Non-profit organization Open Collective Foundationproviding financial and legal support to non-profit projects, made a decision about closing at the end of 2024. It is important to clarify that several independent legal entities are involved in maintaining the Open Collective ecosystem, which supports services for organizing the collection of donations and financing open projects. In addition to the closing non-profit organization Open Collective Foundation, there is the company Open Collective Inc, the non-profit organization Open Thanks for reading Collective and the organization Open Collective Europe.
All these organizations are completely independent, have their own personnel and goals, despite the similarity of names. For example, the Open Thanks for reading Collective organization provides financial support for open source projects. The main driver of the ecosystem is Open Collective Inc, which maintains the Open Collective collaborative funding platform. The management of funds (reception, storage and sending of funds) is delegated to individual organizations that can connect to the platform. The closing Open Collective Foundation was one such organization.
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Other legal entities associated with the platform will continue your job like will continue function and co-financing platform Open Collective, which was used by many open source projects to collect donations. The change concerns only the winding down of the activities of the non-profit organization Open Collective Foundation, registered in the United States and using services provided by Open Collective Inc, which maintains the Open Collective collaborative funding platform.
As a reason for the closure of the Open Collective Foundation called inefficiency of the business model used, taking into account the number of complex services provided and commissions paid by Open Collective Inc. At the end of last year, the organization suspended accepting new applications and tried to develop a strategy to solve the financial problems that had arisen, but in the end it was decided that continuation of activities was inappropriate and the organization was not viable.
Open Collective Platform used such projects as Manjaro, Flatpack, NixOS, Gitea, EndeavorOS, KeePassXC, Homebrew, Xfce, FreeCAD, PHP, F-Droid, LibreCAD, QubesOS, Curl, Solus, LibreELEC And Neovim. At the same time, financial support for Manjaro and EndeavourOS is provided by the Open Collective Europe, NixOS is provided by the Stichting NixOS Foundation, and all others on the list are provided by the Open Thanks for reading Collective, which are not affected by the closure of the Open Collective Foundation.
Funding through the Open Collective Foundation was organized for approximately 600 projects, mostly non-software related. For these projects, starting from March 15, the acceptance of donations will be stopped, and starting from September 30, the withdrawal of funds will be suspended.
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