81–90 of 184 posts
I usually want to give say $30/month to OSS (personal use) and as a professional, I would have the authority to donate $300/month.
This would be great to not worry about individual donations, and just based on one-click or even just divide up the funds equally amongst all of my starred projects.
OP here. I'd love to see something like this exist. Let me know if it does already, or if someone is trying, and I'll link it below. EDIT: This model is used by Flattr [0]. Unfortunately Flattr isn't targeted at open-source software; an OSS-specific approach (ideally implemented by a highly visible, established player) is (probably) necessary for something like this to reach its potential. [0] https://flattr.com/
Liberapay sort of does it that way, though their payment processor has made it somewhat difficult. Basically you pay them 50$ and then you decide how much you're going to sent to projects and how often.
For example, I donate about 0.50ct each month to mastodon (sadly I do not have much expendable income at the moment). But it means I can spread little money into donations over an entire year.
I think they still need to make a percentage-mode, where I allocate money from my pool on percentages (ie, 20% of the money to mastodon over a year, every month, results in 0.83$ every month being transferred, or 10$ over the year)
I like the idea but instead of pools going arbitrarily every which way or to the discretion of the donator, it should be automatically applied across that open source project's dependencies as well. If I am open source software A, and I make ample use of open source software B within my project, your pool donation should automatically apply some to B, relative to it's usage in the project.
Agreed this would be nice, though this layer of complexity introduces a bigger attack surface for bad actors. They could try to get their modules listed as dependencies of popular projects to piggyback on their downloads. On the flip side there are some low-level tools (say, the `stylis` CSS autoprefixer) that are almost never used in their "raw form" but are the backbone of several massively popular projects. It's a…
OK my project is open source. I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero users. How much do I get paid? Zero? But I wrote open source code that solves a real problem. It's open source. I should deserve to get paid. Because open source software. I don't think your funding model works.
You don't get paid unless someone adds you to their sponsor pool. If no one knows about your thing, you don't get paid. Am I misunderstanding your question?
And if nobody knows that software exists, then it's not helping anybody. My phrasing sounds cruel, but I can't think of a better way to express it
> Existing open source funding models don't work for small projects. Is this true? It seems to me that open source small projects flourish and continue to grow [0]. Although, oddly, I can’t find a simple chart of python or npm packages added over time, I expect it is. Since the article is based on a seemingly false premise, it’s hard to consider the rest of the article. [0] https://octoverse.github.com/
That page argues (convincingly!) that open source is growing faster and faster in terms of contributors, projects, commits, etc. This is definitely the case, despite the fact that the funding problem is unsolved. But who knows how much faster OSS would be growing if it was solved?
Not just how much faster it would grow, but how much existing projects would improve. Maintainer burnout is real, and I think that OSS would benefit a lot from long-term maintenance being encouraged by even a few dollars a year.
Even $3/year would make OSS maintenance a lot more fulfilling for me personally, because that $3 shows that I'm actually helping people.
This sounds great! That being said, I wonder how well this would work out for smaller projects. Spotify uses a very similar model, and from what I hear, lesser known artists make very little money on their platform.
The key difference is that while users pay into the pool, they don’t determine determine how the pool, or their portion of the pool, is distributed. Plays determine distribution, but not a single users plays, all plays.
If all github users donations entered a single pool, and that pool was distributed to projects based on the number of clones each repo received, that would be similar to the spotify model.
But I don’t believe that’s being proposed.
Rather, a user sets up a donation amount, which is then distributed to the projects they include in their “sponsor pool”.
If the kind of open source you mention were actually valuable, there would be a market for it. You make a common mistake many people make when trying to calculate value: it has nothing to do with how much something is used, it has to do with the incentives for those creating it. People do not casually write open source to make money (unless sponsored by a company). They do it for the recognition and for vanity, and I…
2. I feel the whole idea of this kind of open source patronage / funding is to decouple the market value of the software (which is $0) from the compensation to the contributors for their time and effort (which I think should be above $0 in an ideal world)
"sponsor pools" "sponsorships" and "donations" are all words that imply optional, not required requests for money as a favor. i.e. begging.
The way to monetise open source is for payments to be required in some way. i.e. provide a core feature set that is valuable on its own and monetise by providing additional valuable features under a commercial license.
Instead we got a stupid global pool based on global popularity that primarily benefits PewDiePie even if I don't watch him. The compensation was barely enough to cover the lost ad revenue so it failed to actually provide a viable funding alternative for channels that aren't getting millions of views.
I hope the same thing doesn't happen with this model. If 100 people sign up at $10/month to only support CatacylsmDDA and minetest then these two projects should get $500 each (minus transaction fees). That money should not be diverted to Angular, React, Vue, ... and then when its time for the two mentioned projects they only get a pittance like $5 per month.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the projects I had in mind when writing this post is the "color" module on npm. It's a fantastic utility for reading in colors in different formats (hex, decimal, CMYK), applying transformations, and getting a modified color back (in your format of choice). For all intents and purposes this module is "done". It's extremely mature and has already implemented everything it set out to do. It has 3.3k stars and 8M…
But if there is no active development why would these projects need additional funding? Is it just a thank you gift?