161–170 of 184 posts
Yet another model that has probably been never used on high scale: letting people sponsor tickets (GitHub issues). The donation would go to the contributor who closes the ticket to the satisfaction of the main contributors. The amount, of course, will be decided by how a ticket is perceived as important.
I think that this essay is fundamentally brilliant, but doesn't come out and yell the self-evident truth: the ONLY way this ever takes off is if Github does it. And man, do I ever hope that they do. There's no other entity in the ecosystem that even approaches the role Github plays, with all due respect to Gitlab and the rest of the also-rans. It'd be wonderful if they did the same thing, but in the end, they are goi…
The only thing really keeping me on GitHub is stars. I have a fundamental objection to entrusting open source to Microsoft. If gitlab implemented this feature Id probably move tomorrow.
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Hm... that's not at all what I intended to convey. And I think you're putting things in quite extreme terms. The field of software / digital engineering has grown an exploitative side. This is absolutely true. To be crystal clear, without diving into detail and derailing the thread: I find this evolution reprehensible and not how humans ought to be treated. Is that dynamic then the result of Open Source as a princple…
You're making some good, if aspirational points, but I'm still not convinced. After all, artists have had patrons for a long time. The gallery system is a relatively new invention. Do I believe that artistic creators are a net-win to society? 100% Do I wish that artistic professions were seen as worthy of support? Yes I do. But in actual today reality, most artists can announce that they are doing a show, staging a p…
It's perfectly valid to leverage Github and open source as a means to an end: either to secure an income as an employee through public exposure of your work, or secure patronage through donations in order to attain a type of (partial) financial independence that allows for creative freedom.
Either way, every line of code that gets pushed in this way, was never directly commissioned nor sold to a paying customer. And that, well, that's a choice between different business models. It's not an inevitability as you make it seem.
It's wonderful to see how open source has flourished, and people ought to be compensated for the work they willingly and consciously distribute u free. I'm more then happy to pledge a small donation left or right, or contribute a patch, a piece of documentation or do a bit of mouth-to-mouth promotion.
Lamenting then that you can't cover your living expenses through donations and shifting the responsibility towards Github e.g. they should provide more affordances to funnel more people towards donating? That's quite an explicit take on monetization which is deserving of critique. Especially if the alternative entails, well, starting to properly value, market and sell your work, which is how the market essentially works.
As I said, that doesn't exclude me from acknowledging wealth disparity, and the fact that loads of people try to use open source and Github as a jumping board to secure a steady wage. I think that's really important: I've hired people in the past for enthusiastically showing and discussing their work, as it shows so much over who they are a a person, what drives them, and how they think.
Finally, let's not forget that Github isn't a charity nor a public administration: it's a private company with a profit motive as well. Which is a can of worm into itself if you start considering centralization, walled gardens and the nefarious consequences of those dynamics.
(By the way, patronage or philanthropy, as you mentioned, historically wasn't driven by purel altruistic motives: nobility employed artists as a way to flaunt their wealth and their power towards their peers.)
I expected Youtube Red to work like this. Each person has its own pool. Channels should have been weighed by watch time with a minimum weight so that small channels get something as well. If I watch one channel then that channel should get the whole $10 (minus youtube cut). 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…
I might have selection bias because I support an OSS dev there but isn’t that a pretty efficient way of directly supporting specific projects?
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To send someone money I'd have to know their address (not viable). If they only accept money through GitHub sponsorship, then I'm prevented from donating in any other way. Which option do we (content creators) endorse? We definitely need to transition to better funding model. Seeking out donations and sponsorships is frustrating and that time could be better spent. GitHub Sponsors managed to solve most problems on te…
> To send someone money I'd have to know their address You could just ask them? I recently donated to an OSS project for which the maintainer didn't publish any means of accepting donations - I simply asked and he sent his PayPal address. Another option would be for maintainers to publish a Bitcoin address in their profile - but again, if not already present, just ask.
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Author here - 100% agree on all fronts! I was dancing around this conclusion but it really does need to be GitHub. And I agree people would be fine paying their own fees if it came to that. Also, in that case, if someone is donating a non-trivial amount, they're incentivized to fund their wallet with a cheaper payment method like an ACH transfer.
I just want to point out that in Europe we have 0-fee SEPA transfers that also work for regular payments. I'm not sure why nobody makes use of that more really. There are simple-as-paypal solutions for it, and given the amount that CC processing costs I'd have expected it to be picked up more. Maybe someone here has practical experience to share on why it's not that easy?
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I'd love to learn more specific details about your leveraging strategy. Keep in mind even someone like Torvalds only serves at the pleasure of big corporations. Let's keep gift economies in alignment with public interest folks. It's difficult to imagine a competent developer needing to squeeze people, for cash money to pay rent, considering how much coders get paid.
Two-thirds of projects on GitHub have 1-2 maintainers, as of 2015.[1][2] I’m sure many of those people are in other areas or occupations, or in other countries, where these high-paying jobs may not exist. Some people simply don’t wish to work at a company, and those folks still may produce value to those other than themselves. Let’s not appeal to productivity too hard; learners and those of lesser coding capability a…
They may, but my point here is that the reason a corporate SWE's code is so valuable isn't because of the code itself. It's because of the ecosystem that the SWE and corp are a part of. That ecosystem serves to multiply a meaningless block of code into a couple million dollars that can be split nicely with all the non-coders who made it useful. Without that ecosystem, an open source project can never hope to monetize to the same level. That big open source projects have substantial funding is an effect of being so imminently usable in those million dollar ecosystems that the forgotten scraps of the corporations are enough to sustain them.
Two issues here: Models like these existed. Flattr and Liberapay. The latter had to switch away from the pooling model because turns out when you do the pooling you essentially become a bank and that’s difficult to do legally. Those models only work if users actually visit your website or your Github. I’m developing an app targeted at end users and I bet 90% of them have never been on Github or even know what that is…
So as I see it the proposed solution does remove friction to supporting a large number of projects, but doesn't solve the visibility issue very well as I expect most projects to be in that "used by something I use" category.
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> To send someone money I'd have to know their address You could just ask them? I recently donated to an OSS project for which the maintainer didn't publish any means of accepting donations - I simply asked and he sent his PayPal address. Another option would be for maintainers to publish a Bitcoin address in their profile - but again, if not already present, just ask.
They're talking about physical address, as that's what the parent suggested.
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The only thing really keeping me on GitHub is stars. I have a fundamental objection to entrusting open source to Microsoft. If gitlab implemented this feature Id probably move tomorrow.
Hey there, we do have this feature at GitLab, just FYI: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/#star-a-project