Funding Strategy for 2020
Michael Mayer
Please take a moment to read through our funding strategy for 2020 and provide feedback if you like:
It's clear many users are waiting for a stable release while only very few donate or help with development. This project is about freedom but not necessarily about free beer.
We are not Google and don't have billions of dollars on our bank accounts to give away to our fans in exchange for their data. It's also somewhat disappointing how little support we get by companies and especially public organizations. Not a single dollar.
Every politician wants to support Open Source and warns social media is bad for your privacy, but only very few are willing to help those that actually do something.
The consequence is that we are forced to think about monetization. We honestly didn't expect this will be an issue and didn't ask for anything the first year. Thank you very much to our few sponsors! We still love each and everyone of you, even those that send multiple pages of written requirements and then ask every week when it is done.
Specific solutions could be to...
- sell a paid, tested & supported version in the app store while our contributors and other developers can continue to use Docker or build from source
- offer a geodata, public events and maps subscription since OpenStreetMap doesn't want us to use their development API for production