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Re: GitHub Sponsors

#441
Dan Ariely's 2008 book "Predictably Irrational" [1], which presents experiments in behavioral economics, has one chapter [2] that discusses the introduction of money ("market norms") in an otherwise money-free social context, typically of favors being exchanged ("social norms")

To summarize, the introduction of hard currency completely disrupts the social dynamics and the resulting work quality, usually for the worst.

You can find an more in-depth summary in the links:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational

[2] http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422685/Predictably%... "Chapter 4: The Cost of Social Norms"

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#442
post #430

Prior to sponsors, you developed that project for the fun of it. It was useful to some, so you gave this sponsorship thing a try. It was a success, maybe not a great success, but still. Now that you have sponsors, you feel somewhat obligated, but still not on the level of that "professional software industry" that destroyed so much about programming for you. Time passes, and at some point it becomes clear that sponso…

This... seems pessimistic and overly dramatized.

And self-indulgent.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#443

Awesome! Some Feature Requests: 1) Let me sponsor a project, not a person 2) Let a project have a private, or a public, allocation of how funding goes. At first, simple percents would be awesome. 3) Let a project assign funding to another project. Probably one it depends on. 4) For a given project, let me see which other projects are funding it. 5) Allow the set up of Unions. These five projects all have one pool whe…

For #1, it looks like that's coming? The documentation[1] has been updated for project sponsor buttons to include up to 4 github-sponsor enabled users. I can't find a project using it yet, but I imagine this divides your donation to the project among the 4?

[1]: https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-but...

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#444

This is a nice start for allowing sending "coffee money" between persons. If however you want to drive Serious Money into actually funding OSS projects please remember this: While virtually no company has a donations budget, almost every company has a $$$ marketing budget. Please let me give you some of that money that would otherwise be spent on blue pens with logos and endless display ads to GitHub projects. I'd be…

This is a good idea, but also the behavior will probably be emergent with the introduction of this feature - I can definitely see OSS maintainers offering logos/links in the README in exchange for monthly sponsorship. I bet we'll see the emergence of "Gold/Silver/Bronze" tiers too, just like at conferences.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#445
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

It's a for-profit company who "loves" open source and hosts a lot of it's projects. But the platform is still not open source. Go figure

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#446
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If maintainers can see who donated, do they prioritize issues / pull requests? (I think that could be a good thing actually). This actually seems like it would be terrible. Contributions should be evaluated on merit, not on bribes. The overall concept seemed good at first but you raised some real concerns.

How so? If anything, it would be cool to have issue bounties to put your money to get the stuff you want solved.

For the same reason lobbying is harmful. The many should be served, not just those who can pay.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#447

Prior to sponsors, you developed that project for the fun of it. It was useful to some, so you gave this sponsorship thing a try. It was a success, maybe not a great success, but still. Now that you have sponsors, you feel somewhat obligated, but still not on the level of that "professional software industry" that destroyed so much about programming for you. Time passes, and at some point it becomes clear that sponso…

Unfortunately due to the death of net neutrality, you find wherever you host your repository, there's more latency and network dropouts, and if you want to share your code only users with "Full Access" tiers at their ISP can view it - all the poor people on the cheap "Basics" accounts are stuck with a generic set of "Inclusions" which don't include your personal hosting choices.

Dejected, you try and start a grass roots movement to open up the internet again, but due to the illegality of encryption the algorithms know and detect the subtle shifts in your social graph and semantic changes in demeanour. Late one evening, you hear a knock on your door. No one is there when you answer it, but you look down to see a small paper envelope. A quaint anachronism.

Inside are photos of your friends and family at home, at work, dropping their kids at school. You turn to the last photo and it's a frame from a webcam - your webcam. A small picture-in-picture overlay shows a particularly disturbing frame from an illegal porno. You don't recognise it, and you were always careful to cover up your camera for "personal" time, so you suspect a deep fake.

Your phone vibrates. A notification from the bank: "Your account is overdrawn." Your life savings are gone. Your phone vibrates again. This time it's a message. "This is your only warning. If you continue to fight the system, it will destroy you." You swipe to see who sent the message, but suddenly the screen goes black and your phone refuses to reboot.

The sun is coming up now. A flock of android sheep swoop through the air, bleating electronically. You drop the envelope and its contents in the nearest recycling bin, step to the edge of your cloud-home, and cast your body to the mercy of the under-dwellers far below.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a nice feature, less overhead for the donator too as the amount donated can automatically be split up among all of your starred projects. Bonus points to offset a sponsor dashboard where you can use a slider to change the percentage splits. In the future a budget feature can be added for sponsored projects and this dashboard can show which projects haven't yet met their budget for the month or quarter,…

This dashboard could also have suggestions for sponsoring projects that you either forked or use as a dependency in your project.

If I forked a repo it’s because I was making a PR to fix something. It says nothing about whether I’m still depending on that code.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#450

This is a nice start for allowing sending "coffee money" between persons. If however you want to drive Serious Money into actually funding OSS projects please remember this: While virtually no company has a donations budget, almost every company has a $$$ marketing budget. Please let me give you some of that money that would otherwise be spent on blue pens with logos and endless display ads to GitHub projects. I'd be…

This is a good idea, but also the behavior will probably be emergent with the introduction of this feature - I can definitely see OSS maintainers offering logos/links in the README in exchange for monthly sponsorship. I bet we'll see the emergence of "Gold/Silver/Bronze" tiers too, just like at conferences.

Take a look at the Webpack page that GP mentioned. This is already happening
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