Continuing the discussion of the Technology Invesment Funds:
While the convenience that such funds provide is beneficial to acquire more donations, but the funds cannot pass on 100% of the donations to the projects and neither should they.
Operating such a fund requires at least the following costs:
- Researching and validating project dependencies. Projects do not necessarily disclose all of their dependencies, especially if they compete with their dependencies for funding, thus the dependencies have to be regularly and independently verified.
- Funding inter-project infrastructure: support hotlines, conferences, support groups - in short: Guild work.
- Usual operational costs of a digital business: servers, domains, administration
If these “funds” should operate as investment funds, this would be deducted as a percentage fee from any investment (i.e. 5% of all investments are used for fund operation).
Alternatively investors could be compelled to pay a more regular fee instead of the percentage fee, though this is a detailed discussion for which this is not the correct place.
The questions we should elaborate more here are: Who should initiate a TIF/TIP?
Should it be developers, a reputable foundation? How should the start capital for TIP/TIF be raised?
See: socialcoding