Open Source Pledge - India Edition?

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There was a FOSS United FOSS Pledge, which got some initial traction, but it wasn’t really binding and I don’t think it is being pursued anymore.

Open Source Pledge is a recent effort which takes the same idea, and makes it a bit more concrete and binding. They have some traction, with 25+ companies:

screenshot of list of companies from the website
screenshot of list of companies from the website836×219 23.6 KB

There are only two requirements

1. Pay Open Source maintainers

The minimum to participate is $2,000 per year per developer at your company.

2. Self-report annually

Each year, publish a blog post outlining your payments to maintainers.

They also have a form, and a public specification to fetch published reports automatically.

The obvious challenge of adapting this to India is the $2000/yr number. There is an open issue to decide on the adoption criteria for other countries, including the obvious PPP based adjustments.

Creating this thread to discuss other approaches - what do people think is a good number to ask for companies in India (assuming it is priced “per-developer”). The PPP number against US comes out to anywhere from 35k-50k INR. But relying on other approaches (such as median salary of a developer in US/India) might give other answers.

Please give feedback here, and upstream so we can get some real adoption from Indian companies.

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The FOSS United Pledge will soon be ported to the new website.
See - Migration : FOSS Pledge page from the old website · Issue #314 · fossunited/fossunited · GitHub

but it wasn’t really binding

This is true. This might be a good time to update the content of the pledge (and then reach out to existing signees to resign the updated pledge if they wish to)

As you mentioned, the terms of the pledge in its current state are not binding and verifiable.

Openly credit and talk about the FOSS that we use in our organisation and acknowledge the value we derive from them wherever appropriate.

How do they do that? The annual self report requirement in the open source pledge seems like a good idea. Or just list your FOSS stack on a webpage and keep it updated - Zerodha's FOSS stack - Zerodha Tech Blog

Encourage our developers and technical staff to create and contribute to FOSS and participate in FOSS communities and activities.

I guess this is fine as is, but i would appreciate if these encouragements (primarily training sessions i assume) were documented. I recently got to know Mercedes Benz conducts two annual FOSS days for encouraging employees to contribute to open source.

Publish notes on our aforementioned FOSS related activities at least annually.

:100:

Try and provide financial and other support to the FOSS projects that are valuable to our organisation.

Creating this thread to discuss other approaches - what do people think is a good number to ask for companies in India (assuming it is priced “per-developer”). The PPP number against US comes out to anywhere from 35k-50k INR. But relying on other approaches (such as median salary of a developer in US/India) might give other answers.

Giving back a % of revenue (or profits) sounds better to me instead of setting up a fixed number that smaller startups may not be able to provide.

@Anoop_M_D has talked about setting up a 1% FOSS return on all revenue generated at Bruno.

For folks at The Commit Company ( @nikkothari22 ) I think that contribution is close to 5%. (please correct me if I am wrong).

This x% can maybe also include non financial contributions. Amount spent on an employee who is contributing to open source can be considered as a contribution?

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This thread also lists some good requirements that we can adopt, I’m not sure why these weren’t incorporated in the previous iteration -

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I am one of the volunteers for this pledge. We are currently discussing if it is possible to account for purchasing power disparities as @Nemo said

I also discussed with @rahulporuri if we could do the same. I believe we shouldn’t go with less than 1000$ in India.

Companies now have a lot of money and earn at the US rate when selling to international customers.

If we think the rest of the companies will pay less just because their colleagues are based in non-US. I don’t feel that is reasonable.

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copie publique is a similar initiative from France.

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The Open Source Pledge has an endorsements page which includes messages from the Open Source Initiative, the PHP Foundation, the Open Source Collective, Perl and Raku Foundation, etc.

If you all are okay with it, we can go ahead and endorse the initiative. @Nemo would you be interested in writing up our endorsement, if the community okays the idea?

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I am also interested in writing the endorsement.

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Thanks @Swastik_Baranwal! I will draft an initial version of the endorsement and put it up here for your comments

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Hey, @ansh. :wave: Anything I can do to help move this along? We would welcome an endorsement from FOSS United. :bowing_man:

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Hey @chadwhitacre, thank you for joining! This is great timing :smile: - I just published a Request for Comments on our endorsement for the Open Source Pledge here. Happy to take inputs from you -

CC - @Swastik_Baranwal @Nemo please have a look!

Deadline for RFC - November 10th, Sunday

P.S - Shoutout to CQ2 by @Anand_Baburajan and Sreelakshmi!

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Is there a way to contact the companies that signed the FOSS Pledge ? This question must ideally go to them - as they are Indian companies that signed the pledge. That way you may get something reliable. Data. Rather than opinion.

I don’t think there’s a good number to ask for “companies” in India - perhaps somebody here knows why the FOSS United FOSS Pledge didn’t ask for anything specifically…

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