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While I agree with your general point, I still think crowd sourcing open source projects is still doable. All we need is to centralize it. I work for a very sm

While I agree with your general point, I still think crowd sourcing open source projects is still doable. All we need is to centralize it. I work for a very small startup that uses hundreds of big or small open source projects. And we never pay a penny for any of them. And I don't think I can go to my boss and ask for a meaningful contributions to any of these. We are not profitable and there's no reward for that contribution. However, if there was a way for me to subscribe to micro payments for a few projects, given some easy trivial incentive, we definitely would've. I can easily subscribe to $5/m payments to like 5-10 projects that we use. Would've meant nothing for us. But economics of scale would've kicked in for them. Allow $1-10 monthly subscriptions, give the backers a badge or something they can use when hiring. Maybe show a badge next to their usernames on github or whatever. Maybe show a badge to the issues the backers create so they get a sense of priority. slowly you can build a small habit of people/companies subscribing small amounts to projects they use. If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project: * Nodejs * Postgres * Node-Pg * Rabbit MQ * Grapesjs * Esbuild * Webpack (Which I badly need to improve it's killing us everyday) * Dokku * Metabase * MJML It's in my company's benefit for each of these to survive/thrive and keep improving. I am afraid that once/if some of them stop that'll hurt us. $5/m and potentially getting some attention from maintainers (in smaller ones) if we had issues would be enough of an incentive for these all. The incentives I suggest: * Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers * Badges next to usernames on Slack/Discord/Irc/Whatever * Badges on Github profiles for backers An example: Docker. They started rate limiting their free tier, asking for $5/m. I don't care about the $5/m at all. My biggest problem with that change was not the $5/m, but the time I had to spend on our different tools setting up auth environment variables.

gioele 5y ago
> If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project: Nodejs, Postgres, Node-Pg, [...] Who would receive that money? Only the core developers? Anybody with "commit access"? In which share? Will it detract voluntary contributions? How should other companies working on the same code-base be treated? Are they allowed to contribute at all? Do they get some shares of the funds? All these questions (and many others) that have been discussed in the Debian project for a long time and nobody has yet found an answer that is acceptable to everybody. Some sources: * "Debian + Dunc-Tank.org = dissent" (2006) https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/ https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/ * "Paying (some) Debian developers" (2019) https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/ https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/ * "DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers" (2020) https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_address/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_addres...
- emilsedgh 5y ago
  Debian's case is so complicated. Many of these complexities and dynamics don't exist in other software projects. Most of the project's I'd support have central figures that can use the money and don't have such difficulties. Babel could've used my $5/m donations. Debian's theoretical and moral dilemmas are not universal. I used to be involved in a similar project for KDE [0] and it was KDE e.V that received the money. How they allocated their money is an entirely different question that depends on each one. [0] https://relate.kde.org/ https://relate.kde.org/
andoma 5y ago
> * Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers This can be a slippery slope. It could easily be mis-interpreted as "Hey, I payed $3 last month so I want you to prioritize my bugs". Generally I think for these kind of sums it should be clear that you donate and pay as a thank-you for what's already there, not for what (in your opinion) should come. Using it to highlight issues would work against that IMHO.

gioele 5y ago

> If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project: Nodejs, Postgres, Node-Pg, [...] Who would receive that money? Only the core developers? Anybody with "commit access"? In which share? Will it detract voluntary contributions? How should other companies working on the same code-base be treated? Are they allowed to contribute at all? Do they get some shares of the funds? All these questions (and many others) that have been discussed in the Debian project for a long time and nobody has yet found an answer that is acceptable to everybody. Some sources: * "Debian + Dunc-Tank.org = dissent" (2006) https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/ https://lwn.net/Articles/201488/ * "Paying (some) Debian developers" (2019) https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/ https://lwn.net/Articles/790954/ * "DPL: Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers" (2020) https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_address/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_addres...

emilsedgh 5y ago
Debian's case is so complicated. Many of these complexities and dynamics don't exist in other software projects. Most of the project's I'd support have central figures that can use the money and don't have such difficulties. Babel could've used my $5/m donations. Debian's theoretical and moral dilemmas are not universal. I used to be involved in a similar project for KDE [0] and it was KDE e.V that received the money. How they allocated their money is an entirely different question that depends on each one. [0] https://relate.kde.org/ https://relate.kde.org/

andoma 5y ago

> * Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers This can be a slippery slope. It could easily be mis-interpreted as "Hey, I payed $3 last month so I want you to prioritize my bugs". Generally I think for these kind of sums it should be clear that you donate and pay as a thank-you for what's already there, not for what (in your opinion) should come. Using it to highlight issues would work against that IMHO.