On what basis would you split donation money among your open source team members without any strife?

Question

I am a developer of an open source project which is hosted in SourceForge.

It started out as a little app then after some releases, it got more and more popular and it started consuming more time and responsibility from me. So I have enabled the donation option in SourceForge.

I'm passionate to continue developing it for free but if (ever) any money comes in, how should I split it with my team?

1. Should I split the amount equally among the number of team members? (50-50 as it is two-member team now)

2. Number of classes, commits or any other valuable submissions by team members?

3. Any other idea?

What would you do in such situation? Please give your opinions.
I hope this question will be useful for others.

Answer 1

I recommend not distributing it to project members at all. Appoint or elect a treasurer, open an account and deposit the money to earn simple interest. If you distribute donated funds between developers, at least one will become disenfranchised as the project grows.

Instead, consider the other possibilities for the funds:

• Swag. Print up some T shirts to send to people who have made more than trivial contributions to the code.

• Bounties. Put a reward on the feature the community really wants but nobody really feels like implementing. This is also a great way to get new long term contributors. Or, 'sweeten the pot' a bit for fixing a really perplexing bug. The bounties don't have to be cash, especially if you have swag to give. It also doesn't have to be swag, a Pi in hand is worth 10 in the oven.

• Hardware. Buy stuff that the community owns that all developers can use. This could be servers, or gadgets that are shared through the mail.

• Tools/Licensing. You might need to pay for software, even being an open source project. You might need to buy a copy of Acme Widgets to study it for the purpose of creating an open alternative, or you might need to help a great contributor upgrade their development environment.

• Events. Help send your developers to conferences or key events when opportunities present themselves. Or, sponsor your own meetup if enough people would be able to attend.

• Legal Fees. While (thankfully) still relatively uncommon¹, you might find yourself in litigation for a number of reasons. It's good to have some money put away. This could be simply enforcing your license or copyright, or defending against something else.

There are so many ways that the money could be spread so everyone benefits, it really doesn't make much sense to limit the good it could otherwise do.

If you get to the point that donations and community support make hiring some of the most prolific developers to work on the project full time reasonable, it means you should be looking at the project as more of a business than a hobby.

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¹ _{Litigation in open source is a lot like plane crashes. You read about the horror stories and drama in the news when something happens, but don't forget the nearly millions of projects that have and will continue to exist without any issue whatsoever}

Answer 2

I think the reality of it is, it'll sit in your PayPal account until there's enough to take the team out and buy a round of beers. And if you're like most OS projects, that'll be months or years from now.

If it gets to be any real amount of money, I propose that you NOT spend it on developers--who obviously are contributing their time and expertise for good reasons that are not financial. Instead spend it on tools needed to further the project (hardware, a Basecamp account, etc), or on fun cheap marketing stuff like tshirts and desk toys. Make sure everyone who's ever contributed gets a t-shirt and you have enough left over to toss out at users groups and conventions and stuff.

Answer 3

Either put it back into the project (buy servers ect) or split it equally between significant contributors (dont give any to people who have only done a couple of lines).

People dont work on open source projects for the money. Trying to share money in any complex way emphisies the cash aspect of the project and is borderline insulting

Answer 4

Just my opinion, but I'd say don't worry about it until it's worth worrying about. If you're getting a few bucks here and there for yourself, I wouldn't sweat it or feel guilty about it unless someone specifically asks.

Now, for ongoing work, I might say "hey, I have a donation button up on the site and I'll give you n% of the cut when donations come in" just to call it out and be open about it.

Answer 5

I really like the idea of "code bounties". It helps to encourage people to donate because they're donating to improve something that is important to them, and it means whoever implements the requested feature/s wins the money (and also solves the "how to divide 50 cents evenly when there's 8 developers" problem ;-) ).