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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

#171

Post by armini »

Ndymium wrote: post #85
armini wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for raising the issue. Is it okay for you to forward the funds to other people in the ecosystem?

Not sure if you're assuming that I am using the service with the wording "for you" or if it's a general question (I'm not a user). But if it's a general question, legally speaking, my best guess (not a lawyer) is that it would be perfectly legal to make a maintainer account to forward the funds to other projects, since you are not receiving anything. I guess you know if a feature like that is worth the trouble to imp…

That’s good because maintainers who receive funds can forward it to others or even send it to an open collective. That helps keep the money circulating in the ecosystem.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#172

Post by nicbou »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #139
suddenclarity wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being that this service has real tangible costs such as card fees for every transaction. That's not really comparable with "it would be nice to be paid for my time" when pushing your code to GitHub. I haven't used the site but it seems reasonable that one solution won't apply to all kinds of projects.

They could break out the transactions explicitly. That would help reduce the feeling that they're taking more than their share, if they're not doing that.

They could also sing a song, do a little dance and tweet a word of praise for your generosity.

At some point the dance isn't worth the peanut.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#173

Post by armini »

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…

Thanks for sharing your experience & insight. You’re observations are similar to our experience. We as a community could always do a better job recognising & rewarding each other.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#175

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

buro9 wrote: post #128
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Funny, but that seems more of a mistake on the bank side, and given that the article is from 2008, I am not surprised. Lots of things went wrong in 2008 on the banks side. Nevertheless, in principle, having a public IBAN is harmless.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#176

Post by throwaway74567 »

weego wrote: post #146
throwaway74567 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that more than half of that $25 goes to the payment provider (Stripe etc.). Maybe more. The remaining ~$10 will go to thaks.dev to cover operational costs, administration and other expenses. I don't expect them to work for free. If you think it's unfair, contact the developers directly to see if you can wire them money (to avoid PayPal fees). If it's too much work, you can pay services like thanks.dev tha…

Why on earth would you think that a payment provider is taking 50%? They take ~3% + 30 cents It's literally public information

Please take more time to read the context. If you read the post that I replied to instead of jumping to conclusions, you will find that you are incorrect

$25 refers to the 5% fee of the total amount ($500) that the site takes. I said that more than half of that fee is used to pay Stripe.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#177

Post by heipei »

hvasilev wrote: post #64

You open source guys need to figure out a way to charge people for the value that you provide. You ran the experiment for a very long time and it looks like this "beggar" model really doesn't seem to be working for the vast majority of your projects. Take money, don't wait for people to give you money for the free value that you provide.

This 100%. I run a German limited company (GmbH) and I can't just send money somewhere without a proper invoice. I've even had issues with paid services (think VPN providers etc) that don't send out invoices, so then I'm stuck with an expense that I can't deduct as a business expense. Make sure you can issue correct invoices, and let potential customers know upfront!

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#178

Post by omneity »

The intention is laudable, but this kind of business model makes me think of all these NGOs appearing in the 90s/2000s purportedly to "help poor africans" [0,1].

While many have been (trying to) do their best, it's unfortunate that many got richer on the back of the people they were supposed to help. Sometimes with local accomplices who also benefit from the grift.

I guess the main take away would be that transparency and accountability are paramount if you want to be part of such an ecosystem, especially as a middleman for money transactions.

[0]: https://landportal.org/node/100425

[1]: https://humanglemedia.com/the-dark-reality-of-corruption-lac...

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#179

Post by lars_francke »

toastal wrote: post #160
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…

Letting Microsoft GitHub try to monopolize laterally in the developer space by doing funding is going to lead to further lock-in for folks down the line. I’d be wary of supporting them with a chunk of your donation.

It's better than not funding people at all. I'd like a different ecosystem as well.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#180

Post by esclear »

armini wrote: post #161
esclear wrote: post #150

One thing that I haven't seen addressed here or in the FAQ is: What happens to donations towards dependencies where the maintainer / organization / group of maintainers is not registered at thanks.dev? The FAQ has a section titled "What happens if I don’t claim my balance?", but I think this only applies to people registered at thanks.dev. I'm not even sure that thanks.dev would be able to reliably contact developers…

great observation & questions, we will update that on our FAQ shortly. If users aren't registered then we can't verify who's project admin & no funds will be allocated to them from the sponsors pool. Only when an admin register then we can allocate funds.

Okay, to make my thought more explicit:

If I decided to sponsor my project's dependencies with say 100 USD and none of the developers are registered with thanks.dev – which seems like a reasonable assumption, especially as thanks.dev appears to be a young project – I wonder what happens with the money. The money can't be allocated.

Does thanks.dev just keep it? Is it "stored" until it can be allocated? And if this is the case: From the information on allocation it seems that all of the money will be distributed between all eligible developers (possibly 3 months after devs don't claim their balance)? If so, what if there is only one (transitive) dependency that is registered with thanks.dev?

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