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As a maintainer of several OSS projects, I could work full time on them and have time for nothing else. Yet, I'm pretty sure that even if these projects would b

As a maintainer of several OSS projects, I could work full time on them and have time for nothing else. Yet, I'm pretty sure that even if these projects would be 100x more popular, the donations I would receive wouldn't even pay my daily expenses. I refuse all donations/tips for three reasons: - as per above, your donation is generally insignificant. it's just overhead in tax accounting - people donate "with strings attached": AKA "here's $2, but I'd really love this feature" - receiving donations wouldn't be fair to any current or past contributors that made the projects what it is The last point is especially true in the OSS landscape. The most front-facing programs get the donations, but the low-level libraries and infrastructure that make them possible get nothing. Heck, I've seen forks with a few superficial tweaks receiving donations and reaping the benefits while the original projects is chugging along slowly at the hard-to-build infrastructure that nobody else wants to do. Bug bounty sites fall almost universally in the last category in my eyes.

slooonz 5y ago
> - receiving donations wouldn't be fair to any current or past contributors that made the projects what it is Hard disagree on that. Maintaining (bug triage, pull requests review, bug fixes…) is actually the hard work and the part that deserve the reward IMO. When I contribute to an open source software to fix a bug/add a feature, my reward is that the software I use has an annoying bug gone/the feature I want. I don’t need any reward. On the other hand, the thankless maintainer deserve it.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  Just fixing a bug isn't making the project what it is, though.
etimberg 5y ago
I've maintained a popular opensource project for the last 7 years. I finally relented and started a GitHub sponsors profile earlier this year. For a long time I had the same mentality about donations so when I set up my sponsors profile I made it super clear that I wasn't offering any perks for sponsorship. If someone chooses to donate, it's purely as a thanks for my work. Currently I make $6 a month so that covers a couple of coffees. In terms of fairness to past contributors, I put the sponsorship on my personal GitHub account and not on the repo for the project I maintain.

slooonz 5y ago

> - receiving donations wouldn't be fair to any current or past contributors that made the projects what it is Hard disagree on that. Maintaining (bug triage, pull requests review, bug fixes…) is actually the hard work and the part that deserve the reward IMO. When I contribute to an open source software to fix a bug/add a feature, my reward is that the software I use has an annoying bug gone/the feature I want. I don’t need any reward. On the other hand, the thankless maintainer deserve it.

DarylZero 5y ago
Just fixing a bug isn't making the project what it is, though.

etimberg 5y ago

I've maintained a popular opensource project for the last 7 years. I finally relented and started a GitHub sponsors profile earlier this year. For a long time I had the same mentality about donations so when I set up my sponsors profile I made it super clear that I wasn't offering any perks for sponsorship. If someone chooses to donate, it's purely as a thanks for my work. Currently I make $6 a month so that covers a couple of coffees. In terms of fairness to past contributors, I put the sponsorship on my personal GitHub account and not on the repo for the project I maintain.