The non-profit organization Open Collective Foundation, which provides financial and legal support to non-profit projects, has decided to close at the end of 2024. It is important to clarify that the Open Collective ecosystem, which offers services for organizing donations and funding non-profit projects, involves several independent legal entities. In addition to the closing non-profit organization Open Collective Foundation, there is Open Collective Inc, the non-profit organization Open Source Collective, and the organization Open Collective Europe.
All these organizations are completely independent, have their own staff and objectives, despite the similarity of names. For instance, the organization Open Source Collective is responsible for the financial support of open-source software. The main driver of the ecosystem is Open Collective Inc, which maintains the Open Collective crowdfunding platform. The handling of funds (receiving, storing, and sending money) is delegated to separate organizations that can connect to the platform. The closing Open Collective Foundation was one of those organizations.
Other legal entities related to the platform will continue their operations, as will the Open Collective crowdfunding platform, which is used by many open projects to gather donations. The change only concerns the winding down of the activities of the non-profit organization Open Collective Foundation, registered in the USA and utilizing services provided by Open Collective Inc.
The reason for the closure of Open Collective Foundation is cited as the inefficiency of the business model used, given the number of complex services offered and fees paid to Open Collective Inc. At the end of last year, the organization stopped accepting new applications and attempted to develop a strategy to address the emerging financial issues, but ultimately it was decided that continuing operations was not feasible and the organization is unviable.
The Open Collective platform is used by projects such as Manjaro, Flatpak, NixOS, Gitea, EndeavourOS, KeePassXC, Homebrew, Xfce, FreeCAD, PHP, F-Droid, LibreCAD, Qubes OS, Curl, Solus, LibreELEC, and Neovim. Financial support for Manjaro and EndeavourOS is provided by Open Collective Europe, NixOS by Stichting NixOS Foundation, and the rest of the list by Open Source Collective, which is not affected by the closure of Open Collective Foundation.
Funding through Open Collective Foundation has been organized for approximately 600 collectives, mainly related to ecology, food, agriculture, and volunteer activities. For these collectives, the acceptance of donations will be terminated on March 15, and the withdrawal of funds will be suspended starting September 30.
Source: opennet.ru
