Code Sponsor is shutting down on December 8

> Even though it's not a charitable cause, they are trying to make the same appeals. And if a charitable organization was eating away more than 50% of the donations in administrative costs, you would likely be very wary.

The funding is low, less than a fast food worker. The person running the operation couldn't even pay his own rent to run it out of an apartment.

Before we start slicing up the pie, we need to have the funds reach a point where they can sustain themselves. For instance, basic living expenses in midwestern US. Funds after administrative costs should be the pie.

We have to stop shaking down people who want to help open source when they ask for funding. It's as if whenever someone tries to fund an open source project or create a way to fix this problem funding in open source, they're hounded and dogpiled.

I've seen this sort of entitled, stingy attitude on the part of open source users, that despite using open source software to their benefit, those doing the work behind the scenes are shamed for trying to sustain themselves.

It's this strange double bind: first you want your software working, new features, and that bug fixed, but the one's facilitating that very thing for you can't have the material means to do it without being shook down.

When I see 10k in funding, less than poverty wage in USA, and people talking about it as if it was a prize pool instead of operating expenses, that's the mentality I'd like to see done more thoughtfully.

> Most of the previous sponsors were drawn into the social cause but not necessarily the practical effectiveness of the ads themselves

This is true for a few of the sponsors, but not the majority. The majority were drawn into Code Sponsor because it can be as effective as Google Ads, while 40% of the marketing funds go back into developers pockets.

Code Sponsor was never presented to sponsors as a charitable organization, nor did we try to present ourselves as such to the community.

Here is the gist that I shared with sponsors to explain how Code Sponsor worked:

https://gist.github.com/cavneb/a86a668063328de2f063ba9c7d078...

> 60% of all traffic through Code Sponsor came from Github. 15% came from ad blocked traffic (I have no idea the referer). About 15% came from websites and then the remainder came from different repository websites (dockerhub, npm, etc).

From the monetizable repo views, 86% of all views were from Github. Barring a massive cultural shift, Github has to be part of the equation.

However, this reward may not always be money: community recognition and extended network, better chances of hiring, or attribution from projects that depend on you should also be considered.

Yeah, it is valid to say that funding needs to be improved. But while ads provide a way, it is a stretching to call it the only or the right way. Maybe open source development is just fine with corporate sponsorship + people doing it in their free time. Maybe developers are repelled by ads so much that it actually hinders contributing to interesting projects. Maybe charity and donations work better we just haven't figured it out yet (see Patreon, which had a surprising success, despite the skepticism around microfunding).

Ads are still the most scalable, fast, easy and passive way to generate revenue but unfortunately the adtech industry has poisoned the well so people forget all the smaller companies trying to do the right thing. Perhaps opencollective can pickup something like this. Good luck on your next project.

Email me. I don't know if I have the bandwidth to do it right now, but I'm confident that I have the answer.