For this litreview, we continued from p77 of Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure by Nadia Eghbal published on July 14, 2016, and finished reading the report. The first part of the report focused on the problems of our deteriorating digital infrastructure made up of open source projects and why they were having them. This second part focuses more on how some open source projects are sustaining themselves and how we can better help to support them in the future.

Some open source projects are able to monetize their project in some way. This is often done when a service can be provided such as hosting the running software or by providing enterprise support. For some projects this is not feasible and some projects will resort to consulting as a way to fund themselves. Another way to fund open source projects has been to post bounties on certain issues in an effort to fund contributors for their time. As the author points out this can result in people contributing for the wrong reasons and people doing a mediocre job then dropping off the face of the earth. A revenue stream that I found very interesting was the potential for paid licenses.

The general idea behind paid licenses is something in between a proprietary license and an open license. The biggest example of this kind of license is the Fair Source license, as mentioned in the report. This license allows free use and access to the source code up to a certain number of users; making it free and viewable source for personal and small business use but allows the creators to charge for large business use. The report mentions this as a way for a project to pay for itself but the author brings up that this is controversial. This license goes against the idea of open source by limiting the freedom to a certain point. It’s also not feasible for library or plugin projects. Although I don’t see this as helpful to open source projects as it is against it’s philosophy, I see this as a great way to have our code to be more open overall. We will always be in a world where proprietary software will exist (though I will gladly eat my words should that change). I see the Fair Source license as a way to get companies that would usually keep all of their code closed source to pick this license instead. It’s more of “something is better than nothing” kind of situation, where we can attempt to get companies who would consider open sourcing their software to use a fair source license to keep at least part of it free, but also re-assure them that they will be able to make money.

The author also mentions crowdfunding as a way to fund open source projects. Django is mentioned as a project that was able to successfully launch a kickstarter campaign to fund some database work. Crowdfunding campaigns are an interesting recent phenomenon. Essentially, someone creates content that explains what they would like to achieve and what you would get should you give money upfront to back the project. Supporting a project is no guarantee for it’s completion nor that if it fails you will get your money back. However, there have been many successful campaigns. I find crowdfunding interesting because it is a way for the common person to be a patron of the arts or an investor. You don’t have to be rich to fund a campaign. This is also part of the problem as these campaigns are generally aimed at middle class to low upper class people. There have been companies to back crowdfunding campaigns but it’s rare. I think though that this is a good option for medium sized projects to help get some stretches of work done.

There are other methods for funding open source projects such as companies sponsoring someone or putting one of their salaried employees on an open source project, usually one of the maintainers. There has been an increase in companies encouraging some of their employees on company time. I think that this is an effective way of combating the issue of having one maintainer and not having enough human resources. The author also mentioned foundations. I was specifically interested in the grants given out by the Mozilla foundation and Linux Foundation, who were both gathering funds to attempt to support infrastructure projects. I also think this is great as there are organizations that can research and attempt to figure out what is needed where the most and are large and notable, making it more likely for them to get funding from companies. Another method I found very interesting is through academic institutions. Research at universities can both start and support existing open source projects. This can help support the system by adding contributors and potentially supporting maintainers who teach or if the project can contribute to research. RIT’s open source community and FOSS minor are great instances of that. Our class, Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software, is a great way to get people introduced to open source software and encourage them to contribute. There is also a FOSS projects class where there are students working on, you guessed it, open source projects. By introducing open source to the curriculum they can increase the amount of contributors to open source.

The author also discusses how to help open source projects going forward. The main issues that were pointed out were raising awareness of the lack of support for our open source digital infrastructure, working with projects for improvement, and expanding the pool of contributors. I agree with the author’s assessment and believe that further campaigning to get companies involved and people aware of this problem. Overall, I feel this report is well written, especially for those who are not developers and is a good resource for those trying to raise awareness for this issue.