[kwlug disc.] Proposal: Free Software Buying Club

[Paul Nijjar]

Hoo boy. This is a long one. Here's the executive summary: I think it
might be beneficial if KWLUG were to start a monthly contribution to
free/open source software projects. I am not certain we should do this
and I don't personally have the capacity to run it all by myself, so I
am soliciting feedback and assistance.

=========

The recent discussion about the GFDL left me a bit uncomfortable. On
the one hand, Rob Day found some great documentation that he wanted to
give to his students. On the other, he was looking for ways to
distribute that documentation without paying $7.95 to the
documentation's author. Even if Rob had been able to find the PDF
available for download, wouldn't it be appropriate for him to donate
some of the money that he made from teaching those classes to the
author of that documentation, even given that the documentation
license does not mandate this? The students benefit from good
documentation, Rob benefits by getting access to this documentation,
and the original author is rewarded for his hard work in writing the
book. As it stands, somebody put long hours into writing good
documentation, and Rob builds his business by distributing this
documentation for free. That's fine, but it's clear from the author's
website that he hopes to make some money by selling these books.

That's not to pick on Rob Day too much. It's not my place to tell him
how to run his business, and in any case I suspect he singlehandedly
does more to keep the free software documentation industry alive than
pretty much anybody else at the LUG. (He probably keeps some bookshelf
manufacturer in business singlehandedly as well.) Certainly, I am no
better and probably a lot worse. Every day I log into my computer I
see the following message:

    Send bugreports, fixes, enhancements, t-shirts, money, beer & pizza
    to screen at uni-erlangen.de

but I haven't sent any of those things, despite the fact that
ever since Chris Frey gave a LUG presentation on the program I have
been indebted to the many ways it makes my life less unpleasant.

There are many more examples. It's an old and tiresome question: it's
great that you can get good karma by contributing to the public good,
but you have to eat and pay rent too, and free software (along with
many other kinds of volunteer or social-justice work) don't have the
kinds of incentives that make their practitioners as wealthy in the
money economy as they ought to be. That reduces the amount of effort
that goes into these endeavors, and gives them a social stigma of
being less important than "real" (i.e. paid) work.

I don't have a good long-term solution to this problem, but maybe we
can make some small difference in the short term. When it comes to
paying for software, I have noticed the following behaviours in
myself:
  - I am willing to pay for things before I have them, and reluctant
    to do so afterwards.

  - I use so much free software that the idea of paying for it creates
    a "Beggars in Spain"[0] problem: if I paid for any piece of software
    am I expected to pay for all of it? I use thousands and thousands
    of bits of software written by thousands and thousands of people!
    If I had to pay everybody I would go broke!

  - In order to pay for software I have to remember to pay for
    software. Going to the store to get the latest edition of Adobe
    Illustrator provides a convenient reminder to pay for the
    software: when I leave the store without paying, the nice policemen
    arrest me and put me in jail. I don't have such a reminder
    when I use apt-get.

  - Even the reminders I do get are inconvenient. For example,
    I often see PayPal links when I am visiting software homepages,
    but:
      * I don't use PayPal
      * My mind is focussed on other things when I visit their
        homepage (usually solving a problem)
      * When visiting the webpage I usually have not yet tried the
        software, and paying for software I haven't tried is a
        terrible idea.
    In other words, the reminders are inconvenient and come at the
    wrong time.

  - I am a stone-hearted freeloading cheapskate (I use Linux, after
    all) and if I gave any money at all it would be some insulting
    amount like $10.  The costs of writing up a money-order and
    mailing it out would easily come out to half that cost, and I
    worry about insulting the software author by sending such a piddly
    amount.

All of this amounts to empty rationalization. At the end of the day, I
don't have to pay for the software I use, so why should I? Well,
because if I don't then I am sending an incorrect signal about how
much I value the software. I am not participating in making sure more
free software gets written. That has lots of bad consequences:

  - Many good programmers (and documentation writers) will fall out of
    love with software ideology and go write proprietary Visual Basic
    scripts for money instead.

  - The more important projects will not be developed on a grassroots
    level, but rather by our New Corporate Best Friends at Sun, IBM,
    and elsewhere. It's great that Sun is funding OpenOffice
    development, but if we put all of our eggs in that basket then we
    who like free software are going to be in real trouble if the
    movement ever becomes untrendy. Sure: we can fork the code, but
    that's no good unless people are willing to develop it.

  - People who want to criticise free software point to us and call us
    a bunch of stone-hearted freeloading cheapskates.

You know where this is going, because I gave away the punchline at the
top of this document. I propose that KWLUG start a project that will
collect donations for free and open source projects, and then write a
cheque (or click a PayPal link) to give money to those projects every
month. Why in the world might this be a good idea?

  - We're a LUG. Most of us understand the value of FLOSS. Some of us
    make our livings using free software. We understand that free
    software has a cost, and we can use this to educate others about
    that.

  - It would give those of us who feel guilty about not paying money
    for software a structured way to donate money, which solves the
    problems of reminders. Then we can sleep better at night.

  - If several people contribute in a month, it makes our piddly
    donations seem more impressive. One person giving $10 is kind of
    sad; three people starts to look respectable, and 15 people
    seems significant (even though $150 is still less than you would
    pay for MS Office.)

  - It would be a convenient way for us to highlight some projects we
    feel are useful and relevant, thus spreading the gospel of good
    free software to others. This is a way to appreciate software
    after we already have downloaded it.

  - It might give our recipients a psychological boost, even if the
    financial contributions are not so impressive. A thank-you e-mail
    is nice (not that I have sent many of those, either..) but
    some cold hard cash in addition to a thank-you note is even nicer.

  - It focuses our efforts on paying for one project at a time, which
    deals with the "Beggars in Spain" problem a bit. We may not be
    giving money to everybody who deserves it, but we're doing
    something concrete every month.

  - It might start a meme. If other LUGs followed our lead then
    suddenly hundreds of people might contribute money to free
    software projects each month, which might start to make an
    economic difference.

  - It's good publicity for the LUG, especially if the recipients of
    the funds are willing to point a link back to us and the program.

  - It's local and already integrated into our lives, unlike the
    "bounty websites" that seem like good ideas the first time we
    visit, but which we never bother surfing to again.

  - It rewards software that is already written, which is a problem
    bounty websites do not address.

  - It can be convenient, especially if people make yearly
    contributions to be distributed each month.

  - Some backwards Luddites don't use PayPal or participate in
    e-commerce, and this would give them an opportunity to give to
    free software. Pooling money might (but might not) reduce
    transaction costs of donations.

Here are some reservations I have about such a proposal:

  - Money is icky, and I don't want it corrupting the LUG. One of the
    great strengths is we get by without taking much money from
    members. We get free webspace and mailing list hosting, free
    meeting space, and run as a loose anarchist collective[1] (sorry,
    anti-anarchists).

    I think this works very well, and it makes the barrier to LUG
    entry very low. If starting this program means that we need a
    Treasurer/President/Secretary and to spend hours arguing about
    vision statements and wordings on Constitutions and to have
    General Resolutions and AGMs and on and on and on, then I am
    running in the other direction as quickly as my pudgy legs can
    move.

    I am hoping we can keep this informal and based on trust, just
    like we do everything else at the LUG. If we can't, then this is a
    Bad Idea.

  - Some people have to administer the program. I am probably a bad
    candidate to do so, so we have to find a co-administrator.

  - As the Debian Dunc-Tank brouhaha[2] illustrates, some people have
    deep reservations about giving some people money while expecting
    other people to volunteer for free software. I certainly wouldn't
    want to cause a civil war over this issue.

  - The question of how to choose which software projects to
    contribute to are tricky. I have some ideas (which I explain
    below) but again it is not worth causing a civil war over.

  - Collecting pledged money could be a big headache for whomever gets
    to do that job. If we do this we need to structure it so that
    that job needs doing as little as possible.

  - Transaction costs (postage, money orders, credit card costs) might
    become a factor.

  - Maybe nobody will want to participate, and we will be writing
    $2 contributions or less. That would be sad.

  - Maybe people will feel pressure to contribute, and stop
    participating in the LUG because of this. That would be an
    incredible shame.

  - Maybe we should be collecting money to buy goats in South America
    instead, because there are more needy causes in the world than
    free software. (That's a hard issue but it's a slope that gets
    real slippery real fast.)

  - I don't have a snazzy name for the proposal. The best I can come
    up with is "Free Software Buying Club". Fortunately, there is a
    LUG full of creative people who can think of a better name
    (possibly employing some naughty implication about endowments and
    open source programmers and documenters).

Here are some ideas about how this might work:

  - Somehow (maybe on our webpage) we have a voting mechanism where
    people nominate software projects for consideration, and then vote
    for the selected projects. Each month, we choose the project with
    the most votes to donate to. Along with the project suggestions
    people would describe the project, demonstrate a way we can
    contribute money to it, and tell us why it is cool and
    worth supporting.

  - People actually donate money in one of several ways:
    + They can give larger donations to be distributed over a longer
      term. For example, Chris Bruner might dig up the change in between
      the cushions of his couch and write a cheque for $14.9 million,
      which could translate into a cool $1 241 666.70 to donate every
      month for a year, regardless of the project we sponsor.

    + They could give a large donation, and then pick the projects
      they want to donate to on a month by month basis. For example,
      Chris might give his $14.9 million, but then decide to give
      $1.9 million one month we decide to sponsor Vim, give $30 000
      the next month for the GIMP, and then skip the following month
      because he doesn't like KDE. The disadvantage to this is that it
      requires somebody to keep track of the accounting more than with
      other options, but it could be done.

    + They could give one-time donations for projects they like. For
      example, Adam Glauser might give $14 the month we are
      contributing to Puppy Linux, and then $8 some other month when we
      contribute to OpenOffice.

      To facilitate this I would suggest that we write cheques on the
      15th or 21st of each month. That way we could advertise the
      project of the month during our monthly meeting announcements
      while giving people time to actually make the donations.

  - Every time we make a contribution we record it on our website, and
    that project becomes ineligible for recontribution for some period
    of time (I'm thinking 24 months, but it could be some other
    number; maybe a year.) We would list the project, a description of
    why it is cool, and how much money we contributed. I suggest NOT
    listing the particular LUG members who donated to the project.

  - People can contribute money by transferring it into an account the
    LUG would open, or maybe just by giving money to the administrator,
    whom we trust enough not to abscond to Mexico with it. The
    administrator keeps a secret file which documents how much each
    software project is getting from each person, and the tabs people
    might have remaining.

  - We only write cheques (or PayPal donations, or whatever) for the
    money we have already received. There are no IOUs, and no
    pledges, and no goons with baseball bats and viral copies of
    Windows necessary to collect debts.

  - We distribute the money with no strings attached, but suggest that
    the authors acknowledge our program on their website so that other
    LUGs can steal our idea.

  - We make it absolutely, totally, dead-sure clear that everybody
    knows that this buying club is voluntary, and that nobody is in
    any way obligated to contribute, and that we won't look down on
    anybody who doesn't contribute -- even if he or she is as wealthy
    as Chris Bruner[3].

So that is the proposal. I can't believe you read through it all. Are
you nuts?! Now that you've gone and done it, you might as well give
some feedback:

  - Do you think this is a good idea? Should we do this?

  - If you think we should do this, would you be willing to put your
    money where your mouth is?

  - What other limitations and challenges do you forsee? In what ways
    should the proposal be changed?

If people think this is a good idea and somebody has the moral
character and energy to administrate, then we could start this project
pretty soon and see how it goes.

- Paul

[0] The title of a pretty famous book by Nancy Kress.

[1] Fun fact! "Anarchism" comes from the root "Anarch", which is
German for "Get Richard to do it".

[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/10/msg00260.html among
others. What a mess.

[3] Oh man. I hope I am not taking this joke too far, and that Chris
isn't in reality struggling to pay his hydro bills or something. Just
don't show up at Chris's house to snoop in between the cushions of his
couch, m'kay?