Re: [Rdkit-discuss] Open-source business models and the RDKit

[Francois B. <ml...@li...>]

On 27/03/2019 01:46, Greg Landrum wrote:
> And now that I've included two other messages, here's (part of) my
> take on this.
> 
> The viability of open-source business models is something I'm deeply
> interested in (I pay rent these days thanks to income from two
> open-source companies) and, like Andrew, something I've put a fair
> amount of thought into. Capturing all of that here is probably
> impossible, so here are a few points that I think are important.
> 
> - We need to be really careful about drawing conclusions from projects
> like Linux, Eclipse, etc. Andrew hit on this already, but the
> potential base of potential donors/contributors to these projects is
> several orders of magnitude larger than the potential base for
> something like the RDKit, OpenBabel, or Chemfp.
> - Geoff pointed out the possibility of setting up a not-for-profit
> organization that can take donations and then disburse them. I'm not
> going to do this; dealing with that kind of paperwork is something I
> dislike and am terrible at. Going via OpenCollective (which Geoff
> pointed to) is a possibility, but they would end up taking >10% of
> each donation for overhead, credit card fees, etc. That seems steep,
> but 80+% of something is still better than 100% of nothing.

I looked at the cost structure in here:

https://opencollective.com/pricing

I understand they would take 13.6% in total (the scenario in which they 
manage the money + accounting, etc.).
That's something, for sure, but not crazy.

> - It's worth pointing out that it is already possible for companies
> that want to directly support the RDKit to do so: getting an RDKit
> support contract from my company (T5 Informatics GmbH) very directly
> supports my work on the RDKit and the infrastructure needed to do
> that. Given that the support contract may seem too expensive for small
> orgs, I could also easily set something up for companies who want to
> show support (and perhaps be listed as sponsors) at a lower price
> point. I doubt there's any demand for that, but I'd be happy to be
> wrong there.
> - Another mechanism that's always available to companies is to just
> pay an open-source developer to work on their open-source project.
> This can take the form of funding development of a particular feature,
> creating documentation, etc.
> - That last bullet point likely works for academics too: think about
> adding some support for open-source development to your next grant
> proposal. I would assume that there are ways to engineer this.
> 
> For individuals to financially contribute is trickier... there's a
> voice in the back of my head that's saying that it will never be
> financially worth it to set something like this up for communities as
> small as ours,[1] but I have to think about that one for a while.

As an open-source project, I feel rdkit is quite successful.
So, the user community is not so small.
Some people who cannot contribute time could contribute money to the 
project
(especially if it is tax-deductible, I guess).

Regards,
F.

> I'm sure there's more to come, but I want to go ahead and hit "send"
> -greg
> [1] one-time donations would feel great, but they don't help when
> making long-term plans unless you can assume that more will
> continuously come in...
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