Discussion: What would it take to ensure Anki will fully become and always remain a public good, while also sustainably funding on-going development and operating of a sync service?

Anki Suggestions
1

(hopefully this is the place for this post; none of the other forum categories seemed to match the topic any better)

Disclaimer: I’m new to all this and not an expert on any of these topics. The goal of this post is to kick off an honest and open discussion in the community of how we can ensure Anki will fully become a public good and how we can fund sustainable, on-going development and sync services.

Starting point

My best current understanding is the following. Corrections encouraged!

  1. Anki name / trademark is owned by Ankitects Pty Ltd (according to USPTO and CIPA filings)
  2. AnkiDesktop is fully open source and mostly AGPL licensed (according to GitHub repo)
    edit: the situation is a bit more complex, see Anon_0000’s post below.
  3. AnkiWeb is owned by Ankitects Pty Ltd and closed source (according to AnkiWeb terms)
  4. AnkiMobile (iOS) is owned by Ankitects Pty Ltd and closed source (according to AnkiWeb faqs)
  5. AnkiDroid is fully open source and mostly GPL licensed (according to GitHub repo)

Unfortunately, Anki Forums is disallowing me to include links to the sources.

Given this, the main barriers to Anki fully being a public good are 1., 3., and 4.

From the research I’ve done so far, it seems like the following model could be sustainable.

Have a non-profit foundation own and control Anki

The mission of the foundation is to ensure Anki becomes and will always remain a public good.

As far as I can tell, this would require transfer of ownership of the trademark, AnkiWeb, and AnkiMobile (iOS) to the foundation, as well as control of the official repository.

Provide a clear path to making all parts of Anki AGPL licensed.

The foundation could take the form of a Canadian Federal NFP or a German e.V.

A US 501(c)(3) non-profit could be an option, but I think there a good reasons to have the foundation not be primarily located in the US.

Form a multi-stakeholder coop to fund ongoing development and sync services

Use the foundation to grant a newly formed coop the rights to use the Anki name.

The purpose of having a coop is to raise funds through membership dues (in addition to any donations the foundation may receive) and to have a vehicle to democratically direct development goals.

All work will be AGPL licensed code contributions to the main Anki repos.

This would be a multi-stakeholder coop in that it would be owned by worker members as well as user members.

E.g.

Class A Members (Users): Pay $10/year for sync services and get 1 vote.

Class B Members (Workers): Employees who get a share of any surplus and have 1 vote.

Thoughts? Do you think this might be a viable model? If not, what would better alternatives be? What are the barriers to implementing any of this?

2

For your information, there are a variety of licenses used.

Contributions currently are licensed as BSD 3 so that the closed source parts of Ankis ecosystem can reuse the FOSS code, see anki/CONTRIBUTORS at main · ankitects/anki · GitHub.

And there are even more including MIT, Apache 2 and others. You can see where which license is used in anki/LICENSE at main · ankitects/anki · GitHub.

1 Like
3

I just saw that there is also a similar discussion going on on Reddit: The case for creating an Anki Non-Profit to be in charge of Anki