[echelon]

An organization collecting funds for open source should itself be open source and not earn margin for anything other than upkeep and paying engineers' salaries.

I kind of feel like Patreon and Kickstarter are in the same vein: rent seeking marketplaces that would be better if they were replaced with entirely open source alternatives that belonged to their respective communities. Patreon should be funded via patreon.

If Wikipedia were started today, I worry that it would have ads or be for-profit.

[Deimorz]

Liberapay is the closest to what you're describing that I know of: https://en.liberapay.com/about/

It's open-source, non-profit, and (tries to) fund itself through its own platform: https://en.liberapay.com/Liberapay/donate

[hbadgery]

We are big fans of Liberapay. They are a great solution working towards making open source sustainable. Our model is very different though.

Instead of a recurring donation based system, we are creating a marketplace that connects open source software consuming companies to open source consulting and development companies who are proposing fundable roadmaps for new features and maintenance of critical open source software. The KickStarter idea comes from the fact that any person or company can fund the project so that in the future, they can use the software.

The deep social reputation database generated by the OpenTeams’ social reputation network will provide the foundation for proposers to demonstrate their ability to deliver on a fundable project's goals and grant the prospective funders the ability to validate the composition of the team proposed.

We really appreciate your feedback, thank you!

[numtel]

As someone working on a crowdfunding platform that I would like to be able to release the source code as an open consumer union implementation, I have concerns about enabling unmoderated crowdfunding.

The power of a collective wallet is not something to be taken lightly. Whether it's environmental destruction or divisive politics, I have yet to decide that setting something like this free is for the best interest.

I would like to see an open source license like the GPL that has enforceable, well-defined provisions for environmental protection and human rights.

It seems like to go all the way, a smart contract would need to be used to ensure the transparency that a standard webserver-based infrastructure cannot provide. But credit cards are the standard for online payments so this would put a project in a further category from the start.

[hbadgery]

Thank you for sharing your concerns. We will not be an unmoderated platform and I will look into the GPL license, thank you.

We are at the very beginning of our journey and so there are many features to come.

[numtel]

Sorry if there was any confusion. I was wondering just in a general sense. I did not mean to imply anything about the moderation of OpenTeams.

[_-o-_]

Сrowdfunding platforms are glorified blogs with Stripe integration. What exactly are you afraid to opensourse?

[hbadgery]

I cannot agree with you more. We are working on making open source software sustainable so that people view open source software as a real career. People should be paid to work on the projects that they love and care so much about! We have had many discussions around becoming open source in the beginning. However, in order to ensure that we achieve the aforementioned mission, we believe that is it best to start off as a proprietary company for a number of different reasons. In the future, we will be looking to become open source. Thank you for your feedback!