Invest in Cucumber
Incomplete documentation and unresponsiveness are the top two problems with open source, according to GitHub’s Open Source Survey.
Cucumber is no different. Our documentation is lacking, and tickets stay open over 6 months on average. The root cause of this problem is lack of funding.
When we founded Cucumber Ltd we had an aspiration to fund the open source project from profits. That aspiration hasn't gone away, but we're not there yet.
Open source software is not free. Somebody else paid for it. Tobias Koppers
About a dozen volunteers contribute to Cucumber on a regular basis, less than a day per week. None of them are paid for their work. For every regular contributor there are about 100k users. We estimate the total number of regular Cucumber users to be roughly 1M people. Many of them work for Fortune 500 companies.
Until now, there hasn't been a mechanism for these companies provide financial support for the people maintaining the Cucumber open source project. This isn’t a scalable model, and therefore we have launched a crowdfunding initiative that allows companies and individuals to invest in Cucumber.
Invest in Cucumber
What's in it for you
If you use Cucumber you want it to be good. You want great documentation, new features, bugfixes and a supportive community. Your financial support makes it easier for people to justify spending time to make this happen.
How it works
Companies and individuals can pay a regular amount of money to support the collective. Core team members can submit expenses for their work to the collective. When a team lead approves an expense, the contributor gets reimbursed for their work.
The open collective is a fully transparent ledger. All transactions are public. Some of the funds might be used to organise events, for example fly some of the core team members to a meetup or community event.
Any funds invested in the Cucumber open collective will have to be accounted for. Corporate sponsors have several options:
- Take it from the marketing budget. For a yearly donation of $1000 or more will display your logo on our website and READMEs on GitHub.
- Take it from the recruitment budget. By showing your support for Cucumber you can attract people with Cucumber skills.