A solution for sustaining Free Software forge development

Social Experience Design 🎭 Sustainable FOSS
#1

https://blog.dachary.org/2022/11/05/a-solution-for-sustaining-forge-development/

Developing a software forge such as GitLab or Gitea can easily keep dozens of volunteers and paid staff occupied full time daily. Creating Free Software forges and federating them to make centralized forges obsolete does not require less resources. Funding so many people in a sustainable way could be very challenging if it was not for the French governmental incentive for R&D.

An employee of a French company who wants to help Free Software forges succeed can be delegated to a project during a few months every year. And during that time the governmental incentive for R&D pays for their salary. There is no limit in time nor is it a competition: every company is eligible. The only condition is that their goal is to solve a problem for which there is no known solution at this time. And we know that federating Free Software forges is one of them.

I hope people with various backgrounds employed by French companies will jump at this opportunity. Now is the perfect time to take part in this revolution. I’ll wait for you in the the chatroom.

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#2

I wonder why I did not think about that sooner. To my knowledge there never was any fundraising campaign calling for that kind of delegation of employees. Although it is by far the most valuable donation a project can ask for (work hours) and it costs nothing to the organization.

The only blocker is that it has never been done but since I’ve been doing exactly that for the past year… I’m more than confident it works nicely. I can also easily tutor anyone willing to follow the same path.

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#3

On Mastodon we had some other examples by country.

#4

Ran into

yesterday.

I just skimmed it but @Gusted mentioned, it wouldn’t even be limited to EU.

#5

Adding to this topic that I have created a top-level section for #forgers-guild and that I consider keeping track of funding activities and opportunities should be a fundraising track at guild’s level. So it may be that there’ll a dedicated sub-category especially for that.

@dachary “free software forge development” isn’t the direct scope of Social Coding Movement, but “Forging free software” is. There’s also a #fsdl:fundraising category where I’d like to keep track of funding consistently, and gather e.g. all grant applications as you do on forgefriends forum. They may be tracked in a #ecosystem:delightful curated list.