I'm donating $150/month to the musl libc project | Hacker News Reader

I'm donating $150/month to the musl libc project

andrewkelley.me

115 pointsryanworl12 comments

Zig is a great project that I am very happy to support with $50/month on Patreon. Andrew consistently communicates progress and gives periodic updates on Twitch/YouTube.

I don't have any relationship with Andrew other than I want his programming language to exist and replace C. I saw it on another HN post just like this.

I would encourage you to watch the talk linked from his Patreon page.

https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk

And then give him some money! :)

This got me thinking, if you're giving $50 to Zig on patreon and they are receiving less than $50 (because fees), and Zig is giving $150 to musl on (whatever funding site) and musl is receiving less than $150 (because fees), why not give your $50 to musl instead? Giving to projects which turn around and give it elsewhere seems wasteful, unless your goal is to also fund sites like patreon.

I've been donating to Zig since long before this announcement. Andrew is free to do what he wishes with the money.

You somehow completely missed the point.

If you keep breaking the site guidelines we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to do that. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and just using HN as intended? The idea is to post thoughtful, substantive, respectful comments, or no comments.

Just like a busy restaurant drives more traffic, seeing a larger dollar amount or more patrons may encourage further donations.

Patreon also has decent message distribution channels and makes subscriptions easy for both sides.

Andrew is an amazing developer that taught me some basic C when we both worked together at Indaba Music years ago and a whole lot of other things about development. I miss those late-night coding lessons! Hope you're well Andrew!

Hey Zach! Thanks for the support :D

> Now if I'm being honest about my motivations for this blog post, it's that I want to prove that open source funding is not a zero-sum game.

Honest.

> If there's anything we've learned from the V language Internet drama that has unfolded over the past few days, it's that open source projects have to do marketing if they want to get financial support.

Marketing or usefulness.

Unfortunately, most people can't make it to a comparable level of usefulness as other existing projects without some level of financial support. The marketing is required to even try. This is the dilemma most startups face, balancing promises vs. current reality

I think his entire point is that usefulness isn't enough. Musl libc is important and useful, but underfunded. Thus, he's doing marketing for it.

Actually usefulness isn't enough, unfortunately. When software is really good you hardly think about it because it stays out of your way and does what you want without a lot of fuss. I myself have been guilty of not donating to projects from which I derive significant value unless prompted, namely: qBittorrent, VLC, Paint.Net, KeePass, etc.

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