[armchairhacker]

I think https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-sta... is a better link.

It also seems “Open Collective Foundation” is shutting down, and “Open Collective” is a super-organization which contains a lot of sibling organizations (“Open Source Collective”, “Open Collective Europe”). And most of the entities getting donations through OCF can simply move to other organizations (hopefully automatically keeping existing sponsors), although others have to find a non-OC organization because they have extra requirements? The whole situation seems strange and technical.

[bombcar]

Seems to me pretty simple - the "for profit" company behind the foundation (read: the for profit entity that charges the foundation as much as it can) charged too much so the foundation dissolved.

>Unfortunately, over the past year, we have learned that Open Collective Foundation's business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tech platform.

It states it right there.

[ocdtrekkie]

OpenCollective used to be much more transparent about how this was handled, but I don't think the math has actually changed much over the years:

Open Source Collective has a 10% fee. To my understanding, 5% of that used to go to OSC itself and 5% of it used to go to OpenCollective. OSC is stable, and still around, so I assume this math continues to work fine, but they simplified the view of it to just say "10% Host Fee" now, which includes both OSC and OC's portions.

However, you'll notice Open Collective Foundation is only charging 5%! That means, even assuming OCF was getting better pricing than OSC (another arguably internal fiscal host), there's almost no margin for OCF to operate.

It looks like OCF wasn't billing enough to cover what is otherwise probably a pretty reasonable platform cost.

EDIT: Actually, even crazier, it looks like OCF became 5% because OpenCollective gave OCF free service starting in 2020: https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-platform-is-...

[yorwba]

The foundation paid a lot more for their own employees than for the platform https://opencollective.com/foundation#category-BUDGET so I don't think you can pin it solely on the company, the "complex services" performed by the foundation itself also cost money.

What confuses me about the budget breakdown is that the all-time expenses and contributions don't add up to the top-line disbursed and income amounts. Especially the income seems to be almost entirely opaque; maybe that was a large one-time grant that is now running out.

[bombcar]

"This year" is all "no tag" which sounds like it's not sorted yet, or just shutdown expenses.

Last year was $1.3m for 5 "number of expenses" (high but not insanely so depending on what it covered) and $400k for the platform.

You can go into detail: https://opencollective.com/foundation/transactions?kind=EXPE... and I'm not sure how they classify employment versus various other things.

It may be that the for-profit company gave the foundation a ball of money to start, and it was to get self-sufficient by now, and failed to do so.

[elixiry]

I don't know what happened, but this def is not the full story. Surely if the company had known it was squeezing the foundation to death it would have been in its best interest to offer a better deal no? I mean it's not like the company has hundreds of customers, and keeping the foundation alive even with reduced to maintain some income and avoid repetitional damage seems like a no-brainer.

[dang]

(this was originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39542039, which had a different link)