IFC.js funding
Relatively recently the controversial case of the faker.js and colors.js libraries came out in the media, where the author sabotaged the projects in protest against the fact that fortune 500 companies were taking advantage of his work and not contributing to the project. Although the case is more controversial and complex, today I want to focus on this specific aspect of the story.
This case is not the exception. There are many very useful projects that save millions for large companies that are selflessly maintained in the spare time of a small group of people. In my experience, of all the effort needed to make code, approximately 30% is doing it and 70% is maintaining it, documenting it, supporting it and offering new functionalities so that it does not become obsolete.
A typical argument here is to bring up numerous open-source projects that have found sustainable business models while continuing to offer their technology for free (Blender, Docker, etc). However, this is a questionable example, because from the moment an open-source project is born until it becomes a sustainable business it has to go through a life cycle, with hundreds / thousands of free hours. Many open source projects are not even able to reach the critical mass needed to reach that state of sustainability.
How to make a free open-source project sustainable in the early phases?
IFC.js is only one year old and we are very happy with the progress. In this second year our most important goal is precisely sustainability with the patreon initiative. We refuse to to ask for "donations", as it wouldn't be fair that the people that help IFC.js have exactly the same as the people who don't. The idea is simple: people who contribute financially to the project will get something in return:
BIM programming tutorials / courses for all levels, exclusive streams.
Exclusive streams.
Access to exclusive hackathons.
Prime support.
Advertising of your projects on our networks.
Decission making power over the nexts steps.
Our goal is to allow the community involved to grow along with the project. For now we are making almost $200/month and there are more users and companies signing up. All the money is handled through Open Collective, so the funds are as transparent as the code.
We are going to use that money to encourage the growth of the community: monetary and merchandising prizes for hackathons, compensation to users who help us to maintain the project and implement new issues, hiring designers and programmers, creating material for programming courses, etc. Although we haven't published any fixed milestone yet, we are already sending merchandising and this week we will start with the streams in our twitch channel. Our idea is to make the community itself decide where the money goes as we get more and more funds.
Comments
hi @agviegas , great work you and your project are doing.
Could you say something about why you have chosen a permissive license and what you think this will mean for your funding model? A permissive license can be seen as a very generous offering, in a perfect world this would be fine as users would naturally be inclined to support the project in some way. But in this world anyone building a product on top of a permissively licensed project is welcome to earn money from someone else's work without contributing so much as a thank you in return (graft). That's what the MIT license allows and Marak Squires should not be annoyed or surprised. His project became important and popular and his effort went unrewarded. He should have thought about that when he chose a license.
That's why I support and prefer copy-left licenses for many purposes. It creates an ecosystem of libre / OSS with each project lifting the others and no-one freeloading.
PS: Blender is copyleft and Docker is not open source at all (it used to OSS, then just gratis, now proprietary. I can't find a record of a FOSS fork from the original code. Portainer has similar functionality and is "open source core")
Hi @duncan, thanks for your insights!
Wow, I thought Docker was still Open Source, but every day you learn something new.
In any case, I think the licensing is a matter of priorities. In my humble opinion, our industry lacks technological maturity in terms of software. That is, any individual or company could make a video game in one or two afternoons if they set their mind to it and without paying anything because there are numerous mature video game engines that have solved everything difficult to make a video game (graphics, physics, collisions, etc). As you know, as of today there is no "BIM engine" that allows AEC players to do the same. In my point of view, this maturity can be reached much faster if the technology has no restrictions and anyone can set up a business on it without having to give anything in return.
In the particular case of IFC.js we are not talking about a company that has to pay salaries. I work at Autility, and part of my development time goes to further advancing functionality that suits my company directly in the library. In other words, I am already living from the project, and I know that there are more people in a similar situation to mine. Many others are collaborating in one way or another (either in the patreon, as code-sponsors or unofficially).
Indeed, it is possible that at this moment there are many companies making money with our work without giving us anything in return, not even a "thank you". However, it is also true that many companies of all sizes (including a big tech one) have met with us and are eager for our project to go forward and willing to support it with code and money. There may be projects out there with permissive licenses that have received nothing in return, but that is not being our case, nor nothing indicates that we are walking towards that point.
Having said all the above, it's important to note that web-ifc (the IFC engine) has a Mozilla license, which is somewhat more restrictive. The only purpose of this license is to avoid people implementing the IFC scheme in parallel and to try to join efforts.
Otherwise, our priority is that anyone can create BIM tools without depending on any company or individual, not even on us. Maybe it's a mistake in the long run, but the reality is that we're happy with the results so far.