this would a slam dunk if you could sponsor projects or organizations besides just developers. if that happened, this would destroy patreon and paypal in the donation space for OSS projects.
GitHub Sponsors
141–150 of 516 posts
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#142Great feature! Something to consider for the feature which would allow us to donate more is:
1) Sponsor a project rather an individual developer
2) Sponsor a specific issue/bug
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#143Leave it to Microsoft to finally figure out a way to get people and more importantly businesses to fund OSS work.
Microsoft has really become "less evil" in the last couple of years.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#144Microsoft is gonna centralize the sh*t out of the eco-system. Let's see how it goes this time.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#145Ugh, not again! First they introduce a Package Registry that not only splits the ecosystem in two parts but also has no open governance or even open source code. Great. Now they are doing the same thing with donations. Instead of collaborating with already open platforms (like OpenCollective or LiberaPay), they decide to build their own closed-source platform. I love that more people are figuring out ways to pay open…
I'm not saying "open development" is not important but your message reads like its dismissive of people with different goals. I'm a developer, I might create some tool for my needs and share it with others. I've got other income sources so there's no need for me to charge money for it. I just put it on GitHub as the easiest thing I can do to allow others benefit from it. In some sense I would be open source developer…
That's fine and all. I'm not really involved in that side of things (consuming/producing open source libraries) and I think that side of open source is working fine, albeit it could be better (like most things).
What I'm mainly thinking about, is the running infrastructure. The live servers that are serving requests and providing a service to open source developers.
Some of these services are just nice to have.
Others are services we 100% depend on to get anything done nowadays.
The npm Inc registry is a good example. Imagine that the registry disappears tomorrow. Probably most JS developers would struggle until a alternative becomes clear and most people migrate there.
But just having the risk of having for-profit companies run these pieces of critical open source infrastructure, is a big risk for me as a open source developer.
This open source infrastructure is what I'm scared about, because we basically have no good solutions yet, for running open source infrastructure.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#146Great feature! Something to consider for the feature which would allow us to donate more is: 1) Sponsor a project rather an individual developer 2) Sponsor a specific issue/bug
I would absolutely sponsor issue's. It'd be a great way to lure people into a longer term sponsorship.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#147I think it's a very compelling deal: under the patreon model (company takes a cut to fund the funding mechanism), the "platform tax" is a permanent sore that makes donating feel less good than it could. Am I giving to the cause or am I giving to the platform? An independent zero fee platform run entirely on altruism will always be in the edge of failure, with one of the failure modes being transfer to untrustworthy o…
What about the Liberapay model? The platform is just one explicit project to which you can donate, just like any other. It's not a tax, nor running only on the creators' donations.
Great case of Dogfooding. Contribute here: https://liberapay.com/LiberapayOrg/
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> doesn't work well for Patreon and others What do you mean? What's wrong with Patreon?
"Take Patreon as an example, a popular funding platform for all sorts of things including open source projects that has been around since 2013 and has paid out $1 billion to creators since then. While that’s an astonishing figure, Patreon isn’t a sustainable business with its current private company model and level of VC funding of $105M: “Under the company’s current business model, 90 percent of funds are paid direc…
Sounds like that's plenty to cover wages of £60k ($80k USD) gross, which is double the median graduate salary in the UK. I guess compared to what people earn in SV it's pocket change?
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#149I run community sites for which I am paid donations to cover running costs including writing code, bug fixes, servers, etc. Today I take donations via PayPal, but the catch with this is that it's hard to provide visibility to donors of how healthy this is (WRT to costs), and whilst I considered Patreon that seemed to be very focused on creative deliverables to donors of a non-code/service nature. I am trying Browser…
> visible "this repo receives $500 per month" it would encourage code contribution whilst providing visibility over the health of a project. I fear this might snowball. Many people don't donate if they see a project with very small donations. It goes like this: "well, my contribution would not make any difference anyway"... The reverse is also true: "this guy is OBVIOUSLY doing something right if he gets $500 a month…
Well what I'd like to do is establish a stack of budgets against a project, e.g. Kickstarter Goals.
$500 p/m = all hosting and domain costs paid for
$750 p/m = we'll use some paid service that makes the service better in some way
$1k p/m = we'll reward contributors $250 p/m distributed across those who contributed to PRs but exact distribution determined by repo admins
And then to have a budget associated to the lowest one being the means for the project to survive... with a running total on that one, showing deficits (because I do have to still cover raw costs and those end up on my credit card the months I fall short, so future months should help recoup that).
In this way, it would be extremely clear what funds a project needs to survive and how donations and support makes a difference.
NB: My projects do fine... we get enough support to be viable. But damn it would be great to not manage it all manually, it's a chore I'd like to give up so I can code more.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#150It's interesting to see the gradual monetization of Open Source. 10 years ago this was just something you did for fun but with the proliferation of services charging for it, the landscape is shifting rapidly. Github are moving in some interesting directions and it'll be interesting to see if they can stay ahead of the competition with how trivial it is to migrate to a rival. I wouldn't bet on them personally but it'l…
As someone who was around 10 years ago I'd question that a little, there were lots of OSS companies then, and lots of people getting hired and paid to work on OSS too.
A difference today is trying to move some of the money down to smaller-scale projects that have little chance of becoming a standalone company, and also more options to get paid without having to go work at a big company.