OSArch Supporters

OSArch is a loosely defined community, with currently no centralized funding or legal organization. Nevertheless, we function as a community, and work together to produce output with measurable impact on the industry. In lieu of a more structured organization, this page aims to document the existing supporters of OSArch. Or, to put it another way, if we were a centralized organization, who would be our “members” be? Examples of centralized organizations are:

• Blender foundation, funded by the Blender Development Fund
• GNOME foundation, funded by Friends of GNOME
• KDE e.V., funded by the Join the Game initiative

There are current discussions and proposals around how OSArch should be structured and how an organization would function (see also Organization), both legally, in terms of making decisions, how to prioritize resources, and how funding is managed and collected (see also Funding sources). None of this has been finalized, and users are welcome to discuss further with these link to the community discussion forum:

• Funding Free Software and OSArch
• Organizational Structure and Governance of OSArch
• Funding Open Source Development: A stab at an open and distributed method of profit sharing
• How to make profitable open source?

Advocates of OSArch

The first level of support we would like to learn about is how many people are simply advocates of OSArch activity. To be an advocate, all that means is that you have read and understood what OSArch is about and are willing to publicly put your name down as agreeing with the principles of OSArch. This can help us quantify those who support OSArch in principle, but are not currently making active contributions.

Part of being an advocate can be participation in online media like forums and social network, and helping to share and publicize the work done related to OSArch.

Contributors to OSArch

A contributor is an individual who is an advocate of OSArch, but in addition, also contributes to an AEC software in the AEC Free Software directory. A contribution may be financial, coding, writing documentation, running legal and hardware infrastructure, creating videos, translating, hosting events, bleeding edge bug reporting, extensive forum participation and so on. A contribution is loosely distinguished from advocacy in that it produces an output. If you’re interested, you can learn how to contribute to OSArch.

It is up to you if you want to publicly disclose how much money you are financially contributing to projects that relate to OSArch goals. A financial contribution may be to one project, or many, to a single developer, or to a fund. If you publicly disclose it, we are able to transparently track the financial resources currently made available to projects, and this helps make a more informed decision on how to achieve financial sustainability for free software in the AEC industry, as right now data is difficult to obtain. Financial numbers can also help us set more realistic goals in the future.

One way our supports contribute is by managing our online presence and OSArch Digital Infrastructure.

Corporate advocates

Are you part of a corporation ready to tell the world you support more libre/open source software in AEC? Let us know on the community forums and let’s discuss the opportunities on what this type of relationship implies.