Request for Proposals: Flathub Program Management

Announcements
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The GNOME Foundation is seeking a contractor to help with program management, financial/legal setup, and public outreach to bootstrap Flathub LLC. This work is funded by Endless.

Project Overview

The GNOME Foundation, in partnership with KDE e.V., is bootstrapping Flathub LLC to become a self-sustaining entity. Flathub has already established itself as the premier app distribution platform for Linux, serving over 4 million active users and hosting more than 2,500 applications from over 1,500 contributors.

The program manager will focus on these key objectives:

  1. Launch payment and donation systems for applications and Flathub itself
  2. Establish operational governance for Flathub LLC
  3. Coordinate financial and legal operations
  4. Ensure community engagement and transparency

Desired Experience and Knowledge

Candidates should demonstrate expertise in:

  • Knowledge of US and software legislative landscape (you don’t need to be a lawyer, but if you’ve worked with lawyers before on contracts/licenses/terms that would be very helpful)
  • Experience with accounting and basic economic management
  • Track record of establishing cross-organizational processes
  • Experience working with volunteer communities and coordinating technical work
  • Fundraising and communication abilities

Project Objectives

The successful candidate will be expected to:

  1. Oversee deployment of payment systems for applications and direct donations to Flathub operating costs
  2. Finalise governance documents and convene a simple governing body for Flathub with representatives from GNOME, KDE and the Flathub community
  3. Establish and manage bank and Stripe payment processing accounts
  4. Finalize and launch terms of use and developer agreements
  5. Coordinate handling of accounting, operations and expenses with the GNOME Foundation
  6. Ensure transparency through clear communications and documentation for the community

Budget

Available budget: $12,000

Expected duration: 3 months part-time

Individual hourly rates are not to exceed $55 USD per hour without prior agreement with the GNOME Foundation.

Eligibility

We welcome applications from individuals with experience in:

  • Open source project management
  • Financial operations
  • Community management
  • Legal document review

We strongly encourage candidates from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds, as well as those who might not meet all criteria but believe they can contribute to Flathub’s success.

Application Requirements

Please submit your proposal including:

  1. Relevant experience and approach
  2. Specific project milestones and timeline to achieve the key deliverables
  3. Weekly time commitment, proposed rate and payment structure

Additional Support

The candidate will work with:

  • GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. leadership
  • Legal counsel for governance, terms of use and developer agreement
  • Existing Flathub technical team
  • Community volunteers and reviewers

Submission Instructions

Proposals must be submitted to flathub@gnome.org by Wednesday 18th December.

For questions or additional information, please use the Flathub Discord or e-mail flathub@gnome.org.

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Sorry if a little off-topic, but wasn’t flathub hosted in the Netherlands & UK (+ Fastly CDN), wouldn’t a US based LLC cause further legal issues regarding software patents, data (especially for payments) and privacy laws etc. in the future; why not in Europe?

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Hey, not a bad question at all. Bits of Flathub are hosted in different places; some of the frontend services are hosted on GNOME infrastructure in the USA, not sure where the build servers are right now - with Equinix in Amsterdam I believe - and some of the core repo servers in the UK.

However the servers aren’t the main thing here - the funds used to support growing/operating Flathub after the first donations have been received from philanthropic grants in the USA, and to the best of my knowledge must be directed into US tax-exempt 501c3 orgs such as the GNOME Foundation. Flathub LLC is owned/operated by GNOME so also counts as a tax-exempt organisation, and is able to share accounting/finance/ops/etc processes with GNOME rather than having to set up all of its own stuff.

Stripe does already work in different ways depending on where you are - people in Europe are more likely to have their transaction processed by Stripe in Luxembourg or whatever. For Flathub itself, I don’t think this is a particularly huge deal for eg data privacy because a) we’re not going to collect much user data at all because that’s just not of interest/relevance to our purpose, and the more we collect, the more risks/complexity around compliance, consent, removal, etc and the more risks, and b) even if “headquartered” in the USA, by operating servers and serving users in the EU, Flathub still has to comply with EU GDPR and other similar laws that require compliance on a transnational basis.

Software patents… well… it’s complicated. I can’t really reproduce our legal advice on the forum here. We’re trying to do what (little) we can to protect ourselves and developers. Maybe at some point somebody who has the combination of technical, legal and financial nous will to set up FreedomHub in Switzerland - they’re welcome to as we’ll keep all of the infrastructure and tools we build open source. The US funding and legal entity is what we have now and what got us to where we are today.

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Thanks for the clarification, all the best!

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This is a truly wonderful step. I am a hobbyist currently hosting my storytelling app flatpak privately. Very happy for this step to allow publishers and developers keep their apps alive and of higher quality. I even admit I’d be happy to test/help.

Cheers

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this is an amazing step , especially with popular platforms like the steam deck i think its a great opportunity for linux software developers to get funding.
However the amount of $12,000 seems awfully low for such a goal. I think a flexible funding campaign(via a platform like kickstarter) would help a lot.

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I don’t disagree there’s a bunch of work to do; but it’s more coordination and management than doing a lot from scratch. The legal agreements are drafted, they need reviewing/finalising. The code for payments is ready - it needs a Stripe account and a roll-out plan. The governance thing doesn’t need to be crazily complex, it just needs someone to make sure it happens and record/publish the minutes, etc. And raising more funds for Flathub itself as part of the work is a great idea. Maybe a fundraiser / drive on flathub.org itself could be a way to test out the Stripe integration for the first time, and have people make accounts? Open to suggestions from whoever applies and how they prioritise things in their plan, but the budget is what we have to start with right now. :slight_smile:

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That has been implemented anyway (not exactly as a fundraiser, but a general donation) and would IMO be the first thing to roll out.

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Heya, just a few questions:

  1. Is it planned for Flathub LLC to remain an entity owned by the GNOME Foundation?
  2. If not, and if it is split, will the entity be run as a non-profit? Will governance be open, or limited to a specific set of projects?
  3. How involved will this Flathub organization be in the governance of the Flatpak project as a whole? xdg-desktop-portals?
  4. Will proprietary applications be able to accept payments? Only FOSS?
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Hi Lea, thanks for your interest. I touched on some of these in my blog post last year (progress has been a little slow since then, hence the need for some dedicated capacity!) - Robotic Tendencies » Flathub in 2023 - but only tangentially. I’m happy to answer in more detail here.

  1. Because GNOME already acts as a fiscal host for Flathub in terms of receiving donations and paying contractor and infrastructure costs, establishing the LLC was the simplest move to protect GNOME from any compliance risks or liability from handling end user software distribution and payments. By GNOME being the single member of the LLC it will also be tax exempt unless we elect to separate it.
  2. Having the separate LLC allows us to handle future transitions without disrupting the operations of Flathub, ie we can move Stripe/bank accounts, suppliers etc all at once should GNOME need to part ways for some reason. The ownership structure is different to governance however - we’re planning to establish a light board structure with some representatives from different communities eg Flathub, GNOME and KDE. At present especially when starting up I am prioritising transparency over more complicated e.g. membership/representation/election structures but we can evolve that over time. Flathub is a bit of a strange beast because it’s all service/infrastructure - our community of app developers doesn’t necessary correlate to having a strong capability or interest in operating the service, so membership/elections doesn’t immediately make sense to me. We will look to set up an advisory board and invite participation from different OSes, desktops and software projects/vendors.
  3. No plans to involve Flatpak or portals governance in this at the moment. Depending on financial capacity there might be scope for Flathub to invest in Flatpak tooling to improve the developer experience in future.
  4. We will allow any verified app to require payments or solicit donations, but we will charge a market rate for proprietary apps (eg 30%) and cross-subsidise FLOSS apps (eg 10%).

Thanks,
Rob

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We will allow any verified app to require payments or solicit donations, but we will charge a market rate for proprietary apps (eg 30%) and cross-subsidise FLOSS apps (eg 10%).

The “market rate” of 30% is a result of monopolistic practices. Steam, for example, bans publishers of games/apps who want to sell on Steam from selling their app in another place cheaper by excluding their cut. They are currently being sued for it. Such as AppStore and Google Play.

Flathub needs to show an example of fair commissions. I would propose maybe 5%, not more that 10% for proprietary and no fee for FLOSS at all.

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30% is certainly excessive. Microsoft takes 12% in their Store and even Apple and Google are taking “just” 15% in their for apps if they have less than $1 million in revenue.

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As someone who has years of experience in setting up and operating elementary, Inc. (including elementary AppCenter, the only example I know of a paid FOSS app store), 30% is honestly only a somewhat high cut if you are operating at big-tech scale (e.g. Apple, Google, Microsoft) and/or subsidize your operations with other revenue (e.g. iPhone sales, web advertising, and Windows licenses).

For AppCenter, the 30% cut (with 50¢ minimum, e.g. for $1 payments) barely (if ever) covered technical costs of operation—excluding paying for employees to maintain it. It turns out it costs a lot of money to provide build infrastructure, a fast global CDN, developer resources, etc.—especially when most apps are free and don’t even hit that cut at all. Keep in mind that Apple and Google at least also charge developer fees for the privilege of publishing your app (including free apps) to their platforms: $100/annually for Apple and $25/one time for Google.

Flathub is incredibly fortunate to have gracious infrastructure donors right now, but understand that Flathub needs to cover costs for (or continue to have external donors provide):

  • From-source builds of every release of every app and its dependencies for every supported architecture

  • Transaction fees for any payments, which by default are 2.9% + 30¢ (unless you can negotiate lower fees some time in the future, if you hit higher volume)

    • This means that for a $1 app payment, Stripe gets 33¢ off the top—if you implement this naively as a 70% payout to the developer, Flathub would lose money to Stripe on every $1 app purchase

    • I seem to recall that this case is handled by the Flathub codebase, but it’s a critical detail of the hidden costs

  • Infrastructure engineering to keep Flathub both operating and improving

  • Continuing to serve fast downloads (2.5 billion, so far) around the globe of installs and updates of the nearly 3,000 existing free apps and all of their dependencies—plus the rest that come to Flathub as it continues to gain popularity

  • Hosting the store front-end itself (flathub.org)

  • Hosting and serving the metadata (MetaInfo, screenshots, icons—everything needed to make a native listing in GNOME Software or KDE Discover) that an increasing number of Linux distros (including Fedora, Endless OS, Pop!_OS, elementary OS, Clear Linux, Zorin OS, etc.) download and parse out of the box for their native app store clients

    • This data is downloaded by every user of these distros—as well as every user who manually adds Flathub to Ubuntu, Arch, etc.—from Flathub’s infra when they use their built-in app stores

That’s… a lot. Flathub doesn’t have a corporate Linux distro that they sell support for to subsidize these costs. Neither does Flathub sell luxury hardware with healthy margins, charge licensing fees to OEMs for a globally-dominant proprietary OS, or operate the world’s largest data-collection Internet advertising business. So, a 10% cut of a payment for a FOSS app seems to me to be entirely reasonable—and maybe even too low for a completely self-sustaining model. And a 30% cut of a payment for a proprietary app seems perfectly reasonable to cover those costs as well as to provide a slight incentive for folks to distribute their software under free and open licenses, instead.

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Yeah, right now the minimal payment is 2$

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Thank you for making Flathub into the app distribution platform for Linux!

By “require payments or solicit donations”, do you plan to ban in-app purchases that use their own payment/donation infrastructure like the Play Store and the App store do?

What about apps that just put a link to their donation page (currently forbidden in Play Store AFAIK), or apps that are free but have other revenue mechanisms (e.g. ads) ?

If you allow apps to have their own payment infrastructure, will you require them to give you 30% of the revenue from Flathub downloads? How would that be enforced?