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Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

This is such a watershed moment in the history of software development that I don't think most of us can grasp its significance yet. Sure we're familiar with other services that do the same, but the adoption rate (like for GH itself) will be clearly different.

One could argue that this is more societally important than YouTube, Twitch, etc funded content for _consuming_ because this funds content for _leveraging_ to build/work on top of. And this is not just limited to the entrepreneurial devs out there, of which "the man" has new employment competition with now. It can also fund entire company departments.

I look forward to mass adoption of this, wallet in hand.

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This is a sad commentary on software development as a profession, as well as society as well. A watershed moment is when private individuals might be able to get paid for the extremely valuable work that they do that allows thousands of companies to make a profit with some companies becoming worth billions. The fact that the ability to socially beg for money for valuable software makes the idea of writing valuable software more viable is a sad state of affairs.

What's the line between patronage and just hiring someone outright for a pet project?

Dignity.

While I understand why others are wary, I am also excited about the good that this could do for OSS projects.

I know I've struggled in the past to give money to projects that make me a profit. The third party tools are hardly brilliant, and maintainers have to set them up, and look after them.

This has the potential to be a really good thing.

The big unknown here is that the MVP is sponsoring individual contributors vs an entire project. Of course it is technically easier to build, and removes GitHub from having to build logic or tools on how to divide contributions fairly among contributors, but it opens up questions on perceived fairness among contributors to a given project e.g. what happens when one contributor, for whatever reason, receives far more contributions than another equal contributor? Will that lead to infighting, jealousy, turnover, lawsuits, loss of motivation?

Yes, nice to have the key people working on open source in Bill Gates pocket. Isn't this what the open source communtiy have been dreaming about all along..

Cynisism aside I get where you are comming from. As somone doing OS fulltime I applaud the effort. I guess it is to much to ask to have a source of income completely without bias.

> but the adoption rate (like for GH itself) will be clearly different.

How many individuals have a paid GH account vs a free one?

Now how many of those are willing to donate to a project/person but hasn't already done so?

LOL! I think you might be a tad overstating the significance of this.

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