the real person involved) at the other end of the deal, for all counterparties. I would agree that the laws surrounding money laundering and terrorism financing in the EU are pretty heavy handed.Īn example: a financial firm is to check the UBO (ultimate benificiary owner, i.e. If this catches on, there could even be an aggregator website that publishes monthly reports of all participating open source projects' financial status, with charts, flourishing projects, projects in distress, etc, and links for potential donors to click to donate. Many widely-used OS projects are not run by not-for-profits but rather by individuals.īut I really like the idea of a standard financial report in the github repo, are there any existing standards we could use for this? Like from the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) or similar? This is a great idea, particularly if there were some way for solo maintainers to flag/indicate that they're having financial problems and so close to abandoning the OS project for a better-paying job. > This episode, and previous ones with NumPy, Octave and other open-source projects have got me thinking: would it be worth adopting Swedish-style radical transparency and publishing a project's financial status and balance in a standardized format, so that it could become a standard item in a Github repo? There's tons of work being done without finance or monetization of any kind that could definitely benefit from both, but where the doers don't wish to be distracted by the questions that surround maximizing ROI.Ĭould a fully transparent non-profit or non-extractive funding model attract interest and participation from investors, patrons, and commercial sales people who understand and like financial infrastructure well enough to support the specialist producer rather than just maximizing short-term return - in other words, to share some of the structural benefits of working within a firm without the authoritarian and political pressures that normally accompany employment? Because many open source innovators aren't motivated by money, they often don't have a clear vision of how money could help them, and avoid dealing with it because the pursuit of it will take up too much of their head space and distract them from the artistic/ design/ development/ investigative/ scientific/ whatever work they are doing.
When they do run into a cash crunch, it's embarrassing for them and potential donors have to evaluate the project in the light of a financial failure rather than its best aspects, albeit a tiny failure of cash flow rather than the epic fails of overconfident commercial bets.Īnd there lies a secondary problem. Too often projects die for lack of interest or slow down for lack of funding and it's not obvious because many people don't like asking for money, especially if making money isn't their primary goal.
This episode, and previous ones with NumPy, Octave and other open-source projects have got me thinking: would it be worth adopting Swedish-style radical transparency and publishing a project's financial status and balance in a standardized format, so that it could become a standard item in a Github repo? Very good of PIA to sponsor this worthy project.