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GitHub Sponsors

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Re: GitHub Sponsors

#281

Post by C4stor »

smudgymcscmudge wrote: post #254
C4stor wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many sponsoring circles have you detected already ? I can't believe people able to be sponsored aren't doing background stuff to make sure they get free $5K a month from github, since it's a simple as doing a reciprocal sponsoring. Heck, anyone with a bit too much cash can just offer to be payed to sponsor, let's say you give me 1 unit, I sponsor 0,9 upon payment, you get 1,8 from github. TL;DR : really surprised…

GitHub is vetting applicants. If they do get hoodwinked, they are at least getting hoodwinked into giving money to somebody they thought was doing worthwhile work to begin with.

So your hypothesis is that they'd rather assume this potential cost for the sake of publicity ?

Also, in the "paid to sponsor" scenario they'd be hoodwinke into giving money both to someone worthwhile and someone totally unknown to them. I'd be really curious to know the technical or legal possibles responses.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#282

Post by briandear »

diggan wrote: post #71
michaelt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Patreon product is 10% payment processing and 90% the marketing/branding/placement/ease-of-use/trust/normalisation, or whatever it is that makes people open their wallets. If GitHub Sponsors is stronger at whatever-it-is-that-makes-people-donate, that would be their advantage.

That's the scary part! OpenCollective for example, being developed via their own platform, need to make sure the platform is sustainable, and can't just throw cash wherever they want to gain marketshare. The result is a sustainable funding platform that will survive for as long as people fund it. GitHub on the other hand, can develop the wrong features, spend too much, give cash away and a whole bunch of other things…

I have never heard of OpenCollective, but I have been using Github for 10 years. And “collective” in the name scares me because it makes me feel like it’s a bunch of street artists squatting in a warehouse in Oakland — perhaps fun and nice people, but not the type of people I’d want to trust with distributing money and compliance.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#283

Post by peteey »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #253
derefr wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who’s making a living on Patreon? The same people who make a living on Kickstarter, or via “gift” transfers through PayPal (before that was clamped down upon): people who can pull in whale patrons/backers. Certain verticals have more whale patrons than others. The common story is that if you’re an artist and you want to go where the whale patrons are, that’s—for some reason—art targeting the furry subculture. That’s…

I patronize several people who literally make their living on Patreon (and YouTube), and it doesn't look like "whales" are necessary. Take LGR: currently making just over $6k/mo on pateron which is $72k/year, or $68k with an assumed 5% cut for Patreon. Depending on where you live that's already a reasonable income for a single person household, and he presumably makes some YouTube money on top of that. That money com…

We are ignoring something between whales and normal people. I believe the $2 trend is due to the expectation of subscription services. People see $2 as a reasonable exchange of what Netflix or Spotify would charge (for an individual show).

Average patrons might be willing to donate $100 a year if they understood they were allowing art or research to exist instead of just paying for market-rate viewership. This type of donation would allow 1,000 dedicated followers to support a niche cause instead of the lowest common denominator stuff creators like Pewdiepie has to put out to amass millions of fans.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#284

Post by steveklabnik »

nine_k wrote: post #140
pdimitar wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This logic is strange. If this repo receives $20 a month, if I donate $5 I'll increase their budget by 1/4, a huge impact. If this repo receives $500 a month, my $5 will increase their budget by 1%, barely visible.

Many people who get paid this way prefer the 1% case to the 25% case. It's much more stable. This means if you decide to stop, they only lose 1%, not 25%.

I mean, people are still going to enjoy getting more money, don't get me wrong. But they'd rather have 1000 people giving a dollar than two people giving 500.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#285

Post by wpietri »

cwyers wrote: post #272
clarkmoody wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that companies are already paying GitHub to host private repos, so it's part of their monthly payment flow. With simple nudges toward sponsorship, many companies will chuck in an extra few bucks toward the projects that they build their codebase on top of.

No they won't. I, and a lot of other people, cannot get accounting at where I work to cut a check for that kind of sponsorship. I can get accounting to cut checks for things that matter. Typically if someone asks what's the difference between paid and free, and you answer, it supports Active Directory, you're most of the way there if you can show a business need for the product. But just a straight-up donation? It's…

It's only a hard sell if you have to run it by accounting. But this is the kind of thing that I would have happily just expensed. It's a known vendor, and if I'm dropping $20/month on some vague software expense, nobody will care.

Note also that the product lets people "choose from multiple sponsorship tiers, with monthly payment amounts and benefits that are set by the sponsored developer." That opens up much bigger pots of money. E.g., a premium support tier is totally justifiable for software that I'm building key code on. That could be $25-100/month, no problem.

And there's a reason conferences sell sponsorships: lots of businesses see it as good marketing to support things that are visible and important to a community. For example, I could totally justify a big-dollar project sponsorship ($1k-5k/year) as a recruiting expense if I want to hire people who already know something important to our work.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#286

Post by naniwaduni »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #255
pingucrimson wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe that is good. How is that good?

Maybe the quality would improve? There's a condition I call "open-source-itis" that a lot of projects suffer from, where tons of new features (usually of dubious merit) get added but nobody ever bothers to fix bugs or make sure the foundation is actually solid. It makes sense, because that's unsexy work that people generally don't want to do and they're all working for free, but it makes a lot of open source software…

I'd expect it to get worse. People pay for features over maintenance even more strongly than they allocate prestige.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#287

Post by bshipp »

Hi Devon, I think this is a great idea.

speaking as someone working for a small company with the ability to sponsor projects of interest, could you evaluate the possibility of assigning rewards to specific milestones? for example, if I'm using a particular FOSS library and see that the maintainer has set up certain functionality as a long-term milestone could I attach a sort of carrot to a particular milestone to provide incentive to continue development?

This would be in conjunction with standard sponsorship, of course. But, for some developers, it's easier to find the motivation to complete a task if there is a defined reward waiting at the end of it.

it doesn't even have to be new functionality; it could simply be implementing a testing protocol to meet internal corporate requirements, or reorganizing old code to fit new standards; stuff that's necessary but boring and shoved to the bottom of the pile for a hobby project. This might really open up the corporate pursestrings instead of relying on individual contributions.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#288

Post by munmaek »

throwaway_7718 wrote: post #129

Say a sponsored developer Bob has some software, that another person, Alice forks. The fork becomes wildly more successful than the original for some reason, and Bob loses many sponsors in the course of time. Would a situation like this force developers to use restrictive licenses? (I get that Bob can just integrate Alice's fork into his original - assume that it's too much work for Bob to do so)

This... doesn't make much sense. An open-source license (one that is actually recognized as such by OSI[0]), means that anyone can fork the code and contribute to it at the very minimum. The only way to stop this would be to use a non open source license (or none at all, making it effectively source-available), but nobody would want to donate to someone making only source-available or closed-source projects.

The reality is that people would just have to choose, unfortunately.

[0]: https://opensource.org/licenses

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#290

Post by radium3d »

xwdv wrote: post #280

I don’t like this. There has always been a purity around writing open source software simply for the benefit of mankind. Let’s not kid ourselves, probably no one is going to make a living from github sponsors, and projects that bring in any significant money are probably written by developers who already make good money do something else anyway. This would basically be beer money to them. You would be amazed at how p…

Don't let them manipulate you. Assert your policy that they are paying for the software as it is at the time of donation. I would donate with the same thought without any expectations of further development because of my donation. Only that the software has already helped me in its current state.
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