Ask HN: Patreon for open source?

There is Tip4Commit: https://tip4commit.com/

What I'd really like to see is some sort of business account for Patreon or one of the others. Lots of companies use open source projects as an integral part of their day-to-day work, yet it does not seem straightforward to set up a monthly contribution to this work for a company. Obviously, they can use one-time grants to the Apache Software Foundation or someone else, but sometimes it is really just a single developer or a couple of developers that develop a crucial software package (webpack and others). Would be great if a company could support this easily as well.

There is [Gratipay](https://gratipay.com/~Gittip/) which is based on donations. You might look into that as well. A commit I think is not representing anything apart from the fact that it is a (hopefully) compound piece of code. You might want to pay for finished user stories which are estimated properly.

Yup, that makes sense. Do you have an idea for a better indicator of development activity we can tie into? I thought about telling the contributor how many commits the team makes on an average month, and capping the maximum contribution they'd like to make.

"Give some love to open source devs."

It turns out that many users of open source projects (especially libraries and packages) are other developers !

It is hard to find a piece of modern software which doesn't depend on some open source libraries. Those libraries might depend on other libraries and so on. Just do an `npm ls --depth=4` in a node-based project to see what a nice tree that is. Same thing with cocoapods, carthage, rubygems, pip, cargo, leiningen, etc.

In my view, money should follow the project structure - developers should donate part of the money they receive to the project dependencies and the devs of the dependencies should do the same thing, recursively and that's how you really spread the love !

I've started working on a prototype a year ago, but got discouraged after someone showed me that there are literally hundreds of projects trying to 'spread the love' and as a consequence no love is being spread :)... so I kind of gave up on it for now, but still think this is how it should be done.