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I’m pretty excited about the GitHub Sponsors feature opening up worldwide, think it can actually help foster a culture of contributing back to the people whose

I’m pretty excited about the GitHub Sponsors feature opening up worldwide, think it can actually help foster a culture of contributing back to the people whose work we all use. They’ve got an interesting page where they show you all the sponsorable projects you depend on, sorted by the most heavily depended-on projects first. Besides voluntary contributions I want to see maintainers refusing to take feature requests and help requests from non-sponsors. Security issues and bugs are always welcome, of course, but it would be interesting to force people to pay for maintainers’ time and attention. Would also be nice to promote sponsorship as marketing-companies spend tons of money on marketing, and visibly supporting important projects is a great way to do it.

prox 6y ago
Absolutely, and we should reminds eachother to donate, even when it’s just a couple of cents. It’s about the thought that counts and the culture of appreciation when it’s useful to you.
tpetry 6y ago
The biggest oppurtunity would be to allow assigning money for tasks and solutions. Like there are so many really good projects with a lot of open issues and good ideas on things to improve a library/framework/project. The ability to say, hey, i am the project owner and i would love to add this cool feature to my library which is complicated, you can donate for this feature, like crowdfunding for software. Or the other case. I have created many pull requests in the past which had been only a few lines to fix an existing bug but they did never merge it. Sometimes i received notifications for years from other people asking why it is not meged and they had to fork (and maintain) it to fix this bug. Just saying here are 50$ if you merge it would be a life-saver. No more maintaining a fork just to fix a bug which is not a priority of the owner who prefers adding more and more features. My point is open source does not need to be free work from the maintainer. A platform like github could change the game by allowing people to get a small payment for what they are doing. But not like their actual plan by just giving them money, i want to connect it to a "problem" to solve (resolve issue, add feature, merge pr, ...)
- niels_bom 6y ago
  For bugfixes: yes. For feature requests: this will really amplify Zawinski’s law. Limiting scope is important imho. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
- themanmaran 6y ago
  So I am actually building out a site designed to do exactly that. http://rysolv.com/ http://rysolv.com/ It lets you crowdfund bounties for outstanding issues on a repo. And whoever resolves the issue earns the bounty.

prox 6y ago

Absolutely, and we should reminds eachother to donate, even when it’s just a couple of cents. It’s about the thought that counts and the culture of appreciation when it’s useful to you.

tpetry 6y ago

The biggest oppurtunity would be to allow assigning money for tasks and solutions. Like there are so many really good projects with a lot of open issues and good ideas on things to improve a library/framework/project. The ability to say, hey, i am the project owner and i would love to add this cool feature to my library which is complicated, you can donate for this feature, like crowdfunding for software. Or the other case. I have created many pull requests in the past which had been only a few lines to fix an existing bug but they did never merge it. Sometimes i received notifications for years from other people asking why it is not meged and they had to fork (and maintain) it to fix this bug. Just saying here are 50$ if you merge it would be a life-saver. No more maintaining a fork just to fix a bug which is not a priority of the owner who prefers adding more and more features. My point is open source does not need to be free work from the maintainer. A platform like github could change the game by allowing people to get a small payment for what they are doing. But not like their actual plan by just giving them money, i want to connect it to a "problem" to solve (resolve issue, add feature, merge pr, ...)

niels_bom 6y ago
For bugfixes: yes. For feature requests: this will really amplify Zawinski’s law. Limiting scope is important imho. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html
themanmaran 6y ago
So I am actually building out a site designed to do exactly that. http://rysolv.com/ http://rysolv.com/ It lets you crowdfund bounties for outstanding issues on a repo. And whoever resolves the issue earns the bounty.