I received my first donation on my open-source side project
1–10 of 110 posts
Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project
#2I know that feeling. Few years back someone asked me if I accept Bitcoin as donation for an SDK I wrote https://github.com/namaggarwal/splitwise
It felt so good that I went ahead and create a wallet and he donated me some fractional BTC. It wasn't much at that time but it motivated me a lot.
Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project
#3I doubt I'll ever know how this feels because I don't create a lot of open-source side projects and soliciting donations is illegal here.
Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project
#4I’m pretty excited about the GitHub Sponsors feature opening up worldwide, think it can actually help foster a culture of contributing back to the people whose work we all use. They’ve got an interesting page where they show you all the sponsorable projects you depend on, sorted by the most heavily depended-on projects first.
Besides voluntary contributions I want to see maintainers refusing to take feature requests and help requests from non-sponsors. Security issues and bugs are always welcome, of course, but it would be interesting to force people to pay for maintainers’ time and attention.
Would also be nice to promote sponsorship as marketing-companies spend tons of money on marketing, and visibly supporting important projects is a great way to do it.
Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project
#5I doubt I'll ever know how this feels because I don't create a lot of open-source side projects and soliciting donations is illegal here.
Where’s here? Your country or HN?
Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project
#6Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project
#7I have been running an open source MathJax-based mathematics pastebin[1] since 2012 and I had received 2 donations for it until recently. Then a mathematician tweeted[2] about it convincing others to send some donations. After that kind gesture by him, I received 3 more donations. So pretty sure I can't make a living out of donations. :-) But I still appreciate them because they help in covering a portion of the hosting cost.
Also, I never seriously expected donations for this project because I don't work much on it these days apart from cleaning up spam from time to time, complying with legal notices and occasional maintenance. I added a donation button only to see if someone would use it. Apart from covering hosting cost, I think an important side effect of the donations is that it provides some additional motivation to continue working on the project and develop it further which I indeed plan to do as soon as I can find the time for it.
[1] http://mathb.in/
[2] https://twitter.com/daveinstpaul/status/1345082256361193473
Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project
#8Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project
#9I also recently received a first $5 donation on an OSS project I created and have been supporting since 2017. It was a really pleasant surprise and motivated me to spend a bit more time on the project to move through some bug fixes and feature enhancements. It’s amazing what a small gesture like that can do.