Since we already discussed it under this thread, @heatharensen, allow me to share your FOSS Backstage presentation here, which I just finished watching.
It’s pretty exciting to see that we’re raising these questions. I hope the rest of the community will feel the same, join the conversations, collectively start designing these funding systems, and we can turn these ideas into reality.
What would we do with it if 1 Billion was pledged to support Digital Public Goods?
Let’s imagine that there is, and there might very well be very soon, as open source becomes much more critical to national governments and national strategies, that there might be funds of a large size, a scale that we’re not used to seeing in the open-source world. Will we be ready for it?
Here are my humble answers to the questions mentioned in the presentation.
How should a dedicated public fund distribute its money to an entire open-source ecosystem?
One of the core challenges is scalability. The open-source ecosystem and dependants constantly change. The developers regularly add new features, fix issues, release new versions, and potentially increase the value of their software. Or, if the software stops being used or maintained, its importance in the ecosystem becomes less.
If we want to distribute a certain amount of funds to such a dynamic ecosystem, we cannot do this by manual, static decisions. No one can precisely say, this project should receive x amount of money.
Therefore, the funding process, eventually, needs to be automated to avoid scalability issues. We need to study and develop a standard way to evaluate the value of each open source project and distribute the fund to the projects based on specific metrics.
Without getting too much into details, my answer is that the algorithm should be similar to OSSF’s Criticality Score, but combined with better “usage” data, hopefully through Software Bill of Materials initiatives, for example, CISA SBOM.
Bonus: I recently started to run a personal experiment precisely about this issue and now distributing a tiny fund into three open-source collectives each month based on their Criticality Score. As usual, any feedback is priceless 
Once the money starts flowing, how can we keep a good balance between paid maintainers and volunteer contributors? Would introducing money harm these communities?
When projects start receiving money, we can expect that it will create some disruptions. Can we minimize such impacts? Might be. Should we worry about this too much? I’d say no.
The essential detail is that there are already open-source projects with paid employees while still having healthy volunteer communities. As we all know, the big tech companies also have quite a solid open-source projects portfolio:
- Microsoft: Featured Projects | Microsoft Open Source
- Google: Projects | Google Open Source
- Facebook (Meta): Projects | Meta Open Source
In most cases, the core maintainers are the for-profit company’s employees with probably above the market average salaries. Yet, there’s still a strong community around the projects that keep making volunteer contributions. More than that, these are probably the healthiest open-source projects in the entire ecosystem.
In other words, once there’s money, it’s up to the core maintainers to manage the community and their expectations. Some will succeed at this stage, and some won’t.
Suppose we wish to guide maintainers in this area. In that case, we can reach out to these existing communities/projects and ask them to share their experiences with us and, therefore, other maintainers; what are the challenges we need to be aware of during such transition?
How can we finance decentralized communities?
Especially if we’re talking about funds equivalent to full-time salaries or more, we should ask core maintainers to set up a company for their open source project and pay directly to that company, not the individuals.
The rest should be similar to any other company; if there’s enough funding for more people to join, the maintainers can ask other volunteers to become employees in that company.
With this approach, the open-source maintainers/projects will not get special (legal) treatment. The path will also be the same for other software companies to join the funding program; open/share your technology, and start generating revenue for your contribution to the digital public goods.
One last detail, the funding structure we describe is similar to the online platforms in that the content creators get paid based on specific success metrics (e.g., YouTube, Spotify). Considering that they already have an experience in all the areas we need to deal with, it would be pretty helpful to get in touch with these platforms and see how we can collaborate in designing these systems for the Digital Public Goods.
I’m pretty curious about the upcoming working group on this topic, and I hope to have more extensive discussions around the public fund options and how to move forward 