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I received my first donation on my open-source side project

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Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project

#101

Post by YorickPeterse »

syshum wrote: post #55
yboris wrote: post #50

I've been trying to encourage more "Charityware" for software [0]. My software is free and open source (MIT license) [1] but I also sell it for $5 and donate $3.50 of every sale to a cost-effective charity. My goal is to increase donations to the charity, and asking people for donations wouldn't be as effective. My software now has generated almost over $9,000 in donations. Personally, every purchase of my software f…

One thing that always hurts OpenSource project is the fact they have not ability for me to "Buy" it, with an actual invoice or receipt that I can give to my accounting people for the sale... It is "donation" of a undetermined amount which is a much harder thing for me to clear the bean counters. So by being able to go to a site, it buy now with a fixed price, and (I presume getting a receipt) you likey having gotten…

I think the challenge here is that there aren't easy to use solutions for this. For donations there's Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, etc; but for invoices I'm not sure if there's an equivalent that makes sense.

Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project

#102

Post by susam »

bigiain wrote: post #99
ska wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, to you comment: Economists are not generally mathematicians, any more than physicists are. I draw that analogy intentionally because in both cases there are subsets of the areas where the lines get a little bit fuzzy and individuals are doing a bit of both. Second to your question. The shortest answer is that mathematicians create mathematics. There are significant distinctions in how they typically think abou…

In my head, there's a difference between "arithmetic" and "mathematics". People (like economists) who add/subtract/multiply/divide _numbers_ are doing arithmetic. Mathematics is _rarely_ concerned with "numbers" as such - they deal in "truth" and "systems" and "logic" and "patterns".

Indeed! There is a popular saying, "Arithmetic is to mathematics as spelling is to writing." Of course, a mathematician is often good at arithmetic just like a writer is often good at spelling. However, someone merely good at arithmetic is no more a mathematician than someone good at spelling is a writer.

A related story from http://www.ams.org/notices/200410/fea-grothendieck-part2.pdf quoted below:

> There is also a running joke that mathematicians tend to be bad at mental calculations. The story about Grothendieck prime comes to my mind: In a mathematical conversation, someone suggested to Grothendieck that they should consider a particular prime number. "You mean an actual number?" Grothendieck asked. The other person replied, yes, an actual prime number. Grothendieck suggested, "All right, take 57."

Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project

#103

Post by trombonechamp »

david_allison wrote: post #90

My first donation still means the most to me: a hamper full of chocolates and a personalised card. That was back in April and I'll treasure it for the rest of my life. The fact that someone's willing to go through those lengths to say thank you is still mindblowing. Since then, the project that I've been working on opened publicly for donations in November. We're going to hit 1,000 donations today, with ~$13,000 and…

I've been learning a new language for the last few years and without Ankidroid, there's no way I would have made as much progress as I did. Being able to study while away from my computer was really a game changer for me. I build my decks with lots of audio, images, and other fancy features of Anki, but I've never had to worry about whether a feature will be compatible with AnkiDroid because everything in AnkiDroid is seamless.

I left a donation - thanks for all of your effort!

Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project

#104

Post by erk__ »

yboris wrote: post #50

I've been trying to encourage more "Charityware" for software [0]. My software is free and open source (MIT license) [1] but I also sell it for $5 and donate $3.50 of every sale to a cost-effective charity. My goal is to increase donations to the charity, and asking people for donations wouldn't be as effective. My software now has generated almost over $9,000 in donations. Personally, every purchase of my software f…

I would guess that the most well known charityware is Vim though I am not sure how well known it is that it is charityware. It has it embedded in the license [0].

[0]: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/uganda.html#license

Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project

#105

Post by niels_bom »

tpetry wrote: post #40
sudhirj wrote: post #4

I’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…

The biggest oppurtunity would be to allow assigning money for tasks and solutions. Like there are so many really good projects with a lot of open issues and good ideas on things to improve a library/framework/project. The ability to say, hey, i am the project owner and i would love to add this cool feature to my library which is complicated, you can donate for this feature, like crowdfunding for software. Or the othe…

For bugfixes: yes. For feature requests: this will really amplify Zawinski’s law. Limiting scope is important imho.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project

#107

Post by ColinWright »

cdubzzz wrote: post #96
ColinWright wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to know by what means the payment was made. Patreon? Ko-Fi? Paypal? Something else? I'm interested in knowing what options exist, and the various pros and cons. Friction-free micropayments are still (as far as I know) a problem without a universally accepted solution.

In my case I tried out GitHub Sponsors because it seemed pretty frictionless (and was!). If I were more concerned about soliciting donations I’m sure I would look at and probably use other platforms but in my case it’s just a small nicety. I am however confused about how payouts happen with GH Sponsors — I feel like every time I take a look at the sponsors dashboard it says the payout will be next month. Haven’t rece…

I'd be interested in seeing a write-up of your (eventual) end-to-end experience of this. Do you have a blog I can subscribe to?

Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project

#108

Post by themanmaran »

tpetry wrote: post #40
sudhirj wrote: post #4

I’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…

The biggest oppurtunity would be to allow assigning money for tasks and solutions. Like there are so many really good projects with a lot of open issues and good ideas on things to improve a library/framework/project. The ability to say, hey, i am the project owner and i would love to add this cool feature to my library which is complicated, you can donate for this feature, like crowdfunding for software. Or the othe…

So I am actually building out a site designed to do exactly that. http://rysolv.com/

It lets you crowdfund bounties for outstanding issues on a repo. And whoever resolves the issue earns the bounty.

Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project

#109

Post by joostdecock »

morgengold wrote: post #86
joostdecock wrote: post #69

The first donation to my open source project (1) came from someone who went through the trouble of emailing me to ask how they could donate. Since then, I've embraced receiving donations and last year I ended up receiving more than 10.000 euro. (2) I (re)donate everything to charity, for reasons (3), but even then it's a great motivator. If it wasn't for the money I would have burned out long ago. It really means a l…

Nice work! Just out of curiosity: Which of the price tiers (1) is chosen most regularly? (1) https://freesewing.org/community/join/

The lowest one is most popular (2 euro per month), but the middle one (4 euro) is almost as popular. The top tier (8 euro) is picked the least, but still has more than half the subscribers of the lowest one.

Re: I received my first donation on my open-source side project

#110

Post by joostdecock »

thetrustworthy wrote: post #75
joostdecock wrote: post #69

The first donation to my open source project (1) came from someone who went through the trouble of emailing me to ask how they could donate. Since then, I've embraced receiving donations and last year I ended up receiving more than 10.000 euro. (2) I (re)donate everything to charity, for reasons (3), but even then it's a great motivator. If it wasn't for the money I would have burned out long ago. It really means a l…

I just read your reasons (3), and I think you are pretty awesome. Thanks for doing this!

Hey thanks, that's really kind of you!
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