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What's wrong with a LibrePay or Patreon for your OSS project?

megous 8y ago
It's another work on top if you want to make it work, perhaps? It's not like you'll register and the money will start flowing in.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  Sure, but if you want to make money from your work, it's a bit of a requirement. Gargon, the author of Mastodon, is making good money from his work on Mastodon. I'll bet folks would make money off Redis if they build a LibrePay or Patreon for it too. Now if you're a random small OSS author trying to become an OSS rockstar, then nobody would contribute.
  - megous 8y ago
    Well, the question was what's wrong with these platforms with regards to OSS. You can't just provide software that 1000s of people use. You now have to be creating some story around it on Patreon or whatever, have a way to get people to patreon or your website in the first place, which will only take away time from your side project. Numbers just don't add up. You can perhaps expect $50/month with those number of users if you really, really tried and spent countless hours on propagation. That's like 1-2 hours of work in a real job. For a cli tool distributed in major linux distros you don't even have a way to get people to your website, because mostly just packagers will go there and some people with exotic preferences who build from source, which is a tiny minority. These websites solve none of this.
voltagex_ 8y ago
LibrePay had some issues with a payment provider that almost killed it. Patreon is owned by the VCs and will eventually make changes that negatively impact creators.
lkbm 8y ago
I think the biggest chunk of people directly benefiting from OSS are companies, for whom Patreon might be an inefficient intermediary. Personally, I'd prefer my employer funnel a few thousand dollars to the the FSF, Python Software Foundation, etc. than setup a Patreon donation for each project we use. (Maybe some big ones like Redis and nginx and BackboneJS should get direct donations, but now many npm packages do we use? Oh god, so many.) That said, if you maintain an OSS tool, please do set up an easy way to donate. When it's easy to donate a dollar or two, I do (well...occasionally). I've found very few developers have Patreon's setup. Some will have a PayPal link, which is especially nice for random online tools that I use once or twice. Most don't provide an easy opportunity to contribute financially. Though I guess I should keep more of an eye out for them. (While Googling for more info, I did come across https://github.com/feross/thanks https://github.com/feross/thanks -- so that's neat.)

It's another work on top if you want to make it work, perhaps? It's not like you'll register and the money will start flowing in.

Karrot_Kream 8y ago
Sure, but if you want to make money from your work, it's a bit of a requirement. Gargon, the author of Mastodon, is making good money from his work on Mastodon. I'll bet folks would make money off Redis if they build a LibrePay or Patreon for it too. Now if you're a random small OSS author trying to become an OSS rockstar, then nobody would contribute.
- megous 8y ago
  Well, the question was what's wrong with these platforms with regards to OSS. You can't just provide software that 1000s of people use. You now have to be creating some story around it on Patreon or whatever, have a way to get people to patreon or your website in the first place, which will only take away time from your side project. Numbers just don't add up. You can perhaps expect $50/month with those number of users if you really, really tried and spent countless hours on propagation. That's like 1-2 hours of work in a real job. For a cli tool distributed in major linux distros you don't even have a way to get people to your website, because mostly just packagers will go there and some people with exotic preferences who build from source, which is a tiny minority. These websites solve none of this.

voltagex_ 8y ago

LibrePay had some issues with a payment provider that almost killed it. Patreon is owned by the VCs and will eventually make changes that negatively impact creators.

lkbm 8y ago

I think the biggest chunk of people directly benefiting from OSS are companies, for whom Patreon might be an inefficient intermediary. Personally, I'd prefer my employer funnel a few thousand dollars to the the FSF, Python Software Foundation, etc. than setup a Patreon donation for each project we use. (Maybe some big ones like Redis and nginx and BackboneJS should get direct donations, but now many npm packages do we use? Oh god, so many.) That said, if you maintain an OSS tool, please do set up an easy way to donate. When it's easy to donate a dollar or two, I do (well...occasionally). I've found very few developers have Patreon's setup. Some will have a PayPal link, which is especially nice for random online tools that I use once or twice. Most don't provide an easy opportunity to contribute financially. Though I guess I should keep more of an eye out for them. (While Googling for more info, I did come across https://github.com/feross/thanks https://github.com/feross/thanks -- so that's neat.)