I'm participating in an hackathon and had this idea: users of open source github repos can contribute $X for every commit the developer contributes, with a monthly cap. It's a recurring donation based on development activity.
Give some love to open source devs.
What do you guys think?
Links:
https://liberapay.com/ https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.com (Python)
https://gratipay.com/ https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com (Python)
https://salt.bountysource.com/ https://github.com/bountysource/core (Ruby)
https://snowdrift.coop/ (not operational) https://git.snowdrift.coop/sd/snowdrift (Haskell)
Gratipay uses Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/gratipay/gratipay/
[1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
It's good for keeping track of exactly how much you'll be spending.
Anecdote: 3 of the 10 campaigns I've "pledged" to use per creation, the rest are monthly.
https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat
https://packagist.org/packages/paragonie/random_compat
Despite being incredibly useful tool, there isn't a lot of active development going on. It just works, and when it doesn't, it's because your operating environment is borked.
Paying per commit wouldn't make sense for us. We have very little technical debt.
It turns out that many users of open source projects (especially libraries and packages) are other developers !
It is hard to find a piece of modern software which doesn't depend on some open source libraries. Those libraries might depend on other libraries and so on. Just do an `npm ls --depth=4` in a node-based project to see what a nice tree that is. Same thing with cocoapods, carthage, rubygems, pip, cargo, leiningen, etc.
In my view, money should follow the project structure - developers should donate part of the money they receive to the project dependencies and the devs of the dependencies should do the same thing, recursively and that's how you really spread the love !
I've started working on a prototype a year ago, but got discouraged after someone showed me that there are literally hundreds of projects trying to 'spread the love' and as a consequence no love is being spread :)... so I kind of gave up on it for now, but still think this is how it should be done.
I've also got the impression that most patrons rather prefer a predictable, monthly amount over a varied amount, even if it comes with a cap.
Central repository (database with website and API frontends) that contains links to donation pages for all open source software. This is crowdsourced information. So if you search for "spark", apache spark appears with link to donation page, and of course more obscure packages will be added as well.
Then a CLI tool is written that scans your code base. This is an open source tool, so for node it will look in NPM packages, for C projects it will look at the make files, etc. Developers can write custom code to detect their own packages if it's not standard.
The output of the CLI tool calls an API at the central repository that creates a report, so you can go to the URL and see all the open source packages you use and links to donate to them.
Now, here is the final piece that would make it so much better, but is more difficult: the central repository itself is a non-profit organization, so instead of having to go to each library's donation page, you donate directly to the central repo (perhaps a set amount every month), and once a month the central repo donates all of the amounts taken in. So if you only want to donate $10 a month, but use 500 open source projects, that's OK, because once a month the central repo will add up all the donations and donate one lump sum. Of course you can change the ratios of donations if you want, so some projects get more of your donation per month than others, and you can remove projects you don't want to donate to even if you use them.
In this way, individuals and companies can fairly compensate all the developers of the open source software they use, easily and fairly, in the amount they can afford.
At the end of the year, you only have to write off your donations to the central repo, and not the hundreds of open source projects, as the central repo is a non profit.
Thoughts?
http://stackshare.io/airbnb/airbnb
(so a company imports its Stackshare profile & you make a list of the open source projects they're using, and if you have donation information from those projects you show it)
https://whispersystems.org/blog/bithub/
Snowdrift looks interesting too:
edit: finally got through their registration. You get: "Which category fits what you make best?"
Video & Film
Music
Writing
Comics
Drawing & Painting
Animation
Podcasts
Games
Photography
Comedy
Science
Education
Crafts & DIY
Dance & Theater
.. it's clear that programmers (unless you're a game programmer) are not welcome.
$Manager: What are you working on today?
$Programmer: The usual Cratfting/DIY.
$Manager: OK, sounds good.
it's pretty impossible to have an exhaustive list of all the kinds of things you can create.. so we've been talking about ways to let people put in their own categories for a while now, but that also has its own set of UX complications.
The idea works, the implementation could be improved.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=659396
businesses have a much greater incentive to ensure continued development of projects than individuals. Personally there's at most a handful of projects I would support with my own money, but my employer's money would be very well spent supporting at least a dozen different OS projects.
For example, my company pays for OpenVPN Access Server not because it offers a ton of value over OpenVPN (it really doesn't, for our use case), but because they provided a way for me to give them money that's acceptable within a corporate budget.
Some prior work from top of my head:
- Bountysource - Gratipay - Patreon - Flattr
So I'll definitely look at all the other, similar/identical products. Another takeaway is that this idea probably won't work on a per-commit basis - what's a good way to make sure recurring contributions correspond with actual development activity?
Even if you're supposedly giving money to reputable developers that are the percentile less likely to commit fraud, there's still a risk of it happening.
A more reasonable approach would be a monthly or a "version" contribution.
Even better than that would be a "fund" where you pledged your money to developers/projects, and it would be distributed equally or by a clear metric.
If you want to know more, the second part of https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/a-new-platform-to-fund-wor... is a short introduction to our teams system and contains a few additional links.
If you're interested in helping out you should join us. :)
"A social community of makers building, selling, and crowdfunding together"
There is no clarity as to what you actually do.
For example, links under build your dream and sell your product both bring me to a Create Your Account page. I don't want to create an account. I want to know what the heck you do.
Also, your headline: "Welcome to Baqqer A social community of makers building, selling, and crowdfunding together" doesn't tell me anything about what you do, or more importantly, the problem you are solving.
If it's "Let users give you money for your open source project" then just say it.
I know that the best thing you can do from SaaS perspective is to get customer's credit card and permission to bill small non-defined amount indefinitely, but I find it morally wrong.
Still, I don't think that WinRAR would have many paying fans on Patreon.
Yes. If you want payments, you can publish a Bitcoin address, or anything else you'd like (my point here is not about Bitcoin specifically). To a first approximation, you won't actually get any payments, though.
That's the difference.
We don't live in a world where people haven't ever tried this brand new donation idea. We live in a world where a lot of people have. Their reports are almost uniform... they literally write blog posts when they receive enough money to pay for a meal in a month or a year, because that's how rarely it happens. It's not a functional mechanism for making money. It doesn't even rise to the level of paying for a hobby; it tends to run at donation rates roughly comparable to what the author could get walking down a busy street every day and keeping their eye out for loose change, and well below the rate of "collecting bottles out of the trash" in any state with a bottle deposit.