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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

#121

Post by matsemann »

lars_francke wrote: post #118
matsemann wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, good point on the non-code-dependencies. While most of them I use have some big corporate backing, there's lots of small invisible things running everything getting little attention (like the old openssh story)

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#123

Post by [deleted] »

mongol wrote: post #35
throwaway888abc wrote: post #5

Love this! Hope it will take off. "Webpack receives close to $200k in funding per year via OpenCollective but its direct dependencies receive minuscule amounts of funding, and there are 80+ of them." ♥

First emoji I have seen on HN. I thought it was not possible to use.

[deleted]

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#124

Post by luckylion »

"Donation" is a somewhat tainted word, because it often has certain legal issues attached. Most maintainers aren't non-profits, so they don't take donations, they get income (and it'll get taxed). At the same time, "donating" something without it actually being a donation is complicated for businesses (e.g. github not invoicing me for sponsorships gets my tax consultants to make sad faces).

I understand the idea, but giving it a better legal framework than "it's a donation. but not really" would definitely help.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#125

Post by sunderw »

ivanvanderbyl wrote: post #47
Sephr wrote: post #23

The UI imposes a 5% minimum (and 15% default) value for "Tip thanks.dev" under "How much would you like to donate each month?" on https://thanks.dev/settings This implementation is clearly for-profit. I want to directly tip open source projects using a system that doesn't involve other third parties taking a significant cut.

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.

I work for a > 100 people company where the business model is entirely based on donations. We are using stripe for payment and it costs us money, but you can still use our service freely if you want to.

I agree it is not simple, but it proves it is doable.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#126

Post by xeonmc »

nicbou wrote: post #87

Donation income is risibly small. People will sign praise your work, tell you how much they depend on it, and how it changed their lives. Others will ask you tricky questions that really ought to be asked to a lawyer. ...and they still won't donate a cent. I get about 70 cents per thousand unique visitors. About one in every 14,000 visitors donate. Affiliate income is roughly 100 times that without trying. Let me put…

I think the main obstacle to donations, even for those who _would_ wish to donate, is the fact that it requires a premeditated process (e.g. going to the project homepage to donate) or that it makes the request _before_ the user had a chance to realize how useful it is, rather than after.

If instead there is some way to capitalize the timing of the user experiencing "wow this makes my life so much easier!" to remind them with a low-friction shortcut to make a donation, this short-circuits the cognitive process that previously require the user's mind to go out of its way to invoke their "oh, I should probably donate" sense of reciprocity.

As reviled as impulse-driven microtransactions are, I think there is much for open-source projects to learn from and wield in an ethical manner.

Right now it seems there is a false dichotomy between being either [be unethical and leverage user impulse] or [be ethical and off-putting to the user].

There is no reason why an understanding of the psychology in friction-reduction can be utilized ethically to encourage "impulse-reciprocity".

A model that might be worth analyzing is the streamer-donation UX flow -- yes it can be used irresponsibly to encourage parasocial obsession, but in the hands of the responsible it is a facilitation of healthy engagements with the audience

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#127

Post by TheDong »

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.

Of course you can still have a cap.

"A payment processing fee of 0.5% + 0.20c is collected on the total donation. We take an additional fee of 4.5%, up to a maximum of $10"

There, done.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#128

Post by buro9 »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #117
buro9 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/succes…

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/jan/07/personalfinanc...

these things are still possible, you don't even have to know as much detail as this person gave out

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#129

Post by column »

pharmakom wrote: post #34
Sephr wrote: post #23

The UI imposes a 5% minimum (and 15% default) value for "Tip thanks.dev" under "How much would you like to donate each month?" on https://thanks.dev/settings This implementation is clearly for-profit. I want to directly tip open source projects using a system that doesn't involve other third parties taking a significant cut.

Maybe 5% is the wrong number, but how do you expect the lights to stay on?

humble bundle suggests a tip and sliders with a 3 part system : what goes to the dev, what goes to charity, what goes to humble bundle.

Nothing stops you there to put 100% into one of those and 0% on the others.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#130

Post by gehen88 »

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…

The "free" in FOSS is about being able to use the software as you see fit, without restrictions. Not that you don't have to pay a dime. Sure in practice the software is usually "free as in beer" but that's a side-effect, not a goal (or guarantee).
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