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GitHub Sponsors

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Re: GitHub Sponsors

#401

Post by seanabrahams »

seren wrote: post #14

A logical next step would be to add bounty on specific bugs or features requests. If a company is relying on open source, and has no capability to fix a critical bug (which is a bad strategy but it certainly happens), it would probably be ready to pay a hefty sum so that the maintainer, or anyone involved in the project, will have at least a look at it. Today, unless you can contact directly the maintainer and hope h…

This 1000x. I spoke to a designer at GitHub specifically about this a few years ago. Their initial concern was over-complicating the UI/UX. There's no doubt they've discussed this internally and I'm very curious what the hold up is.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#402

Post by rudiv »

techntoke wrote: post #314
OrangeManBad wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Getting linux on desktop. Check * Getting OSS contributors paid. Check Unlike Google, it seems Microsoft (Satya) isn't just doing OSS for PR but he probably sincerely believes in it. Thanks also to Hanselman who seemingly has been a major pro-OSS voice.

WSL is absolutely terrible and can't be taken seriously.

Maybe for your use case, but there are plenty of basic applications for which it works fine, if a little slow. The WSL2 implementation should make it fully competitive option for lightweight tasks like frontend web dev and introductory programming - if MS's figures on performance improvements are accurate.

WSL replacing Linux in the near future is, as you say, not a serious concern. But it being a viable alternative for a portion of the people who would normally use desktop Linux is quite realistic, I think. What say?

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#403

Post by ssn »

Contributing to open source software has never been about money. I would be very interested in reading the economical analysis of the impact of this move by GitHub.

How will the money incentive align with the existing incentives.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#404

Post by cutenewt »

benatkin wrote: post #209

Not so fast. People have said this about gittip (now Gratipay), Patreon, Twitch, and now YouTube and Facebook. All of these have been mixed blessings. Here's an article about how Patreon doesn't work out even when everything goes smoothly: https://theoutline.com/post/2571/no-one-makes-a-living-on-pa... "After launching my Patreon, I struggled for months to find work. Patreon filled my downtime, and became a full time…

Micro-patronage seems to be a hard way to get by.

It'd be more lucrative for a patronage website to allow someone to go after big whales.

Just imagine if someone got a 1 million dollar grant. Even if it took a long time to secure it, it'd be a lot better than convincing 200,000 ppl for $5.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#405

Post by cutenewt »

johnnyfaehell wrote: post #393
kodablah wrote: post #192

This is such a watershed moment in the history of software development that I don't think most of us can grasp its significance yet. Sure we're familiar with other services that do the same, but the adoption rate (like for GH itself) will be clearly different. One could argue that this is more societally important than YouTube, Twitch, etc funded content for _consuming_ because this funds content for _leveraging_ to…

This is a sad commentary on software development as a profession, as well as society as well. A watershed moment is when private individuals might be able to get paid for the extremely valuable work that they do that allows thousands of companies to make a profit with some companies becoming worth billions. The fact that the ability to socially beg for money for valuable software makes the idea of writing valuable so…

What's the line between patronage and just hiring someone outright for a pet project?

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#407

Post by stephenr »

diggan wrote: post #344
stephenr wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doing your own service but building it open source and as a open platform Why would they ever do this? Practically nothing they do is Open Source.

Well, they trying to put themselves in the middle of open source. Why wouldn't they, if they really care about their users, not just getting profits?

> if they really care about their users, not just getting profits?

[citation needed]

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#408

Post by dantiberian »

diggan wrote: post #47
kristianc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the open alternatives don’t seem to have amounted to anyone making a living from open source. Centralizing it offers a nicer UX - it’s not just about feature parity.

So, for me that indicates that the problem is not that there is any service for making payments, but rather that open source developers who lives on donations, needs to be paid more by more people. It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen. Instead, they signal nothing about this problem and shipped yet-another platform. They could have easily have contributed to solving…

> It would be cool if GitHub integrated with existing platforms and helped that to happen

They did that as well today today with support for a .github/FUNDING.yml. This file lets people provide links to Open Collective, Patreon, Community Bridge, Tidelift, Ko-Fi, a custom link and they show up as alternative sponsoring options for a repo: https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-....

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#409

Post by rurban »

JohnFen wrote: post #377
reggieband wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month. For the kind of dollar values most github supporters are working in (probably in the range of less than $1000/year) - a single yearly lump sum would be easier to expense directly on a corporate card rather than getting accounting involved monthly.

> In my experience at a reasonably large corp ... getting the bureaucracy to spend $20/month is somehow more of a pain than getting it to spend $50,000/month. This has been my experience, too. I suspect it has to do with how budgets are allocated. A large expenditure request follows a different path and will probably get seriously examined and specially budgeted for. A small one only needs the approval of the departm…

Fully agree with that. And that's why I love github that much. I got two sponsors from github-as-official-company already. It's apparently easy there to get that microbudget approved.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#410

Post by adamnemecek »

xwdv wrote: post #371
adamnemecek wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very shortsighted view. The purity view is the thing that prevented open source from taking over for the longest time. No, there will definitely be people making money from this. Say Evan You, creator of vue is making 18k a month in patreon https://www.patreon.com/evanyo . Why wouldn't people use github now instead? > I will not be using github sponsors for my open source projects... Why not? There's no shame in aski…

I’d be thrilled if people were making money from my work, that’s the point.

OK you should also get a part of that. Donations are very non commital for both sides. You aren't expected to do what your donors tell you to. It will help you spend more time on your projects. Like it's in the interest of the users to give you money.
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