GitHub Sponsors • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#461

Post by el_cujo » Thu, May 23, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #430

bluefox wrote: post #429

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.

Hopefully it will balance out the crazy optimism so many other posters are having over this announcement because they think they'll make money off of it.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#462

Post by andrewstuart » Thu, May 23, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

Sponsorships and donations don't work in any substantial way because they are optional.

What might work is "KeepAlive" subscriptions, where companies pay substantive amount of money monthly to keep projects that they depend on alive.

KeepAlive payments are about corporate self interest - ensuring that the projects they depend on aren't abandoned.

The secret to success is naming.

Calling it "KeepAlive" subscriptions conveys the self interest, and connects the potential death of the project to your need for it to be healthy because you've built it into your systems.

Naming payments to open source projects as "Sponsorships" or "Donations" leads to the expected outcome - a trivial trickle of money.

The payment amounts must be predefined and set high too - $200 - $500/month for small businesses $500-$5000 / month for medium and large business. It's critically important not to leave the amount to the "purchaser" - that's when you get payments of $1/month which is what happens on Patreon.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#463

Post by dual_basis » Thu, May 23, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

beager wrote: post #416

dual_basis wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monetary == unfair? Why?

Imagine you’re a solo maintainer of an NPM package, and you know that one of the FAANG companies uses your package. Normally, you respond to issues on weekends and cut new builds when reasonable bugs are reported. Then, the FAANGco starts sponsoring you, a pittance for them but a solid amount for you. They put in issues and submit PRs that are intended for their own use case, or even worse, that constrain the utility…

I don't know, I don't really see it as a problem. What is the difference between this and FANGco hiring the developer to specialize the product for them in-house, which is something that happens often?

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#464

Post by EGreg » Thu, May 23, 2019, 10:31 PM UTC

Androider wrote: post #435

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…

Is this an offer? Because we would do it :)

But your company probably doesn’t depend on our software.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#465

Post by EGreg » Thu, May 23, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

Interesting alternative to...

Anyone remember how cryptocurrency was going to be the way to pay for open source projects? By which I mean buying the kickstarter-like tokens of the project and trading them on markets, speculating until it launches?

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#466

Post by nullc » Thu, May 23, 2019, 10:53 PM UTC

Many projects that have had contributor sponsorship efforts in the past have had negative experiences with it, due to contributors showing up motivated by farming the payments with minimal investment.

In my experience sponsorship that isn't at a level that can sustain a developer at least at an ongoing significant part time level often ends up being toxic-- pulling in the worst outcomes from funding it (changing motivations to being dollar driven, bringing in low effort farming contributions) without bringing most of the positive outcomes.

I really hope that this is handled carefully.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#467

Post by miguelmota » Thu, May 23, 2019, 11:21 PM UTC

Very cool, this feature was much needed. It would be nice to be able to sponsor specific issues that pay bounties once the pull request is merged and issue is closed instead of only a specific developer. Would also be cool if the developer can specify a preferred payment option other than fiat such as open to accepting cryptocurrencies

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#468

Post by justinclift » Thu, May 23, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #329

Really neat! As someone who works on open-source full time and is largely sponsored by my users, here's my take: The good: - gets money into open source with an intuitive and accessible interface that will get it to the forefront of people's minds - they're the only platform that isn't taking a slice off the top (yet) - (temporary) donation matching and eating payment processing fees The bad: - a few projects on gith…

It'll also be interesting to see how GitHub competitors respond.

GitLab may be in a position to do so, unsure about others.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#469

Post by roca » Fri, May 24, 2019, 12:18 AM UTC

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…

You'd be amazed at how many people "make demands to the creator to implement some feature or fix some bug" already when they're not paying any money.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#470

Post by xwdv » Fri, May 24, 2019, 12:51 AM UTC

adamnemecek wrote: post #410

xwdv wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not in their interest to give me money, they have no interest in that at all. They simply want me to continue working and updating my project so they can keep making money.

I don’t need a part of their money. Those weren’t the terms that I put out my software with. Imagine if you had to donate money for every package and library you used. Building applications would get very expensive quickly, when it could just as easily be cheap and free.