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Re: GitHub Sponsors

#481

Post by RhodesianHunter »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #477
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…

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. 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…

I completely agree with you in some cases.

However as a data engineer I strongly doubt that many (any) of the dozens of open source projects I use on a weekly basis were created for idealistic reasons.

They were almost all tools (or collections of tools) that were created to fill a business need, or to make a developer's life easier, and then open sourced for one reason or another.

I don't see any conflict with corporate sponsorship of these projects.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#482

Post by DoreenMichele »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #481
DoreenMichele wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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…

I completely agree with you in some cases. However as a data engineer I strongly doubt that many (any) of the dozens of open source projects I use on a weekly basis were created for idealistic reasons. They were almost all tools (or collections of tools) that were created to fill a business need, or to make a developer's life easier, and then open sourced for one reason or another. I don't see any conflict with corpo…

I'm not at my best. Maybe someone other than me can find Patrick McKenzie's HN comment about "please make it easy for me to get an invoice instead of calling it a donation because I have to comply with tax laws and yadda, but would be happy to support your open source project if I actually use it for business purposes and can get the piece of paper called an invoice that my accountant and the government insist on."

I think that's a good direction that is probably underdeveloped currently, though every single time I mention it someone points to a tweet of his rather than the actual HN comment. (Which is not the end of the world and maybe there's a better way to frame that, I'm just not at my best )

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#483

Post by johnbatch »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #482
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with you in some cases. However as a data engineer I strongly doubt that many (any) of the dozens of open source projects I use on a weekly basis were created for idealistic reasons. They were almost all tools (or collections of tools) that were created to fill a business need, or to make a developer's life easier, and then open sourced for one reason or another. I don't see any conflict with corpo…

I'm not at my best. Maybe someone other than me can find Patrick McKenzie's HN comment about "please make it easy for me to get an invoice instead of calling it a donation because I have to comply with tax laws and yadda, but would be happy to support your open source project if I actually use it for business purposes and can get the piece of paper called an invoice that my accountant and the government insist on." I…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#484

Post by DoreenMichele »

johnbatch wrote: post #483
DoreenMichele wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not at my best. Maybe someone other than me can find Patrick McKenzie's HN comment about "please make it easy for me to get an invoice instead of calling it a donation because I have to comply with tax laws and yadda, but would be happy to support your open source project if I actually use it for business purposes and can get the piece of paper called an invoice that my accountant and the government insist on." I…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939

Yes, that's the one (with accompanying pertinent discussion).

Thanks.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#485

Post by RhodesianHunter »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #484
johnbatch wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939

Yes, that's the one (with accompanying pertinent discussion). Thanks.

The parent of this thread is someone in marketing suggesting ways this could come out of the marketing budget, very similar to the workaround of invoicing suggested in your linked comment. Both are ways to make donating to OSS a business expense rather than a charitable donation.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#486

Post by DoreenMichele »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #485
DoreenMichele wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the one (with accompanying pertinent discussion). Thanks.

The parent of this thread is someone in marketing suggesting ways this could come out of the marketing budget, very similar to the workaround of invoicing suggested in your linked comment. Both are ways to make donating to OSS a business expense rather than a charitable donation.

No, not really. Adding logos and yadda in exchange for remuneration is a really well established form of commercial monetization. In contrast, invoicing OSS is a new and innovative way to get cash for what you already do, just like a donation.

If people want to go that route, my comments on the internet aren't some kind of bar to that approach, so I'm not sure why you seem to feel some need to argue it.

But if you are doing open source for idealistic reasons and yadda, as per my comment, then invoicing per Patrick McKenzie's explanation is actually something new and innovative that serves a similar function to the donation model in terms of preserving an element of the OSS model that matters to some folks/projects, but opens up the possibility of getting it from a company. In addition to being something of a green field for the donation model and extra source of money, companies generally have deeper pockets than individuals.

I'm not telling anyone they aren't allowed to commercialize their project. I'm just saying it's a space I've thought long and hard about for many years and researched and yadda, and if you are in open source because a business model is antithetical to your mental models and goals for the project, then invoicing may suit your needs in cases where corporate sponsorship feels like the wrong answer.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#487

Post by sytelus »

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…

I personally don't like this whole sponsorship thing. This sets up people to optimize for getting and retaining sponsors instead of doing things that they would have wanted. A better approach could have been to offer money o fix issue or implement feature. For example, you could file issue/feature request on a project where developer has indicated that they have no time to work on and then offer $1000 to fix it. This is small amount if you depend on it for your business. The developer can decide if its worth their time and interest.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#488

Post by techwolf »

Kye wrote: post #419
caser wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super curious to learn more about the lucrative furry art niche and how you came across it. Surprised no one else has mentioned this part of the comment.

Probably a furry or substantially furry-adjacent. We are legion.

"Furries make the internets go", as the saying goes. I've met more furries accidentally through software and infosec projects than through anything else, to the point that I don't really bother separating it from my professional identity anymore.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#489

Post by lugg »

deadbunny wrote: post #104
nstart wrote: post #15

I 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…

Being able to vote with dollars on bug/features would be great.

Bug bounties would be amazing.

I'd drop a lot of money on a particular docker feature that hasn't been dealt with for the last 3 years running.

Re: GitHub Sponsors

#490

Post by pabs3 »

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…

Debian is looking for corporate sponsors for our annual conference:

https://debconf19.debconf.org/sponsors/become-a-sponsor/

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