Donating to emacs development via a "support license"

I've seen developers expensing a Sublime Text / JetBrains license to their employer, no questions asked. It would be amazing if one could similarly contribute financially towards emacs development efforts. Would it be possible to cook up something formal enough (through FSF or some other org) like an annual "Emacs support license" with a couple of different tiers based on amounts (such that users can choose the split to different projects of interest). Users might then be able to expense it at work with the justification that it helps improve the specific packages they depend on (including core emacs). The same "licenses" could equally well serve as a portal for personal donations, but I feel that there's likely substantial low-hanging fruit in getting corporate funding in this grassroots manner. (I've pondered about this on-and-off before, but some questions on the emacs survey reminded me of this again.) UPDATE, to address some repeating questions/comments: The key point in the proposal is *corporate funding*, which is a substantial untapped pool IMHO. My guess is that there are enough places where <$50/yr expense of this sort will raise almost no questions that it can easily dwarf current donations for emacs development in total (not that I've done a calculation -- but it would be interesting to see numbers that we could discuss!). Getting it in such a distributed manner also feels healthier than depending on a few large corporate sponsors (it's hard to convince anyone to donate huge sums, and would also concentrate too much power). The licenses need not be tied to development bounties, but there should be a way to make a case to license purchasers that this will genuinely contribute to long term health of emacs, and thereby serve their needs. Whether this goes to specific developers or to FSF or used to fly people out to an in person Emacs Conf, etc. is a decision to be made by the Emacs devs & community, and somewhat orthogonal to the intent of the proposal. The crux of the problem IMHO is how to thread the fine line between showing off value to donors (incentivizing license purchases) while also maintaining the values of community in the development process. That requires a judicious solution the community can nucleate around, and might be a theme for productive discussion; I wanted to provoke some thinking because that seems possibly achievable.

This sounds like a good idea. If your company will pay for a jetbrains license or other support contract then I don’t see why an eMacs specific version could work.

I can see how this conversation goes: Employee: Boss, a lot of us use emacs. Can corporate pay for a support license? Boss: What do we get for it? Employee: A bunch of anonymous hackers responding at their leisure to a bugs mailing list. Boss: Don't we get that now?

Maybe this is totally unfounded, but I'm concerned that once someone is paid to develop a thing, they're no longer interested after the payments dry up. At least, if someone's paid to work on Emacs, it would make sense to have them focus on the stuff no one really wants to do, like dig deep and refactor the internals so that it's easier for anonymous hackers to work with later.

Employee: Sort of, but our bug reports would be tagged as coming from support license holders, so they're likely to get more attention.

You obviously don't know how SLA's work.

Several of the developers have Patreons or other subscription thing to help support them, at least according to the end page of the 2022 Emacs survey. They usually work on specific packages or subsystems though, and it's not a general funding mechanism for the whole project.

In Org mode, we are experimenting with liberapay teams where the donations are automatically distributed across interested developers. In theory, one may create Emacs team where various developers can join.

Excuse me, an employee donates his employer's money to some cause? Now, *that* shows some dedication, right? Donating other people's money.

r/emacs is the wrong place to ask about it. The Emacs developers are on the emacs-devel mailing list and I can foresee that this kind of question will either attract few responses (if any at all) or a lot of bikeshedding (because it's worded in a way encouraging everyone to pile on it). But maybe there's a middleground. One can hope...

Does this create two classes of users?

Why should they get different priority from the rest of us donating through other channels?

Nah, hackers hack only on what they find interesting. Ask /u/Eli-Zaretsky

Can't you donate money to some of your favorite Emacs hackers? There is a list on the end of this years survey. Or just put a "bounty"? Make "Wanted" for a bug and give a lrize to one that solves the bug first? Or a new feature?

Reddit gets a lot of sneering for it's scummy areas, but frankly I think it's a good place for discussion and its voting system works quite well. At least in fringe subreddits like this that aren't big astroturf and or troll targets. Get more political or popular and it gets much more distorted. Compare to cesspits like Facebook where there are no downvotes and no anonymity and I think they're much more toxic with less healthy discourse.

If instead of "donate […] cause" you say "spend […] product" is it any different? The problem is really open-source hasn't found a great way to fit into a capitalist economic model, not that people want to give their employer's money for business-critical tooling.

Interesting idea, OP. I often wonder if there is a better way to fund FOSS developers in general, so that they can make an independent living from their software. (It is also a recurring topic of discussion on Hacker News.) One idea I've seen discussed a few times is a FOSS package manager that distributes income to the package developers (kind of like an app store). The simplest model is to charge a subscription fee for using the package manager, and then redistributing that fee to the (authors of) packages that have been installed by the user. Two early projects in that vein are [https://www.stackaid.us/](https://www.stackaid.us/) and [https://tea.xyz/](https://tea.xyz/) I like the package manager idea better than selling support licenses because it maintains the developer's freedom to work on whatever aspect of the project they choose, rather than being obligated to fix specific bugs. Edit: Accidentally deleted last paragraph just as I was posting.

Has it found a way to fit into a non-capitalist economic model? Does China or North Korea or Venezuela or Cuba or the USSR or East Germany (in the 80s) produce open source software more than the US? No. I don't think so. The problem is not capitalism. It's economics itself. Open source is being produced as a public good. It doesn't have to be. Software can easily be produced as a private good, and it has been. So, people who write open-source are, intentionally, leaving money on the table. I'm thankful to them, I hope they get something out of it (at least a line in their CV), but they cannot expect to make money, because they have chosen to not monetize their work. They can only rely on donations. And that's OK. But donating the money of someone else is... an interesting twist to the idea. I guess if the employer is fine with that, ok. I wouldn't be. I would tell the employee "support your own causes, dude. Put your own money where your mouth is."

The key point in the proposal is *corporate funding*, which is a substantial untapped pool IMHO. My guess is that there are enough places where <$50/yr expense of this sort will raise almost no questions that it can easily dwarf current donations for emacs development in total. The licenses need not be tied to development bounties, but there should be a way to make a case to corporate license purchasers that this will genuinely contribute to long term health of emacs. Whether this goes to specific developers or to FSF or used to fly people out to an in person Emacs Conf, etc. is a decision to be made by the Emacs devs/community, and I don’t have any strong opinions.

Nope, that completely misses the point of the proposal. Refer my other comment in the discussion :-)

:-) ok. Well, of corporatipn find it useful they will poir money in it. Take a look at Blender. Lots of big name are poiring $$$ and €€€ into it. Linix (kernel)does not grt monetary support same way, but a lot of big companies have paied people or entire teams working on it. I don't know who is paying Linus, FSF I think, but a lot of features in the kernel comes from companies investing in the Linux. There was a guy here last year or two years ago who offered people payment if they solved his problems in Emacs. No idea how it went and if he is still around. Maybe it was you?

> companies have *paid* people or FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*

Good bot, thanks! :)

That was a really helpful page. So much so that I've kept that tab open. 😅 Wouldn't mind such a listing in a more prominent/visible spot.

> UPDATE: The key point is ... corporate funding. You, like many of your inspired brethren inured to the largesse of big tech, continue to ignore a basic economic principle called *leverage*. Hang out for a spell on emacs-devel, and you'll see emacs has none. Its devs work tirelessly around the clock out of pure love. They're holding sinecures in socialist countries, have "quiet quitted" their day jobs for the last decade (think Milton in *Office Space* 1999), or collecting disbursements from trust funds. GNU often plays the anarchistic, money-agnostic Joker [1] to Big Tech's Batman, a hapless enforcer who must follow the archaic rules of common sense, such as getting paid for one's time and expertise. That's the power of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. To paraphrase a spry geezer from another seminal action film, "Strike me down on robustness and features, and I shall obliterate you on price." [1] "You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with." (The Dark Knight, 2008)

You are right of course, corporations spend a huge amount of money on software licenses compared to individuals, and if you could (somehow!) redirect some of that money into Emacs development (or other important FOSS projects), it could be a total game-changer. However, I think businesses are lacking a strong selfish incentive to buy the proposed Emacs license. Or put a different way, the penalty for not buying the license is not severe enough. The benefits gained by general improvements to Emacs and/or its packages are probably too far removed from the core product/service of the business (whatever that may be) to be justifiable. With commercial software like Sublime/JetBrains, the case for spending money is much clearer -- unless the company buys the software licenses, their devs can't use the tools and development work grinds to halt. They are operating costs.

> That requires a judicious solution the community can nucleate around, and might be a theme for productive discussion I think you are missing one of the important parties in the discussion: the corporate. What would be their immidiately obvious benefit?

What they get is that the tool used by their developer gets better -- just like Sublime and JetBrains (where they buy licenses even if a developer could happily get by with a free version), and on a timescale of months and years this makes their employees more productive. It's important to understand a few things: 1. The hurdle that needs to be cleared by the quality of explanation is _proportional to how much they care_. It's important to keep in mind that we're discussing a sponsorship _by a bureaucracy_. An explanation that looks convincing enough for a bureaucracy is one that a manager can sign off without fingers getting pointed later. They probably already sign-off on many larger expenses which are less justified. 2. Further, in the larger companies there will be too many requests to decide this on a case-by-case basis, so they will probably have some high-level policy decision about discretionary expenses for tooling, which most likely doesn't care for the details of the specific software/packages being used by the developer. At that level of decision making, they don't want to have to care about such persnickety details -- after all, that's why they're employing developers. 3. The amounts we are discussing are too small for most corporates to think too much about. A $50 expense to keep a developer happy & productive (who is likely being paid upwards of $50k) about their tool choices is almost a no-brainer. It only needs to make the developer more productive (not to mention morale) by 0.1% for this expense to be justified. Yes, there are companies where such an expense will lead to loads of bike-shedding, but there are _enough_ big companies where this will be approved.

> With commercial software like Sublime/JetBrains, the case for spending money is much clearer -- unless the company buys the software licenses, their devs can't use the tools and development work grinds to halt. In many cases that’s not true — free editions of these software are almost as good (not to mention alternative software options).

I see. After some googling, I do see that some companies, in fact, support free software development: https://opencollective.com/adgoji Of course, no company can support Emacs if Emacs does not provide the means to donate.

i was reading your post, and although it has a lot of *big boy words*, i don't get what you're trying to say