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Regarding the announcement to dissolve Open Collective Foundation
Published on February 28, 2024 by Lauren Gardner

Dear OSC community,

You may be aware of recent developments regarding the dissolution of Open Collective Foundation (OCF) by the end of the year 2024. We are extremely sad to hear the news and are still processing it, but we wanted to send a quick note to our collectives. Please be assured Open Source Collective is not affected and will continue to operate as usual. Our organizations are distinct entities, each with its own budget, accounts, staff, board of directors, and mission.

The similarity in our names stems from a common origin, as the founders of Open Source Collective were also involved in creating the fiscal hosts Open Collective Foundation and Open Collective Europe. Additionally, we all utilize the Open Collective platform, a detail we recognize may contribute to confusion. Although the naming of these entities is similar, we are all separate business entities.

Open Source Collective remains committed to our mission and to serving the open source community.

We have compiled a list of OSC-hosted collectives with an entity or grant currently hosted by OCF. We will discuss these with OCF and reach out individually regarding the next steps. If you are an OSC-hosted collective with a project on OCF and want to contact us directly with questions or have yet to hear from us by the end of this week, please get in touch with us at [email protected].

For collectives currently hosted by Open Collective Foundation, you may be curious to know more about Open Source Collective and our fiscal hosting offering. Open Source Collective is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit fiscal host that only hosts open source software-related projects. If your collective works in the open source community, you may be eligible to be hosted by us. However, it is essential to be aware that as a 501(c)(6) organization, there may be restrictions on funding opportunities from specific donors who are limited to funding 501(c)(3) entities. Additionally, there may be constraints on transferring funds from a 501(c)(3) fiscal host to a 501(c)(6) fiscal host.

If you are an organization looking for a new 501(c)(3) fiscal host and are a social movement or charitable organization, you may wish to reference a list of fiscal host organizations here: https://www.fiscalsponsors.org/member-directory.

Our hearts are heavy for our friends and colleagues at Open Collective Foundation with whom we shared dreams, efforts, admiration, and inspiration as we each worked to build a community of care and support.

Please let us know how we can help and if there are any questions we can help you answer.

Lauren Gardner, Executive Director of Open Source Collective

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Jonathan White

Posted on February 28, 2024

I read this a couple times and don't understand if we actually need to do anything regarding this announcement? Can it be restated with explicit steps on what would need to be done and if we are actually affected.

Lauren Gardner

Posted on February 28, 2024

I read this a couple times and don't understand if we actually need to do anything regarding this announcement? Can it be restated with explicit steps on what would need to be done and if we are actually affected.
Hi Jonathan, 

It looks like your collective is hosted by OSC and you do not have another collective on OCF so you are fine, there is nothing you need to do. Some admins have collectives on both OCF and OSC so we are just being proactive with those folks to see how we can help.

ELI5
- Open Collective Foundation (OCF) is shutting down at the end of the year
- Open Source Collective (OSC) is not affected by this 
- Despite the similarity in our names, we're all separate business entities 
- If you have a collective on OSC AND another collective on OCF, we will reach out to you to see how we can help
- If your collective is just on OSC, nothing changes. Just reach out to us at [email protected] (or here) if you have any questions for us 
👍️  3

Huan

Posted on March 3, 2024

Can I donate my money from OCF https://opencollective.com/clubber-ml to my OSC https://opencollective.com/wechaty/ ? I'm admin of both them.

I remember before we can make donation from one collective to others if you are the admin,  like this: https://opencollective.com/wechaty/contributions/44885 . However, I can not find how to do it on our web interface now.

Can you help me to know how to do it, or help me to do it if we have not support it in our web interface anymore?

Thank you very much!

Jonathan White

Posted on March 3, 2024

Awesome thank you!

Jon Richter

Posted on March 6, 2024

To iterate on an idea from when I first saw opencollective/opencollective:

Are there any other publicly known instances of the software than opencollective.com?

I'd like to independently validate the hypothesis, that replicated deployments embedded into a hyperlocal cooperative economy could benefit from an independent instance maintained by themselves, say a regional federation of coops, commons and mutual aid collectives.

Maybe there are preliminary examples published somewhere from which a replication study could draw experience from?

It would only appear possible, if there are no proprietary or cloud provider dependencies that cannot be surrogated with FLOSS, except payment providers.

Not to fall in these pits again: