# Challenge: Monetary compensation for free software development

**URL:** <https://discuss.coding.social/t/challenge-monetary-compensation-for-free-software-development/51>\
**Category:** SX solution development\
**Tags:** challenge\
**Created:** [April 7, 2022, 1:44pm UTC](https://discuss.coding.social/t/challenge-monetary-compensation-for-free-software-development/51 "2022-04-07T13:44:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![realaravinth](https://discuss.coding.social/user_avatar/discuss.coding.social/realaravinth/32/35_2.png) [@realaravinth](https://discuss.coding.social/u/realaravinth)\
**Post date:** [April 7, 2022, 1:44pm UTC](https://discuss.coding.social/t/challenge-monetary-compensation-for-free-software-development/51/1 "2022-04-07T13:44:17Z")

</div>

Had a discussion with @aschrijver in Matrix DMs about ways to monetarily compensate free software developers. This post summarizes our discussion:

## Bounty system

Funds received from grants divided into bounties for separate tasks. Contributions towards completing the task receive bounties.

### Advantages

1. Work and rewards are quantified.
2. Bounty amounts can be discussed and assigned, leading to fewer conflicts.

### Disadvantages

1. Non-bounty tasks are not compensated. Chores like refactoring often fall into this category.
2. Resembles Gig Economy. Not sustainable.

## Solution(my 2c)

Ideally free software projects of reasonable scale would have enough funds to pay its developers’ salaries.

For example, meet.coop does this to some extent, they [mentioned in a meeting](https://forum.meet.coop/t/sign-up-commons-hour-session-6/948)(notes yet to be published) that they have enough revenue to pay 1.5 developer salaries.

However, not all free software projects have a stable source of revenue. Hostea is one such project with negative revenue/balance:

## [Hostea’s](https://forum.hostea.org/t/tentative-about-page-for-hostea-org-march-2022/19) approach

@dachary and I are involved in creating a complete [software forge ecosystem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)) based on Gitea with dedicated managed hosting. While @dachary isn’t paid for his work, [Easter-eggs pays for mine(publishing contract approval is WIP)](https://tasks.batsense.net/tasks/275).

At Hostea, we log the amount of work we do in the hopes that when the project finds funding, we would be paid for our work. Our hourly rates were both self-proposed and agreed upon by both of us without contention.

It is entirely possible that the project won’t receive any funding ever but we both find this a reasonable compromise.