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Comment by jgilias | Hacker News Reader

Well, the article mentions his Patreon, as well as features a GitHub Sponsors button at the end of it.

True, both were mentioned in passing - but it would be good to hear about how sustainable this is?

If an open source maintainer relies on GH sponsors, Patreon, Open Collective then they are going to have to invest time in marketing themselves to the community. It's an odd dynamic.

Gotta have some hustle if you wanna get paid.

..which is a real shame, as there are very talented people working on public goods who don't have that "hustle" and could do with the support.

Open source / Free software has been valued over $400 billion, and supports our entire economy, funding developers shouldn't be a problem.

Open source / Free software is a public goods issue, and we should be looking for the best ways to support them.

Quadratic funding could be a useful mechanism for this:

https://wtfisqf.com/

Great if you're an extroverted narcissist, but that only represents (a small) part of the software development world.

Definitely not a sustainable model. I don't think open source will ever find a sustainable business model that can be applicable generally.

As public infrastructure, government funded? Lots of problems...

I personally think there ought to be better way to fund Anonymous developers like through Monroe or something similar.

Patreon after the recent incident make me trust less and less centralised players. Seems like a power corrupt symptom

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