Voluntary contributions made from companies to individual maintainers, contributors, or OSS projects. Often these are one-time sponsorings, but recurring payments in form of quasi-salaries are becoming more common.
Requires:
- Setup of a company-grade payment mechanism (hosted or self-build)
- Description of one or more donation tiers
- Recurring "marketing activites" to motivate companies to sponsor
- Recurring communication with sponsors
Variants & Options:
- Single Sponsoring: One-time contribution
- Recurring Sponsoring: Monthly recurring contributions
- Tiered Sponsoring Levels: Offering of mentions (on Twitter, etc.), talks, seminars, etc. for higher or recurring donations
| Characteristics | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Effort to set-up | Days | Companies might need more documentation than for donations |
| Effort to maintain | Medium | Companies are more likely to inject new money |
| Cost to set-up | None | |
| Cost to maintain | None | |
| One-time Income | Medium | Few sponsors will pay more than a yearly salary (due to fund size and high competition (too many projects to feed)) |
| Recurring Income | Medium | Few sponsors will pay recurring salary-like sponsorings (probably capped with yearly fund) |
| Income Predictability | Medium | Monthly to yearly reminders to sponsor necessary; Sponsors are more loyal but if one big sponsor goes it causes higher instability |
| Full income Threshold | 10+ | |
| Recipient | C | |
| Additional Work | Low | Might require documentation, PR work, etc. |
| Visibility | Low | Better for essential but underfunded OSS with problems |
| Necessity to pay | Low | Completely voluntary; Better for essential OSS |
| Entry Threshold | Medium | Requires charitable entity or company-level consideration of taxes, etc. |
| Countervalue | Work | Can range from unrestricted use of money to development of specific features |
| Scalability | Low | Scales with the number of companies (but probably capped at salary level) |
| Effort for marketing | Medium | Companies often seek out OSS on their own (essential to their products) |
| Competitors | None | |
| Software types | All |