If you measure wrong thing then you will get wrong results. Do you want programmers to think about "how many commits this issue is worth"? Just publish your Bitcoin address in readme file.
Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
#22I already donate to Vue and Laravel via Patreon. Per-commit seems like a return to the line-of-code as a metric that was disastrous for obvious reasons.
Re: Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
#23Woah - received some amazing feedback here! Thanks everybody.
So I'll definitely look at all the other, similar/identical products. Another takeaway is that this idea probably won't work on a per-commit basis - what's a good way to make sure recurring contributions correspond with actual development activity?
Re: Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
#24You should check out Gratipay(Formerly Gittip) - Although we currently aren't back up to speed (with working payments) it's an open source project/company.
Re: Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
#25http://www.backerpass.com would work well as it doesn't require backers to signup for an account like Patreon. (disclaimer: i know the guy who created it.)
Re: Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
#26If you measure wrong thing then you will get wrong results. Do you want programmers to think about "how many commits this issue is worth"? Just publish your Bitcoin address in readme file.
Patreon produces money. Payment information in a README doesn't. They're not comparable.
Re: Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
#27That's what we're doing over at Baqqer.com ( https://baqqer.com/ ) - come over and add your project! If you're interested in helping out you should join us. :)
Was curious what you guys do, but honestly, every page redirects to a signup/login page.
"A social community of makers building, selling, and crowdfunding together"
There is no clarity as to what you actually do.
Re: Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
#28Paying per commit seems as sensible as paying per LOC (related story: [1]). Simple recurrent monthly donations as one can easily set up (eg. on Flattr) make more sense, in my opinion. [1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
Issues closed is probably a better metric, though there's no actually good metric for software development.
Re: Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
#29As others have pointed out, platforms to fund work on open source projects already exist, and the best part is: they're open source themselves, so you can contribute! In fact I was the top developer of Gratipay for a year myself, and now I've created a fork called Liberapay (the reasons were the legal difficulties Gratipay faced in the US, and the decision its founder made to turn it into a non-neutral platform).
Links:
https://liberapay.com/ https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.com (Python)
https://gratipay.com/ https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com (Python)
https://salt.bountysource.com/ https://github.com/bountysource/core (Ruby)
https://snowdrift.coop/ (not operational) https://git.snowdrift.coop/sd/snowdrift (Haskell)
Re: Ask HN: Patreon for open source?
#30I don't actually know how well it works, but there is exactly ONE way that I've managed to financially support open source software: offer a version with licenses.
For example, my company pays for OpenVPN Access Server not because it offers a ton of value over OpenVPN (it really doesn't, for our use case), but because they provided a way for me to give them money that's acceptable within a corporate budget.