 --> 00:29.680 I'm good. 00:29.840 --> 00:32.360 So thank you for being here and for the interest. 00:32.360 --> 00:33.360 I'm guessing. 00:33.360 --> 00:34.360 Yes. 00:34.360 --> 00:35.360 How are you? 00:35.360 --> 00:41.720 I'm guessing there's a lot of curiosity nowadays, you know, well open source has grown a lot. 00:41.720 --> 00:47.000 Everything has been changing a lot and we want that to make a profession, we want that 00:47.000 --> 00:53.360 to make it solid sustainable and we have to think a lot of those formula people over here 00:53.360 --> 00:58.160 because they have been going through this journey and this is what we learn a little 00:58.160 --> 00:59.160 bit. 00:59.160 --> 01:03.640 What the heck does a funding means for an open source community for a project, is this necessary? 01:03.640 --> 01:08.200 It's not, how do I choose for one and things alike? 01:08.200 --> 01:09.200 Is that really helpful? 01:09.200 --> 01:11.760 Should I avoid money and just burn it? 01:11.760 --> 01:14.120 What should we do? 01:14.120 --> 01:21.200 And we have a one hour short time for a bunch of people and we start with short introductions 01:21.200 --> 01:26.360 so we can know them a little bit better and a little bit of their paths and we follow 01:26.360 --> 01:27.920 with simple discussion. 01:27.920 --> 01:34.760 As we have a nice warm crowd over here, pressing questions, discussions, we can try to 01:34.760 --> 01:40.920 figure that out, we can run also microphones, stop talking, so let's get started with 01:40.920 --> 01:48.760 the easy print. 01:48.760 --> 01:57.920 So I everyone, I'm Lucy and I'm Guil, and we work on the easy print and it doesn't 01:57.920 --> 02:26.920 work, but we're both French IT engineer and I think it doesn't work, so we're both 02:26.920 --> 02:32.080 French IT engineer and we work on a library called Wiziprint which is a Python library 02:32.080 --> 02:40.840 which transform HTML and CSS into PGF and so we really like a specification and food. 02:40.840 --> 02:43.840 And so what is Wiziprint? 02:43.840 --> 02:53.840 Already say that and so it's like a browser but instead of putting the output inside window, 02:53.920 --> 03:01.280 putting inside a PGF so you have your HTML and you have nice invoices, report, whatever 03:01.280 --> 03:05.600 you want to generate. 03:05.600 --> 03:14.040 So a bit of a story about Wiziprint, Wiziprint started in 2011, the goal was to automate document 03:14.040 --> 03:21.760 generation at this time, Wiziprint was created inside French company, setting project 03:21.760 --> 03:30.840 to make sense to people and we try several stuff like a world-like office, Lattec, Fire 03:30.840 --> 03:37.600 Fox and so on but it's kind of limited to do all the page feature and also to have something 03:37.600 --> 03:45.200 who looks nice because if you ask a designer to make a Lattec document really nice, I think 03:45.200 --> 03:47.720 that don't like you after that. 03:47.720 --> 03:58.520 So Wiziprint was created in 2011, after that we became W3C member and Wiziprint gained some 03:58.520 --> 04:08.280 stars on GitHub and until this time it was just a project inside the company and it's in 04:08.360 --> 04:15.920 2020 when we both left the company to work on Wiziprint almost full-time. 04:15.920 --> 04:23.600 During the time at the company, the Open Patreon account to get some donation but they didn't 04:23.600 --> 04:32.720 put in place a lot of marketing stuff to talk about it so at best it was $178 per month 04:32.720 --> 04:41.600 so not a lot of money to eat every day and so in 2020 October we launched Kobuyon 04:41.600 --> 04:44.160 because the French and we like food. 04:44.160 --> 04:49.200 We have the goal of leaving from Fries Software from there so we can talk about the source 04:49.200 --> 04:54.200 of income, not the Patreon account. 04:54.200 --> 05:00.240 So we try to get some money using different strategies, some of them are software development, 05:00.240 --> 05:05.720 we wrote some code and we get paid to add new features in Fries Software and that's 05:05.720 --> 05:06.720 pretty nice. 05:06.720 --> 05:14.320 We also paid to integrate Wiziprint in the different stacks our users have. 05:14.320 --> 05:18.760 We developed Wiziprint software, we helped users to use the software and that's useful 05:18.760 --> 05:24.080 because creating HTML and CSS is hard and when you want to generate some beautiful 05:24.080 --> 05:29.920 documents with it, well we have to find some people that can do this and that's us. 05:30.400 --> 05:35.800 We do some consulting, help people understand how it works and how they can use Wiziprint 05:35.800 --> 05:37.800 in a nice way. 05:37.800 --> 05:43.480 We got donations with a sponsoring system, some companies give us some money that's really 05:43.480 --> 05:45.600 really useful. 05:45.600 --> 05:52.760 We got some grants to from NLNet which is incredible so if you just amazing check what 05:52.760 --> 05:59.720 they do, it's cool and we also offer support so that if some users have some problems 05:59.720 --> 06:05.000 that can just send a mail and they're sure that we'll answer their questions quickly 06:05.000 --> 06:08.960 so that's how we get the money. 06:08.960 --> 06:14.000 There are other things we tried or we don't want to try. 06:14.000 --> 06:19.400 Setting software is not something we're interesting because we like to write Fries Software 06:19.400 --> 06:25.720 and it's complicated for us to separate what could be sold and what couldn't. 06:25.720 --> 06:32.440 The same for plugins, there are lots of projects that works with a close source plugins 06:32.440 --> 06:36.400 but we don't want to do this even it's okay. 06:36.400 --> 06:44.200 We could offer training also but nobody asked us maybe once but it's not a real source 06:44.200 --> 06:52.080 and last we could build something online so that people can send HTML and CSS and we send 06:52.080 --> 06:53.800 the PDF back. 06:53.800 --> 06:59.080 But that's complicated but there's just the two of us so writing with the print is complicated 06:59.080 --> 07:00.080 enough. 07:00.080 --> 07:05.680 We don't want to maintain an online platform so that's it. 07:05.680 --> 07:10.680 Thanks. 07:10.680 --> 07:25.200 Well we are the general foundation in Mariamachadas part of the Board of Directors 07:25.200 --> 07:30.360 long time community member. 07:30.360 --> 07:37.200 My name is Sri Ram Ram Krishna I am a part of the fundraising team I've been a former director 07:37.200 --> 07:46.920 of the GNOME Foundation and I've been with this project since it's inception in 1997. 07:46.920 --> 07:49.960 I guess I'll speak to my slides here. 07:49.960 --> 07:54.000 There's a lot of stuff on this slide so I'm going to let you all read it and I'll tell 07:54.000 --> 07:55.320 my our story. 07:55.320 --> 08:05.360 So GNOME is what I consider one of the foundational projects in an era when open source 08:05.360 --> 08:14.840 and free software were just getting started and the mid to late 90s and it's very likely 08:14.840 --> 08:19.360 at some point they're using software that was built by us. 08:19.360 --> 08:25.880 We did an incredible amount of engineering in those early days to build the human interface 08:25.880 --> 08:28.400 to hardware. 08:28.400 --> 08:38.600 So this is our purpose is to build a desktop and a human interface that is great to use 08:38.600 --> 08:45.920 easy to use and consistent and it's designed. 08:45.920 --> 08:51.400 But in order to complete our mission we need to create a foundation because as the project 08:51.400 --> 09:00.800 grew over time we need to find ways to fund infrastructure, getting people to conferences, 09:00.800 --> 09:11.240 organizing conferences and various other things that to build a sustainable ecosystem. 09:11.240 --> 09:20.200 So in that regard we set up this foundation and currently the foundation consists of 09:20.200 --> 09:27.560 a interim on paid position for an executive director to full time paid positions for a 09:27.560 --> 09:34.280 director of program management and an infrastructure engineer and administrative assistant. 09:34.280 --> 09:41.720 In the early days because we were a foundational project we had actually quite a bit of investment 09:41.760 --> 09:54.640 from lots of corporations and companies and so forth and we mostly dependent on those primarily 09:54.640 --> 10:08.280 then we did endos early days but as time moved on and ecosystems change right and as open source 10:08.360 --> 10:16.200 became more involved in infrastructure, code as infrastructure, interest in the desktop 10:16.200 --> 10:26.200 wind and so we find ourselves as less is paid to our project and we need to find new ways 10:26.200 --> 10:35.640 to fund our ecosystem and so now we're shifting our patterns to one time of donations and 10:35.720 --> 10:44.920 basically community driven donations but mostly focused on recurring donations. So that's who we are. 10:46.040 --> 10:51.320 Right now the growing process consists of 200 developers working on the growing platform and as I said 10:51.320 --> 10:58.920 it's important another you're probably using some part of our technology if you're using 10:58.920 --> 11:06.760 either on Linux on a server or on a client. So that's me. 11:15.720 --> 11:20.920 Thank you. Hello everyone. My name is Gabor Sarnyash. I'm here to talk about the funding 11:20.920 --> 11:26.280 of the Dark Daily project. I am not a founder of the Dark Daily project and the related company 11:26.280 --> 11:31.720 Dark Daily Labs but I've worked at Dark Daily Labs and I have been around long enough for the project to 11:31.720 --> 11:39.080 know about it. So first I would like to convince you that databases are kind of a unique type of software. 11:39.080 --> 11:45.720 Databases are fundamental building blocks and companies put their most valued data into databases. 11:45.720 --> 11:51.400 It's often the primary source of truth and your database really shouldn't crash and even if it 11:51.400 --> 11:57.800 does it should still keep the data intact and recoverable. So it's fair to say that they are 11:57.800 --> 12:04.840 difficult to make. They also have to be feature-rich and this together is that it's about 10 12:04.840 --> 12:10.840 plus person years to create a database system. If you don't believe me here is a slide from Mike Stombracur 12:10.840 --> 12:16.600 the founder of Postgres. He said that a database from production to production readiness is about 12:16.600 --> 12:23.880 20 million dollars to develop. This is more about a hundred percent years. So it's difficult to do 12:23.880 --> 12:29.640 a database and it's definitely not possible to do it with a group of volunteers. It's what 12:29.640 --> 12:36.600 of upfront investment and even if you do succeed in this new era of cloud systems there is always 12:36.600 --> 12:43.080 the risk that your shiny open source database system gets taken by a cloud vendor. They package 12:43.080 --> 12:49.240 it into their existing ecosystem and start selling it as a database as a service and take a lot 12:49.240 --> 12:55.000 of your revenue with them. This is obviously quite a problem. It's especially a problem if you 12:55.000 --> 13:00.520 fund your development using venture capital because if you do that you give up the ownership 13:00.520 --> 13:06.040 some ownership of your product to your investors and after a while those investors will want to 13:06.040 --> 13:12.360 have returns on their investments and they will not be happy to see a big cloud provider taking 13:12.360 --> 13:19.080 all the revenue from the software that they have fund. This of course is kind of an inevitable 13:19.080 --> 13:24.520 rock pool for this project. This happened for example with Redis. What happened with Redis 13:24.520 --> 13:31.800 is a series of real licensing instances over the last couple of years. Redis started with 13:31.800 --> 13:38.440 BSD but now it has three different licenses. Two of them are known as OSI approved 13:38.440 --> 13:45.160 and just source available licenses. Similar things happened to Redis' module system and if you 13:45.160 --> 13:50.040 are a company and you would like to pick a database system that you trust to store your data in, 13:50.040 --> 13:55.000 this just does not spark confidence. This is not really what you want to see. At this point you 13:55.000 --> 14:00.600 would may want to consider a closed source or alternative that is at least more planable and stable. 14:00.600 --> 14:05.640 This is not unique to Redis. This happened with MongoDB. This happened with Elastic 14:05.720 --> 14:11.160 and a bunch of other database systems like D graph that went through four licenses in its lifetime. 14:12.120 --> 14:18.600 So VC money is difficult. The other model that you can do is the ecosystem model. This is obviously 14:18.600 --> 14:23.640 done by Postgres. We all know and love Postgres. I think it's fair to agree that it's a very successful 14:23.640 --> 14:30.040 project but this needs a long runway to get going. Postgres has its roots in academia and it's 14:30.040 --> 14:36.200 a 30 plus years old project so it takes a long time to build up that network of companies and once 14:36.200 --> 14:41.880 you do that you are actually quite resilient. If a cloud vendor takes your system you can even 14:41.880 --> 14:48.120 benefit from growing the ecosystem but it is difficult to steer a shape that this many companies. 14:48.760 --> 14:54.600 And the final model is Boost trapping. This maybe is popularized by SQLite which is one of the most 14:54.920 --> 15:01.080 deployed pieces of software ever. SQLite was originally developed by a single developer and funded 15:01.080 --> 15:08.600 by various US Navy and General Dynamics Fund. This is the model that we used for DugDB. What is 15:08.600 --> 15:15.720 DugDB? DugDB is an in-process analytical database system that supports SQL. It's MIT licensed and 15:15.720 --> 15:21.800 it has it roots in academia. It was developed at CWA. I'm stood up by Johannes Moulison and Mark Rasford. 15:22.440 --> 15:30.120 And at this day it's a widely successful database project with over a million downloads per day 15:30.120 --> 15:36.120 and over 300,000 unique visitors every day. But it wasn't easy to get here and it still isn't 15:36.120 --> 15:42.040 easy to find a project like this. We tried something called the DugDB Foundation which was a 15:42.040 --> 15:50.200 non-profit but that holds the intellectual property, the trademark of DugDB and also accepts donations 15:50.280 --> 15:56.280 and it turns out that the latter part doesn't really work. It is very difficult to operate an 15:56.280 --> 16:01.960 organization like this because if you provide any services in exchange for those donations, 16:01.960 --> 16:08.600 that is a no-go in the eyes of the tax authority. And even though we could collect some donations, 16:08.600 --> 16:14.760 it's only enough to maybe fund one or to developers not enough to have a dynamically developing 16:14.760 --> 16:21.240 database product. What did work for us is DugDB Labs. This is a boost rep company based in Amsterdam. 16:21.960 --> 16:27.400 What had with this is that the project was already known in open source and we already had customers 16:27.400 --> 16:35.080 lining up to get services from this company. This company has today grown to about 30 people and this 16:35.080 --> 16:40.520 is working in what you could label as the red hat model. So it develops an open source piece of 16:40.520 --> 16:47.960 software. It provides services around it. It provides support, consultancy, future prioritization, 16:47.960 --> 16:54.520 and so on. And as a bonus, we also work with other companies for example mother Dug. DugDB Labs 16:54.520 --> 17:00.520 owns shares in mother Dug and mother Dug has a big consulting contract with DugDB Labs and then 17:00.520 --> 17:05.880 mother Dug can develop their own database as a service. So the incentives are clearly lined out. 17:05.880 --> 17:11.800 DugDB Labs is working on open source and mother Dug is working on a closed source cloud database 17:11.800 --> 17:17.160 system. And overall this has been going well so far and I will be happy to discuss this in the 17:17.160 --> 17:21.480 coming debate. And now we're at last a k-z-smaku. 17:21.480 --> 17:48.840 Hi, I'm Gium, creator of Macoon. So it's not a raccoon. It's an API-moking tool. Sandboxing virtualization 17:48.840 --> 17:57.880 that I created more than eight years ago. And no, I'm the maintainer, main maintainer, founders, 17:57.880 --> 18:05.480 slash creators, slash benevolent dictator for life or something. So it does API-moking mostly. 18:07.080 --> 18:12.040 And also the subtitle is sustainability for the rest of us. I think it's important. There is sometimes 18:12.040 --> 18:19.080 a bias toward massive open source projects. So sometimes we forget, we know the industry numbers. 18:19.640 --> 18:25.480 We forget that it's not good, right here. I mean everything is messed up. I should have put that first. 18:25.480 --> 18:32.120 The numbers are really not good. And we have massive open source projects that can make us 18:32.120 --> 18:37.160 for good that most of the time it's only one or two person. They are burning out. They have a 18:37.160 --> 18:44.600 no money. And the project will be probably dead in some years. So still, we have decent numbers. 18:44.600 --> 18:50.440 So eight years old, eight thousand GitHub stars, vanity metrics. Nearly one million downloads, 18:51.080 --> 18:56.840 thousands of monthly active users, even if it doesn't mean anything really. We were backed by 18:56.840 --> 19:03.000 GitHub accelerator in 2023, which was nice. And we are used by a lot of big companies. 19:03.560 --> 19:09.960 I think for example, what are from Germany? There are 20 teams using the tool. They are contributing 19:09.960 --> 19:17.720 just a little bit. That's already nice, but it's used. What I discovered when trying to, 19:18.760 --> 19:24.280 and sometimes I say monetize, and then I'm like, oh, it's open source, sorry. It's not monetization. 19:24.280 --> 19:30.280 Still, we have to found our work, our labor on this project, the maintenance, the, you know, 19:30.280 --> 19:35.720 the nights, the bugging things, the bugging things in the train when I was coming here this morning. 19:36.440 --> 19:42.920 And what I discovered is that when the popularity is massive, it's easier. I saw that with tailwind, 19:42.920 --> 19:49.320 viewed JS. Of course, there are a lot of examples, Doug DB. And I wish one day we would be like you. 19:50.360 --> 19:56.440 But when you are like a smallish, mediumish project, it's definitely not small. It's definitely 19:56.440 --> 20:03.400 not massive. And we are not backed by a famous company. It's hard to get public funding because 20:03.400 --> 20:09.000 we are used in a lot of companies, but it's not maybe critical, or, you know, it's not an 20:09.000 --> 20:14.600 critical infrastructure. So it's harder to get public grants, for example. So what I also discovered, 20:15.000 --> 20:19.960 and what what can we do when it's like that. I also discovered that there is one different 20:19.960 --> 20:24.520 receipt for each project. And I think we will, we will see that we all are very, very different 20:24.520 --> 20:31.800 models. We tried use of donations, which is great. We are always super grateful for each donation. 20:31.800 --> 20:37.160 It's, it's fantastic, but it doesn't pay the bills. It's, it's very complicated. The next step was, 20:38.040 --> 20:41.560 and I put that in the same bucket. So company sponsorship and support contracts. 20:42.360 --> 20:47.880 For me, the most natural next move was to ask the companies using the tool to pay for it, or to 20:47.880 --> 20:54.280 give something back. Because they save time. They deploy it in their infrastructure. They run 20:54.280 --> 21:00.280 test against the API mock. It's working well, etc. So, you know, more security, more of everything. 21:01.560 --> 21:05.000 It's very complicated. Sponsorship, it's complicated. That will be the first 21:06.440 --> 21:12.040 the easiest thing to put in place. You know, by the way, you can put your logo and, you know, 21:12.120 --> 21:17.560 you give back. Then you are talking to the marketing team, you know, and they're like, 21:17.560 --> 21:23.000 oh, well, what is your click-through rate? How many pages do you have? Oh, you want 200 per month, 21:23.000 --> 21:29.720 but you know, we are paying that for, we are paying 500 for UGS, but they have 500 billions pages, 21:29.720 --> 21:34.040 and you have what? And you're like, yeah, okay, you know, but, and what is the click-through rate? 21:34.040 --> 21:39.320 Oh, we are not tracking that, because, you know, privacy, friendly, etc. It's very complicated. 21:39.400 --> 21:44.440 So, we have some sponsors. We are really grateful for that, but it's not working that well. 21:44.440 --> 21:50.520 We tried super contract. Same. Really hard. Maybe because it's a developer testing tool. 21:50.520 --> 21:56.920 It's not that critical. I mean, it's critical sometime, but if it's broken, you have time to fix it, 21:56.920 --> 22:04.120 and maybe a super contract is harder to justify, you know, to your n plus 1 or something. 22:05.000 --> 22:11.480 And for sponsorships, super contracts, you have multi-active users, you know, companies 22:11.480 --> 22:15.480 using it, you try to contact them on LinkedIn, and suddenly you are a salesperson, and it's 22:15.480 --> 22:21.240 hopeful, and they goes to, and to answer, and they say, you know, it's so complicated. I will have to escalate 22:21.880 --> 22:28.120 10 levels to get an approval of something, so it's really complicated. And I nearly finished. 22:28.760 --> 22:33.320 Pay for features. It didn't work for us, but you know, maybe it will. I would like to do that. 22:33.960 --> 22:40.520 And then we finally set it up on a proper commercial offering. So, we are building a cloud, 22:41.480 --> 22:46.600 SaaS, hosted version. Of course, it's all full, because now you answer, 22:46.600 --> 22:52.120 from compliance questionnaires, you know, sub to summer, and all the things you don't want to do. 22:52.120 --> 22:59.560 So, it's a nightmare, but no, it pays the bills, and the company is a lot of paying for something 22:59.560 --> 23:08.440 that looks like very traditional IT contract, something. Yeah, and that's not my little 23:08.440 --> 23:15.480 later slide, but I will stop there. I think providing more things shouldn't be the only way to 23:15.720 --> 23:20.760 find the open source. Sometimes, I mean, we should be able to just work and maintain the thing, 23:21.320 --> 23:28.120 and it should be already something, you know, that we could monetize, let's say. And yeah, 23:28.120 --> 23:32.520 and the solutions, that's for the panel. So, and that's me. And that's it. Thank you. 23:33.080 --> 23:39.080 APPLAUSE 23:41.560 --> 23:52.760 So, from just like a little, yes or no questions, from your, from all the models that you mentioned, 23:52.760 --> 23:58.120 that are quite different from the nature of the project, but also from the need of what you want. 23:58.200 --> 24:05.080 So, just a yes or no, from the model you're using now, how many of you do you think you reach 24:05.640 --> 24:10.360 a sustainable model? If it is the as your razor hand. 24:15.400 --> 24:18.360 Yes, so for us it's a sustainable model. 24:20.440 --> 24:25.000 So, from all the projects, we found one, because we kind of showed a lot of 24:25.880 --> 24:32.760 differences in between how much we're searching for it, and you show very well. And when you're, 24:32.760 --> 24:38.120 so the next question that I want to hear individually, it's when you are looking for a funding 24:38.120 --> 24:45.640 model, what actually do you want to be fun? Because what everyone is saying is that no one wants to 24:45.640 --> 24:52.840 have a company as we know it. We're trying to build a different type of thing that it doesn't 24:52.840 --> 24:59.640 fit into the business model as it is, although we force ourselves to try to get this money, 24:59.640 --> 25:04.600 as you said. That's why they pay for it. That's what they know. So, what is it? What is this thing 25:04.600 --> 25:09.560 that we need to fund? What do you search when you're looking for a funding model? 25:11.960 --> 25:20.040 Maybe I can quickly answer, I mean, from my point of view, like I said, when I finished my 25:20.040 --> 25:28.360 show, I think we should be able to get paid for maintaining a tool because it's already providing 25:28.360 --> 25:36.440 value. So, what I tried for a long time was to find a funding model where I could be paid for doing 25:36.440 --> 25:43.880 that because I already provided value. And everything I read everywhere, all the advice I got was 25:43.880 --> 25:51.000 to create a secret repository for paying people with extra content, extra marketing, extra tutorials, 25:51.000 --> 25:57.560 extra everything. And finally, we do an extra software as a service. And it's a fantastic 25:57.560 --> 26:05.560 adventure, but it's way more complicated than finding what a fund Mercedes spends who are using 26:05.560 --> 26:12.280 the tool and say, okay, you are maybe saving $10,000 a year, $20,000. If you give $500 a year, 26:12.360 --> 26:16.680 and 10 company does that, we are nearly there, I mean, not completely, but nearly there. 26:22.920 --> 26:31.000 So, yeah, for the yes, no part, it's almost in between because most of 26:32.040 --> 26:40.040 money comes from working on with the print, but we do other things outside, like teaching, for example, 26:40.120 --> 26:46.520 so we have two main source of income with the print and the teaching. And for the funding, 26:46.520 --> 26:55.800 like, yeah, kind of same maintaining and having time to add feature and doing bug fixes, 26:55.800 --> 27:00.360 because when you have people coming, like, this is very important. You fix this bug now, 27:01.080 --> 27:07.480 it breaks my production and it's a Sunday, so yeah, great, but no, we have life sometimes, you know? 27:08.120 --> 27:15.240 So, yeah, I think the ability to book time and use it to book time, you need money for that. 27:22.920 --> 27:29.080 Right now, as a fundraising, but we are doing this, we have our advisory board, 27:30.040 --> 27:38.680 there are companies who gave us their feedback and also gave us an amount per year, 27:38.680 --> 27:46.840 but also we are, since last summer, we have a website for recurrent donations or one 27:46.840 --> 27:53.640 donation. We are moving forward to have our recurrent donations, to have an sustainable, 27:54.120 --> 28:03.160 to have a better idea what we can count on on a monthly basis and be able to plan better. 28:04.360 --> 28:13.720 As a foundation, we provide to our project, things like legal protection, infrastructure, 28:14.680 --> 28:21.640 we help with many other things, and also, with that money, we would like to 28:22.280 --> 28:29.240 be able to support our community, not only through events or help them travel to meet 28:29.240 --> 28:36.200 and progress on the project, but we would like to be able to, in some point, to fund 28:36.520 --> 28:49.560 a part of the project that otherwise would not be able to progress or they have less light, 28:49.560 --> 28:57.400 there are less flacy, let's say, so that there are very much needed and having recurrent 28:57.400 --> 29:06.360 donors and having a better idea what we would be, our monthly revenue will help us to do that, 29:06.360 --> 29:13.960 so we are focusing to go there to be able to grow our project and better be a better project. 29:17.160 --> 29:22.280 I'm just because you did an particular answer, because for your understanding that the 29:22.280 --> 29:27.800 B has achieved some sort of sustainability, when you are thinking about the funding, I know you mentioned 29:27.800 --> 29:33.320 things like the freedom, not to be at the mercy of an interceptor, for example, 29:33.320 --> 29:40.840 but because you're a mix, how do you balance to make this stability, but also when you're 29:40.840 --> 29:48.120 searching for your searching for everyone should be paid or there is a mix between that and volunteer 29:48.120 --> 29:52.920 labor, how it is this funding used at the end to support this project? 29:53.960 --> 29:59.800 So our long-term goal is to have longevity for the project and to have it not only maintained, 29:59.800 --> 30:05.400 but also dynamically and rapidly developed over the years and so far this has been working, 30:06.200 --> 30:12.920 and I think what helps Doug Dewey tremendously is that it is providing significant 30:12.920 --> 30:19.800 cost savings for companies, so some of the cloud database vendors, the cloud data warehouses, 30:19.800 --> 30:27.320 they do have a bad reputation for being very expensive and those we find online on social medias 30:27.320 --> 30:33.400 that people report amazing cost savings by switching from those services to local services like 30:33.400 --> 30:39.800 Doug Dewey, and then if some of that amount that was saved, they spend on a support contract for 30:39.880 --> 30:46.440 Doug Dewey, that makes the project sustainable and it still generates them significant cost savings, 30:46.440 --> 30:52.680 and what we try to achieve with Doug Dewey is that we have this core that is the 30:53.800 --> 30:59.080 central piece of the database, and it's covered by some community support, it's a SQL engine, 30:59.080 --> 31:04.920 it's a Python client, it's something that's essential, and then we have all these kind of 31:04.920 --> 31:11.240 extensions, five format support extensions, database connectors around it, and they have varying 31:11.240 --> 31:16.440 degrees of support, so obviously if you report that Doug Dewey crashes on a SQL query, 31:16.440 --> 31:21.320 that's covered by community support, but if you have this obscure five format with this specific 31:21.320 --> 31:28.840 cloud provider on the free BSD client, then you may have to pay up to get that fixed in a reasonable amount 31:28.840 --> 31:33.560 of time, and that allows it to segment the market based on the demand for support. 31:34.520 --> 31:43.960 And when I think that maybe Gium, the first Gium, could start answering because you are one person 31:43.960 --> 31:53.960 project, you are also like a very small project, how much of your time and resources, your 31:53.960 --> 32:01.320 internal resources are needed to find this funding models, and when you balance that for the 32:01.320 --> 32:07.560 energy and amount of time and resources, you need to do the work, how much is it is really 32:07.560 --> 32:14.680 important to keep on the pressure, the pressure of financial sustainability, or going more 32:14.680 --> 32:23.800 towards the community building or community engagement process? It's quite special for us, 32:23.800 --> 32:30.040 because we started during the COVID, and we didn't want to leave from fist of fair, 32:31.000 --> 32:37.240 we wanted to leave from fist of fair in three years, and as we needed to stay at home, 32:37.240 --> 32:41.720 we started to write a lot of content because that's all we could do, we couldn't work with 32:41.720 --> 32:47.720 your friends, we wanted to do this at the beginning, and so the clients came, just because they 32:47.720 --> 32:53.720 saw that we were offering some support on with the print, and so we don't spend much time 32:53.800 --> 33:01.960 trying to find clients in a normal way, we don't send mails, we don't buy ads everywhere, 33:03.560 --> 33:09.720 the clients see what we do, they often use the software, there are millions of users, 33:09.720 --> 33:15.240 so if just one person gives someone it's okay, we don't have to spend time to find clients, 33:16.200 --> 33:24.120 what's difficult for me is to switch from, I was working on the project for free, I was paid 33:24.120 --> 33:31.000 by my company, and then I have to write a bill, and they have to pay me for the same 33:32.200 --> 33:40.440 work I was doing for free before, and that was hard, hopefully Lucy says you must have a zero 33:40.440 --> 33:49.080 ad, because you can't live with that, and that's much of the burden I have to do is just yes, 33:49.800 --> 33:56.920 we have to get paid, and we have to find a way to get some money, so that's hard to answer the 33:56.920 --> 34:05.240 question, we don't spend time to find clients, but we have to work on the way, we share the 34:05.240 --> 34:11.000 knowledge we have, and get paid for that knowledge, and that's what's complicated, anything for us. 34:16.680 --> 34:20.680 I just want to complex file a little bit, so go in beauty norm on this question about 34:20.680 --> 34:26.040 what are searching for funding, what is internal capacity needed for searching for different types of 34:26.040 --> 34:32.440 funding, also how much there's different funding models that we have tried out, are the work 34:32.440 --> 34:38.520 and are not, have directly affected your core community and your users? 34:47.560 --> 34:56.200 The different ways of funding that we have tried is obviously, as I said, we have an 34:56.200 --> 35:06.280 unnecessary work who helps us to go through the year, let's say, we have done sponsorships, grants, 35:07.960 --> 35:15.560 and now we are doing, and yeah, one, frontend time, our contributors, our community have been 35:15.560 --> 35:28.360 on anything, I think the last, the way we are from racing at the moment, since last summer to 35:28.360 --> 35:35.640 reach out, not only to our closer community, but also to the non-close community, but also the 35:35.640 --> 35:45.640 users, we are using right now a pop-up, when every time we release a new version, we will 35:45.640 --> 35:54.840 say, hey, so you like our work, maybe you would like to also support, and with that we are 35:54.840 --> 36:02.040 reaching out people like my mom who have been using genome for the longest time, I have no idea 36:02.040 --> 36:10.600 that with the money, but also non-close community, also didn't know that we actually need money to 36:10.600 --> 36:21.640 be able to do our job, I think the latter, this new way to from race is the our backs also, as I 36:21.640 --> 36:32.040 said, we can achieve recurrence revenue, trust revenue, and not only revenue from our contributors, 36:32.840 --> 36:41.880 that should be always, I think, the objective, be able to reach out to our users, because 36:42.840 --> 36:51.240 yes, companies are using us, and that's important, but also our users, they are obtaining a 36:51.240 --> 37:03.400 product, which is safe for them to use, not only in a trusted product, but also in safety and privacy, 37:04.120 --> 37:11.800 I think now more than ever is very important to communicate that, so yeah, I don't know if I 37:11.800 --> 37:21.720 have answer. So I'll add one interesting, I guess anecdote or dimension to this, because we are a 37:21.720 --> 37:28.280 desktop, one of the funding things we did do is to put it in the minder, on the desktop to say, hey, 37:28.360 --> 37:39.160 this is a community-driven project, it's a nonprofit you're looking for funding, and one of the 37:39.160 --> 37:45.080 things that makes it effective, and this is initially done, because I want to give our other 37:45.080 --> 37:50.920 sister project, KDE, the credit for this, because they did this first, and it actually worked quite 37:50.920 --> 38:01.640 well. So putting that reminder, maybe once a year, did KDE quite a bit about the money that we 38:01.640 --> 38:09.240 are also trying, but for a lot of us, we're really privacy focused, so we were not sure whether 38:09.240 --> 38:15.880 putting a reminder like that, but the effective of that is, if you're doing funding and you're 38:15.960 --> 38:22.200 reaching out, you're only getting a portion of your audience, but people are running on a 38:22.200 --> 38:31.160 desktop, you're reaching somebody, let's say, who's installed Linux on their laptop, you get them, 38:31.160 --> 38:36.440 because they're not on social media, following Linux or anything like that, so one additional bit 38:38.840 --> 38:39.720 info there. 38:46.200 --> 39:00.600 So let's help, let's help, let's do a brainstorming exercise of imagination of like a 39:00.600 --> 39:05.480 radical creativity here and try to understand and get out of this, because right now I think 39:05.480 --> 39:09.880 most of our imaginations are very tied to what we know, which is business, which we're 39:09.880 --> 39:13.400 complaining about the companies, but it's hard for us to get out of this, that's why we're 39:13.400 --> 39:20.120 keep saying, well, I think we need to expand our capacity to understand how that model could be. 39:20.120 --> 39:27.720 So let's do a little bit of brainstorming, wishlist imagination of where we are, where we want to be, 39:27.720 --> 39:34.440 and how to get there with a little feature and reality. So if you were a project or someone listening 39:34.520 --> 39:41.560 right now and you're thinking, well, I know I know I need more, I know I'm not handling 39:42.360 --> 39:49.800 and I need more, but what is that what and how to get started? Should you apply for a grand 39:49.800 --> 39:56.840 to ask someone to sponsor me, how would it be the first steps and where would it be the main go to 39:56.920 --> 40:03.880 keep that not a daily check? I want to eat the next day, but a sustainable thing. 40:12.760 --> 40:19.640 It's hard to find one goal because a great idea is to have a diversity of 40:19.640 --> 40:25.160 source of income. If we have one idea that gives all the money, if the idea is not 40:25.160 --> 40:33.240 a good and we'll lose that money where that's so, what we can do to be sustainable is to find 40:33.240 --> 40:38.680 a lot of different sources of income and so a grand is a good idea that sponsorship is a good 40:38.680 --> 40:45.320 idea, but letting users pay, it's a good idea, new features is a good idea, so maybe the next step 40:45.320 --> 40:51.080 is to find all the next steps that we love out to do to find different sources of income, I think. 40:51.400 --> 40:59.400 When choosing a source of income to start, it's not something fixed and that doesn't move 40:59.400 --> 41:07.080 because if I don't do the slide with it, it extracts from a talk we did like two years ago 41:07.080 --> 41:12.680 with all different sources of income and it's not exactly the same because some stuff 41:12.680 --> 41:19.160 were in the, oh we do not earn money and now we use them, like for example the grand, 41:19.240 --> 41:26.200 it was complicated especially with all the administrative stuff and now we do that so it's not 41:26.200 --> 41:33.160 because you choose a way to finance the project that it's always till the same and you can add more 41:33.160 --> 41:40.360 way to earn money after, think to start with the things you are more comfortable with also. 41:40.360 --> 41:53.400 I would like to chime in regarding databases and foundational pieces of infrastructure, 41:53.400 --> 41:58.920 obviously this can be quite capital intensive to develop, but I think the whole push for 41:58.920 --> 42:03.720 European digital sovereignty is a very good opportunity, so if you have a project like this for 42:03.720 --> 42:10.040 example a database project, it's not that difficult to position that as part of European 42:10.040 --> 42:16.360 digital infrastructure and I'm personally quite skeptical of a big European cloud that could 42:16.360 --> 42:21.640 drive all the existing American cloud providers, I just don't see that growing out of the ground 42:21.640 --> 42:28.360 in the next five years so I think that you have to start with smaller building blocks, funding 42:28.360 --> 42:34.680 smaller components like a database system and then organically grow it out of that so if you're 42:34.680 --> 42:39.640 a project like that I think this is a good opportunity whether it is sustainable for the next 20 years 42:39.640 --> 42:49.000 that's to be seen. Yeah I agree with the public funding, I think it will only 42:50.680 --> 42:56.600 solve part of the problem as you say that a basis are more critical or use maybe in 42:56.600 --> 43:02.520 production so it's definitely more critical and when you have a big audience or a lot of users, 43:02.520 --> 43:08.760 maybe you have this critical mass and you can you know pray to to some public runs for a lot 43:08.760 --> 43:14.920 of projects I don't think it's realistic even if they are used in a lot of companies. I have a more 43:14.920 --> 43:21.960 radical idea that was suggested by friends of mine in open source too, maybe we should just ask 43:22.040 --> 43:29.640 people to pay for the software somehow. Now I mean directly and not just relying on good will 43:30.360 --> 43:39.400 even if I'm 100% convinced by open source and everything around it but I saw tools for some 43:39.400 --> 43:45.320 of developer tools published under an MIT license but considering that the binaries are not 43:45.400 --> 43:51.960 completely open source and they say pay for the binaries, build it from the repository and then 43:51.960 --> 43:59.080 use it as you wish and but if it's for commercial purpose because it was built you know by 43:59.080 --> 44:05.640 someone then there is an X-screen every week if it's for commercial purpose please pay for it. 44:05.640 --> 44:14.040 It's still under an MIT license. I have mixed feelings but still you know maybe it will help 44:14.040 --> 44:18.200 to ask people to pay directly and I know a lot of companies would be convinced and say oh my god 44:18.200 --> 44:23.880 that we need to be compliant. It's compliance is another question that is very important for them so 44:23.880 --> 44:29.400 maybe that's a thing to try I don't know. Sorry for the radical idea. 44:29.480 --> 44:47.560 I really don't know how to answer this like in the future when you are starting as a 44:47.560 --> 44:55.400 project and it's more or a small foundation or whatever your type is. 44:56.840 --> 45:05.320 There are in 13 aspects that maybe grants will be good for you but I see them a little bit 45:05.400 --> 45:17.880 limiting on time and on a scoop. So maybe for very concrete things that you need to 45:17.880 --> 45:26.440 develop or go further that will take you for a short period of time and that could be 45:26.440 --> 45:35.080 a good option but I still believe that you need to find a way to get the recurring revenue. 45:35.080 --> 45:39.480 That's what is going to make you sustainable. That's what is going to make you 45:40.200 --> 45:47.480 be able to plan ahead and to have big plans and big dreams and maybe achieve them. 45:48.440 --> 46:00.520 I agree in charging for corporate uses but also one of the things that open source 46:00.520 --> 46:10.840 gives is inclusivity to those parts of the world that cannot pay for 13 kinds of software. 46:10.840 --> 46:20.760 So also is kind of to maybe for 13 countries is easier for them to pay but also we need to think 46:20.760 --> 46:29.800 that the diversity that we can provide and they help that we can provide for 13 parts of the 46:29.800 --> 46:39.320 world that cannot pay for the software. I think it's a very good thing to think about also. 46:41.720 --> 46:45.160 Any less pressing thoughts for closing this? 46:49.800 --> 46:56.440 If you have, if not please help me thank this lovely people for sharing their experience. 47:05.320 --> 47:06.920 Anyone have a question? 47:10.840 --> 47:38.760 Thank you for sharing your experiences. It's great to see that all of your projects 47:39.400 --> 47:45.960 are of different size which I think is great opportunity to see your opinions. I would like to ask 47:45.960 --> 47:52.440 about the other side of funding and that is giving it to your developers and the members of your community. 47:53.560 --> 48:00.760 I would like to ask what is the, maybe for your project, what is the target scope that you're 48:00.760 --> 48:06.760 looking for. I hear there is a company, I hear there is a foundation for a very large project. 48:06.760 --> 48:13.320 I hear there is a small project for your different project.