Ask HN: Patreon for open source?

There's also https://opencollective.com/ https://github.com/OpenCollective/OpenCollective (JavaScript).

patio11 has written before on why tips or especially "donations" are a bad idea, or at least not the best idea:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=659396

businesses have a much greater incentive to ensure continued development of projects than individuals. Personally there's at most a handful of projects I would support with my own money, but my employer's money would be very well spent supporting at least a dozen different OS projects.

Here's my idea for getting more money to open source. Someone please implement it, I'm too busy right now.

Central repository (database with website and API frontends) that contains links to donation pages for all open source software. This is crowdsourced information. So if you search for "spark", apache spark appears with link to donation page, and of course more obscure packages will be added as well.

Then a CLI tool is written that scans your code base. This is an open source tool, so for node it will look in NPM packages, for C projects it will look at the make files, etc. Developers can write custom code to detect their own packages if it's not standard.

The output of the CLI tool calls an API at the central repository that creates a report, so you can go to the URL and see all the open source packages you use and links to donate to them.

Now, here is the final piece that would make it so much better, but is more difficult: the central repository itself is a non-profit organization, so instead of having to go to each library's donation page, you donate directly to the central repo (perhaps a set amount every month), and once a month the central repo donates all of the amounts taken in. So if you only want to donate $10 a month, but use 500 open source projects, that's OK, because once a month the central repo will add up all the donations and donate one lump sum. Of course you can change the ratios of donations if you want, so some projects get more of your donation per month than others, and you can remove projects you don't want to donate to even if you use them.

In this way, individuals and companies can fairly compensate all the developers of the open source software they use, easily and fairly, in the amount they can afford.

At the end of the year, you only have to write off your donations to the central repo, and not the hundreds of open source projects, as the central repo is a non profit.

Thoughts?

It seems to not be there now, but some months ago, patreon's entry page listed out the types of "creators" that one could sign up as. As I recall, this list seemed to take actual pain to not mention open source software, among an otherwise exhaustive list of creative endeavors including not just art, music, writing, but technical endeavors as well as such as research. I always took this to mean "programmers not welcome". This was about the time that there was a mass exodus of bloggers from Gittip (what gratipay was called at that time) to Patreon so they almost seemed related.

edit: finally got through their registration. You get: "Which category fits what you make best?"

Video & Film

Music

Writing

Comics

Drawing & Painting

Animation

Podcasts

Games

Photography

Comedy

Science

Education

Crafts & DIY

Dance & Theater

.. it's clear that programmers (unless you're a game programmer) are not welcome.

"If you want a way to receive donations, you can publish Bitcoin address."

Yes. If you want payments, you can publish a Bitcoin address, or anything else you'd like (my point here is not about Bitcoin specifically). To a first approximation, you won't actually get any payments, though.

That's the difference.

We don't live in a world where people haven't ever tried this brand new donation idea. We live in a world where a lot of people have. Their reports are almost uniform... they literally write blog posts when they receive enough money to pay for a meal in a month or a year, because that's how rarely it happens. It's not a functional mechanism for making money. It doesn't even rise to the level of paying for a hobby; it tends to run at donation rates roughly comparable to what the author could get walking down a busy street every day and keeping their eye out for loose change, and well below the rate of "collecting bottles out of the trash" in any state with a bottle deposit.