[RFC] Revamping the FOSS pledge

[ansh]

TL;DR - We are proposing a revamp of the FOSS pledge. Please share your thoughts on the requirements for member companies that sign the pledge.

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In 2022, the FOSS United foundation launched a FOSS Pledge in an attempt to help Indian companies reflect on their usage of FOSS and publicly reflect on their dependency on the FOSS community.

India is a thriving tech hub thanks to countless organisations building innovative technology on top of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) obtained freely from across the globe. Indian developers represent one of the largest developer pools and yet, the number of FOSS projects that come out of India leave a lot to be desired compared to its global counterparts. We also rarely see technology-first companies acknowledge and credit the FOSS used in their organisations. This simple FOSS pledge aims to serve as an impetus to organisations to start acknowledging and contributing to the projects and communities which they derive value from.

There were 4 major requirements from organisations that signed the pledge -

As an organisation, we pledge to:

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

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

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

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

While the pledge did see some initial traction and has over 40+ signees, there were some shortcomings -

• The pledge is not binding.

• While it does mention certain tasks that need to be done (publish notes on FOSS related activities, financial contribution, acknowledge usage of FOSS etc.) we did not actively follow up with the signees on the same.

@Nemo brought this up in a related thread last year -Open Source Pledge - India Edition?

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@ashlesh and I discussed a potential revamp of the FOSS pledge. There is already a github issue on porting the pledge to the new FOSS United Platform.

We are proposing the following for an updated version of the FOSS Pledge -

Member organisations will need to -

• Acknowledge their use of FOSS on a location that is easily accessible via the web. All member companies must have a /stack page or similar listing the FOSS tools they depend on. See fossunited.org/stack for reference

• Publish an annual blog post mentioning their contributions to FOSS. This includes but is not limited to financial contributions to FOSS projects, upstream code contributions to FOSS projects, participation in FOSS communities and other such activities. See Joining the Open Source Pledge for reference.

• [Optional (?)] [To be Discussed] A mandatory financial contribution to FOSS projects, foundations and/or communities. If we decide to go ahead with this, it will require us to set a threshold on the minimum financial contribution. For example, the Open Source Pledge requires organisations to donate a minimum of $2000 per developer per year in the company. This figure can be adjusted to India’s PPP to arrive at a number. Alternatively, there have been discussions around a FOSS tax - organisations donating x% of their revenue (or profits) to FOSS. Similarly, we will need to discuss and decide what that percentage is.

While signing the pledge is a moral responsibility of organisations that greatly benefit from FOSS, we do want to provide certain incentives for members.

• Members will be showcased on the FOSS United website and social media announcements.
• FOSS United will amplify their FOSS contributions through social media, guest posts, events.
• FOSS United will work with the member orgs on hiring open source talent through our upcoming hiring program.
• Any other incentives?

At the foundation’s end, we will -

• Ensure that the decided requirements are fulfilled by the organisations.

• Reach out to them quarterly with reminders on the contribution blog post, potential donation opportunities (eg. co-sponsored project grants, FOSS United event sponsorship (?) etc.)

• Run regular campaigns and outreach activities to get companies to sign up (and more importantly, pay up )

@ashlesh and I are happy to put in some time to get this running.

We are looking for feedback on the structure of the pledge, especially point 3 of the membership requirements (around financial contributions).

Please share your thoughts on the proposal. If everyone is on board with the idea, we would like to launch this sometime in early May, as part of our planned campaigns for Maintainer’s Month.

[ansh]

Tagging team, governing board members, some previous FOSS pledge signees , FOSS United partners/sponsors and people who have participated in conversations around FOSS sustainability in general -

@rahulporuri @Vinay_Kumar @vishnus @Shree_Kumar @Bowrna_Prabhakaran @Bodhish_Thomas @Swastik_Baranwal @Nemo @Anoop_M_D @vishnu @rushabh @prasun_anand @Mz1 @Divya_Mohan @Ram_Iyengar @Shoaib_Merchant @nikochiko

[nikochiko]

Acknowledge their use of FOSS on a location that is easily accessible via the web.

for orgs to be able to implement it well, i think it is important to clarify:

• what is the motivation for us to have them list the foss tools?
• how does this help the foss projects?

it will be approached and implemented differently depending on that. e.g. an exhaustive list is impractical and likely misses the point. then what is the subset of their foss stack that we want them to talk about?

ps. if it fits in with the motivation, i like the idea of a list like https://nownownow.com/ with an about page that talks about this.

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A mandatory financial contribution to FOSS projects, foundations and/or communities.

• what kind of foss projects do we want to help with the financial contributions?
• there are also foss projects with commercial offerings (say, https://netdata.cloud, sentry.io, redis.io). does paying for their offerings qualify?

[ansh]

Thanks for the reply, interesting questions!

• Acknowledging your dependency on FOSS is the first step to contributing back to the community. A lot of organisations in India don’t even acknowledge the fact that they use FOSS, so it is trivial to ask them to donate. The motivation is to make them aware of their dependency. A similar idea of the previous FOSS pledge was to have orgs add a “Made with FOSS” footer on the website for similar reasons. It does not directly help the projects however I feel there is some value in companies choosing to acknowledge and thank the projects they rely on?

what kind of foss projects do we want to help with the financial contributions?

We can leave this on the organisation to decide IMO. These may or may not be projects they rely on or use. For eg. Co sponsoring a FOSS United project grant is also a fair contribution IMO.

there are also foss projects with commercial offerings (say, https://netdata.cloud, sentry.io, redis.io). does paying for their offerings qualify?

No, we are looking at contributions (or more specifically, donations) to projects. Buying a support license, enterprise edition or any other paid offering where you get something in return is not a valid contribution IMO.

Similarly, sponsoring a FOSS United project grant is valid, but sponsoring a FOSS United event is not since there are incentives associated with that.

[ansh]

Important question - If an organisation chooses to spend developer time on a project, is that a valid contribution? Eg. Org X employs a FT developer to contribute upstream to a FOSS project, or has a policy where the tech team does open source contributions one day every month. Many companies count the billable hours of their devs working on OSS as a donation.

I personally don’t want to count this. Thoughts?

[Divya_Mohan]

To address point #2 from what you’ve stated as a challenge, I’ve borrowed an example from the UN Global Compact Program website. To ensure a continual investment into the program rather than a one-time declaration, company profiles have been listed with reaffirming statements of their contributions/activities for a particular year. For example, here’s Microsoft, where there’s been a reporting structure set up to reaffirm commitment to the cause every single year. This is also a good example, because there are years when there have been clear misses in terms of the reporting, and grace periods have been extended to the next year where there has been combined reporting. While not at the same scale, we could do something similar to ensure that accountability via this pledge is consistent and not sporadic.

[computational_mama]

Hi, this looks great! Thanks @nikochiko for sharing it!

Definitely the acknowledgement stuff is very nice and highly validating to the creators, loved the idea of FOSS Stack! In context of the monetary contribution, making it mandatory will feel stressful for smaller companies/orgs that want to buy in to the pledge idea (which is also more important at this stage).
Everyone has equity in different ways in the world and how and when they contribute back to the software that they use shouldn’t be dictated in a monetary way.

I think the pledge can suggest ways in which we can formalise contributions for the org and staff (money, PRs, shout outs on social, tutorial written, workshop facilitated). There are some interesting solutions here (including those for non-code contributions): 🌸 Welcome! 🌺

[ansh]

@Divya_Mohan Thank you for sharing!

Agreed. We should list down all member organisation profiles and link them to their individual webpages wherein their annual “contribution reports” can be published. The Open Source Pledge does this in a fairly simple manner too - Zerodha | Open Source Pledge

[ansh]

@computational_mama thank you for the response. Was hoping someone brings this up

I agree that a mandatory financial contribution will drive some (or rather most) companies away. This is something that we’ve discussed internally and it really depends on the goals of the pledge. Personally, I see this as a campaign to make companies aware of their dependency and convince them to pay up. Hundreds of technology first companies today gain immense value from FOSS and do not give back. While non financial contributions are nice, offering them as a substitute for donations will beat the point of this campaign IMO. Blog posts, code contributions, workshops, etc., are all incredibly valuable but when these are available as options very few companies will actively choose to fund FOSS.

My motivation for this pledge is to shift the culture around this:

If your company makes money using FOSS, you should be putting money back.

That said, you’re absolutely right that encouraging different forms of contribution is important to keep the pledge inclusive and accessible.

@ashlesh proposed a tier system to implement this. A basic tier for companies who go through with acknowledgements and other contributions and another for those who go a level beyond and fund the FOSS they use.

I suppose we could also carve out exceptions for companies that want to contribute in other ways on a case by case basis. We will have to set some criteria on what amount and kind of non financial contribution counts as an equivalent. Thoughts?

[Swastik_Baranwal]

Hi @ansh, I love the idea of revamping the FOSS pledge. Hopefully, we can have more people to enhance the RFC on a bigger scale!

[ansh]

I spent some time rethinking the motivation of the pledge and also had a few chats about this with people at the Bangalore meetup last weekend. I am now leaning towards what @computational_mama suggested.

A campaign for asking people to pay up is much needed but i don’t think it’ll work. Conversations around a “FOSS tax” need to be pushed globally before it can fly in India. We should still try to motivate companies to contribute financially, but making it mandatory seems like a misstep for now.

So maybe we can just go ahead with the first two criteria -

Member organisations will need to -

• Acknowledge their use of FOSS on a location that is easily accessible via the web. All member companies must have a /stack page or similar listing the FOSS tools they depend on. See fossunited.org/stack for reference

• Publish an annual blog post mentioning their contributions to FOSS. This includes but is not limited to financial contributions to FOSS projects, upstream code contributions to FOSS projects, participation in FOSS communities and other such activities. See Joining the Open Source Pledge for reference.

Any thoughts?

[Divya_Mohan]

That sounds like a great plan @ansh ! IME, instead of urging companies to write a blog post annually, it’d be easier for them to submit a form with the contributions once a year and for us to host it. It eliminates any perceivable barriers to self-reporting and is easier to track, as well.

[ansh]

Thanks for the suggestion Divya. I personally think the information should stay on the company’s website/blog, so the content can stay up regardless of if the FOSS pledge stays alive a year later or not

Ideally, companies create the blog post and we just link to it on a contributions’ page. I know this brings more friction but feels ideal to me. Thoughts?

[Divya_Mohan]

I personally think the information should stay on the company’s website/blog, so the content can stay up regardless of if the FOSS pledge stays alive a year later or not

It is always wise to err on the side of caution with self-reporting/regulating, since it’s a tricky topic. While I love the idealism of it living on their website irrespective of whether or not the FOSS pledge stays alive, reporting & a second round of verifications (and/or followups) by the committee/team of pledge volunteers would serve many purposes

• Make the pledge more than just a “minimum compliance affair” by having a set of transparent criteria and a team of volunteers to understand if there was an actual fulfilment of the criteria outlined by the submitting org.
• This also paves the way for a two-way conversation between the submitting orgs & the people behind the pledge on how the process could be improved for the next year (assuming there’s one).
• This would also scale well to an incentivisation model (like the CHAOSS Badging project). This takes into account the tiering system y’all spoke about in the previous comments.

[Shree_Kumar]

I’d say the FOSS Pledge was good as is. FOSS is as free as it gets Perhaps run a campaign again and see if more companies sign up ? We could nudge folks to make some financial contributions and perhaps give some publicity to those who do…

I’ve been thinking about what we can learn from other efforts - one example being https://opensourcepledge.com/ ? I see the needle on that is moving very slowly too. In general these efforts seem to loose steam. I have seen that happening with myself as well.

I for one do not believe solely that “companies should contribute more”. I say individuals have to do their part. The army of people using FOSS dwarfs companies, and small contributions can go a long way. But it hasn’t proved easy to get that done. If FOSS developers aren’t that active then can we reasonably expect companies to act ?

I think we need bottom up and top down initiative both. What if… we had a survey targeting FOSS developers asking them what they are doing, if they think it’s a problem, and how they can help ? Perhaps FOSS developers working in companies can volunteer to do something - maybe that’s can be part of the survey.

[ansh]

I’d say the FOSS Pledge was good as is. FOSS is as free as it gets Perhaps run a campaign again and see if more companies sign up ?

The only problem with the pledge is that it was non binding, and companies didn’t really do any of the tasks they pledged to

We could nudge folks to make some financial contributions and perhaps give some publicity to those who do

That is what we currently seem to be leaning towards, yes. A /stack page to acknowledge use of FOSS and periodic (annual most likely) reports on how they have contributed.

The army of people using FOSS dwarfs companies

I don’t think that is entirely right since the army of people using FOSS is mostly doing so as part of their day job at a company Agreed on creating both top down and bottoms up approaches. If we can get individuals to understand what we’re trying to do, they will end up convincing their employers to sign up.