181–184 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.
What about the satisfaction of the person who raised the issue?
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> The reason these npm-type packages can't charge is that they're extremely fungible. I'd say it's less that they're highly substitutable (which I was I think you mean, instead of fungible) and more that they are non-excludable goods. A seller has no way to exclude a buyer from consuming opensource; that is in fact part of the definition . But without excludability, there's no incentive for a buyer to buy, other than…
> non-excludable I think the term you're looking for is "public goods", which combines non-rivalrous and the author chooses not to exclude people through legal means . Running out of time to comment before I need to get to work so I'll just link our economics page here: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics
It doesn't matter why they might be exclusive. If it's through technical means like DRM (even absent legal support for it) or (blurry, admittedly) needing an exclusive tool such an Open Source plugin for Photoshop, then it's not really a public good. The latter case is arguably a public-good within the "public" of Photoshop-users.
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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…
> those folks still may produce value to those other than themselves. 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. Wit…
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Doesn’t Patreon already solve this problem? 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?
Almost, except for the low end. It would be perfect if it grouped donations and charges, and let you allocate any arbitrarily small amount to any creator. As it is, it charges fees per creator you patronize, and limits donation to being at least $1 per creator. I'd put $30/month there easily if I could spread it over 100-200 creators with fees of $0.30 + 2.9% on the $30, but the current $0.10 + 5% on each $1 donation…
Liberapay lets you donate a minimum of ¢1 ($0.01, and they also support 32 other currencies) a week https://liberapay.com/about/faq#maximum-amount, and IIUC lets creators choose the cut that goes to them