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If you measure wrong thing then you will get wrong results. Do you want programmers to think about "how many commits this issue is worth"? Just publish your Bit

If you measure wrong thing then you will get wrong results. Do you want programmers to think about "how many commits this issue is worth"? Just publish your Bitcoin address in readme file.

jerf 10y ago
Patreon produces money. Payment information in a README doesn't. They're not comparable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX_pF03vCSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX_pF03vCSU
- al_chemist 10y ago
  "Produces money"? "Payment information"? I think we misunderstood each other. If you want a way to receive donations, you can publish Bitcoin address. If you want an elaborate way to enforce payment and produce money out of voluntary but unconscious decision - yes, Patreon is the way. I know that the best thing you can do from SaaS perspective is to get customer's credit card and permission to bill small non-defined amount indefinitely, but I find it morally wrong. Still, I don't think that WinRAR would have many paying fans on Patreon.
  - jerf 10y ago
    "If you want a way to receive donations, you can publish Bitcoin address." Yes. If you want payments, you can publish a Bitcoin address, or anything else you'd like (my point here is not about Bitcoin specifically). To a first approximation, you won't actually get any payments, though. That's the difference. We don't live in a world where people haven't ever tried this brand new donation idea. We live in a world where a lot of people have. Their reports are almost uniform... they literally write blog posts when they receive enough money to pay for a meal in a month or a year, because that's how rarely it happens. It's not a functional mechanism for making money. It doesn't even rise to the level of paying for a hobby; it tends to run at donation rates roughly comparable to what the author could get walking down a busy street every day and keeping their eye out for loose change, and well below the rate of "collecting bottles out of the trash" in any state with a bottle deposit.

If you measure wrong thing then you will get wrong results. Do you want programmers to think about "how many commits this issue is worth"? Just publish your Bitcoin address in readme file.

jerf 10y ago

Patreon produces money. Payment information in a README doesn't. They're not comparable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX_pF03vCSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX_pF03vCSU

al_chemist 10y ago
"Produces money"? "Payment information"? I think we misunderstood each other. If you want a way to receive donations, you can publish Bitcoin address. If you want an elaborate way to enforce payment and produce money out of voluntary but unconscious decision - yes, Patreon is the way. I know that the best thing you can do from SaaS perspective is to get customer's credit card and permission to bill small non-defined amount indefinitely, but I find it morally wrong. Still, I don't think that WinRAR would have many paying fans on Patreon.
- jerf 10y ago
  "If you want a way to receive donations, you can publish Bitcoin address." Yes. If you want payments, you can publish a Bitcoin address, or anything else you'd like (my point here is not about Bitcoin specifically). To a first approximation, you won't actually get any payments, though. That's the difference. We don't live in a world where people haven't ever tried this brand new donation idea. We live in a world where a lot of people have. Their reports are almost uniform... they literally write blog posts when they receive enough money to pay for a meal in a month or a year, because that's how rarely it happens. It's not a functional mechanism for making money. It doesn't even rise to the level of paying for a hobby; it tends to run at donation rates roughly comparable to what the author could get walking down a busy street every day and keeping their eye out for loose change, and well below the rate of "collecting bottles out of the trash" in any state with a bottle deposit.