🆕 blog!

[edent@mastodon.social]

🆕 blog! “How Can Governments Pay Open Source Maintainers?”

When I worked for the UK Government I was once asked if we could find a way to pay for all the Open Source Software we were using. It is a surprisingly hard problem and I want to talk about some of the issues we faced.

The UK Government publishes a lot of Open Source code - nearly everything…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/03/how-can-governments-pay-open-source-maintainers/
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#government #money #OpenSource

[revk@toot.me.uk]

@Edent For my #Faikout project (www.faikout.uk) the best way to financially support the project is buy the Faikout boards I sell. There are others that make and sell (big in Australia), and there are a small number of s/w contributors to the project who could, if they wish, make and sell to get some money. But the money for the selling of the boards is clearly for the person making the boards, and so, I hope, avoids any possible argument.

I agree it is tricky though.

[nice lego]

[revk@toot.me.uk]

@Edent Sadly, I guess, this creates a bias for the PCB designs. Whilst I do not go out of my way to make them expensive for someone to make in small quantities, the design choices are based on the fact that I order in several 100's at a time, and not for someone ordering 10 for themselves. If you want 10, buy from me, after all...

It is a bias that is hard to avoid.

A second design for small orders?
A third design for hand build?

Not crazy, but lower priority for now.

[revk@toot.me.uk]

@Edent Money always steers design choices in some way or another, and very hard to avoid that.

That said, the code is very much geared to be flexible (e.g. with GPIO assignment and polarity, etc) and to allow for people to run (as they do) on common general purpose boards. So there is a path to that, which I have no plans to close in s/w design.

[hdv@front-end.social]

@Edent cc @marlenabcn

[prushforth@mastodon.social]

@Edent Great subject, and good advice. We also did full procurement on open source feature development, which although probably not the best way to generally support a project, may help the developers keep the servers running.

[bobthomson70@mastodon.social]

@Edent I’m sure there other ways to help support open source dev too, for example:

https://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html#:~:text=For%20non%2Dsponsorship%20corporate%20contributions,Google%20Pay%2C%20and%20Microsoft%20Pay.

[jasperamorgan@mastodon.social]

@Edent perhaps there could be a role for Public service commissioning. OpenSource maintainers could effectively be treated like charities for the purposes of funding.

It would, however, require an act of parliament - maybe that kills the idea already.

[gina@fosstodon.org]

@Edent a familiar problem, we're seeing the same thing in the Dutch gov.