Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
GitHub Sponsors
471–480 of 516 posts
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This seems like it's needed and (dareisay) overdue? Seems what they are planning to offer is not better nor different than what others already are providing (see OpenCollective or LiberaPay). In fact, it seems less than the existing options. The existing options are open platforms with open source code. What GitHub is introducing, seems to be a loss-leader (they give free cash away) for the sole purpose of getting…
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.
Doing this took ten years of operating as a commercial entity earning respect, and then ramping up my productivity hugely to compensate for earning about a quarter what I'd be making as a commercial entity. On the other hand, it's predictable and steady, whereas operating as the commercial entity proved wildly unpredictable and stressful in a whole different, darker way.
UX is fine but the platform will never give people a survivable income by itself. You need to build a business like any other, and then be able to take a MASSIVE hit to your income for the sake of your principles.
I'm happy with my choices but other people really can't do likewise. Certainly not from scratch: you wouldn't gain enough traction. I work in the music business. There's a saying, how do you earn a million dollars running a recording studio? Start with ten million. It's a lot like that, and no payment platform is really going to help.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#474I love this. I do wonder though if anyone can educate me on the choice to do a monthly sponsorship? I think that's awesome but at the same time, there are a lot of developers I want to send 10 dollar tips to for that library that they made. Just wondering if there's a reason to not have both. My guess is that foregoing one time transactions in favour of ensuring that people gravitate towards making a more sustainable…
I only have experience in non-development creative work, but one-off payments/donations are much more anxious than monthly. Sales of t-shirts/songs/ebooks could be higher than what I get monthly on Patreon now, but: 1: I could never be sure. One month it was $0, the next it was $3, the next it was $40. This is impossible to plan around. It's even worse now with everything moving to SaaS. It's easier to justify a subs…
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#475Earlier 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…
Complaints are publicity. They bump internet discussions, create buzz, and often go along with protestations of 'I really love (FooBazBar), I promise it's the best thing ever, now if you would only fix this bug…' and then angry flames over the bugs and defenders coming to protect the honor of FooBazBar.
Fix bugs and people are happy and stop talking. They return to happily using the product. Again, we're talking perverse incentives for just the sort of obnoxious behavior you describe, or worse.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#476> To supercharge community funding, GitHub created the GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund, which matches up to $5000 per sponsored developer in their first year of sponsorship. In the first year, GitHub will not charge any fees, so 100% of sponsorships will go to the sponsored developer. In the future, we may charge a nominal processing fee. What's to stop me^Wsomeone else and their friend from sponsoring each other for $…
If Github aren't doing KYC and AML, then their payment processor better have. Otherwise this is the swiftest way I've seen to make $5K.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#477This 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…
I've done a lot of volunteer work over the years and I've spent a lot of years developing web projects (not as a programmer).
The thing is that idealistic efforts and commercial efforts tend to have an inherent conflict of interest that a donation model helps get around.
I take tips and Patreon on my projects, plus I do a certain amount of paid work. The minute you start commercializing it, you need to do it for the money and someone else will be telling you what matters to them. It actively interferes with you doing what you think is best organically.
Once in a while, someone manages to find some sweet spot where their career and their ideals fit together nicely. But most folks need to do drudge work that they don't find morally objectionable to pay the bills, then find other avenues to express their ideals.
I think it's a great thing that it is now possible for some people to do a thing for idealistic reasons or the like and have a few bucks kicked their way for their trouble. But I think it kind of misses the point if you want to suggest ways to commercialize it. People can already do that by starting a regular, old fashioned business.
OSS is generally about doing a thing that serves humanity in some important metrics. And I wish serving humanity and making a profit were easier to marry together. But, in practical terms, I think that's just a hard thing to do.
Giving people a third option to do a thing they believe in and have a few bucks kicked their way seems like a way out of that trap so more people can try to do things "for the right reason" rather than for the almighty dollar.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a known vendor, and if I'm dropping $20/month on some vague software expense, nobody will care. If you said the money is going to GitHub, and it's actually going through GitHub, that's lying. I think it will probably show up differently on credit card statements anyway, so people won't be tempted to do this behind the backs of the accounting department.
Could you imagine getting audited and your boss finding out you donated $xxxx dollars in donated patronage to others? I would not want to be the one in that room...
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess our perspectives are different. You seem to see this from GitHubs point of view, I'm seeing it from the view of open source developers. Both perspectives are equally valuable.
I agree that our perspectives are different. I see this from the perspective of someone who wants to see developers get paid. Safely and securely, in a way that makes it easy for them to get paid the next time too. I'm also looking at this from the angle of "What non-nefarious reasons would GitHub have for making these decisions?". One of the first that sprang to mind is credit card security, which touches on quite a…
What non-nefarious reasons would GitHub have for making these decisions?
GitHub is owned by Microsoft now- they can afford to do this at a loss / zero sum amount because Microsoft thinks it's a good idea.As long as Microsoft is being altruistic here, we should be fine.
I think.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#480Awesome! 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…