Hello Community!

Happy New Year to you and your families! And the beginning of a new year is an excellent time to make improvements that will help our community—particularly people who make donations.

We are grateful to everyone who donates! Along with technical contributors and commercial users, our donors help sustain the project. Since the introduction of donations in December 2019, we've received  $18,080 in donations—that helps us cover operational expenses including those required to set up the Foundation. Now there’s a better way to donate, receive rewards, and fund community contributors:

Support VyOS on OpenCollective

We’ve had ways to donate for a while already, but donors’ experience has been less than optimal. When we first introduced ways to donate, we picked Patreon and BuyMeACoffee because those platforms were already prevalent and looked reasonable.

Luckily, an alternative is itself open-source and is made specifically for open-source projects—OpenCollective.

Initially, we were a bit skeptical about it. Still, it’s growing in maturity and popularity, and by now, we are convinced that it’s a better way to collect and manage donations. However, there’s even more to it: it will also help us share our own and donated funds with community contributors for completed work—something completely impossible with our old donation management platforms.

If you haven’t heard about OpenCollective before, you should read about it on their website. It’s open-source itself and is built specifically for open-source projects. Our fees will be down to 10% with our current chosen fiscal host, and when the VyOS Foundation is fully set up and becomes our fiscal host, there will not be any third-party fees for us at all while we will still plan to donate to OpenCollective to support it.

So, how will donor experience improve with migration to OpenCollective?

First, there will not be any delays between when a new LTS release is made and when it becomes available for donors. Right now, we post those images to Patreon and BMC by hand, but OpenCollective will be integrated with our support portal.

Support portal accounts will be automatically created for donors and LTS image access permissions will be granted according to their tier—no more delays.

Second, there will be options to donate towards specific projects, such as the local web GUI, Ansible and Terraform support or documentation, and other additional functionality or ideas. 

Third, and most important, it will be possible to use the OpenCollective infrastructure to issue grants to community contributors working on those projects. So, not only will it be possible to donate towards a specific project, it will also be possible to fund the effort of community members already working on that project.

There will also be transparency reports—that’s a built-in feature of OpenCollective that Patreon and BMC lack.

We expect OpenCollective to significantly improve the experience of our donors and community developers and become an essential part of the future VyOS Foundation infrastructure. 

We will phase out Patreon and BMC  soon—we’ve sent messages to all current recurring donors and already migrated many accounts to support.vyos.io (Check your mail and/or private messages)

We have not yet finished setting everything up, and the holiday season and the amount of other work we have to do, don’t make it easier, so it will take a while, but we expect to have everything finished by the end of January.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Happy New Year, and thanks for supporting us!