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

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

On 27/03/2019 16:24, Francois Berenger wrote:
> 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.

If rdkit was accepted at the software freedom conservancy, I understand
the management fee would be 10%:

https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/

https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services/

>> - 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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