Here's when MSFT gets to throw their weight around. GitLab simply could not afford to match this program, and I doubt Atlassian could as well. In a year Microsoft will have won so much share of OSS that this will pay for itself many, many times over in the years to come.
GitHub Sponsors
491–500 of 516 posts
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#492This 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…
Yep 100% agree, this is how both Vue.js and Laravel have succeeded with "donations" on Patreon which are actually companies paying for advertising space on the project's respective websites. Both are doing 6 figures annually in recurring "donations", which is almost entirely from $xxxx/mo tiers targeted at businesses.
I think the other thing that is better about doing things this way is that when a company is buying ad-space from you, it's very clear what they are paying for. With the current peer-to-peer setup that was shipped this week, I guarantee the "please fix my issue I donate $10/month!" problem is much more likely than it is with a company who is paying to have their logo on your website.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#493I get that some people are concerned about github strengthening its monopoly here, but that shouldn't be solved by preventing or opposing the improvement of the platform. There's a sense in which it's like opposing Tesla improving its autopilot tech because it further entrenches them as the leader in the electric car market - or whatever - you get the idea. Monopolies can lead to very bad outcomes for society, but we probably need to handle that by some means other than attacking improvements to the platform.
This comment of course assumes that you think that it is actually an improvement. It does seem like there is a risk of hurting the "spirit" of open source, but then you'd have to hold the position that things like librepay/opencollective/patreon are bad for open source, which at least makes the claim a little dubious. I don't have strong predictions here, but if I had to gamble I'd say that lowing the friction to rewarding content producers (of any sort) is going to be a good think more often than not.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#494I think it's a very compelling deal: under the patreon model (company takes a cut to fund the funding mechanism), the "platform tax" is a permanent sore that makes donating feel less good than it could. Am I giving to the cause or am I giving to the platform? An independent zero fee platform run entirely on altruism will always be in the edge of failure, with one of the failure modes being transfer to untrustworthy o…
>GitHub will not charge fees for GitHub Sponsors. And to celebrate the launch, we’ll cover payment processing costs for the first year, too! One-hundred percent of your sponsorship goes to the developer. My reading is that they're only going to forgo the fees for the first year, and after that it's going to be basically similar to Patreon in terms of where the money goes.
No, they will take much less than Patreon. They will only charge the Stripe fees, which are much lower. And they will withhold nothing for Github by themselves, only for Stripe, their payment processor.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#495Earlier 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…
You don't need an invoice to make something a business expenses and or tax deduction.
Even in the case of an audit, the bank or credit card statement showing who the money was paid to is enough.
Now, if you are giving cash, you would definitely need an invoice.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#496One of the people promoted on this page is not like the others. Two projects, essentially zero work done (one is literally a single line in a readme file, the other a basic html page with a list of words), and yet already asking people for $100 per month to support her. Everyone else put in the work first. smh
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#497Earlier 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…
You don't need an invoice to make something a business expenses and or tax deduction. Even in the case of an audit, the bank or credit card statement showing who the money was paid to is enough. Now, if you are giving cash, you would definitely need an invoice.
That is not gonna fly where I am from. Our external accountant, CPA type guy, will absolutely hound our ass, and charge his hourly rate doing it, for the invoice corresponding to the VISA card charge.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#498Prior 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…
I would need data to concede that javascript required makes gitlab DOA for devs. Or, that they wouldn't enable javascript to write code.
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#499Really 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…
Is there any reason why you couldn't mirror your repo on github for the donations platform?
Re: GitHub Sponsors
#500This 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 line of discussion ("Make it so we can pay you $xxK/mo, don't ask for donations.") comes up a lot on HN.
Here's what I did:
First, I spent four years developing security libraries for PHP developers that can be considered core infrastructure. Random_compat was an API-compatible polyfill of PHP 7's random_bytes() and random_int() functions for PHP 5 projects (and has over 100 million downloads). sodium_compat reimplemented most of libsodium in pure-PHP, and currently powers WordPress's signature verification functions. That's just two examples, I have over a dozen of distinct and useful libraries-- many of which have been adopted into popular frameworks-- that make your software materially more secure. If you're a serious player in the industry and your code base is PHP, you're running my code.
Okay, value delivered through open source? Check.
All of the above was also published through an LLC rather than just under an individual's name.
Then, I began offering the usual HN recommendations (support contracts, especially for EOL versions of PHP for Enterprise Linux customers).
I even created a streamlined workflow section on the company website and linked all of our open source projects to it: https://paragonie.com/enterprise
To date, the SQL tables that power that section of our website only has test records I created to make sure it was turned on correctly.
So I believe this to mean one of two things:
1. There's a missing step that I'm not doing that, once executed, will rake in the dollars.
2. The prescribed advice on message boards about how to run an open source business doesn't work.
(Until I figure out which it is, I'll have to continue doing code audits and penetration tests. Not exactly hurting for money, but it's not coming from the channels that people expect for open source. Enjoy the anecdata.)
https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie/random_compat