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Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

thanks.dev

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Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#111

Post by lars_francke »

robertlagrant wrote: post #107
lars_francke wrote: post #99

In case you hadn't seen this yet, GitHub offers this service: https://github.com/sponsors/explore (need to be logged in) I have no insight but I could imagine that GitHub are going to offer something similar based on that data at some point in the future. For us the "top" developers on that page are people with 150+ repos that we depend on that I have never head of before. It turns out that they are all tiny JavaScri…

> A 5% flat fee is too much for me though, if it had a cap then it'd be different. It can't have a cap if payment gateway processing fees are percentage-based.

I do see your point but in this case _everyone_ pays the 5% even though the payout only happens once per project and the payment also only happens once per person donating.

It might be that it is this expensive to run, I don't know. It just seems unfair to me that the platform would get 5% and "only" 95% are distributed to the projects. I do understand that everyone has a different definition of "fair" and I also don't know what I'd be willing to spend. It's something I'd need to think about.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#112

Post by throwaway74567 »

armini wrote: post #54
ivanvanderbyl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems reasonable to me. I assume they are using stripe for payments, so that's already 2.9% gone to facilitate you giving money to the project.

Not to mention hosting costs :) Sponsors have a slider that allows them to adjust their tip from 5% to 100% of their monthly donation. We figured minimum 5% would cover our compute & merchant fees but left it to the community to decide what we should get. We thought this was the most aligned approach with open source. Totally open to other ideas and suggestions though.

I think your approach is reasonable. There will always be comments from people who think everything should be "free" without considering costs.

In a perfect world, Stripe and the credit card companies could waive the fees for donations, but that is not the case.

Someone has to actually cover those fees.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#113

Post by matsemann »

lars_francke wrote: post #99

In case you hadn't seen this yet, GitHub offers this service: https://github.com/sponsors/explore (need to be logged in) I have no insight but I could imagine that GitHub are going to offer something similar based on that data at some point in the future. For us the "top" developers on that page are people with 150+ repos that we depend on that I have never head of before. It turns out that they are all tiny JavaScri…

Same here, that list from github is close to useless.

In some cases we depend on a library indirectly, because we use a wrapper to match it to our stack. An old school example is we use bower, and want to use the uglify library. Someone has made an uglify-for-bower wrapper, that's like 20 lines of code, so we depend on that. But all the meat, and where I would like the money to go, is the uglify maintainers, one level down.

I'm not saying those people making the wrappers haven't brought us some value. But it's less than the underlying library.

Github falls prey to this. My guess is thanks.dev also would? But at least it has a "boosting" option, I just don't want sindresorhus to scoop up all the money...

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#114

Post by armini »

aunty_helen wrote: post #110

I put 50$ in the pokey machine but it’s only paid it out to two projects? Some of the other projects which are missing out I already donate to. Any ideas?

Thanks for taking the time to register & donate. We’re looking into it now & we will send you a DM shortly.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#115

Post by coldtea »

robertlagrant wrote: post #105
coldtea wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could give the ability to sponsor their own service with donations in the exact same way they do it for third party FOSS projects.

They're trying to solve the problem, not add to it.

If their solution is good, it should also be applicable to them

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#117

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

buro9 wrote: post #101
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought about this in a conceptual way some years ago [1] and the best option seems to be to let the developers decide how they want to be paid, i.e. have a `thanks.dev` file in the tree of the package with JSON-like data, e.g. "payment": "iban", "data": "IBANCODE"` or "payment": "link", "data": "https://..." or "payment": "cryptoCoin", "data": "0xb3..." and so forth. Of course, the problem is there are many differen…

The best case is that this works. The worst case here is a lot of fraud for the people who shared their details.

Why would there be fraud? The IBAN/payment link/crypto wallet/etc. is only one way: anyone can deposit, only one can withdraw. Everyone knows the IBAN for donating to Greenpeace, but only one can sue them [1]. As for the file itself, not being changed by a third party, the distributing program can check hashes of current payment method vs. previous and notify accordingly.

[1] https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/succession-greg-sue-green...

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#118

Post by lars_francke »

matsemann wrote: post #113
lars_francke wrote: post #99

In case you hadn't seen this yet, GitHub offers this service: https://github.com/sponsors/explore (need to be logged in) I have no insight but I could imagine that GitHub are going to offer something similar based on that data at some point in the future. For us the "top" developers on that page are people with 150+ repos that we depend on that I have never head of before. It turns out that they are all tiny JavaScri…

Same here, that list from github is close to useless. In some cases we depend on a library indirectly, because we use a wrapper to match it to our stack. An old school example is we use bower, and want to use the uglify library. Someone has made an uglify-for-bower wrapper, that's like 20 lines of code, so we depend on that. But all the meat, and where I would like the money to go, is the uglify maintainers, one leve…

I would guess so as well, yes.

That doesn't stop us from sponsoring some projects, it's just a manual process and having this automated would be great. Not sure if thanks.dev can do it but at the moment I'd probably like to exclude the whole JavaScript ecosystem and just include one or two libraries that I _know_ we're using.

And I'd like a similar thing as thanks.dev but for non-code-dependencies. Let's say our devs are using Kubernetes, Kind, Visual Studio Code, VLC etc. - they are not dependencies of our code but it'd be good to have those sponsorships also managed in a single place.

There may even be some use in having a standard format to define those kind of things so they can be machine readable. i.e. I'd like a repo that contains a file with the tools we rely on that can then be used for sponsorship purposes. Like a SBOM for internal tooling.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#119

Post by rakoo »

gabereiser wrote: post #63
aunty_helen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of "someone should build something for free" when complaining about a donation system for helping open source projects get paid for their work.

No, the idea of having a simple payments system for open source devs to use to get paid for their "free" software should be "free". Let the merit of the software dictate. That's the whole point of open source. To build things freely and openly to make the best possible software that we (humans) can make. We should also expect the same in the tools we rely on to do that work. It's not a hard ask. It's a philosophy of…

> To build things freely and openly to make the best possible software that we (humans) can make.

This only works in a system where humans do not need money to live. This is not our system. In a capitalist system, for better or for worse, if you don't own a means of production you must work to get money because you need money to live.

We should recognize the value of work, and if it is useful, pay for it. It is only normal in such a system. I wish we were in a commons-based society, that all resources and production would be decided by workers in quantity and distributed based on needs, but that's not our system.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#120

Post by lars_francke »

armini wrote: post #100
lars_francke wrote: post #99

In case you hadn't seen this yet, GitHub offers this service: https://github.com/sponsors/explore (need to be logged in) I have no insight but I could imagine that GitHub are going to offer something similar based on that data at some point in the future. For us the "top" developers on that page are people with 150+ repos that we depend on that I have never head of before. It turns out that they are all tiny JavaScri…

If you have the time, we’d love to connect with you on our discord & learn more about your experience. It’s a hard problem & that needs a strong open community. Given the recent PayPal incident, I don’t think GitHub should be the only solution.

I just joined. Not sure if I can offer much in terms of solutions, only problems :(
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