Hi Frederick,

Niels here - Founder of OpenProject.

Open source developers need to pay their rent, too. Are you an open source developer?

Best
Niels

Good morning Niels,

of course, they have to. For me, it is more dependent on the business model.  For example, you may take a look at Blender.  There I´m a part of the developer Community. The Main team finances themself over donations from the end-user up to companies like Nvidia.  Today they dominate the 3D Market. So yes I guess it is absolutely possible to manage it that way. And of course, there is a difference in the size of popularity, OP is flying under the radar, but Blender went although through this situation, starting as unknown geek software with 4 to 7 paid developers to the leading position. I have no doubt OP couldn't be the same, project management getting more and more important. But Blender succeeds inasmuch as they could bind a massive amount of users to their software and get popular. My argument is, do not hold back key features rather of bumping up as much as possible so people get fascinated while using and share their experiences.

Best greetings. Frederick ✌🏿

Hi Frederick,

Thanks that you acknowledge that open source developers need to get paid.

So since you advocate to donate to open source projects. Let's make a quick reality check: How much did you personal donate to open source projects last year?

Best

Niels

Hi Niels, 

Every year I make donations to a variety of opensource projects (both personally and on behalf of my employer). 

I/we understand the need for all open source developers to be paid (free software != free developer services), however I/we prefer to use fully open source tools where possible to avoid the risk of lockin/dependence on non-free features, and restrict our access to help develop/extend/internally bug fix ie there is very little incentive or interest in moving to the non-community version of openproject.

This is a high value project to our company though, and I do want to make a donation - I searched google for "openproject donation" and this thread ranked highest on my results, I see some problems:

1. I can't seem to find a way to make a donation to openproject
2. This is not a good example of an exchange between you and the community (admittedly, the OP could have asked their question in a less combative way but I suspect there may be some non-native language influencing the tone), and most importantly
3. it is not representative (at least in my experience) of how you (Niels, and OpenProject in general) traditionally interract with the community. It has always been extremely polite and considerate

I'd still like to make a donation, and if that avenue is not available maybe you would be open to the idea of making it an option for those users who want to explicitly support the community version?

...and extending the wishlist somewhat, perhaps if that revenue channel got to an adequate level you could release more of the enterprise features to the community edition? :D

Thanks for a great product, and I hope to be able to help it remain viable into the future (and perhaps turn this thread into a good news story while I'm at it)

Regards,

Bernard Gray

Dear Management, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I hope this day starts good with "all of you"

Sorry to reopen this old ancient topic, but it is not archived yet 🅰 

Would it be posible to donate a symbolic one time donation to OpenProject?

I donate to projects that I think could make a change to a better world, but I do not see a possibility to donate to OpenProject,

I use OpenProject for a Construction Project but the project is on ice at the moment.

I could use a paypal email address or a German IBAN Bank Account for Donation

Please could you make the nformation public so people can start to donate to OpenProject, too?

If it has legal issues that donation cannot be done to profit oriented companies like OpenProject, please write a short answer that your project is profit oriented and not for a better environment.

Thank you and kind regards from Cologne

Anton Wexler

I completely agree with Niels that open source projects should make money. And I actually believe that we, as those who would like to see more open source projects, MUST support such developments. Needless to say, I personally support several open source projects as much as I can afford.

I have a small company and was looking for an open source project. I found two really good ones, OP and Taiga. Both seem great, but since my company is located in Austria and OP is developed in a way that I and my colleagues prefer, I went with OP.

At the moment I am using the community version and we are really shocked how good it is and how great the quality of the code is. Of course, to set up the community version you need to have a good level of Linux administration knowledge, but all in all it is worth it.

I think if someone has a problem with open source projects making money, they should go with free Atlassian Jira. Of course, you will be paying with your data (as mentioned in their TOS (your data will be used to train and improve their system)).

We are definitely planning to buy the paid on-premises version in the near future after our tests are done.

But I have a small complaint about the pricing of the OP. I do not understand why the pricing of the on-premise is the same as the cloud. With the on-premise version we have to bring our own server and maintain everything ourselves and therefore there should be a different pricing. I know that this fee is because of the time that your employees should spend answering the customers. But I think you should start charging your customers who need on-premises service per ticket. This is how hostbillapp.com has set up their pricing plans.

All in all, good job and it makes me really happy that open source projects like NextCloud, OpenProject, Taiga and many others exist and I think they should all start monetizing their efforts. Donating is not enough!