Polar v1.0: Let’s Fix Open Source Funding

Absolutely, I'm not saying it's not a risk. Ultimately, my stance and belief is that OSS is obviously a massive ecosystem deserving of an independent COSS pathway to support careers and small businesses to emerge from it. Creating such a long-tail economy is going to require so many different things and more will emerge once it's successful. That's how it should be. So I'm convinced there is room for many actors within this domain. Just like how Open Collective is doing a phenomenal job and solving real & hard problems within the donation & sponsorship domain even with GitHub Sponsors (often in partnership with OC).

So going back to my stance on what I think GitHub's strategy should be: Instead of expanding GitHub Sponsors themselves, I think it should become the payments layer within OSS. Offered through an API that their apps & partners can integrate with with GitHub getting revshare. Avoiding spreading themselves thin by chasing all these opportunities themselves and instead empowering more of them through a GitHub Payments API.

> Curious what you think about subscriptions versus one-time payments. Seems like Polar is going more for the latter. Would love if this was normalized and could see it leading to more money coming in overall. My concern is that subscriptions are great for predictability (company sponsors $500/mo) and without that I need to find a way to re-acquire money to pay rent every month.

Completely agree. We're going to do both. Started with one-time payments now in early alpha, but expanding into subscription is a core part of our long-term vision for all of the reasons you mentioned and more.

1. Sponsorship is hard to sell internally. Only possible to get small budgets with the motivation of advertising towards developers (be it their product or hiring).

2. "We'd love to invest more, but we don't know towards what, what it will be used for and how that in turn benefits us which is needed to unlock more capital internally".

3. Once I pitched Polar, they got excited about how it could address #2 and all mentioned cases where they had been blocked by OSS issues or where they had feature requests. Not being able to address those themselves.

There is a lot of unnecessary friction today to sponsor specific features, issues or milestones – despite such being a lot easier to sell internally because they're tied to businesses needs. Polar aims to change that + gives maintainer(s) complete control to ensure it aligns with their goals and direction of the initiatives.

> I'm not even sure people even appreciate the work that is involved in most of their requests

Absolutely. I think this is solvable though, e.g giving maintainers the ability to set goals for certain features, milestones or issues being one.

But, we cannot expect it to match an hourly salary as a paid engineer from Day 1. It's a new pattern. However, since maintainers are in complete control (it's not a traditional bounty service) sponsored issues that are accepted should align with efforts the maintainer wants to pursue too. Before they got $0. Now, they better know what their users want and can get them to sponsor efforts that align with theirs.

> My other concern is around expectations. I've always tried to be very clear with any donation type thing that it's a donation. There's no obligation created on my part to provide any services or support. Directly coupling payments to requests might turn this into much more of a "I paid you to do this, why isn't it done yet".

Completely agree.

With Polar, maintainers are in complete control. They can decide which issues they want the Polar badge to be embedded on to whether the amount pledged is shown or not (since it can apply such pressure). In combination, we don't have this feature today (early alpha), but we want to make it super easy for the maintainer to accept/deny pledges in their admin. To setting thresholds and more, as mentioned earlier.

Our goal with Polar is to empower you as a maintainer and give you all the tooling to manage this with ease.

Polar is designed for maintainers and to give them complete control. So you can decide which issues Polar should be embedded on, i.e issues that align with your long-term goals and direction for the initiative. So you can get sponsorship for efforts that align with your goals.

> Or if you and people like you paid me enough consistently that I could quit my day job and focus completely on my OSS projects, then I would probably do that. But even for $1k an hour I don't know that I would want to deal with contractual obligations for my hobby project.

That's the goal, but give us time :-) Pledges/sponsorship towards issues today (Polar v0.1) are not a contractual obligation. As we expand the services we offer, maintainers will have control which ones to leverage. So it's completely up to you what to offer and what not based on your desires and needs. Hopefully, however, Polar at least gives you all the tooling to craft such services and subscriptions.

Shared some more context re: this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36755640

1. Is bootstrapped rather than VC backed as far as I understand 2. Treats itself as one dependency among many, so it isn’t favored over other receivers 3. Rather it is penalized against other receivers as it at most will get 7.5% of one’s monthly donation: https://www.stackaid.us/