[HN Gopher] I received my first donation on my open-source side ...
___________________________________________________________________
I received my first donation on my open-source side project and it
felt great
Author : jerrygoyal
Score : 350 points
Date : 2021-01-12 10:05 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gourav.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (gourav.io)
| joostdecock wrote:
| The first donation to my open source project (1) came from
| someone who went through the trouble of emailing me to ask how
| they could donate.
|
| Since then, I've embraced receiving donations and last year I
| ended up receiving more than 10.000 euro. (2)
|
| I (re)donate everything to charity, for reasons (3), but even
| then it's a great motivator. If it wasn't for the money I would
| have burned out long ago. It really means a lot when people show
| their support in such a tangible way.
|
| I recommend everyone to both accept donations, and donate to
| others.
|
| (1) https://freesewing.org/ (2)
| https://freesewing.org/blog/bye-2020/ (3)
| https://freesewing.org/docs/various/pledge/motivation/
| thetrustworthy wrote:
| I just read your reasons (3), and I think you are pretty
| awesome. Thanks for doing this!
| morgengold wrote:
| Nice work! Just out of curiosity: Which of the price tiers (1)
| is chosen most regularly?
|
| (1) https://freesewing.org/community/join/
| renewiltord wrote:
| If you can always put a crypto address or whatever on your site
| that would be helpful. Recently found a guy who wrote a blog post
| and a GitHub repo that was absolutely dope. Happy to send him
| like $50 but I couldn't find an ETH address.
|
| Emailed him anyway. We'll see.
| susam wrote:
| I have been running an open source MathJax-based mathematics
| pastebin[1] since 2012 and I had received 2 donations for it
| until recently. Then a mathematician tweeted[2] about it
| convincing others to send some donations. After that kind gesture
| by him, I received 3 more donations. So pretty sure I can't make
| a living out of donations. :-) But I still appreciate them
| because they help in covering a portion of the hosting cost.
|
| Also, I never seriously expected donations for this project
| because I don't work much on it these days apart from cleaning up
| spam from time to time, complying with legal notices and
| occasional maintenance. I added a donation button only to see if
| someone would use it. Apart from covering hosting cost, I think
| an important side effect of the donations is that it provides
| some additional motivation to continue working on the project and
| develop it further which I indeed plan to do as soon as I can
| find the time for it.
|
| [1] http://mathb.in/
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/daveinstpaul/status/1345082256361193473
| offtop5 wrote:
| I'm stupid , but what exactly do mathematicians do ?
|
| I'd assume economists are a significant portion of them ???
| catears wrote:
| I can't remember which TV-series I saw it in, some kind of
| murder or "who dun' it?" show. But I remember that they had a
| pretty genuine and true role for a mathematician in that
| episode.
|
| The mathematician was tasked with calculating the areas of
| manhattan that would be hit during stormy weather and give a
| rough estimation of the required drainage for the water to
| seep away.
|
| That's the rough details, can't remember exactly. However, it
| always struck me as a job where the "mathematician as a job"
| fit really well.
| _hl_ wrote:
| I've seen questions of this kind a lot on HN, and I think
| they really deserve a better answer than what I can come
| with. Here's my best shot at an answer:
|
| Mathematics is a bit like art. There is no functional purpose
| to art, people just do it for the sake of itself, and for the
| intellectual stimulation. Likewise, mathematics deals with
| building theory on top of previous theory, with no real
| purpose other than for the sake of building theory and
| getting intellectual stimulation.
|
| Think of this: Where did that previous theory come from? It
| was built on top of previous theory, etc. Mathematics is
| pretty much a never-ending stack of things built on top of
| each other for the sake of building things on top of each
| other.
|
| Every now and then (quite often actually), there is some
| really useful stuff that can be done with this enormous stack
| of theory, with applications in practical fields like
| computer science or engineering. In fact the computer was
| invented as a result of a lot of merely theoretical
| contemplations about the nature of logic. But for a "pure"
| mathematicians, the applications are not the main focus of
| mathematics. For a forum like HN where a lot of folks are
| driven by _doing_ stuff, this idea might seem rather strange,
| but it is the same motivation that drives artists and
| probably many other things.
|
| Then there's of course the applied mathematicians who try to
| use everything they know about math to work on some real-
| world problem. Theoretical computer science is often a good
| example, where we build algorithms that try to improve
| performance for some practical problem by using mathematical
| insights into the properties of the problem. But there's also
| less applied computer science, where algorithms are built
| merely because they are interesting or beautiful or whatever,
| and then maybe someone finds a need to apply them, or not.
|
| For those without any formal education in mathematics, here's
| a little problem that will help you understand what a
| mathematical proof actually _is_ : Consider some set S
| containing some elements (anything really, just some stuff).
| For any elements a, b in S, we define an operation: a + b
| yields some other element of S (+ here is just a symbol, not
| necessarily addition). The operation + has _only_ the
| following properties: - (0) a + b is another
| element of S - (1) For any c in S, we have (a + b) + c
| = a + (b + c) - (2) There exists a special element in
| S, written as 0, such that a + 0 = a, for any a in S
|
| Note that we did not assume that b + a = a + b. In
| particular, 0 + a might not be a. Assume that there exists an
| element 0' such that 0' + a = a = a + 0. Use only the
| properties stated above to argue that 0 = 0'. If it helps,
| replace "+" with any other symbol.
|
| ----
|
| Solution: This structure (a set with an _associative_
| operation and a _neutral element_ ) is called a monoid. We
| are proving that the neutral element of a monoid is both
| "left-neutral" and "right-neutral". The proof proceeds as
| follows:
|
| By (1), we have 0' + 0 = 0', but also 0' + 0 = by our
| assumption of 0. Hence 0' + 0 = 0' = 0, which was to be
| shown.
|
| This solution is fairly straightforward. The next step is to
| try your hand at something a little more complicated: Define
| a second operation (-a) which takes an element of S and
| returns an element of S called the inverse of a, with the
| property that a + (-a) = (-a) + a = 0, for any a in S. Prove
| that (-(-a)) = a.
| dnautics wrote:
| I don't think it's accurate to say mathematics is always
| art. Two theoretical fields in particular: fourier
| analysis, which came from wanting to solve heat flow
| equations, and probability, which came from wanting to win
| at games of chance, come to mind as applied math migrating
| to theoretical
| offtop5 wrote:
| So I'm guessing there's a handful of professorship
| positions, of pure mathematics and getting the published
| papers.
|
| And everyone else kind of just gets normal jobs in the
| private sector. I think a lot of quants come from PhD
| mathematics
| _hl_ wrote:
| There's a handful of extremely accomplished professors,
| but beyond that contributions come from all over the
| place. Anyone with a bright idea can contribute. As for
| getting paid to do it, well, you are probably right, but
| for many people it is probably also just a bit of a
| hobby.
| jimbokun wrote:
| To elaborate on the idea that Math is like art, others have
| pointed out that despite mathematicians best efforts to
| avoid practical applications, it often ends up being useful
| anyways:
|
| http://faculty.cord.edu/andersod/wigner-hammingresponse.pdf
| stuckindider wrote:
| NSA is one of the largest employers of mathematicians. They
| look for flaws in crypto implementations.
| metahost wrote:
| Was looking forward to using it but, it says my IP is
| blacklisted. :(
| susam wrote:
| It was the spam filter at work. I have tuned it just now.
| Would you please try once more and see if you can use it now?
|
| By the way, this spam filter is one of the things I want to
| fix when I resume work on this project again. Currently, it
| blacklists IP addresses whereas ideally it should be blocking
| certain type of content only.
| fierarul wrote:
| Honestly, I _think_ I heard about the website you are using
| about donations but I wouldn 't necessarily put my credit card
| in there.
|
| It would be trivial for you to also put a PayPal address, which
| seems safer for one-off donations.
|
| You might also be tempted to put BTC/ETH addresses but I doubt
| there's many donors that way.
| input_sh wrote:
| You can pay via PayPal and the author likely receives money
| via PayPal.
|
| One could cut out the middle man, but at the same time, it's
| a prettier interface to look at specifically made for the
| purpose of donations.
| fierarul wrote:
| I don't see a PayPal logo underneath the 'Pay' button.
| input_sh wrote:
| I guess it's country-dependent then? I can see
| debit/credit card and PayPal as options as soon as I
| click on "support".
| akersten wrote:
| What kind of legal notices are you routinely dealing with?
| That's a frightening aspect of maintaining an open source side
| project I hadn't really considered.
| susam wrote:
| The notices are usually takedown notices to remove content
| violating various regulations that spammers often post to the
| website. This issue occurs if my spam filter or I do not
| detect and remove such content before someone else finds it
| and submits a complaint about it.
|
| In my experience, this additional overhead comes with hosting
| a live service that allows user-generated content. Other
| types of projects where the tool is run offline or where the
| users take the tool and host it themselves are fine.
| atoz2020 wrote:
| Congrats! You should join xs:code and start generating revenue in
| minutes. I believe that your code should stay free, but your time
| worth money and the only way to make OSS sustainable is to
| provide value on top of the free code. try this:
| https://xscode.com
| 255kb wrote:
| I know this feeling, seeing people _pay_ for your free software!
| It 's very rewarding, and also a sign that some people got huge
| value from your hard work. Even if it's symbolic, or just enough
| to cover the server costs, it's what motivates me to continue.
| Still, I wish more companies would donate to support the massive
| amount of open-source software and libraries we all use every
| day. I understand that making a company pay for something free is
| a challenge. But come on, they can pay vast amount of money for
| getting support for open-source softwares, support they will
| probably never use... :)
|
| (Project on which I received donation:
| https://github.com/mockoon/mockoon)
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I understand that making a company pay for something free is
| a challenge.
|
| I don't know how many times I've heard variants of this. "You
| can't monetize open source because companies won't pay for it."
| It's not that hard to get them to support the project if you
| sell something that's not available for free. It could be as
| simple as selling a special version of the documentation for
| $25. That's obviously not at the same level as dropping a $5000
| donation, but it's more than zero, and it's a heck of a lot
| easier for an employee to ask them to pay $25 for a tool they
| need to do their work than to ask them to donate $5000.
| 255kb wrote:
| I totally agree. It's probably easier to make a company pay
| by offering support, training, etc. It's the donation schema
| that is complicated for them.
| larrik wrote:
| Honestly, selling the company the right to yell at you and a
| promise to not disappear and take the software with you is
| probably enough for some of them...
| 4lejandrito wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| I got my first GitHub Sponsor the other day and even though it is
| just $1 / month it made me feel like a rockstar. Also I got $3 on
| BuyMeACoffee a few months ago and it was wonderful.
|
| Keep up the good work.
| veridies wrote:
| I definitely agree. From a different perspective, I have a few
| free albums on Bandcamp under a Creative Commons BY-SA, just as
| a side project. Getting $5 or $20 here or there is really nice
| -- it makes me feel like someone found my music worthwhile to
| them, which is a good feeling.
| 4lejandrito wrote:
| I can only imagine how you feel. I find music so much harder
| than programming and I feel incredibly happy when someone
| enjoys my guitar playing (I am just a beginner really). You
| must be really good.
| naikus wrote:
| Congrats and thanks! you inspired me to add a ko-fi dontaion link
| to my github project https://github.com/naikus/svg-gauge
| gbraad wrote:
| Also received 2 donations in total for my 2FA authentication app
| for mobile phones (and web runtimes) over a span of over 7 years.
| Since a few years I haven't madeany contributions to it as my
| daytime jobs took over and have kids since. Over the years
| noticed many companies suggested my projct as an alternative, but
| this caused people to expect me to be their support for lost
| bitcoins, etc. If there would have been some incentive I might
| have reconsidered working on it, but recently archived the
| project.
| sneak wrote:
| It makes me sad to see developers donating time and effort to
| support an ecosystem (VSCode) built explicitly to spy on users
| and promote proprietary software.
|
| The fact that VSC's core is released under an open source license
| is irrelevant to the harm that is being done.
| UltraSuperUser wrote:
| Do you really think any of what you just said will be effective
| to your target demographic without being far more detailed,
| containing any sort of sources, or while being this
| unnecessarily inflammatory?
|
| All the people you wish would care will scoff, dismiss the
| comment as being looney and that'll be that.
|
| You have to realize that, unfortunately, in every part of life,
| marketing matters. Got to make a message your audience will
| appreciate.
| sneak wrote:
| You seem to have mistaken my comment for one intending to be
| persuasive.
|
| I wish for people to be informed, not to care. What matters
| to someone is an individual decision.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Not sure how it is inflammatory to state VS Code spies on
| users, when according to a GitHub issue[0] Microsoft has been
| refusing to clearly comply with GDPR for over 2 years now,
| with the only response being (paraphrasing) "just read the
| source code" when asked what kind of data is collected.
|
| [0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/47284
| MayeulC wrote:
| Well, any piece of software that requires signing off
| copyright to a private entity gets a soft blacklist in my
| book. The project picked a license, asking for CLA is not
| playing on a level field.
|
| I count the FSF as an exception here, since they provide
| additional guarantees with their CLA, and it is primarily for
| enforcement: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html
| jjice wrote:
| Can you elaborate? As for as I've seen, disabling telemetry in
| VSCode is pretty straight forward.
| johndough wrote:
| Opt-out telemetry, as opposed to opt-in telemetry, usually
| violates GDPR. This issue is being discussed at
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/47284
|
| VSCodium is recommended as an alternative
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
| sneak wrote:
| Last I checked, opting out of telemetry doesn't disable the
| autoupdate checks (another inadvertent form of telemetry),
| and also sends a telemetry event when opting out, which is a
| clear violation of user consent.
| qertoip wrote:
| Accepting Monero and Bitcoin costs you nothing and is a great way
| of solicitating donations as cryptocurrency users are
| historically massive donors.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| There's always a time cost with financial things, at least.
| Some tax authority probably expects you to track and report
| that income, and will want their share.
| rel00 wrote:
| This is always the problem with taking "donations" privately.
| Although innocent, the reality is that a lot of tax
| authorities look at this as income.
|
| As someone who's primarily a creator, I find it often eye
| brow raising the kinds of complicated rules which tax
| authorities create to "level the playing field". Definitely
| tread carefully.
| rglullis wrote:
| We are not talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars
| here, are we?
|
| Do you get in trouble with the Tax Man because you tip your
| server at a restaurant or gives some spare change to the
| someone on the street?
| kd5bjo wrote:
| Giving? No.
|
| Receiving and not reporting? Maybe, depending on local laws
| and how zealous the tax enforcer is. This probably falls
| into the category of "Not allowed, but too small to worry
| about." That works fine, until they decide to audit you for
| some other reason.
| rglullis wrote:
| Sorry, I misread your original comment.
|
| Sure, if the project is successful to the point of
| receiving significant amounts, having to report it
| becomes mandatory.
|
| Speaking as someone with an open source project that
| started due a grant and that I'd love to turn into a full
| time job: If I were receiving so many donations that it
| would require me to spend time to report to the tax
| authorities, I'd put it on the list of "good problems to
| have".
| kingosticks wrote:
| Obviously it depends which tax system(s) you have to deal
| with, but in some countries if you are fortunate to
| already earn over the tax free allowance from your day
| job, it doesn't matter how big or small the extra
| (donation) income is from your side-project - it will be
| mandatory to report it. So you can either comply, which
| has a cost, or not comply and risk whatever comes from
| that.
| rglullis wrote:
| I am talking about the scenario where there would be
| working on open source _is_ the day job.
|
| Whether the revenue came from big sponsorships, support
| contracts or donations, it certainly would need an
| accountant anyway.
| atoz2020 wrote:
| https://xscode.com/vscode-extension/
| cdubzzz wrote:
| I also recently received a first $5 donation on an OSS project I
| created and have been supporting since 2017. It was a really
| pleasant surprise and motivated me to spend a bit more time on
| the project to move through some bug fixes and feature
| enhancements. It's amazing what a small gesture like that can do.
| ColinWright wrote:
| I'd be interested to know by what means the payment was made.
| Patreon? Ko-Fi? Paypal? Something else?
|
| I'm interested in knowing what options exist, and the various
| pros and cons. Friction-free micropayments are still (as far as
| I know) a problem without a universally accepted solution.
| RMPR wrote:
| Can relate. I only received one donation for my side project[0]
| but more than money. It gave me some motivation to continue to
| work on it, thinking that it's so useful for someone out there
| that he/she actually gave money for that.
|
| 0: https://github.com/rmpr/atbswp
| okokok___ wrote:
| This is why I started console [1]. Open-source software engineers
| are severely under paid for the value they're producing.
|
| [1] https://console.substack.com/
| andrew_ wrote:
| I love stories like this. Most folks aren't in open source for
| the returns, and any form of gratitude is uplifting and
| incredibly motivating. I've got my fingers in so many open source
| pies that it's silly, but I do it because I love it. Yeah, some
| really big corps use my stuff and a few packages have millions of
| weekly downloads, but I'm not doing it for the money. It helps
| keep my skills and thinking fresh, networks me with a ton of
| people worldwide, improves my soft skills with every interaction,
| and makes me a better cooperative collaborator. I receive exactly
| $5.80 a month in donations (via Patreon) and I'm just happy that
| two people thought enough of my work to send me a few duckets
| from their hard-earned income every month. I'll happily take that
| beer money and the personal development that comes with it as a
| reward.
| epicseneca wrote:
| Great to see this. Inspiration to keep going.
| namanaggarwal wrote:
| I know that feeling. Few years back someone asked me if I accept
| Bitcoin as donation for an SDK I wrote
| https://github.com/namaggarwal/splitwise
|
| It felt so good that I went ahead and create a wallet and he
| donated me some fractional BTC. It wasn't much at that time but
| it motivated me a lot.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| hope you kept it and sold it a few days ago when BTC hit 40K
| USD. yes?
| mdni007 wrote:
| Any sane person at the time would have sold it immediately
| for $50
| namanaggarwal wrote:
| I guess for me it's more like a certificate than money. I
| still have it and its worth a lot (more than money)
| Hamuko wrote:
| I doubt I'll ever know how this feels because I don't create a
| lot of open-source side projects and soliciting donations is
| illegal here.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Where's here? Your country or HN?
| Hamuko wrote:
| My country of Finland.
| emilfihlman wrote:
| Not true, you can have a donation link on your page and
| projects just fine.
|
| t. another Finn
| Hamuko wrote:
| How is that compatible with Rahankerayslaki, which
| explicitly forbids soliciting money from the general
| public without a permit?
| emilfihlman wrote:
| The iirc court of appeals has confirmed that merely
| having a donation link is okay.
|
| So you might legally be somewhat limited in what you can
| write there (like "donate to me SO THAT I can write more
| code YOU enjoy"), but saying
|
| "Support me / donate to me / Support my work through Ko-
| Fi"
|
| is entirely fine.
| Ndymium wrote:
| Can you link a court case to support this argument? I was
| once in an association (ry) and we tried finding out if
| we could have a donation link on our website and we were
| told it is not allowed. Even just having a bank account
| number was not allowed. The only way to receive a
| donation would have been for a person to ask us
| proactively and then we could tell _that person only_ our
| bank account number.
|
| I run a free web service where some users have asked me
| to set up a donation system but AFAIK it is illegal so I
| haven't done it. Instead I set up a company and will sell
| premium accounts with some borderline useless but actual
| feature that normal accounts don't have, so that it's no
| longer a donation.
| Hamuko wrote:
| "Donate to me" sounds like a pretty explicit appeal to
| give money, so I would personally steer away from that to
| not get in trouble with the law ( _" rahankerayksella
| [tarkoitetaan] toimintaa, jossa yleisoon vetoamalla
| kerataan vastikkeetta rahaa"_ & _" yleisoon vetoamisella
| [tarkoitetaan] suullisesti, kirjallisesti tai muulla
| tavoin ilmaistua pyyntoa tai kehotusta antaa rahaa
| keraykseen"_).
|
| AFAIK, just adding your PayPal details or bank account
| number to your website would be okay because you would
| not be making any sort of an appeal.
| emilfihlman wrote:
| "Lahjoitukset minulle voi osoittaa taman linkin kautta"
|
| "Minua voi tukea taman linkin kautta"
|
| "Lahjoita minulle taman linkin kautta"
|
| All are acceptable.
|
| And since "lahjoita" is entirely equal to "support" then
| also
|
| "Tue minua taman linkin kautta" is entirely fine.
|
| Of course the Finnish justice system is known for being
| unjust and arbitrary in many cases so your mileage may
| vary.
| hpeinar wrote:
| Very interesting read as an Estonian. Apart from being
| legal, we even have a special field on our income
| declaration form (which we fill every year) that is
| specifically for money earned through ways like that. If
| I recalled correctly it's under "Income received abroad
| -> Salary and other remuneration".
|
| I also run a donation based site (which also has ads) and
| I declare both of these on the form and pay my share of
| taxes from it. But it is then fully legal money and I can
| do whatever I like with it from government perspective.
|
| I don't speak any Finnish at all, but if the wording is
| so important, wouldn't it work if you ask the money to
| pay for the services cost instead? Not as a donation to
| yourself. Servers cost, your time costs etc. Could all be
| counted as an upkeep of the project.
| hopia wrote:
| You have to remember that we're talking about a country
| whose police considered Wikipedia to be fundraising money
| illegally with their global donations based system, due
| to Finnish laws: https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-7144745
|
| I don't think it's a worthwhile risk to take for Finnish
| open source developers to accept donations and think it
| won't be considered illegal by the authorities.
| u678u wrote:
| If you say something like "Dont worry its not illegal
| you'll be fine" you really need a link to some proof. :)
| emilfihlman wrote:
| https://is.fi/taloussanomat/art-2000001494059.html
|
| https://rescue.fi/article.php/20070131_effi
|
| It was only district court but the prosecutor did not
| seek the court of appeals (which they legally have to do
| if there's a chance their view might succeed), leaving
| the precedent.
| Ndymium wrote:
| Note that Effi no longer lists the mentioned donation
| details on their website[1] and their verbiage is much
| more limited now so I don't know how much they themselves
| count on the court case. I would like to see the actual
| court case transcripts but they were not linked in the
| articles, shame.
|
| [1] https://effi.org/yhdistys/lahjoitukset/
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| So, just wondering - how important is precedent normally
| in Finnish Law?
| d33 wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but perhaps this perspective would work in
| Finland?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10863939
| Hamuko wrote:
| Selling software should be okay, but I imagine that's a
| significant burden to a lot of open-source developers who
| are not aiming to make it a job.
| davide_v wrote:
| I still remember the first donation I received from my project
| [1] back in 2017, yeah it felt amazing. The person who donated
| also sent me an email with subject "much thanks".
|
| [1] https://github.com/DavideViolante/Angular-Full-Stack
| makeworld wrote:
| I have been lucky enough to have a monthly GitHub sponsor (even
| two at one point), as well as several one-time donations through
| Ko-Fi, all for my Gemini browser, Amfora.
|
| It's pretty exciting to actually be paid for open source, and
| helps motivate me to continue developing it, knowing there are
| users who genuinely care about it out there. Although to be
| honest, I've found the compliments I've gotten over it more
| rewarding and motivating than any donations. If the donations
| significantly increased somehow than I think that might flip, but
| either way I'm enjoying working on it.
|
| https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora
| jcuenod wrote:
| I received my first donation ($13) in the summer last year and
| yes, it was a great feeling! Then I had the experience of
| immediately raising the bar for donations and hoping for larger
| ones :)
|
| Congratulations!
| ajkjk wrote:
| fyi, your extension's description is missing spaces after all the
| commas, which would make it seem very suspicious if I was
| considering installing it.
| sudhirj wrote:
| I'm pretty excited about the GitHub Sponsors feature opening up
| worldwide, think it can actually help foster a culture of
| contributing back to the people whose work we all use. They've
| got an interesting page where they show you all the sponsorable
| projects you depend on, sorted by the most heavily depended-on
| projects first.
|
| Besides voluntary contributions I want to see maintainers
| refusing to take feature requests and help requests from non-
| sponsors. Security issues and bugs are always welcome, of course,
| but it would be interesting to force people to pay for
| maintainers' time and attention.
|
| Would also be nice to promote sponsorship as marketing-companies
| spend tons of money on marketing, and visibly supporting
| important projects is a great way to do it.
| prox wrote:
| Absolutely, and we should reminds eachother to donate, even
| when it's just a couple of cents. It's about the thought that
| counts and the culture of appreciation when it's useful to you.
| tpetry wrote:
| The biggest oppurtunity would be to allow assigning money for
| tasks and solutions. Like there are so many really good
| projects with a lot of open issues and good ideas on things to
| improve a library/framework/project. The ability to say, hey, i
| am the project owner and i would love to add this cool feature
| to my library which is complicated, you can donate for this
| feature, like crowdfunding for software.
|
| Or the other case. I have created many pull requests in the
| past which had been only a few lines to fix an existing bug but
| they did never merge it. Sometimes i received notifications for
| years from other people asking why it is not meged and they had
| to fork (and maintain) it to fix this bug. Just saying here are
| 50$ if you merge it would be a life-saver. No more maintaining
| a fork just to fix a bug which is not a priority of the owner
| who prefers adding more and more features.
|
| My point is open source does not need to be free work from the
| maintainer. A platform like github could change the game by
| allowing people to get a small payment for what they are doing.
| But not like their actual plan by just giving them money, i
| want to connect it to a "problem" to solve (resolve issue, add
| feature, merge pr, ...)
| Whitespace wrote:
| You can donate to the author here: https://ko-fi.com/gorvgoyl
| pknerd wrote:
| I got $2 donation from someone who liked my docker php blog post.
| It felt great!
| david_allison wrote:
| My first donation still means the most to me: a hamper full of
| chocolates and a personalised card. That was back in April and
| I'll treasure it for the rest of my life. The fact that someone's
| willing to go through those lengths to say thank you is still
| mindblowing.
|
| Since then, the project that I've been working on opened publicly
| for donations in November. We're going to hit 1,000 donations
| today, with ~$13,000 and close to ~$600/m recurring [0].
|
| It's a massive motivator to keep going. The "thank you" messages
| and financial contributions have turned my time spent
| contributing to open source into probably my most emotionally
| fulfilling experience.
|
| [0] https://opencollective.com/ankidroid
| yboris wrote:
| I've been trying to encourage more "Charityware" for software
| [0]. My software is free and open source (MIT license) [1] but I
| also sell it for $5 and donate $3.50 of every sale to a cost-
| effective charity. My goal is to increase donations to the
| charity, and asking people for donations wouldn't be as
| effective. My software now has generated almost over $9,000 in
| donations.
|
| Personally, every purchase of my software feels rewarding. It's
| probably not as great as a regular donation, but it's a close
| second. Furthermore, since my software is pay-what-you-want (with
| a minimum of $5) people have been often giving more than the
| minimum. That _really_ feels like a donation.
|
| [0] https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-
| pro...
|
| [1] https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
| syshum wrote:
| One thing that always hurts OpenSource project is the fact they
| have not ability for me to "Buy" it, with an actual invoice or
| receipt that I can give to my accounting people for the sale...
|
| It is "donation" of a undetermined amount which is a much
| harder thing for me to clear the bean counters.
|
| So by being able to go to a site, it buy now with a fixed
| price, and (I presume getting a receipt) you likey having
| gotten much more income than if you where to have a "donate to
| me" link with a open ended amount...
| njarboe wrote:
| This is even more important if you want people in academia to
| support open source projects with money. It is view as fraud
| and is illegal to give money to an open source project from a
| federal grant. If one can buy it and get an invoice, then
| support is possible.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| Congratulations, you've discovered the Enterprise Edition (or
| Enterprise Support).
|
| People think it needs a shitload of extra functionality, when
| in reality it just needs some minimal perks and a tag with a
| LARGE price written on it.
| [deleted]
| kingosticks wrote:
| Is there an easy way to have people donate "to" my project where
| the money goes straight to my chosen charity but I still get some
| sort of notification / running total of how much has been
| donated? I think I'd like to know people were donating - I could
| ask they tell me but I'd never know if they didn't bother
| emailing or if nobody thought it worth donating - but I don't
| want any of the (tax) hassle that might come from personally
| receiving a donation, even if I always remembered to re-donate it
| on.
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