15 ms·

Build a salary with GitHub Sponsors

272 points by rk06 6y ago

amadeuspagel 6y ago
Patreon (for podcasts) and onlyfans work thanks to parasocial relationships. People don't have a parasocial relationship with the authors of the open source software they use.
- ma2rten 6y ago
  Maybe it could be a parawork relationship instead of parasocial, like sponsors voting on new features and faster response to issues.
  - um_ya 6y ago
    Just having a paid priority issue section or a direct line contact to the core dev would be worth paying for. It seems to work with Youtube superchats and Twitch messages.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    Phabricator has been doing that for years (but more extreme - you can't even submit it comment on bugs without paying) and I think they're the only open source project my company gives money to. Definitely a reasonable option.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  I would pay for specific features or bug fixes in software, as a user that's more important, than the lerson implementing it, though people are still very important. There are so many tiny things that bug me when I'm using my devices, it would be great to pay to improve some of them.
  - CubsFan1060 6y ago
    Someone posted this just yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25879238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25879238
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      It’s really cool, I will try it. It’s great, as I don’t have to wait for the maintainer to set it up.
- rexpop 6y ago
  Don't we? I can name a few Ruby celebrities off the top of my head: - Matz - TenderLove (Aaron Patterson) - DHH - _why (Jonathan Gillette)
vienarr 6y ago
so its like onlyfans but for open source community
- 67868018 6y ago
  Idk why bother when they could literally just use OF
  - timpattinson 6y ago
    because the aforementioned website is known almost exclusively for porn. Some, maybe most, people would be fine with it, nothing wrong with it really. But if you're trying to earn a living why cut yourself off from the 50% of people that wouldn't subscribe due to the site name only.
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      Besides the association, which one might or might not be fine with, I'd worry that being porn-centric would put OF at risk of credit card companies not wanting to work with them, similar to what PornHub faced recently.
  - langitbiru 6y ago
    OF is blocked in my country.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
    OF has high fees afaik.
  - rk06 6y ago
    the main thing is that onlysponsers does not take a cut and it is integrated with github sponsers for payment and sponsorship tiers
stingraycharles 6y ago
I know that Patreon had these “members only” posts, and it’s pretty meh. Maybe it’s due to the projects I’m sponsoring, but I always had a feeling of “if you’re writing these posts just for us, please don’t bother and just enjoy writing code”. And just to make sure this is not interpreted incorrectly, I mean this in a positive way, I don’t want to be catered to, I want to ensure the survival of the project in the long term.
- toxik 6y ago
  Wasn't Patreon involved in some scandal regarding censorship of uncomfortable people or something? Edit: It was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patreon#Bans_of_specific_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patreon#Bans_of_specific_users
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Wasn't that because of their payment processors? What are you supposed to do when your supplier doesn't allow that type of content?
    - toxik 6y ago
      I think if you read the Wikipedia link you will find that it was not because of their payment processor, as far as I can tell.
  - Haunted_Cabbage 6y ago
    I think the term uncomfortable people is a flippant and trivial term when it comes to the details listed in that link.
    - toxik 6y ago
      You do not have to agree with a person's opinions to see the value in defending their right to express them. I would pre-empt a discussion on whether or not Patreon has exhibited political bias in its bans. Instead, consider that Sam Harris also believes this. Is Sam Harris somehow also an alt-right taboo character? Surely not.
ignitionmonkey 6y ago
GitHub Pages could add a feature like this using access controls. Right now it's just "Private" and "Public" but I can see a possible demand for "Sponsors". Though, things like sponsor-only RSS feeds and mailing list integrations might be beyond the scope of Pages. https://github.blog/changelog/2021-01-21-access-control-for-github-pages/ https://github.blog/changelog/2021-01-21-access-control-for-...
- superbaconman 6y ago
  I was just thinking about this and I agree. It would be nice if these settings could apply to the other sections of a repo: Wiki, discussions, issues. Let the software be free but give the devs a way to make cash off people using their software professionally.
toxik 6y ago
Typo in the title
- patja 6y ago
  I'm also not seeing anything here that meets the definition of the word "salary". These details matter if you are trying to be taken seriously.
  - rk06 6y ago
    the idea here is sponsorship is backed by github sponsors, while onlysponsors makes it easier for devs to create content and restrict it to sponsors.
- rk06 6y ago
  sorry for that. I am not seeing an option to edit it
iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
I'm concerned about the idea of open source turning into teaser content, the main goal of which is to get people to pay to unlock "sponsors only" content.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Yeah that sounds scary, but we already get that with a lot of open source software written by consultancies selling a paid version. (Red hat is disincentivized from making the Linux ecosystem more sane on a deep level.) At the end of the day, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law, it's probably more feasible to incentivize less sharply: UBI with the incentive improve society's productivity and you and everyone else get's more stuff. Do that overly-blunt incentivisation along with the overly-sharp incentivisation we have today, and we might strike some sort of better balance if not spectral (bluntness ~ wavelength) coverage.
  - justinclift 6y ago
    > Red hat is disincentivized from making the Linux ecosystem more sane on a deep level. That's a bit confusing. Are you able to expand on that, so it's easier to understand?
    - lez 6y ago
      Red Hat is making its money by selling support. The more obfuscated the system is, the more $$$ they make.
      - comex 6y ago
        Eh. Most of the Red Hat projects people complain about are targeted mainly at desktops, as opposed to servers. And when it comes to desktops, Red Hat’s biggest competition isn’t Ubuntu or CentOS or whoever; it’s Microsoft. There are far, far more users using Windows, who might be convinced to switch to Red Hat if it works well, than there are users using other Linux distros, who might be convinced to buy support if the packages they share work poorly.
baxtr 6y ago
Sounds like a copycat of the infamous OnlyFans platform...
samesense 6y ago
Excellent. I’d pay to see guido’s python.
dessant 6y ago
OnlyFans has been floated here and in past HN threads, and it perfectly encapsulates the current state of open source software funding: a site used predominantly to distribute porn is a better channel for funding open source developers than most dedicated alternatives. OnlyFans takes a 20% cut, is Only Sponsors a free or paid service?
- wut42 6y ago
  OnlySponsors seems to be built entierly on Github API & GitHub Sponsors, and does not take any cut besides what's GH Sponsors itself is doing, which is none, IIRC.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    The current GitHub Sponsors costs do still appear to be free for individuals. It looks like they are going to take 10% from sponsorships from organizations, which is also currently waived due to beta status.
hashkb 6y ago
It'd be nice to find ways to fund open source without closing off aspects of it. Also, capitalizing on FOSS with a walled garden product like this, with a middleman cashing out, doesn't feel right. I'd like to keep my choice to support a developer based on the quality of their work.
- jp_sc 6y ago
  There is a middleman, two, actually, this site and GitHub, but no one is "cashing out", for now at least.
  - hashkb 6y ago
    I'm sorry; I should have said "taking a cut" - it's not about how much; the point is I'm not in favor of that method of capturing value. GitHub earns its cut with massive network effect, which it built for years, funded with a quality product that users paid for directly, before rolling out marketplaces.
geerlingguy 6y ago
I don't like the idea of getting people to sponsor your open source work, only to 'close source' the incentives to get them to sponsor. In effect, this is just a paywall/license for good documentation for popular software/libraries. To be clear, making money as a pure open source developer is impossibly hard, and creativity is required. Very few enterprises making millions off OSS send monetary support, so you have to cast a wide net for $2-5 sponsors who are willing to throw the equivalent of a coffee a month to you.
slow_donkey 6y ago
It's hard for me to see the value in monetizing posts from OSS projects. If I wanted to pay for someone's thoughts I'd be using substack or paying for pictures from OF - in both cases the value I receive is directly tied to the subscription. Possibly a more interesting approach could be gated support similar to an exclusive discord for patreon subs to ask questions.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
I very much applaud these people making passive money by selling educational content, but we shouldn't kid yourself: there is nothing open about this and your sponsors are not sponsoring your OSS contributions, they just find your content valuable enough. Do they still benefit from 0% fees from Github / Microsoft?
Copenjin 6y ago
I actually like the idea but without a Pricing page it's hard to tell if it's build to last or just an experiment. OnlyFans is clearly for a different kind of content for now, until this changes I don't see why something like this shouldn't be considered a good alternative. Other than github providing something similar, why don't they also expose something useful about github users supporter info through their API? Maybe they already do, don't think so.
geofft 6y ago
I worry about this sort of model because it incentivizes you to poorly document your code, or alternatively, it breaks down if someone else documents your code well. For instance - if there's a particularly tricky way to do something, and you release a sponsor-only video or post explaining it, and then one of your sponsors sees a question about the same topic on StackOverflow and explains it in their own words (StackOverflow already prohibits linking to external explanations without including an answer in-line), would you feel like that is unfair to you? If you publish a performance trick (as demonstrated on this site), and one of your sponsors sends you a PR to improve performance in the common case, would you want to accept it? As your project grows, more people will ask questions and more people will be building a community around it. If you want to have market exclusivity for answers, you effectively need to prevent that community from growing so that people must go to you. It might be possible to do this at scale. This is part of Red Hat's business model, for instance: they have a customer-facing knowledge base that isn't public that includes answers to tricky questions. But Red Hat doesn't depend on the secrecy of this knowledge base. Your entire organization can get access to the KB if you buy a single Red Hat license of any type, which costs something like $50/year. And developers at Red Hat would be happy for those problems to get fixed in the upstream projects. Red Hat's business model is more strongly around support instead of secret documentation, that is, around responses to specific questions instead of restricted-broadcast answers that help everyone. If you're having a problem in production, Red Hat can help you figure it out (as long as you've been paying them for server licenses for all your servers). And the knowledge base mostly exists to deal with the problem of people having limited time - they document something that's broken, but the intent is to actually solve it, not to leave it in the long-term state where it requires reading the KB article. Now, people have been trying to do smaller-than-Red-Hat-scale support contracts for their OSS for a long while, and it's worked in some cases (e.g., SQLite, Postgres) but not in general. It might be the case that restricted educational material works out better in practice!
- rk06 6y ago
  I think such concerns don't have merit because: 1. an open-source project which is hard to use, would not gain any traction in first place. 2. If open source maintainer had a sizeable amount of users, and wanted to make money off it, they would put the project behind a paywall. Pulling the kind of shady stuff you mentioned is too much effort for little benefit. Plus it will be easily caught anyway. ------------- As an aside, onlysponsors is trying to address a real issue in open source world: helping open source maintainers find sustainable income. Even if this is not a perfect solution, it is likely a step in right direction
rk06 6y ago
OP here. I didn't make onlysponsors. I found out about it while listening to a podcast about Vue. and decided it is quite interesting and useful for many open sourcers here. Original creator is @posva[1] [1]: https://twitter.com/posva/ https://twitter.com/posva/
- ryancnelson 6y ago
  can you correct the mangled misspelling of the site's actual name in your posting title?
  - rk06 6y ago
    I don't have the option to do it. But a mod has edited it.
- posva 6y ago
  I'm curious: do you have a link to the podcast?
  - rk06 6y ago
    It was mentioned offhand. It was some episode on Views on Vue. I binged on it, so I don't remember the episode number.
michael_j_ward 6y ago
Linking to patio11's now 5 year old post [0] Has anyone solved this yet? Why is it not stupid simple to get a "support invoice" from an open source project to make it expense-able? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939
- benatkin 6y ago
  > both countries are very lenient with regards to necessary business expenses (必須経費 over here). This seems to be the issue. If you're really paying for the software and not the support, it isn't a neccessary business expense because you can have it for free. Same for the support. If others can get support for free — and it's easy to observe it happening — chances are you can get it for free. Someone down the line might notice it's a donation and not a necessary business expense. And if you really need extra support, we're back to the old paradigm where open source can help you land a project but you still need to do the work and it's in addition to the work you do on the project, and it's not easy work. For example, a week-long training course, or custom code.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    There are a ton of examples of programs that are free or reduced cost for individuals and more money for corporations. Like all the Jetbrains products. The IRS doesn't get on people for paying for a corporate license for Jetbrains because it would be against the license. Open source support could be the same way. Free for individuals, but costs money for corporate/commercial uses. I don't think the IRS would even blink twice at that.
    - cstejerean 6y ago
      But the open source community would because such a license would not qualify as open source. See the recent debacle sign the Elastic licensing change.
      - jedberg 6y ago
jahewson 6y ago
Are paywalls really what open source needs?
- rk06 6y ago
  No, but open source maintainers need something to upsell, to achieve sustainable income
codetrotter 6y ago
Just a couple of weeks ago I did a search on Google for “OnlyDevs” to see if anyone had already thought of this. I didn’t immediately see anything relevant at the time, so I then looked to see if onlydevs.com was available, which it wasn’t – parked by some domain shark. But the service I used for looking for domain availability suggested only.dev which is available and I was like oh neat but then I saw the price that it would cost and it was too much for me. Only.dev would cost ~870 USD per year which is way to expensive for a domain for some random idea. Anyways, neat to see that someone came built this, and nice that they were able to come up with a name for it that would not cost them an arm and a leg for the domain :p
devin 6y ago
The title of this article has a typo in it. It is Only Sponsors not “Sponsers”.
squidfunk 6y ago
I also started with GitHub sponsors after reading about Caleb's post about sponsorware in May 2020 and have managed to grow my sponsorships since then to more than $1k a month. To those who are interested how I did it: I'm the author of Material for MkDocs [1], a popular solution for technical documentation. I created a private fork called "Material for MkDocs Insiders [2]" where all new features landed since then and tied those features to funding goals at $ 500, $ 1,000 etc. The promise is that the moment a funding goal is hit, the features are merged back into the original repo and released for general availability. It works reasonably well so far, better that I would have thought. My Twitter following is rather small (700), but I'm posting a lot about Material for MkDocs and new features and try to engage the community. I guess if you have a large following like Caleb, you could up the amount in a few months, given that you have something on your hands that users want and solves a problem. [1]: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ [2]: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/ https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. For clarification, does any subset of your community have access to the private version, like perhaps people paying a subscription fee or something? Or is that version completely hidden from everyone, and just used to develop and test new features until a funding threshold is met to release them into the public version?
  - squidfunk 6y ago
    Sponsors have access to the private repository (I'm using GitHub's collaborator feature). I have several sponsor tiers and $10 a month or more will get you access to my sponsorware, which means you will be added to the private repository and can use the features immediately. What you're effectively getting is early access, so you can use the features before other users. The official documentation of my project lists exactly which features are "Insiders only", and which aren't. When the features tied to the funding goal that was hit are merged, everybody can use them. I try to always have sponsors-only features on higher tiers to keep sponsoring attractive. As I understand, Caleb does it with content and entire projects - I'm doing it with new features for an existing project. Also, I'm doing it fully transparent, disclosing how much I earn with this, which I think is crucial to build the necessary trust relationship.
erezsh 6y ago
I like the design. Do you plan to add comments? Chat?
chrisweekly 6y ago
Mods: Typo "Sponsers"
zebnyc 6y ago
Unrelated, I really like artwork / images like the one on the hero section. https://onlysponsors.dev/_nuxt/img/career.67d5c3b.svg https://onlysponsors.dev/_nuxt/img/career.67d5c3b.svg Where can I find similar (free / paid) ? Thanks
- akiselev 6y ago
  One I've used is PixelTrue [1] (no relation, just a happy customer). The envato marketplaces [2] are probably the biggest platform for such content though [1] https://www.pixeltrue.com/ https://www.pixeltrue.com/ [2] https://graphicriver.net/ https://graphicriver.net/
- posva 6y ago
  You can find the links to resources in the about page: https://onlysponsors.dev/about https://onlysponsors.dev/about
andrewmcwatters 6y ago
onlyfans jokes aside, there's a reason why Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, et al. don't release comprehensive numbers about their platform: no one makes money off of them. The distribution curve makes no sense for the average person, but it makes a lot of sense for the platform owners.
- nandi95 6y ago
  What about tidal subscriptions? Are they any good?
varispeed 6y ago
In many countries when you work as an employee you have to pay taxes like an employee (and tax must be collected at source). How this platform deals with that?
caniszczyk 6y ago
I think folks need to be wary of supporting github sponsors, the way it's currently structured only perpetuates a gig style economy for open source maintainers, my guess is <1% of folks using sponsors get enough money equivalent to a salary (unfortunately GitHub doesn't share data on how well the sponsors program is doing) https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/ https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-...
avipars 6y ago
love the name
jedberg 6y ago
Here is my biggest problem with supporting open source: discoverability. At the end of last year, I was doing all my last minute charitable giving, and after my PSF donation, I wanted to donate to open source projects. I opened up Github's sponsor page, and stopped there. There were thousands of projects, but I have no idea which ones are important to me, other than a few big ones. It would be great if a tool existed that would look at everything I've installed via Brew(or your package manager of choice) and all the imports in my own Github projects, and follow all the dependency paths to the bottom, and then give me a report of how often a dependency shows up in that graph. For example, I know ffmpeg is at the bottom of a few of my stacks. But what else? There might be a library that I rely on 12 different ways, but it's so fundamental and deep in the stack that I have no idea. It would be even better if this magical tool could then directly link me to the support page (or figure out if one even exists). My other problem with all of these open source sponsorships is that it seems for some reason none of them support one time donations. They all want me to sign up for a monthly gift (and I don't even get to chose the amount). I understand that that helps their cash flow, but that's now how I donate. I look at my income at the end of the year, set a target percentage, and then make all my donations at the end of December until I run out of budget (except for various fundraisers during the year). And I know I'm not the only one who donates that way. December is always the biggest month of gifts for charity. They really should have an option for people like me.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  https://backyourstack.com https://backyourstack.com has you covered! (it's still in beta and has only basic functionality, but at least it's a step in the right direction). It scans your dependency file (e.g. Gemfile in Rails).
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Fantastic!! I had a feeling that if I posted this, someone would point me to a tool that does exactly that. Just signed up, thanks!
- david_allison 6y ago
bkyan 6y ago
I think this would be more compelling to me, if the focus was on premium support options, rather than additional content.
gravyboat 6y ago
While this may work for individual contributors I don't see how it benefits open source work and the community in general. It suggest writing articles and creating videos but there is then a drive to release less information publicly to try and get people to pay because your code is confusing or your docs are lacking. That seems like a big negative. It also doesn't work for team based projects. I'm one of the maintainers of Streamlink [1] which has members from around the world and we've been running various methods of donation since 2017 or so. In that time our Open Collective [2] has made about $1600 USD. We have over 50,000 users across all platforms (based on download stats as we don't collect any metrics in our apps so it's potentially higher) yet the entire amount we've collected is thanks to less than 100 people. We note the Open Collective on every release as well. My own personal donation methods total $15 from one person in the past 5 years since we forked the project and started maintaining it. We have more users than many start ups do and I know that there are several companies using our software, but I haven't figured out how to make donations really work yet. How do we determine who should make what from a shared pool of money? How do you value a contribution, PR, etc., and most importantly how do you get users to actually pay without negatively impacting the project? [1]: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink [2]: https://opencollective.com/streamlink https://opencollective.com/streamlink
guiltygods 6y ago
This is soon going to devolve into people holding users for ransom after they get sufficient traction of their software due to it being open source. Good that you are using the software. Now any fixes or new features are going to cost you since there is now an elite group of users who get pay for features while the ones who adopted early are left in lurch.
rk06 6y ago
Pricing[1] was added after posva read this thread. Here is the description: Starter tier Publish up to 15 posts, private or public and test out if this models works for you, completely free. Sponsor Tier Sponsor Eduardo, the creator of this project, for $10 a month to completely remove the post limit. I think it is quite generous as it is capped at $10 per month. I don't know what will happen if a user stopped the payment after using it for a while. I think that and other issues will be sorted on the fly as it comes up. [1] https://onlysponsors.dev/?_#pricing https://onlysponsors.dev/?_#pricing

272 points by rk06 6y ago

Patreon (for podcasts) and onlyfans work thanks to parasocial relationships. People don't have a parasocial relationship with the authors of the open source software they use.

ma2rten 6y ago
Maybe it could be a parawork relationship instead of parasocial, like sponsors voting on new features and faster response to issues.
- um_ya 6y ago
  Just having a paid priority issue section or a direct line contact to the core dev would be worth paying for. It seems to work with Youtube superchats and Twitch messages.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Phabricator has been doing that for years (but more extreme - you can't even submit it comment on bugs without paying) and I think they're the only open source project my company gives money to. Definitely a reasonable option.
xiphias2 6y ago
I would pay for specific features or bug fixes in software, as a user that's more important, than the lerson implementing it, though people are still very important. There are so many tiny things that bug me when I'm using my devices, it would be great to pay to improve some of them.
- CubsFan1060 6y ago
  Someone posted this just yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25879238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25879238
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    It’s really cool, I will try it. It’s great, as I don’t have to wait for the maintainer to set it up.
rexpop 6y ago
Don't we? I can name a few Ruby celebrities off the top of my head: - Matz - TenderLove (Aaron Patterson) - DHH - _why (Jonathan Gillette)

vienarr 6y ago

so its like onlyfans but for open source community

67868018 6y ago
Idk why bother when they could literally just use OF
- timpattinson 6y ago
  because the aforementioned website is known almost exclusively for porn. Some, maybe most, people would be fine with it, nothing wrong with it really. But if you're trying to earn a living why cut yourself off from the 50% of people that wouldn't subscribe due to the site name only.
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    Besides the association, which one might or might not be fine with, I'd worry that being porn-centric would put OF at risk of credit card companies not wanting to work with them, similar to what PornHub faced recently.
- langitbiru 6y ago
  OF is blocked in my country.
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
  OF has high fees afaik.
- rk06 6y ago
  the main thing is that onlysponsers does not take a cut and it is integrated with github sponsers for payment and sponsorship tiers

stingraycharles 6y ago

I know that Patreon had these “members only” posts, and it’s pretty meh. Maybe it’s due to the projects I’m sponsoring, but I always had a feeling of “if you’re writing these posts just for us, please don’t bother and just enjoy writing code”. And just to make sure this is not interpreted incorrectly, I mean this in a positive way, I don’t want to be catered to, I want to ensure the survival of the project in the long term.

toxik 6y ago
Wasn't Patreon involved in some scandal regarding censorship of uncomfortable people or something? Edit: It was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patreon#Bans_of_specific_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patreon#Bans_of_specific_users
- emteycz 6y ago
  Wasn't that because of their payment processors? What are you supposed to do when your supplier doesn't allow that type of content?
  - toxik 6y ago
    I think if you read the Wikipedia link you will find that it was not because of their payment processor, as far as I can tell.
- Haunted_Cabbage 6y ago
  I think the term uncomfortable people is a flippant and trivial term when it comes to the details listed in that link.
  - toxik 6y ago
    You do not have to agree with a person's opinions to see the value in defending their right to express them. I would pre-empt a discussion on whether or not Patreon has exhibited political bias in its bans. Instead, consider that Sam Harris also believes this. Is Sam Harris somehow also an alt-right taboo character? Surely not.

ignitionmonkey 6y ago

GitHub Pages could add a feature like this using access controls. Right now it's just "Private" and "Public" but I can see a possible demand for "Sponsors". Though, things like sponsor-only RSS feeds and mailing list integrations might be beyond the scope of Pages. https://github.blog/changelog/2021-01-21-access-control-for-github-pages/ https://github.blog/changelog/2021-01-21-access-control-for-...

superbaconman 6y ago
I was just thinking about this and I agree. It would be nice if these settings could apply to the other sections of a repo: Wiki, discussions, issues. Let the software be free but give the devs a way to make cash off people using their software professionally.

toxik 6y ago

Typo in the title

patja 6y ago
I'm also not seeing anything here that meets the definition of the word "salary". These details matter if you are trying to be taken seriously.
- rk06 6y ago
  the idea here is sponsorship is backed by github sponsors, while onlysponsors makes it easier for devs to create content and restrict it to sponsors.
rk06 6y ago
sorry for that. I am not seeing an option to edit it

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago

I'm concerned about the idea of open source turning into teaser content, the main goal of which is to get people to pay to unlock "sponsors only" content.

Ericson2314 6y ago
Yeah that sounds scary, but we already get that with a lot of open source software written by consultancies selling a paid version. (Red hat is disincentivized from making the Linux ecosystem more sane on a deep level.) At the end of the day, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law, it's probably more feasible to incentivize less sharply: UBI with the incentive improve society's productivity and you and everyone else get's more stuff. Do that overly-blunt incentivisation along with the overly-sharp incentivisation we have today, and we might strike some sort of better balance if not spectral (bluntness ~ wavelength) coverage.
- justinclift 6y ago
  > Red hat is disincentivized from making the Linux ecosystem more sane on a deep level. That's a bit confusing. Are you able to expand on that, so it's easier to understand?
  - lez 6y ago
    Red Hat is making its money by selling support. The more obfuscated the system is, the more $$$ they make.
    - comex 6y ago
      Eh. Most of the Red Hat projects people complain about are targeted mainly at desktops, as opposed to servers. And when it comes to desktops, Red Hat’s biggest competition isn’t Ubuntu or CentOS or whoever; it’s Microsoft. There are far, far more users using Windows, who might be convinced to switch to Red Hat if it works well, than there are users using other Linux distros, who might be convinced to buy support if the packages they share work poorly.

baxtr 6y ago

Sounds like a copycat of the infamous OnlyFans platform...

samesense 6y ago

Excellent. I’d pay to see guido’s python.

dessant 6y ago

OnlyFans has been floated here and in past HN threads, and it perfectly encapsulates the current state of open source software funding: a site used predominantly to distribute porn is a better channel for funding open source developers than most dedicated alternatives. OnlyFans takes a 20% cut, is Only Sponsors a free or paid service?

wut42 6y ago
OnlySponsors seems to be built entierly on Github API & GitHub Sponsors, and does not take any cut besides what's GH Sponsors itself is doing, which is none, IIRC.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  The current GitHub Sponsors costs do still appear to be free for individuals. It looks like they are going to take 10% from sponsorships from organizations, which is also currently waived due to beta status.

hashkb 6y ago

It'd be nice to find ways to fund open source without closing off aspects of it. Also, capitalizing on FOSS with a walled garden product like this, with a middleman cashing out, doesn't feel right. I'd like to keep my choice to support a developer based on the quality of their work.

jp_sc 6y ago
There is a middleman, two, actually, this site and GitHub, but no one is "cashing out", for now at least.
- hashkb 6y ago
  I'm sorry; I should have said "taking a cut" - it's not about how much; the point is I'm not in favor of that method of capturing value. GitHub earns its cut with massive network effect, which it built for years, funded with a quality product that users paid for directly, before rolling out marketplaces.

geerlingguy 6y ago

I don't like the idea of getting people to sponsor your open source work, only to 'close source' the incentives to get them to sponsor. In effect, this is just a paywall/license for good documentation for popular software/libraries. To be clear, making money as a pure open source developer is impossibly hard, and creativity is required. Very few enterprises making millions off OSS send monetary support, so you have to cast a wide net for $2-5 sponsors who are willing to throw the equivalent of a coffee a month to you.

slow_donkey 6y ago

It's hard for me to see the value in monetizing posts from OSS projects. If I wanted to pay for someone's thoughts I'd be using substack or paying for pictures from OF - in both cases the value I receive is directly tied to the subscription. Possibly a more interesting approach could be gated support similar to an exclusive discord for patreon subs to ask questions.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

I very much applaud these people making passive money by selling educational content, but we shouldn't kid yourself: there is nothing open about this and your sponsors are not sponsoring your OSS contributions, they just find your content valuable enough. Do they still benefit from 0% fees from Github / Microsoft?

Copenjin 6y ago

I actually like the idea but without a Pricing page it's hard to tell if it's build to last or just an experiment. OnlyFans is clearly for a different kind of content for now, until this changes I don't see why something like this shouldn't be considered a good alternative. Other than github providing something similar, why don't they also expose something useful about github users supporter info through their API? Maybe they already do, don't think so.

geofft 6y ago

I worry about this sort of model because it incentivizes you to poorly document your code, or alternatively, it breaks down if someone else documents your code well. For instance - if there's a particularly tricky way to do something, and you release a sponsor-only video or post explaining it, and then one of your sponsors sees a question about the same topic on StackOverflow and explains it in their own words (StackOverflow already prohibits linking to external explanations without including an answer in-line), would you feel like that is unfair to you? If you publish a performance trick (as demonstrated on this site), and one of your sponsors sends you a PR to improve performance in the common case, would you want to accept it? As your project grows, more people will ask questions and more people will be building a community around it. If you want to have market exclusivity for answers, you effectively need to prevent that community from growing so that people must go to you. It might be possible to do this at scale. This is part of Red Hat's business model, for instance: they have a customer-facing knowledge base that isn't public that includes answers to tricky questions. But Red Hat doesn't depend on the secrecy of this knowledge base. Your entire organization can get access to the KB if you buy a single Red Hat license of any type, which costs something like $50/year. And developers at Red Hat would be happy for those problems to get fixed in the upstream projects. Red Hat's business model is more strongly around support instead of secret documentation, that is, around responses to specific questions instead of restricted-broadcast answers that help everyone. If you're having a problem in production, Red Hat can help you figure it out (as long as you've been paying them for server licenses for all your servers). And the knowledge base mostly exists to deal with the problem of people having limited time - they document something that's broken, but the intent is to actually solve it, not to leave it in the long-term state where it requires reading the KB article. Now, people have been trying to do smaller-than-Red-Hat-scale support contracts for their OSS for a long while, and it's worked in some cases (e.g., SQLite, Postgres) but not in general. It might be the case that restricted educational material works out better in practice!

rk06 6y ago
I think such concerns don't have merit because: 1. an open-source project which is hard to use, would not gain any traction in first place. 2. If open source maintainer had a sizeable amount of users, and wanted to make money off it, they would put the project behind a paywall. Pulling the kind of shady stuff you mentioned is too much effort for little benefit. Plus it will be easily caught anyway. ------------- As an aside, onlysponsors is trying to address a real issue in open source world: helping open source maintainers find sustainable income. Even if this is not a perfect solution, it is likely a step in right direction

rk06 6y ago

OP here. I didn't make onlysponsors. I found out about it while listening to a podcast about Vue. and decided it is quite interesting and useful for many open sourcers here. Original creator is @posva[1] [1]: https://twitter.com/posva/ https://twitter.com/posva/

ryancnelson 6y ago
can you correct the mangled misspelling of the site's actual name in your posting title?
- rk06 6y ago
  I don't have the option to do it. But a mod has edited it.
posva 6y ago
I'm curious: do you have a link to the podcast?
- rk06 6y ago
  It was mentioned offhand. It was some episode on Views on Vue. I binged on it, so I don't remember the episode number.

michael_j_ward 6y ago

Linking to patio11's now 5 year old post [0] Has anyone solved this yet? Why is it not stupid simple to get a "support invoice" from an open source project to make it expense-able? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939

benatkin 6y ago
> both countries are very lenient with regards to necessary business expenses (必須経費 over here). This seems to be the issue. If you're really paying for the software and not the support, it isn't a neccessary business expense because you can have it for free. Same for the support. If others can get support for free — and it's easy to observe it happening — chances are you can get it for free. Someone down the line might notice it's a donation and not a necessary business expense. And if you really need extra support, we're back to the old paradigm where open source can help you land a project but you still need to do the work and it's in addition to the work you do on the project, and it's not easy work. For example, a week-long training course, or custom code.
- jedberg 6y ago
  There are a ton of examples of programs that are free or reduced cost for individuals and more money for corporations. Like all the Jetbrains products. The IRS doesn't get on people for paying for a corporate license for Jetbrains because it would be against the license. Open source support could be the same way. Free for individuals, but costs money for corporate/commercial uses. I don't think the IRS would even blink twice at that.
  - cstejerean 6y ago
    But the open source community would because such a license would not qualify as open source. See the recent debacle sign the Elastic licensing change.
    - jedberg 6y ago

jahewson 6y ago

Are paywalls really what open source needs?

rk06 6y ago
No, but open source maintainers need something to upsell, to achieve sustainable income

codetrotter 6y ago

Just a couple of weeks ago I did a search on Google for “OnlyDevs” to see if anyone had already thought of this. I didn’t immediately see anything relevant at the time, so I then looked to see if onlydevs.com was available, which it wasn’t – parked by some domain shark. But the service I used for looking for domain availability suggested only.dev which is available and I was like oh neat but then I saw the price that it would cost and it was too much for me. Only.dev would cost ~870 USD per year which is way to expensive for a domain for some random idea. Anyways, neat to see that someone came built this, and nice that they were able to come up with a name for it that would not cost them an arm and a leg for the domain :p

devin 6y ago

The title of this article has a typo in it. It is Only Sponsors not “Sponsers”.

squidfunk 6y ago

I also started with GitHub sponsors after reading about Caleb's post about sponsorware in May 2020 and have managed to grow my sponsorships since then to more than $1k a month. To those who are interested how I did it: I'm the author of Material for MkDocs [1], a popular solution for technical documentation. I created a private fork called "Material for MkDocs Insiders [2]" where all new features landed since then and tied those features to funding goals at $ 500, $ 1,000 etc. The promise is that the moment a funding goal is hit, the features are merged back into the original repo and released for general availability. It works reasonably well so far, better that I would have thought. My Twitter following is rather small (700), but I'm posting a lot about Material for MkDocs and new features and try to engage the community. I guess if you have a large following like Caleb, you could up the amount in a few months, given that you have something on your hands that users want and solves a problem. [1]: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/ [2]: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/ https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/insiders/

SkyMarshal 6y ago
Thanks for the explanation. For clarification, does any subset of your community have access to the private version, like perhaps people paying a subscription fee or something? Or is that version completely hidden from everyone, and just used to develop and test new features until a funding threshold is met to release them into the public version?
- squidfunk 6y ago
  Sponsors have access to the private repository (I'm using GitHub's collaborator feature). I have several sponsor tiers and $10 a month or more will get you access to my sponsorware, which means you will be added to the private repository and can use the features immediately. What you're effectively getting is early access, so you can use the features before other users. The official documentation of my project lists exactly which features are "Insiders only", and which aren't. When the features tied to the funding goal that was hit are merged, everybody can use them. I try to always have sponsors-only features on higher tiers to keep sponsoring attractive. As I understand, Caleb does it with content and entire projects - I'm doing it with new features for an existing project. Also, I'm doing it fully transparent, disclosing how much I earn with this, which I think is crucial to build the necessary trust relationship.

erezsh 6y ago

I like the design. Do you plan to add comments? Chat?

chrisweekly 6y ago

Mods: Typo "Sponsers"

zebnyc 6y ago

Unrelated, I really like artwork / images like the one on the hero section. https://onlysponsors.dev/_nuxt/img/career.67d5c3b.svg https://onlysponsors.dev/_nuxt/img/career.67d5c3b.svg Where can I find similar (free / paid) ? Thanks

akiselev 6y ago
One I've used is PixelTrue [1] (no relation, just a happy customer). The envato marketplaces [2] are probably the biggest platform for such content though [1] https://www.pixeltrue.com/ https://www.pixeltrue.com/ [2] https://graphicriver.net/ https://graphicriver.net/
posva 6y ago
You can find the links to resources in the about page: https://onlysponsors.dev/about https://onlysponsors.dev/about

andrewmcwatters 6y ago

onlyfans jokes aside, there's a reason why Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, et al. don't release comprehensive numbers about their platform: no one makes money off of them. The distribution curve makes no sense for the average person, but it makes a lot of sense for the platform owners.

nandi95 6y ago
What about tidal subscriptions? Are they any good?

varispeed 6y ago

In many countries when you work as an employee you have to pay taxes like an employee (and tax must be collected at source). How this platform deals with that?

caniszczyk 6y ago

I think folks need to be wary of supporting github sponsors, the way it's currently structured only perpetuates a gig style economy for open source maintainers, my guess is <1% of folks using sponsors get enough money equivalent to a salary (unfortunately GitHub doesn't share data on how well the sponsors program is doing) https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/ https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-...

avipars 6y ago

love the name

jedberg 6y ago

Here is my biggest problem with supporting open source: discoverability. At the end of last year, I was doing all my last minute charitable giving, and after my PSF donation, I wanted to donate to open source projects. I opened up Github's sponsor page, and stopped there. There were thousands of projects, but I have no idea which ones are important to me, other than a few big ones. It would be great if a tool existed that would look at everything I've installed via Brew(or your package manager of choice) and all the imports in my own Github projects, and follow all the dependency paths to the bottom, and then give me a report of how often a dependency shows up in that graph. For example, I know ffmpeg is at the bottom of a few of my stacks. But what else? There might be a library that I rely on 12 different ways, but it's so fundamental and deep in the stack that I have no idea. It would be even better if this magical tool could then directly link me to the support page (or figure out if one even exists). My other problem with all of these open source sponsorships is that it seems for some reason none of them support one time donations. They all want me to sign up for a monthly gift (and I don't even get to chose the amount). I understand that that helps their cash flow, but that's now how I donate. I look at my income at the end of the year, set a target percentage, and then make all my donations at the end of December until I run out of budget (except for various fundraisers during the year). And I know I'm not the only one who donates that way. December is always the biggest month of gifts for charity. They really should have an option for people like me.

bergstromm466 6y ago
https://backyourstack.com https://backyourstack.com has you covered! (it's still in beta and has only basic functionality, but at least it's a step in the right direction). It scans your dependency file (e.g. Gemfile in Rails).
- jedberg 6y ago
  Fantastic!! I had a feeling that if I posted this, someone would point me to a tool that does exactly that. Just signed up, thanks!
david_allison 6y ago

bkyan 6y ago

I think this would be more compelling to me, if the focus was on premium support options, rather than additional content.

gravyboat 6y ago

While this may work for individual contributors I don't see how it benefits open source work and the community in general. It suggest writing articles and creating videos but there is then a drive to release less information publicly to try and get people to pay because your code is confusing or your docs are lacking. That seems like a big negative. It also doesn't work for team based projects. I'm one of the maintainers of Streamlink [1] which has members from around the world and we've been running various methods of donation since 2017 or so. In that time our Open Collective [2] has made about $1600 USD. We have over 50,000 users across all platforms (based on download stats as we don't collect any metrics in our apps so it's potentially higher) yet the entire amount we've collected is thanks to less than 100 people. We note the Open Collective on every release as well. My own personal donation methods total $15 from one person in the past 5 years since we forked the project and started maintaining it. We have more users than many start ups do and I know that there are several companies using our software, but I haven't figured out how to make donations really work yet. How do we determine who should make what from a shared pool of money? How do you value a contribution, PR, etc., and most importantly how do you get users to actually pay without negatively impacting the project? [1]: https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink [2]: https://opencollective.com/streamlink https://opencollective.com/streamlink

guiltygods 6y ago

This is soon going to devolve into people holding users for ransom after they get sufficient traction of their software due to it being open source. Good that you are using the software. Now any fixes or new features are going to cost you since there is now an elite group of users who get pay for features while the ones who adopted early are left in lurch.

rk06 6y ago

Pricing[1] was added after posva read this thread. Here is the description: Starter tier Publish up to 15 posts, private or public and test out if this models works for you, completely free. Sponsor Tier Sponsor Eduardo, the creator of this project, for $10 a month to completely remove the post limit. I think it is quite generous as it is capped at $10 per month. I don't know what will happen if a user stopped the payment after using it for a while. I think that and other issues will be sorted on the fly as it comes up. [1] https://onlysponsors.dev/?_#pricing https://onlysponsors.dev/?_#pricing